Still haven't fully recovered from the spiral I went into a few days ago. I haven't made the calls I'm supposed to make and I haven't been to a meeting. Avoidance could be triggering me also. I said I would text my friend to see if she wanted to hangout this week but I haven't. Usually when I do the things I said I would, and stop procrastinating, I feel better. In order to not do them, however, I tell myself it won't really help, and again I want to stay in this misery. I think it's a ploy to act out, as in, "oh well everything sucks guess I'll just do what I want." In this way I don't have to risk, and I don't have to fail. Or I just make myself miserable until I actually do them.
Because I do do them, eventually, mostly, I just complain and berate myself until I do. I have this view of myself as lazy and a procrastinator, but I do get them done, there's just some things where it takes me a while. There's also been a lot of lies to myself, a lot of self deception. I tell myself I'm going to do something and I don't do it. I avoid, and I snigger off into the distance, leaving myself in the dust, as if I've gotten away with it. There's a lot of damage to repair.
Lately there's been a lot of fantasizing about my ex, and a fixation on marijuana. I don't know why I like weed so much. Well I do know, because it's weed, but I usually don't have that great a time on it, and it makes me sleep in a lot and it makes me fearful and anxious. It exacerbates a lot of my symptoms, and yet I feel empty if I don't do it. Today I went out to get coffee, and talking with the barista I noticed I felt a lot more confident, that usually doesn't happen if I've smoked. I feel a lot more anxious. I do feel closer to myself though, closer to others, and that brings out the fear. I feel certain they're not going to like me. When I don't smoke I can't really feel any of this and that's great, I just feel kind of sad and empty.
If I don't smoke on a ketamine night then I feel like the whole experience was a waste. I fear I really missed out on something, as if there's some message I won't get otherwise, or some other way later. I also feel like I want to be cool, as if being cool weren't enough. I want to be able to smoke but I often get quite anxious and paranoid, and that's ok, and if someone were to ask me to smoke and I said "no," then I'd feel like a real loser. I'd have disappointed them and then...well, next stop aloneville. I also feel like I want to prove myself with the plant because I've had such difficulty with it in the past, as if if I can smoke and not experience any trouble, that means I'm better. When I had my debacle I was telling myself "I just need to keep climbing the mountain," and "now I know the way I can get back to where I was faster," as if there's something up there.
There may be something up there, but another way to do this is to manage my symptoms as they come up, each day, rather than looking for some cure-all. When I think of that though I become disheartened, thinking "I can't do that everyday." I keep looking for a "fix." I've come to realize from all this how attached I am to what Bradshaw termed "a mood altering experience." To be fair, it seems we alter our moods constantly throughout the day. Some are more normalized than others, like having a drink after work, but that's exactly the mindset that can quickly become pathological. Two nights ago when I didn't smoke I wanted to masturbate, I wanted to change my mood somehow, and the difficulty for me with marijuana and other drugs is that, that seems to be the whole point. I want to elevate my mood.
There other reasons one might smoke or drink or take drugs: to connect more deeply with others, to have a transformative experience of oneself, to simply have a little more fun, but then, this assumes there's something wrong with the more normal, terrible, daily experience, and I think this is the thing about psychedelics and plant medicines is that, basically, they can get you there faster, and if you're not ready for that it can be quite troubling, and more so if you don't want to go at all. Basically I'm just elucidating my own confusion, because it seems like there's a fine line between wanting to elevate something, and wanting to escape it. Maybe that line is a belief that there's something wrong here, or something simply doesn't feel right. Drugs can be a slippery slope for those who look for the quick way out or the fix, and for all the good they can do I'm coming to believe there's no quick way out of this, no Cliff's Notes. You can smoke and do all you want but you still have to do the work, you're still going to have to learn how to be vulnerable.
Which is the thing for me and which is probably responsible for many of my moods: I resist and fight this vulnerability thing. I complain, I try to find an easier way to do it, I cannot, and if I ingest a plant that makes me feel like I'm losing control, and I fight it, I'm probably going to have a pretty awful time, so why wouldn't it be the same with life? If we're here learning how to live, which to me seems so much like learning how to die, and I fight it, then I'm probably going to have a pretty awful time, and some of my best moments, like when I write and it turns out well, or I have an insight, or I spend time with some people and actually have fun, are when I realize the things I'm afraid really aren't so bad, and if I focus on what feels good, instead of what doesn't, then I could actually have a pretty good time, but with all my resistance, I simply don't.
The other night, when I didn't smoke, I realized how attached I am to mood altering experiences. Bradshaw defines addiction as "a pathological relationship to any mood altering experience that has life damaging consequences," and while subtle mood altering may not be life damaging in the short term, it indicates a mindset that's going to breed dissatisfaction. I don't want to get into perfectionism, but for my own sake I want to see how this relationship prevents me from, well a lot of different kinds of experience, it keeps me from intimacy in all its forms because I am constantly running. Running from myself and how I feel, running from a situation that makes me uncomfortable, and so I don't learn, I don't grow, I don't get to experience the joy that comes from overcoming difficulties, the joy that comes from being responsible for myself and how I feel, because taking ownership is a call to action. If I'm taking ownership of how I feel then I can take steps to change it, rather than constantly running and staying in the same place. This feels hard to describe but I've felt the difference. It's the difference between wanting someone to rescue you and change how you feel, rather than being able to do it for yourself. It's about maturity, about being an adult and saying "I can take care of this," rather than being a child and saying, "I need someone to take care of me." Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just a state that only allows for so much happiness, because you're dependent on others for it, rather than being able to get it for yourself. And the big thing that I'm missing is that when you take responsibility, you're also saying this big scary thing that I keep running from, my emotions, aren't so scary after all, and I can handle it. Each time I say no to a quick mood change my confidence grows, my self acceptance. And lastly, because this has gotten long, in regards my marijuana use, one way to parse it is that I can go to it, like sex, as something that mood alters or as something that nourishes, something healthy that my body calls out for, and learning to distinguish which is which is part of recovery in this program for me, and involves a lot of trial and error, a lot of error, but one that is necessary given the long history of self deception and avoidance, one that requires a lot of self forgiveness, but will we be worth it, I'm sure, in the long run.
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