Let’s face it: I am a drug addict. Every night, I take five kinds of drugs to put me to sleep and to keep me from having manic attacks the next day. In the morning I take another pile of drugs in order to make it through the day without dying of suicide or the high blood pressure that results from rage or from the pure insanity that results from hormonal imbalances.
I crave these drugs, like any addict does. I crave my night-time meds because, well, they put me to sleep, blotto, giving me respite from the continuous crashing pain. And the daytime drugs: I take them to keep the ogre of depression away, and to deal with my “co-morbid conditions”: arthritis, high blood pressure, menopause, low Vitamin D, low Folic Acid.
I fear what would happen to me if I did not have these drugs. This leads me to hoard stashes of the “important” ones: the ones that would certainly result in seizures if I didn’t take them: Lamectil, lorazepam, clonazepam, maybe Lithium. And the others…Oh, the others could “merely” result in mood changes that could put me into the suicidal ultradian cycling that has wreaked such havoc in my life before.
Yes, I crave these drugs. Especially at night, when I look forward to the forced oblivion of quasi-sleep the drugs provide. And in the morning, even though I need twelve hours of sleep to sleep off the night drugs, I sometimes forget to take my morning drugs. After a day or two, though, I start getting withdrawal symptoms: a kind of hollow feeling, a feeling of unreality, and of course depression, that mostly clears when I take my doses.
Freud craved cocaine. I do too. I’m told that an addict never really gets over the craving: you just learn to deal with it. I don’t know what I’m going to do with this pile of drugs I’m addicted to now. Each one has its role and responsibility for keeping some symptom in check. Oh, if I could just have a continuous IV drip of cocaine, or even an unending pile of coca leaves and lime, how happy my brain would be, eh?
