Drugs vs. Emotions

As a former user, I’ve come to the realization that my drug use stemmed mostly out of being unable to control my emotions. I was unable to handle the power inside of me that controlled me. Prior to using, I had sleep problems since an early age. My brain seemed to never shut off analyzing this and analyzing that. I pick up on other people’s emotions, too. I’ve been called an empath by a shaman. I was given these gifts, and had no idea how to handle them, control them, or what they even were, so I turned to drugs.

My first drug was Vicodin, because it blocked the pain in my teeth. My second drug was Xanax, because it blocked the anxiety and made me feel kinda tingly. I started feeling false emotion, false happiness. I moved on to Paxil and Celexa and Prozac and Lamictal and Zyprexa and over the course of 10 years I have been on most every major clinical prescription medication that affected mood and/or pain. In that ten years, my body re-programmed itself to depend on these stimulants/depressants to regulate my core emotion and upon inner examination I have discovered that by using these drugs, I not only restricted my creativity and emotional growth, I lost sight of who I was, what I was here to do, and who I was supposed to be.

Feeling lost, disconnected, unplugged from the world and not feeling anything became my addiction, and I would do anything to achieve that state of mind and being, including drugs like heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines, and hallucinogens of all kinds. And then those wouldn’t work anymore. I would need more, and more, and more to achieve the personal nirvana my distorted brain created. Every one of you reading this that is an addict knows what this is like, can relate to this, can associate with this in some sort of way. And now that I have your attention, my current addict friends, let me tell you what I have discovered since being off of any chemical drug for over a year.

For those that just want to be happy, you have to allow yourself to be happy. You can’t force it with a drug. Happiness is the tickle in your belly when you’re laughing so hard because your old lady or old man tried to fart and shit their pants. It’s a natural reaction to a condition that has been met in our brain waves. And you know what else? It’s ok to cry. It’s ok to let rivers flow out of your eyes and get rid of all that water weight dammed up in the cerebral cortex. It lightens the brain. Being depressed is OK, too. Whoever says life is perfect is the one that is crazy.

Stress is the #1 psychologically damaging emotion, especially that which is caused by an environment you can’t control. I’d lay a pretty solid bet it’s those with the most stress that have the highest desire to escape from reality. Logical statement, yes? But how do you control it when all you do is barraged daily with negative events!? Those that live in big cities know what I mean. Every corner you turn, the chances of running into something bad almost triple over seeing something good in extremely populated and poor neighborhoods. It’s not their fault they can’t get out. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s an extension of Darwin’s Natural Selection philosophy. Social tensions are pretty high right now. The people that really matter in this country and that need the most help in this country could actually give two shits about what is going on in politics and who our next President is going to be. Why? They already know it won’t affect their status. And so drug use becomes a priority. It takes away your reality of a shit neighborhood, of so much evil in the world, and it seems the media would much rather spread the news of evil because it’s much more accepted than always talking about good things. Sensationalism is what it is called. It stimulates the senses by heightening anxiety and making you want to watch more to either appease the anxiety or even as absurd as it sounds, to incite anxiety, so you can do your drug of choice. Am I saying the news makes you do drugs? No, probably not. These are all environmental factors that I have decided create a stressful environment. By learning and growing myself, I can now conclude that stress is a major contributor to my drug use. And by building up protective barriers both mentally and emotionally, I have been able to work things out naturally. I’ve been able to control negative thoughts and energy by learning how to compartmentalize things that cannot be controlled and things that can be controlled, and learning what my body was telling me. This essay is basically aimed at those that are addicts, both current and recovering. This message is aimed to the front line on the war on drugs.

Nobody can cure an addict. Only the addict can cure him/herself.

The drug barons are not to blame. They’re simply providing a product that has a demand. That’s economics 101. Sure there’s a hostile environment around that much drugs. People with machine guns and whatnot. Why is that scary? It’s simply protecting your product, no more than a farmer shoots a coyote to protect his chickens. If you think that analogy is off base, sit and think about it for a while. All blame does is gets the stress off of yourself by putting it onto someone else. That’s not love, that’s hate.

The government is not to blame. Nor are the people running it. The fault lies purely with the addict if fault is to be assigned. We are all creatures of free will. There is no denying that. I don’t care where you are… you have a choice to breathe, don’t you? To hear? If not hear, than see? You have choices in a choice-less environment if you actually sat and thought about it. Your choice is limited, however, when you start using. Pull yourself together and overcome the addiction. I believe in you.