I Am an Addict.

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PS: The below is, as often, an uncut, full length, less filtered tincture of a really recent piece shared online, cut to bits. Kiss-kiss!

I am an addict.

I mean this genuinely.

I have somehow cracked my personal internal psychological code to learn how to use endorphins to help me survive the sometimes-impossible.

If I dance, I get endorphins. And I can truly use endorphins to carry me through almost ANY amount of pain.

I almost wish I could teach a Ted Talk (or Instagram Live) on the skill, because if you’re sitting a 7 or 8 on a pain scale when you’re ON pretty high (and of course highly regulated) pain meds, then “using dopamine to get something done” is NOT as common sensical as it seems.

It’s a damn art form.

But I need you to think honestly for a second to possibly corroborate some of what I’m trying to process through as of late…

(Then, tomorrow, I’ll get back to the drug stuff)

As I wrap up exam week as a teacher and head into different chapters to come, I am trying to process these embarrassing but very real questions that might actually apply to more than just myself:

If you found that riding in certain cars with certain types of head rests or sculptyshaped seats could completely throw out your back for days… How small would your world feel?

If you are the type who would roll their eyes at every single thing I just said above and think “Just be tougher? Just use your psychology to push through?” and yet, that doesn’t always work… How small would your world feel?

If you hadn’t eaten “out” in literally weeks and saved up to have a quiet Vietnamese food date with your love… but then sitting in a booth made your spine pain spiral to where it interfered with your day job, even days later…

How small would your world feel?

WHY I am asking doesn’t really matter for today. Rather…

What your brutally honest answer might be.

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I am a psychopath who likes to completely stop taking my medications.

Let me ‘splain:

My medication regimen is like having Tylenol, when daily nerve suffering is this consistently high.

I am highly neurotic and nervous about addiction at all times, and deeply aware of how much that has destroyed lives for so many, including loved ones of my own who have become my now heroes for fighting so everyday and advocating on the topic.

I think there are Reddit weirdos in the world who are kinda messed-up jealous of the idea that some people with profound pain might have “access” to controlled medications.

And I say that knowing it puts a target on my back.

But I don’t give a sh*t.

I give a HUGE sh*t (ew) about targets on my back for things I long to fix about myself. Things I’m working on actively. Things I resent or regret.

I think almost anyone who doesn’t feel that feeling about themselves is either: 1) enviably and perhaps deplorably unaware of their lack of self awareness, 2) detached, somehow, from the pollution trails we all leave in the sky throughout our lives by piloting our planes of damage with us, and thus just living out an alternate coping mechanism I wish I had, or 3) a skosh sociopath. Or living out a Demi Lovato song I don’t know how to live.

ARE there people out there who don’t feel shame and blame for the ways they’re shamed or blamed (most all by themselves)?

If so… Can we have what you’re having? (Please give a grrrl advice.)

Being targeted for what ails you most, or whatever you’re actively acting to enact change towards internally IS painful. That’s shooting practice that weighs each personality out there down with varying level of bricks. (I am of the oft fully V.Woolfe variety (said sincerely)

But being targeted for truths I can’t fix is completely different. That is a bullseye I can squarely take; Adjusting for accuracy.

I know certain truths in my life, even if they’re sometimes ones I do not wish to face.

Whether narratives that I wish human nature cared to ask follow up questions towards before swirling merrily through the metaphoric grapevine, faster than M.Gaye, or just what my medical reports snd physician team would say if asked:

Some pain has the strangely maudlin and bittersweetsour of providing proof.

So, unlike my many errs as a human soul trapped in a skeleton, f*cking up and learning along the way, my skeleton stays f*cked far of its own accord.

I have more to say about pain meds - the topic the trolls froth at the trace of…

But as the squad lines up to shoot, I turn like Mata Hari and prep to blow a kiss.

▪️▪️▪️▪️

It’s terrifying to talk openly about pain meds for pain online.

And here’s why:

Other than afore mentioned very serious addiction and epidemic crises, we hate sick people who need help.

And, though I hate a good spoiler alert to early in the bad plot: That Is All Sick People.

(Well, most. In our own individual ways. Though I’m not the official spokesperson.)

Any one who truly knows about degenerative or life altering sickness knows that medications frequently create more secondhand problems than they do calms, so it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. And, progressive pain teams or long term physicians track your internal workings like a frat boy with the stock market if you’re fortunate enough to have any kind of medicinal help.

I do…

I get no benefit from pain medications.

Not in a way that should make any one jealous, that is. Or come “at” me or anyone else who’s actively suffering and wishing others had to suffer less too.

By this I mean, I am in so much pain from my spine most days of the week (just sitting, or looking down, or sleeping on the wrong side), that all pain meds do for me is slightly equalize my diminished quality of life.

They make the screaming become a shout, but that’s it; It’s never a whisper. Not any more. Not at this point in my bones or bust, anyways.

I think there is a great myth that, because of the very rightfully horrifying addiction crisis in some countries (which should be the focus, 100%), sick people feel pain meds in the way a well one might.

But I don’t.

I’m in too much pain.

So, the Reddit sickcels of the shadows that hate any one who’s open about how much they’d be open to sharing every cell of their health, since DNA just is what it is- Might not know that sick is not always a secret.

In fact, if being open about how much some humans need some level of pain management to stay alive and “productive” (and all the other things we are judged to be or not be) could get more sick people help with less stereotype as to why some medications exist and why we need new, safer ones to exist for the next generation:

Then I’ll gladly never shut up.

Ily and ty and brb