back to the drawing board

Excerpt from blog entry “August 12th 2015”

I thought that once I was sober, all my problems would be over and life would be good. I would be happy and healthy and I could have a fresh start to my life. But I am now learning that its just not that easy. Since I have become sober,… I’m still dealing with physical problems that have gotten worse like my fibromyalgia and the essential tremors. My mental health issues have not miraculously gone away either.  None of the problems I had before I started using went away. I was just masking them with drugs so I didn’t have to deal with them. Numb it all away,… Now the numbness is gone and my body can once again ‘feel’. Feeling is a good thing. But it is going to make me have to go back to the beginning of all my issues and deal with them properly. The loss of the twins,… the loss of my parents,… the loss of my marriage,… even the loss of the life I once had being a wife and a mom with kids and dogs and a lovely house. I have none of that anymore. So apparently my therapist has told me that now,… I have to grieve. And I will also have to deal with all the guilt and shame of my abuse and how it effected myself and others. You can’t take back your mistakes. You have to take responsibility for them. I have to deal with the fact that I harmed my children and family. The shame of what I did to my girls alone seems unbearable. How do you make up for something like that? You can’t. You just have to hope that the people you hurt can forgive you. But their scars will still remain and be a part of their lives forever. Whether I intended it to or not my behaviours have forever been engraved in their lives. Have changed their lives. Have hurt them. And that’s an awful lot of guilt and shame that I’m not sure I can deal with. My therapist has been a tremendous help in this. But she can’t do the work for me or feel the pain for me ~ only I can do that. I definitely have a long road ahead of me in coping with all this.

I also still have my mental health issues that will never go away.  Now that I’m not ‘numbing out’ I will have to deal with the depression and social anxiety that has crippled me over the past few years. I’ve talked a lot on this blog about these things. They are very real to me and effect my life every single day. Now I have to fight them without abusing drugs. I’m not sure how I’m ever going to feel like I fit in anywhere. I don’t think I will ever feel comfortable in any social situation and I will probably always have my agoraphobia-like issue of never wanting to leave my apartment. But as my therapist assured me,… I don’t have to deal with all of this at once. I can take each thing and break them down and take each day with baby steps. There is no “due date” for having to cope with life. You do it at your own pace. I will never be “all better”. It’s something I’ve always had and will always have to cope with. But I don’t have to overwhelm myself by doing it all today.

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I have been avoiding writing this entry in this blog. Because I have relapsed. And that really isn’t easy to say. Its embarrassing and makes me feel like a failure.

If you read the above excerpt,… it explains the problems that I am still having even though I was clean and sober. All my physical and mental ‘issues’ were still lurking under my drug-use ~ I just couldn’t feel them because I was always so high. They were well concealed under all my mood-altering drugs. But once the drugs were taken away,… all those ‘issues’ came right back.

So two weeks ago, I got some weed and I have been smoking it every single day since then. And as shocking as it may sound ~ it felt great. All the physical pain and essential tremors all disappeared.

So this has led to a serious problem. I have never touched pills or alcohol since I started this sober journey 6 1/2 months ago. Just marijuana. Because in my mind (right or wrong) marijuana is not “a drug” to me. If it helps all the ailments I have then how can it be such a horrible thing? I know the pills were dangerous ~ that is definitely drilled inside my head now. Pills nearly killed me. But weed? Its actually legally prescribed to people for physical pain. And it helps me so much. How am I going to stop smoking this if my brain doesn’t even think its the wrong thing to do. Intellectually, I know that to be sober you have to refrain from ALL mood altering substances. Alcohol, pills, AND marijuana. But my body is telling me how much better I feel when I smoke weed. I have a war brewing inside my head about this and I’m not sure which side is going to come out the winner. And I will never stay sober if my mind doesn’t change on the fact that marijuana is not a drug. The willpower to quit just won’t  be there. It is quite the dilemma. I stopped yesterday. I want to stop forever,… but I just don’t know at this point how things will turn out. I will definitely try,… but at the end of the day,… I will always be an addict.

So time to get back to my N/A meetings. I have to get up in front of everyone now and collect the first white key tag again. For people who are new or who have relapsed. That is going to be humiliating to do. I know a lot of others have relapsed and had to start all over again but somehow, I just never thought one of those people would be me. I feel like a failure.

I am not very proud of myself right now.