Addictions

You know you have an addictive personality when you've been dependent on alcohol, cutting, caffeine, smoking, painkillers and a lot of other things that aren't even addictive. Now I “just” struggle with cutting, caffeine and cigarettes. Three “c”, what are the odds? I usually only have two or three addictions simultaneously. It's manageable, but not optimal, and as long as I stay away from drugs and alcohol I'm fairly functional. After all, both cigarettes and caffeine are socially acceptable, and cutting is rarely anyone else's business. As long as I don't start bleeding allover the place. First year of gymnasium comes to mind...

I wore short skirts combined with tights back then, and had moved on from cutting my arms to my lower legs. I had less sensation there (well, not anymore cause my arms are basically scar tissue now, and all the cutting has destroyed some nerves) so the gashes ended up deeper and thus they bled more. Often I remember bleeding through those tights, leaving little puddles of blood on the plastic floors in classrooms and corridors. I never got any comments though, I guess they all knew it was self inflicted wounds.

Now I’m back to my lower arms, cause it's easy access and well... it might sound stupid but it feels good to cut there. But it's getting hard to break through the scar tissue, so I suppose I’ll have to move on to another area again. Skin is the largest human organ, so it shouldn't be so fucking hard to find a “good” spot. First I wanted to go for my chest (since I kinda hate that part of my body) but I do realise that would not be so damn smart considering I’m gonna get operated on right there in the nearest future... think it through, think it through...

Thankfully, my episodes of alcoholism have been brief, for just a few months at a time. I really don't like being a drunk, to be honest. Sure, the rush of being tipsy 24/7 is quite nice, and it has also helps me sleeping and as a medication for my anxiety (and that's why I've been doing it). But in the long run it just harms more than it helps. It's expensive, you get dehydrated, it's complicated when traveling, it's a hell trying to hide it and on top of all you feel really pathetic.

Smoking cigarettes is by far my favourite drug. Easy access (as long as I remember to bring my ID-card, cause I still look like 17), socially acceptable to some degree and it's not as harmful as the other things I’ve listed. Sure it's dangerous, but you can't die from overdosing it. I have slowly increased the amount I consume it over time. When I was eighteen I smoked my very first cigarette and then had around five a month, then it escalated to about a pack a month, then a pack a week. When I was twenty one I learned how to take deep drags which made me physically addicted to nicotine and upped the dosage to about a pack a day. This spring I took it even further as I could finally smoke inside my apartment, and I’m now up at two to three packs a day. Mostly somewhere around 50 cigarettes, or one every fifteen minutes. Which basically means I’m holding a cigarette between my fingers sort of constantly.

My caffeine addiction comes and goes like my alcoholism, and the two are strangely often combined or succeed one another. What often drives me to detox from it, is as simple as that I get tired of, or feel disgusted by coffee all of a sudden. Though, this is my extreme caffeine addiction periods. Come to think of it, I’m always addicted to it. Just that most of the time I settle for tea and or coke. In that sense I haven't been caffeine free since I was 12 or something... but the caffeine addiction I have now is quite more severe, with 10 or up to 20 cups of coffee a day.

Painkillers. That was a short period of roughly four or five months back in late 2010 (at that time I was addicted to everything: alcohol, cutting, caffeine, smoking and painkillers). I had gotten Citodon prescribed for my headache that had gotten vastly more severe than usually, which is not so strange, all things considering. It was one hell of a time in my life. That Citodon didn't help much for the headache, but it sure made the pain funnier, so to say. It was so easy to overdose it, add booze and caffeine and head off to School... I’m still baffled that no one noticed anything. Except for painkillers I did some tripping on the mood stabilising drug Lyrica, about a year later, until the rashes became unbearable. I’ve abused almost every kind of pill I’ve gotten prescribed legally by various doctors over the years. And also over the counter meds that weren't prescribed for me, but legal in its own sense.

Just the act of abusing medicines like that in general, could almost be considered an addiction in itself. I can be kinda freaky like that, overdosing and combining pills wildly without having the slightest clue of what effect that will or won't give me. Mostly I just wake up with a headache the next day though. I still do it, but not in the purpose of killing myself, just for a rush of some, or any sort. What can I say, risk taking and surprises intrigues me. Just in it for the rush!

I feel like a pitiful being, when thinking about all of my addictions and what I’ve done to myself. What extreme lengths I go and have gone to, to achieve some relief from my own mind. When my meds aren't enough, when no meds are enough, when I try to live independently, when the psychiatry leaves me high and dry, when I can't stand living with myself. Maybe my self esteem has hit rock bottom, but I feel kinda pathetic. Like boohoo, I hate myself so much I’m gonna drink myself to death. Or whatever. I just don't know how to live, how does one do? I’m in pieces and instead of patching them up I just cut them into even smaller pieces. And I will probably always be addicted on one thing or another, just have to pick the least dangerous addiction and stick with that.