Old school rune scape

Being too damn nice.

Fiction. Written. Scifi almost exclusively.

When I can’t get the good stuff I use the bad stuff. But I’m always using.

Weed was easy. Don’t even think I was addicted. For me, I’ve been struggling for with sleeping pills lately. Might go back to the weed but just do oils before bed for sleep. I’m a shift worker in a high stress job so I need something at night to calm the nerves sometimes.

I quit heroin and other heavy opioids just before fentanyl really hit the streets. Quit cold turkey after losing a few friends and realizing that I could get a bag cut with fent and die, and I couldn’t do that to my siblings; they’re a lot younger than me and really idolized me at the time.

When I was well enough to get to a store without shitting myself or throwing up bile everywhere, I went and bought a handle(1.75l) of the cheapest vodka I could. I continued that every day until 4 years ago.

I have cirrhosis, and my liver could shit the bed at any time, but I’m alive and I’m clean (for the most part) and sober. I work in recovery and am working to become a Drug and Alcohol Counselor now.

I quit smoking about 6 months ago. I went to the store, didn’t have quite enough for a pack, and just haven’t bought another. Tobacco has been the hardest for me by far. Alcohol withdrawal almost killed me - I had to be hospitalized for near a month - but I was on high doses of benzodiazepines so I don’t remember much of it. The cravings for a cigarette are intense. They’ve gotten better zand they will continue to do so, but damn, it’s rough.

Alcohol. I never drank until I got an IT internship and the boss was big into craft beers. I started drinking craft beer every night just to have something to bond with him through to try to turn the internship into a full-time job. I did get the job, but then struggled for years with alcohol dependence.

After my dad died I nearly drank myself to death and managed to quit for an entire year. Then I got cheated on, and home was no longer a safe space, so I hung out at the bar every day instead. It’s been 6 months and I’ve gone from ~75 beers / week to ~24. Just tapering myself off slowly. Wegovy helps - I can’t have more than a few drinks without feeling super bloated now.

Doom scrolling. The thing is though when I take time off work I don’t touch the internet at all for days on end. I work on my hobbies instead. It’s when I only have a day or two of free time (even less when you account for having to do chores) and not enough time to finish whatever I’m working on along with whatever I have to come back to next Monday weighing on my mind that I just turn to my phone instead. That’s only working 40 hours a week too. There are people in far worse situations than me.

Caffeine I have quit a few times and that has the worst physical withdrawal of anything I have quit (hard drugs & alcohol I have never used enough to become physically habituated). Speed probably the most difficult emotionally/psychologically.

I don’t worry about caffeine anymore, just maintain the habit.

Porn and weed.

I’ve no doubt there are people that can use it moderately, but my brain just keeps wanting more. I quit cigarettes with no issues. I went from drinking a 6-pack a night to barely drinking at all. But those two really are hard to escape. Every time I kick weed I always have a night where I’m relaxing and I go and get a preroll - then end up getting more and smoking for the next few days before I realize what I’m doing. Same thing with porn. I can smoke a hell of a lot of porn.

But seriously, it’s hard to quit. And I think that part of the reason is due to my inability to label either of those things as “real addictions” in my head. Neither of those things are demonstrably decreasing my quality of life, at least not the way cigarettes and alcohol did, so I’m having trouble contextualizing them as harmful. Porn is easier for me in that regard, since it definitely subconsciously affects my views on the human body, and noticing that more is helping me shake the habit.

For the record, I do think weed is a lot less harmful than booze. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to use it, and I’ve been using it the wrong way for so long that I don’t think I can use it the right way.

To quote one of the great philosophers of our times:

“Well, Stan, the truth is marijuana probably isn’t gonna make you kill people, and it most likely isn’t gonna fund terrorism, but, well son, pot makes you feel fine with being bored, and it’s when you’re bored that you should be learning some new skill or discovering some new science or being creative. If you smoke pot you may grow up to find out that you aren’t good at anything.”

Now, I don’t necessarily think all of that is true. Plenty of people are creative and innovative and also smoke pot, but it does make you content with doing nothing. Very relaxing in the moment, until you realize, after a few years of daily smoking, that all your friends have been learning new things and growing and you’ve been sitting on the couch watching TV the whole time. It’s totally fine to use every now and then, and by no means should be illegal, but we do need to start being realistic about how daily cannabis use quells that burning desire to be active and improve ourselves.

Phone

Sitting down too much. It took four lumbagos in three years to finally get the point.

I don’t write as much anymore unfortunately, but the huge upside is that, after two decades of not being able to do so, I can finally squat again with heels planted without tipping over. A proper Slav squat. Practicing this almost daily for nearly a year has improved my foundational skateboarding skills significantly. And I simply feel more youthful too.

Gonna have to go with alcohol and benzodiazepine abuse for this one, basically because it’s the only one that I have beaten (citation needed). Only one relapse in the past 10-ish years or so! Though it took a few relationships with it, and I’ve gone through multiple hospitalizations (some even voluntarily), and because of that combo and all the other shit that was going on in my head (not to mention the cocktail of SSRIs and eventual SNRIs like Effexor at max dosage combined with stuff like Seroquel at max dosage for literal years, of which Effexor is still the bane of my existence; and stuff like ECT) there’s like this hazy quality in my own past for me. As if I’m talking about someone else. I can’t even remember most of my life from around 2013-2018 or so.

I’d say the worst part about abusing benzos with alcohol is how good it feels. I still have the cravings. Like even now I’d be up for it. That combined with the fact that it only brings out the worst in me, every narcissistic and sosiopathic tendency is not only brought forth but amplified also. And it’s unhealthy in general.

So if you don’t happen to die in your sleep; once you wake up and realize just how many people you’ve hurt, when the full weight of your own actions and the coming consequences descend upon you, you just might hope that you did. Vice, thy name is me

Feeding my dog from the table.

I can beat the addiction of playing around on my phone very often throughout the day.

New things. I simply can’t stay with anything. Makes it basically impossible to have any decent job, because people want and expect you to be an expert at what you do.