281105

There's a point in every section of a course of using, a flip point.  A chaos point where an orderly system decays suddenly into disaster.  You can tell you're at that point when taking gear makes you feel normal, and a day spent without gear is a day feeling ill or just weird.  I felt that way today - sickish and skitty all day, then I got on at 6pm and if I didn't remember using I'd swear I was straight. 

Medical terms are tolerance, as in your body "tolerates" a certain dosage of a chemical.  As a user, you need to use this minimum amount plus a premium to get the same effect you used to get before you had a tolerance. This is one of the basis' of the using system.  Habits grow, and before you know it you're injecting enough smack to kill an entire class of Grade 5 schoolchildren.  And all you get is another hole in your arm and a muddy feeling behind the eyes. 

By that stage of a habit you're using to stave off feeling sick rather than to get stoned, so you don't need to keep upping it unless you have that desire to get more and more stoned, which luckily I could live without.  I went for years at a subsistence level of 6 shots a day, all 2.8 grains (1/6 gram).  Not stoned, but not sick.  Just floating at tolerance.

Met an old friend, L, at Twg today.  He has been through the whole shit cycle himself, many years ago.  He is the only one I know of who walked away and stayed clean, without just swapping one chemical crutch for another.  He is now fully into yoga/living well, so in a way he has an alternative crutch, but then we all need crutches to live.

We discussed how gabo gives you "a clean slate".  When things get really bad you just walk away, draw a line under that part of your life and start again.  He said this was an advantage of using - straights don't ever get the opportunity to do this.

He talked of physically swinging yourself around to walk away from scoring.  This means smacking into shit but it works.

He talked of the energy a junkie has when they hang out, and he compared it to the energy a Buddhist monk has when meditating deeply. At times I know what L meant, I was thinking the other day that if I ever stopped using I could become a "World Destroyer". Corny, and a title snatched from my 2000AD comic book, (Avatar story) , but the point i sthat I feel like I have so much energy built up inside of me from 15 years of stuffing down every emotion, that if it was ever to be released, I could lay waste to my surrounds purely by thought. Schizophrenic delusions I know, but it's an analogy. Power is inside me, building and untapped. One day I will either die or release it.

Lots more was said, all very good to hear, yet again, all stuff I know inside, but I haven't organised it coherently yet into something that helps me.

Importantly, he said (as I know) that S & I must part to become whole ourselves.  Not his exact words but the gist was that.

back