Detox is Fucking Hard for Functional Addicts...
It’s been a while, but as you can imagine I got some shit to deal with...
So where did I left? Oh yes I was attempting to detox from methadone with smak... And how did that go? Well, let’s say it worked to get me off methadone (which honestly is the hardest fucking thing to get of off).
I tapered H down until 0,02, my scale couldn’t even detect it! But then you know after 10 days of tapering smak the methadone WD symptoms were kinda gone but the H ones came in. In my opinion those are way lighter and “easier” to handle. Yet still a fucking pain in the ass.
Now, before getting to today, when I’m off any opiate completely for 10 days, there is something I wanna talk about and that it’s not such a common subject.
I’ve been using heroin for 12 years but in between I moved to NYC I cleaned up and stayed sober (from opiates) for over 5 years. During those 5 years I did a lot of things including starting a business with my husband which was pretty successful until - for many reasons, primarily because we are European - we decided to move back to Europe and expand the business.
We moved to Barcelona and that was probably the worst decision we’ve ever taken.
Long story short, even the last period in NY we were using oxy, mainly on WE, but you know how it goes... Yet we were capable of conducting a fully functional life meaning working, sport, social. And that was the case for me before I moved to NY. I graduated on smak, I’d run a gallery space every day I was on it! And that’s because I’m the type of person that has a bit of issues fitting in groups that are not totally alike me and overall I fucking hate the society we live in and i just don’t fit in it. Well that shit helped me with that and with the anxiety that came with this feeling of exclusion.
Now Barcelona: we didn’t make to expand out business, we didn’t make to find a group of people we liked to hang out with and, on the other hand, in one of the hippest and coolest neighborhood in the city’s historic center is full of what they call “narco pisos” , which are occupied houses where they sell (good) heroin, coke and crack 24/7. We used to live a 15 min walk from all of them... I’m sure you know what followed.
We had to leave and start our recovery because we snorted and smoked our money, the company turned to shit and we were looking like 2 zombies.
So we moved to the city I’m from to start the detox (last April). But you know, it was not a detox like “ I got nothing to do until I feel better” . As functional addicts we had to work, our families don’t know, we had to work on our company, on our debts, on finding new gigs (we are creative freelancers too) otherwise we had no money to live.
Now all this responsibilities, including taking care of our dog, buying food, working, all this when you taper down methadone (or other palliatives) and you do it fast is like hell on earth. We never had time to rest, we had to be functional (except for social life which would have triggered a relapse) and I pretty much went insane. I was put on mood stabilizers and benzos just to be able to get out of bed and do something.
There should be programs for functional addicts who never shot. I’m not saying I'm better (far from that) but I mean I don’t even know how it feels to shoot it, it’s another league I guess it’s fucking clear.
Anyhow such programs don’t exist and so as usual we had to kinda do it ourselves. So after tapering heroin we finally got our hands on suboxone which we took for about 10 days, the last dose was like a quarter of a quarter of a piece of 1mg of the strip, like nothing. Yet we still had some withdrawals symptoms, you know, minor but enough to keep you blank staring at the wall all day. So a friend brought us opium. We tapered down that too for 4 days, then 2/3 days of kratom (red borneo one if you wanna try it works amazingly). And then that was it. I’ve been clean from all opiates for 10 days now and from heroin since July 1st.
To sum up these had been my therapy for 5 months:
No doctor will ever tell you that that would work. As an addict I can tell you that it can work if you really wanna stop and had ENOUGH of that shit.
I’m currently very uninspired and moody, the so-called PAWS (POST ACUTE WITHDRAWAL SYNDROME), but man it feels like a piece of cake compared to the pain I’ve been through.
Why am I writing this? maybe my story can help someone or maybe someone can help me. What do ya’ll think? I just feel that sharing helps so guys bring it on in the comments, follow me and I’ll follow you.
One last piece of advice: try to look at the road you’ve done rather than the long one ahead. don’t linger in your achievements but man be proud of every little step forward!
