My Birthday, in more ways than one
Today is my 56th birthday.
I went through a lot of loss between 2000 and 2005. Sister, father, grandmother and business partner/intense, complex and ultimately tragic romantic relationship. And, as an NYC girl, I’m counting 9/11…….there was a period of time when I didn’t trust floors not to fall out from under me. It was a lot to process in a short time and I just smoothed a lot of it over and carried on.
In 2008 the tide went out and my worldview crashed and I saw that a system I had believed in had been overtaken by greedy and stupid. My spirit was sick.
The free-floating anger was overtaking me and hormonal fluctuations weren’t helping either. I was always angry, irritated and fatigued and I couldn’t get up in the morning. My brain stopped working properly and tasks that used to be easy became difficult which gave me lots of anxiety. I was taking a low dosage Prozac which helped a little but not much. I began supplementing with poppy pod tea, if I sipped at a thermos of the stuff I could get through the day and feel good. After about 8 months I tapered off by using kratom………but after 2 or 3 months of that I bought more pods. For the next few years I continued this roller coaster. A little less than a year ago I tried to quit completely by doing a slow taper of the poppies.
I managed to taper down to about a rounded teaspoon of ground poppy pods a day but I was still using 4-6 grams of kratom a day, and I got stuck there. Every time I tried to taper further I felt so bad I couldn’t get up in the morning and function and there was always a reason not to cut back THIS this week……………my place of business got wrecked during Sandy, I went through a long period where I had to work 12 hour days just to keep up..etc, etc.
I was still careful not to INCREASE the doses……… so the small doses became less effective. This made it even harder to commit to tapering further.
Then I discovered Iboga. I considered a flood treatment but I couldn’t figure out how to get a sitter and get away for a stress-free week. I probably could get away for a week but I would be incredibly stressed out worrying about my foster kid and my business, and for legal reasons I was hesitant to ask my any of my friends to sit with me. I also thought the flood doses IWorld recommended were frightfully high and my profound sensitivity to SSRI’s – I got severe facial pain, neck pain and headaches if I used more than 15mg of Prozac a day, -- was a deep concern. So I e-mailed back and forth with them and they recommended microdosing.
Now I am an old hand at the art of microdosing because of years keeping my low dose Prozac balanced. I used a liquid version and developed a good sense of how many mg’s I needed a day to keep the level constant.
At first I took a 300mg capsule of RB daily for about 5 days. The first few days were incredible but that’s just my body chemistry and I knew it wouldn’t last………..I get the same rush the first few days after I began taking an SSRI and I know it’s not an indication of the long term effects….but it gave me a nice little window . After 5 days the drug had built up so I stopped for a day then dropped down to 50mg a day. ( I open the capsules and pour a little it into an empty gelcap, eyeballing the amount).
By now the euphoric effects had stopped, but I still felt good.
I stopped the low Prozac doses right after I ordered the RB and took half my usual poppy/kratom doses the first 5 days and I continued to taper. After 5 days or so at 50mg I began to build the RB dose again, now it’s about 100mg a day. My poppy kratom use was minimal the 5 days and I took nothing yesterday—the taper is complete.
I have been doing meditations every evening…I found that putting on some soft lyrical music and letting my mind open up took me to some amazing places .At first I tried with classical and then spa music but it didn’t resonate with me but my favorite ballads keep me in the right frame of mind – I think everyone has music that “speaks” to them. I began to see my psyche as a tangled knot of jewelry chains and I began to try to work out the tangles. Some nights I had some really amazing relevations that let me let go of a lot of guilt and baggage and some nights there were no major discoveries. I have made a lot of progress in the past few weeks, up until two weeks ago was blaming my drug problem on menopause and it was only my self-examination that led me to the true causes. I am also working on reinforcing positive thought patterns and keeping my thoughts out of the well-traveled rutted roads of negative thoughts. The negative thought patterns are like a rutted road and the “wheels” of your thoughts naturally settle into the well-worn ruts unless you try to keep them out then blaze new paths along positive lines.
And I took the big step, I went through my apartment and threw out everything ---all the pods, seeds and about 12 ounces of Kratom capsules. To me this was the key………..the emergency stash is just a slip waiting to happen and I know how the addict mind works.
Now I have to heal my spirit and build a different, gentler life. I’m real good at having the courage to change the things I can change and the wisdom to know the difference but I’m a little weak in the serenity to accept the things I can’t change department so I’ve got my work cut out for me.
So, SERENITY NOW !!