Q&A vol. 2 - July 2021
Monthly questions from readers, answered in full by the author.
When I was putting myself back together post-trauma, my body was different than it had been before - more sensitive to pain but more numb to sensation. Did you experience something like that pre and post addiction?
I don’t know much about trauma. When violence has been inflicted upon me in the past, always by men, I have got the strange sense of being apart from or beyond the body, experiencing the moment almost as if it was happening to somebody else. Afterwards there would be shock, grief, fear etc., and that would be experienced fully, but the traumatic things never seemed to ‘happen’ to me whilst they were happening. I am not sure if that is an ordinary thing to occur, so really I can’t really say for sure if pre- and post-trauma is anything like pre- and post-addiction.
Come to think of it, though, trying to remember a time when I wasn’t addicted to something is remarkably difficult. When I was a kid it was spearmint lifesavers and biting my fingernails; in adolescence, it was the internet and a socially acceptable caffeine habit and sweet treats at 4pm. Then when I turned eighteen there was the socially acceptable drinking habit and recreational drug habit. As I grew up, cycling these habits and fixations, they layered progressively upon my consciousness to mask the ceaseless throb of my anxiety.
These addictions came more sharply into focus in the direct aftermath of my withdrawal from amphetamines. Through the process of recovery I was suddenly forced to recognise and reconcile all the other habits that had formed over all the years since childhood. It was apparent that in order to make a complete recovery from the addiction, I also had to address all the other stuff that was associated with it.
The understanding emerged that beyond the addictions I been courting throughout my life, there existed a living presence, and authentic ‘I’, which remained untarnished from the addictive behavioural patterns. I’ll admit that the use of psychedelics whilst recovering from stimulants framed this understanding, and eventually gave rise to a period of sustained exploration about what other addictions I could let go of.
For example, I gave up drinking coffee at the same time as I withdrew from speed. Then I quit eating sugar, and then carbs, and any processed foods. Once I quit sugar I stopped craving alcoholic beverages, so I dropped drinking too. Back in 2011 my health kick wasn’t a fad, so eating out became difficult; I quit going out to eat and just made my own food. I stopped reading the newspaper, except on Sundays. Then I went celibate, for a long time, and got rid of all my social media accounts. Eventually I stopped eating meat, then eggs, then dairy... Every time I dropped something else from my life, I would think, am I still me without this?
The answer was yes and no. Because most of my habits were socially oriented, in becoming less addicted to things I became much less social; indeed, all this letting go of stuff eventually resolved in the effacement of my social identity and a withdrawal from society at large that I maintain to this day. Curiously, the more I gave up the less anxious I became, and in choosing not to feed addictions, I began to nourish aspects of consciousness that had hitherto remained unexplored. The quality of experience and scope of perception were radically improved.
It could almost be said that giving up things became my new addiction. But that was only to a point… Once I had found myself in a whole different context of experience (new place, new lifestyle, new people etc.) brought about through the process of letting go, I could return harmlessly to enjoy what I had given up, on occasion. Interestingly, a deeper and more enriching quality of sensation came through when I no longer turned towards things for a ‘fix’; after abstinence from sugar, the experience of eating fruits became paradisiacal. After prolonged celibacy, lovemaking was elevated to more refined and lasting sensitivity to pleasure.
Coming back to the question of physical shifts, I can say that during the periods of withdrawal and detoxification, lots of things took place that were very uncomfortable. The body started changing in all sorts of unexpected ways once I started to clean up the detritus of addiction; sometimes it was subtle, like increased senses of taste or smell, and other times it was horrifyingly obvious, like being bloated for months on end. So what you have mentioned about the body is something I can relate to.
The body in a state of detoxification fluctuates to extremes, and makes some dramatic and uncomfortable transformations that are well beyond control by our default cognitive programming. As my organs of detoxification were relieved of the burden of processing stimulants (and then everything else) a whole lot of weird stuff happened that I could not comfortably talk about with other people whilst it was playing out through the body. Constipation. Inflammation and swelling all over. Inexplicable cysts flaring up. Appetite diminishing from time to time. Nothing was predictable.
The wisdom of ‘this too shall pass’ prevailed through it, and eventually all the weird happenings tapered off. Hemostasis was reached, eventually. In my case I could feel my kidneys working properly again only after 6 years of withdrawal from amphetamines. Detoxification is now experienced from time to time as a matter of ongoing maintenance, like changing the oil in a motor engine; the discomforts give way to a clearer and more refined level of functioning, as the body recalibrates its natural balance.
Just to clarify, were you professionally diagnosed with anxiety or self-diagnosed?
The short answer is a retroactive self-diagnosis. Since the time period of this story (2009-2010) there has been increased literature, advocacy and public dialogue about high-functioning anxiety as a pathology in its own right. This story contextualises my past experience and subsequent healing process through the prism of anxiety as an underlying cause, which reconciled a lot of lingering self-judgement about the breakdown that ensued. Now I can see the breakdown as the culmination of a lifetime of anxiety; it brought my pathology into total focus, forcing me to deal with it.
I’d like to qualify the question of professional diagnosis with a caveat on the services available to support mental health in Australia; the system is unwieldy, for the most part, and commonly liable to frustrating errors at a great cost to patients. At the time of this story, I was ‘diagnosed’ with ADHD by a flagrant quack practicing as a clinical psychologist, which of course was my stratagem, as an addict, for obtaining the golden ticket to a full-time speed habit. Manipulation for gain is a hallmark tendency of an addict; I engaged with the medical establishment only to exploit it and support my addiction.
This story, I should say, is the dramatisation of a diagnosis, not the diagnosis itself. All the things that happened really happened, and all the thoughts and feelings really did take place; but the meaning and purpose of the story is really a matter of interpretation, which is the same as a diagnosis. Thus, it's really up to the reader to diagnose the authorial 'I' as one thing or another - as privileged, pathological, or just another product of the era.
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