Reality's almost always wrong

"I was deluded into thinking I might be crazy."
- House, Season 6

A while back, I gave myself a shot of serious honesty up my arse, and came to some pretty nasty conclusions. Most of the fucked up things I've done in my life, or the painful things that I've gone through myself, have been down to drugs and/or alcohol.

I have hurt people and let people down, lost people's respect and friendship. I have self-medicated and hid anxiety, depression, insecurity and my intense fear of not being 'good enough' or 'fun enough' to be in other people's company by drinking too much, smoking too much, but in the end it all fell apart and stopped being a good move, an easy way of being around people. It just made them hate me. I have taken acid to escape realities I've been too scared to face and only become more paranoid and caged by those realites. I took cocaine to move time along, to stop the big blackness between waking up and going to sleep. I smoked weed because I thought it would chill me out, just like it did for everybody else. I'd dome the whole teenage getting high sniffing clue and aerosols thing before I was 13.

The first time I drank I was 16 and going out with what I lately realised was an alcoholic, encouraged to drink all the time, take drugs all the time, if he could make someone else drink as much as he was then he didn't have a problem. Simple, easy maths. At first it was just watching him shout at people, then it was shouting at me. Then he started getting violent with people, then he was hitting me. He loved driving drunk, loved it even more if he could force me to go with him, taking me to houses of friends I didn't know and places I didn't know how to get home from, being forced to stay and sleep in a house full of drunk, drugged up strangers. A couple of months after I was 17, in a house with another set of strangers, blind drunk, he raped me.

I kept drinking all the time (except for the year that I didn't, because I was more concerned with starving myself to death) I would go out and drink, stay in a drink, couldn't be around people unless I was drunk, didn't think they'd like me if I was sober, didn't know how to BE sober anymore anyway. Then I got raped again, different person, same story. Still drank and drank, wrecked a lot of good things in my life, lost a lot of good things in my life, then came uni and more drinking then ever before, painkillers, drugs, drama...

I'd had enough.

I've been sober for 15 days. I am still having a rough time. I don't know how long the detox thing is supposed to last but I'm pretty sure it should have been over my now. My stomach hurts all the time, I'm tired all the time, my limbs jerk, salt and sugar cravings are through the roof, I've gained 10lbs, I'm shaking most of the time and I am incredibly unhappy and depressed. For the first time in a long time my mood and self-esteem are on the floor. It's hard not to isolate. Hard to get out of bed. Hard to go out unless it's to walk around aimlessly or to buy food to binge on. Feeling on the edge of a huge depressive pit.

The way people see me has probably changed, too, or they don't understand. I've gone from being the 'life and soul' to being this quiet, frightened thing that locks herself away in her room for hours at a time, doesn't want to go out, doesn't turn up for uni half the time... I am sure that they won' take much more from me yet I can't explain myself.

I must have been so stupid in just thinking it was as simple as not drinking. It's so much more than that and I'm not quite sure how to get through that bit.