Firefly, You Might Wanna Skip This Post.

Well, I'm back, thanks to a well-loved laptop no one at work wanted anymore. Which was still better than my 1998-era Sony VAIO desktop. It took a while to get it where I wanted to get it.

During which time...

Look. I am anonymous on this blog so I can be honest, right? But I was really conflicted about reporting this. Still am, I guess, but if I've learned nothing in 35 years I've learned: when you don't know if what you're doing is the right thing, charge blindly ahead anyway. And I'm taking a page from Ka here, and losing the drama and evaluating the true gravity of the situation as objectively as I can.

I had a minor lapse in judgement this past week. Two of them, as a matter of fact. Those of you who know this story can probably already intuit what's coming; those of you who don't...well, I wish you did, because writing this is turning out to be a little harder for me than I thought it would.

I did some heroin this week.

If you're clutching your pearls and exclaiming "oh no!", please stop. If you're not, please don't start. I am being as objective as it is possible to be about this; I have looked at what set me off, at how bad it was really, and how hard it's going to be to not do it again.

I am not sorry, exactly. I think I needed a refresher in what I hated about it, instead of the warm fuzzy memory aspects of it which never seem to leave. It's very easy to forget the bad. I needed to drive around and avoid what seemed like a million cop cars. I needed to get taken for $20 by jackass little boys selling fakes, again. I needed to feel the raw edges of panic as it wore off and everything that happened, no matter how insignificant, became part of the worst of all possible worlds. I needed to remember the bad, and so this was not an entirely wasted endeavor.

I also needed to remember something else: once is not ever going to be enough. I realized it after the first hit. I really realized it when I found myself driving around the next day, looking for more.

Facing facts here: I like heroin. I like the way it makes me feel. I like not feeling scared of not being able to hide every single flaw I have; I like feeling comfortable in my own skin for a change. But I also know those feelings are fleeting, and that afterwards there are consequences. And I also realized something else: wanting it is one thing. Acting on it is where the problem comes in. I was beating up on myself so hard for just wanting it that I think on some level I figured "well screw it, might as well just go on ahead." Wanting it is fine; doing it is not. Important lesson learned.

So I stopped, and I plan to stay stopped, and to be grateful that I CAN stop. I am not going to wring my hands over this mistake and let myself become so overwhelmed with shame that I feel there's no reason not to do it again, and again, and again. I was strong enough not to do it for nearly six years; I can pick up where I left off and be grateful for the lessons.

Among those lessons: sometime soon, I really have to start dealing with my grief. It was ten years Sunday since JP's death, and somewhere between that milestone and doing heroin again and the emotional rainstorms coming a lot more often lately (I found myself last night crying over a stupid BANK commercial)--somewhere along the line I realized that I am hurting a lot more than it's easy for me to admit. I've based so much of my self-worth these past ten years on being "strong", and these past few days have taught me that denying my pain like this is not "strength". It's damn near killing me, is the long and short of it, and what's more, it's drawing my life into a tighter and tighter circle around me, narrowing every chance and life decision into a simple equation: possible pain?=hell no. I am avoiding a larger and larger subset of life, just so I don't have to deal with this big internal owwie, and I can foresee a point at which I will have avoided everything for so long that I'll have no choice but to keep doing it til I die. And that's no sort of life at all.

I don't know what I'm going to do about it, but I do know that something needs to be done. And "something" is not heroin.

I wasn't going to write this, because I was afraid of letting everybody down. I know exactly one of you in real life, and yet your opinions mean a lot to me. Enough, anyway, that I worried about whether you might think less of me if I admitted that I got high again. But I promised myself back when I started this blog that I would be completely honest, and I like to think I've lived up to that so far. I've been merciless in my characterizations of some people in my life; you've seen the warts-and-all side of LJ, and my mother, and just about everybody else I know. It would be dishonest of me to keep MY warts hidden, after all that.

I will get past this, and I will be fine. Maybe even better.