u/SussyAltUser made a post asking when you realised you were addicted to meth, I went into my notepad to write what should have been a few sentences into a rambling mess that was too long to be posted as a comment.

Something in me wants to vent this out somewhere so I will make it into a post instead if anyone wants to read it.

Here goes ———————————————————

After doing amphetamine on a sort of “schedule” (once every 2-3 days, sometimes I would sleep other times I wouldn’t).

I knew I was somewhat addicted to regular speed at the time, but I also knew I could stop for periods when needed (like visiting family, or work related stuff), BUT only if there was a possibility of using the days, weeks and even months afterwards.

If you have told me I could never use amphetamine again I would have probably entered some form of mental withdrawal instantly, if that is even a thing. I suspect that the times I would be sober, just imagining being high was a good enough substitute , I’m not sure…

But that was all fun and games, in fact the period of using amphetamine was probably the best period of my life in terms of achieving goals, creating and strengthening relationships etc. and for once had a positive outlook on my life and the future ahead.

I would enjoy reading the stimulant related topics online and of course I would see methamphetamine being mentioned here and there.

After a while the summary I came to was that meth was very similar to amphetamine, just more potent, instead of being this crazy drug that would have you toothless and fighting in a 7/11 in the first week. (I was already comfortable with handling the consequences of sleep deprived stimulant abuse)

So of course I went and got myself some meth!

At first I wasn’t sure if I enjoyed it, because even though it was shockingly similar to amphetamine, there were very slight alterations in the high that whist being small, at the same time made it so different.

The biggest example: on amphetamine if I would hyper focus on something, I had some sort of control what to spend 12 hours doing, with meth it would be whatever was in front of me at that exact time.

I still had the meth bag, and I don’t like to waste drugs, so I kept using it in that same once every 2-3 day schedule as I did with amphetamine.

After a few tries I got somewhat used to it and could kinda control the activities I would hyper focus on , but would still mostly spend it doing something not worthwhile.

(LET ME NOTE THAT I HAVE A VERY STRICT NO STIMFAP POLICY, IT HAPPENED ONCE ON SPEED AND SUCKED MY FUCKING SOUL OUT)

Because of this it was official that I enjoyed methamphetamine.

In terms of comedowns (until later in the story), they didn’t really affect me all that bad, most of the time with amphetamine it was a sort of “death from boredom” situation. And the same with meth except it gave me a little bit of stimulation that made endlessly scrolling or other low effort tasks somewhat “fun”.

Fast forward 4 months and amphetamine was a thing of the past, and meth was my new best friend.

Throughout those 4 months I kept to the schedule and never broke it, not because I had discipline, but because that was what I was used to, and I thought that if I used the day after without allowing my body to recover whilst feeling tired as fuck, that it would cause a lot of damage.

I would still doing well in life and was genuinely happy as well.

Until that 4th month ended.

Within the space of a week I had a number of different things go wrong from friendships, relationships, education, family, career etc.

I don’t want to go into too much detail as the events are somewhat specific and if someone I knew read this they would know who wrote this, but when I say education problems I don’t mean failing I mean something like my entire 3 years of exam documents being lost, or relationship wise it wasn’t a break up it could have been something like a girlfriend getting cancer.

Those examples are not what happened to me, they are me just trying to explain the sort of circumstances without having people who know me figure it out.

(Anyways let’s carry on the story)

This week hit me like a bombshell and turned me upside own. Instantly suicidal (which I was for many years until I did amphetamine, even with some failed attempts) and once I had processed everything, and strictly followed my 2-3 day schedule/rule, I waited until the morning after using methamphetamine to make probably the biggest life changing decision in my entire life.

Do I become a meth addict?

That is the choice I gave myself.

Whilst sat there tired and worn out, I already knew my answer.

Yes…

The original idea was that I would just use whenever I wanted, and by the end of the year I would have slept so little and became so neurologically damaged that actually killing myself would become much easier, as the attempts long before this point always failed.

The week after was also a depressing one, as now all I could think about was that I’m “now a meth addict” and “what’s next? IV’ing meth? Using heroin too?”.

I find some humour in this now as it shows how naive I was and foreshadows what is to come.

Anyway, I quickly got over the label of meth addict of any other “scary drug” label to the point that if someone told me they just did a IV fentanyl and IV coke mix speedball, my brain would have a reaction no different than if someone told me they just smoked a joint.

So now we are at the stage where the surroundings are falling down, yet not a care is given.

I’m doing meth daily.

I’m staying up for 3 days and then sleeping for about 6 hours, just to put more meth in my body.

I did this for about 8 months.

And i was having a fucking blast,

I would spend days learning new skills, from coding, playing instruments, cooking, career networking(I hate this one though, so fake), and much more. And most of these things I stuck to and are big parts of my life that I use/practice today.

If you compare this to me before I ever touched drugs, i would spend all day. Either watching tv, on my phone or fucking video games.

This is why I struggle to answer the question regarding if I would go back in time and stop myself from ever touching meth, because Im almost certain that I would have never bothered to do any of these things and existence today would be, while manageable, dull as fuck.

This is also why I ended up not killing myself (successfully at least, there was one time) because most of the time there was something that would occupy my mind, weather it was good or bad.

After 8 months i started to get bad comedowns (I would get one occasionally prior) where i would silently shed a few tears if I thought about certain topics.

It’s normally hard for me to cry or express emotions (I do feel them though) even when people I know have died. I think it’s because I never really saw my parents ever cry, so when I would shed tears on these occasions it was a genuine sadness and would tear me apart, until the next morning as I happily drop a shard into my morning coffee…

I don’t remember the exact time periods after the 8 month mark, but my best guess is that it ranges from 1.5 to 2 years.

All the sleep I had not had was also turning me slightly “schizophrenic”, I don’t think that’s the correct term to use as I don’t think I have schizophrenia but it’s how the closest people to me (who I told about my use) would describe the thing i was becoming as.

I don’t mean seeing this that aren’t there, but sudden changes in communicative behaviours, “ticks” like always using my nails to get dirt from under my other nails, even though there was no dirt, constant or suddenly changing what my eyes are focusing on.

I had only slipped into psychosis a few times, and was lucky it wasn’t anything severe or that got me in trouble, the worst was me thinking my phone was hacked because I accidentally logged into a public WiFi with the same name as the private one I use, which is and was probably a genuine thing to be concerned about, but I heard “laughing” outside which I thought was the people who owned the imposter network connection and spent the next few hours removing every bit of personal information, passwords, cookies, photos of my family that I could find on my phone and laptop and changed so many security settings on so many devices and accounts that even today I have to go through about 10 2FA steps to login to certain things. Then I realised that the “laughing” was a sound my fridge would make every so often…

To some meth users, that may seem crazy, and to others it would be a boring Monday morning.

I think the paranoia and hallucinations didn’t get to me so much because most of the time I knew that they were just that, hallucinations. They would still annoy me if it was something that could trigger an automatic response, such as hearing your name being called, or seeing a shadow quickly pass by you, but within a second I would know it wasn’t real

In fact I got so used to blocking out police sirens, my name being called and so on that I would ignore real events. The most notable was when my building had a fire but the alarm wasn’t working and someone was knocking on my door trying to get me to evacuate, which I ignored thinking it was in my head.

The fire wasn’t anything too serious (pizza left in oven and charred a little bit of some guys kitchen) and the staff/landlord? (Idk who it was) used their own key to check if I was in there. Luckily I had appropriate clothes on (i like to wear stupid shit when I’m on stims, idk why it makes me laugh when I go pee and look in the mirror) and it was one of the few times where my room didn’t resemble an abandoned trap house, otherwise I’d have been evicted out for meth use.

To handle the comedowns I then added benzos to the mix. Xanax, pressed Xanax, kpins, Valium, pressed fentanyl, pressed catshit. It all worked a charm and was like opening my third eye, because I had also started to become bored of doing the same activity each day and it almost completely eliminated the comedown. I say almost because I was still having fun long after what would have been the stage of despair and wouldn’t want to sleep.

Let’s talk about putting a needle in your vein. Long before this point I had purchased needles and spend a day trying to hit a vein, and couldn’t, all I had was a bloody arm that made me feel a form of self shame which made me not try again for a while.

I was also scared of needles before meth, and still a little scared when I first tried to inject, but not long after eating benzos, combined with meth I saw the box of unused needles.

It was like a fly to shit. The retardation of benzodiazepines and the do-anything attitude of meth made hitting a vein seem like the most important thing to learn.

No matter how much blood or pain (there wasn’t much pain to be felt under the influence of the two substances) i wanted to hit a vein so bad, and I cant put into words the determination and fun i was having… by stabbing myself with a fucking needle?

Then I saw documentary about heroin addicts that showed the pain and suffering they endured each day. Whilst it was meant to shed light on the issue and make people think twice about touching needle drugs, there was a part that showed a girl injecting.

They blurred it, but I could make out the area and vein.

THE INNER ELBOW.

How could I have not seen it before, the vein is so fucking big.

Whilst I wish that woman all the best and hope she is doing better, her hard times and the shitty editing of whoever made the documentary had blessed me with the knowledge of fun self-destruction

What I was doing wrong prior was going for the veins that were visible on the inner forearm. Those veins are deeper than you think. From analysing my inner elbow vein I also learned that you can determine a veins hitability by feel. If it’s squishy and feels funny(not your penis), you can probably slam there.

I had opened Pandora’s box and wanted to put whatever possible in my vein, but only if I was on benzos or really fucked up.

I would crush pressies and mix with water and inject it, even though they weren’t water soluble and made my blood go fucking weird when registering, I still put made sure it went in my damn vein.

Years old weed cart? Smash it open and cram the oil, and probably microscopic glass too; in my vein.

Missed a shot? Stab a needle in there, suck it back out, and don’t miss another shot, fucking idiot!

Apart from the meth, did any of these random items get me high? No, only a painful lump that went away after a few weeks. I didn’t go to the doctor for that so I can’t say what it was

Did this completely degenerate brain decomposition state of mind give me a fun time? ABSOLUTELY!

So obviously I then started to shoot heroin soon after…

Luckily I experienced my first heroin withdrawal soon, and I’m not sure if I’m just a huge pussy, but it was hell, so did I quit heroin? No, I just put that on a once or twice a week schedule… I would joke about how it didn’t work last time but I actually did stick to it and even lessened and quit the heroin use, but I think only because that one withdrawal scared me so much and not because any coherent thought was present at the time.

Now this is the point where I failed to logistically plan my drug abuse.

You see, meth is relatively cheap if you have a good source, and each meth user knows the importance of not wasting a single shard and the dread of seeing the stash getting empty, so even at my worst I made sure to never drop a shard and to make sure I re stocked before running out. (I still carpet surfed for hours, yet to find anything)

Benzos make you retarded.

Whilst I love them with all my heart, they will convince me to go through a years supply of meth, heroin, ketamine, alcohol, lsd, tylenol, you name it, in a single month.

When this first happened I restocked big time and said to myself “don’t let the benzos make you do it all at once”.

Maybe a top 5 for the most stupid things ever said.

I went through it all in…? I have no fucking clue. I know it lasted way shorter than it should have (months).

It felt like days but could have been weeks. A complete blur.

All I had when I woke up was a bit of heroin and a combination of withdrawals that was so varied I wasnt sure if I was high or in agony. The only feeling that I could decipher was this unrelenting anxiety. I couldn’t breathe properly or talk and had so little energy that going to the toilet to piss was like climbing a mountain.

As for the heroin left, I still used it all, just not very fast. Which I’m thankful for, as the withdrawal was only slight by the time I finished the bag. somehow I regulated that even during goblin mode.

Like I said, the 8 month section onwards was the span of about 1.5 to 2 years and what was when is unclear in memory. I will never say “I quit” because by the size of this text I obviously still use amphetamine and meth, and have typed this in a way that may suggest I’m clean.

As for benzos I only do them when I get bad anxiety before something important, or if I gotta sleep desperately, and haven’t touched heroin or needles since.

Physically, I have no idea how I still have my teeth and surprised that my limbs never fell off from IVing random shit, but there is always a price to pay and will probably find out I developed 50 variations of heart disease and rectal cancer from hoofing in the coming years.

I don’t think I lessened my drug use to “escape this hell” or “better my life”, as deep down I feel it is because at the height of it all it felt like I was wasting drugs, which I have come to realise is my biggest fear.