1/ Alright, I know I missed the official @threadapalooza date, but I thought I'd (try to) chime in with something I'ma go ahead and guess not many of you have direct experience with:

My experience with opiate addiction- a thread

2/ To start, I'd like to share a bit about who I was as a kid, for context. I was a bit of a nerd- raised on Tolkien and Asimov and endless hours playing Zork as a youngster.

3/ I was in band, then jazz band, then honor band and marching band. I was offered a scholarship for first chair bass clarinet at a college I ended up not choosing to attend.

4/ I was in clubs in high school, several of them ones that I had started. AP student. I even went to several board game conventions, and regularly played Diplomacy with my AP Econ teacher.

5/ My parents are still together. There were no drugs and not a whole lot of alcohol in our household. No physical violence.

6/ Looking at that bio, you probably wouldn't guess that I'd start using heroin at 19 and end up living on the streets in LA by the time I was 30.

7/ I wasn't really intending to make this super in-depth on the psychology part of things, but I have a lot of tweets left to go on this thing, so maybe I'll come back to the why of things later on.

8/ The first real drug experience I had was MDMA, my senior year of high school. There were no gateway drugs for me, I dove in hard and fast. Barely over a year later, I tried opium for the first time.

9/ This was when I was a student at UCSC. I'd been strongly against ever trying heroin or meth before then, but opium- that had mystique! Opium brought to mind tortured artists, not street junkies.

10/ I didn't even like it very much- didn't think I was feeling anything, until I started throwing up.

11/ That, however, is one of the most dangerous characteristics of opiates in general.

They just aren't really all that great! I thought: 'what's the big deal? I don't even like this very much, I'm certainly not going to get addicted.'

12/ And then- then, I had a moment of pure genius.

'I'm not at risk of becoming addicted, and I want to know what withdrawal is like, on a visceral level.'

So I got myself addicted. Intentionally.
Just remember that if you end up feeling even the slightest bit of pity for me

13/ It didn't even work the first time I tried. I smoked a few times a day for maybe three days in a row, then stopped.

No withdrawal.

14/ So I tried harder. I went a week.

That did it.

15/ Withdrawal is the reason I started to enjoy heroin. It took me years of intermittent use to realize it only felt good to do when I was feeling bad.

16/ That's the danger of it. It causes you to feel shitty, so you get more. It's expensive, so you start feeling bad about the money you're spending on it.

17/ You hide it from your family, your friends. The shame increases, increasing your need for something to help you cope with your day.

18/ In the beginning, I was what you'd call a functional addict.

I kept that up, with varying degrees of success, for many, many years.

19/ I wasn't a weekend user- when I was using it was several times a day.

But I kept jobs. I was typically even a manager at the restaurants I worked at - so I didn't have to spend so much money on food.

20/ I never stole to support my habit, but I fell behind in things like rent- which amounts to a sort of slower version of theft, if I couldn't pay it back.

21/ I couldn't go on trips, because I'd always run out and get sick. Then there was the stress of trying to transport things through airports.

22/ I can't count how many times I went through withdrawal.

At first, I forced myself to do it cold turkey, every time.

23/ There were never babies crawling on the ceiling for me, but it was just as bad in other ways.

24/ My whole body would ache. Sometimes I'd crawl to the bathtub, but usually I'd spend a week marinating in my own sweat-and-vomit-drenched sheets.

25/ Coughing, sneezing, vomiting bile.
Cold sweats would alternate with intolerable heat.

26/ The smallest sounds and slightest lights were amplified, painful.

27/ One of the first times I went through the full thing, I was living in a house with rats in the walls. I can still remember tossing and turning nights in a row, those small scritching noises so loud they'd pound through my brain.

28/ After a few years, I switched from smoking it to injecting it. I was in a long term relationship at the time, and told myself I'd be less of a financial burden on him if I could use less.

29/ On the surface, it was somewhat logical. When you smoke it, you inevitably lose a bunch to the air around you, not to mention the layers of gunk coating your lungs.

30/ But in reality, I just ended up increasing the amounts I was using over time.

I'd vary between $30/day, to more like $100/day.

31/ Smoking it, overall, led to worse withdrawal symptoms than shooting it did, despite using larger amounts.

32/ There'd be so much gunk in my lungs, I'd cough far more, which inevitably led to more vomiting. That vomiting was typically green bile, acidic and painful. Eating was out of the question, just led to more vomiting.

33/ The worst one out of a fair number of heavy contenders was the second to last time I saw my grandfather alive.

The last time he was able to really visit with anyone.

34/ I went with my family to spend a few days in a rental cabin, and took some suboxone with me.

35/ Suboxone and subutex are two of the medications you can use to treat withdrawal symptoms- but suboxone you have to wait until the heroin is out of your system before taking it. If you don't, you get what's called precipitated withdrawal.

36/ Precipitated withdrawal is withdrawal 2.0, basically. I didn't wait long enough, and when I took it, I immediately started heaving.

37/ I lied to my parents.

Told them I had to leave, that I got called in to work.

38/ On the airplane, I couldn't stop throwing up. I was not thinking clearly, and didn't have enough notice to get to the bathroom.

39/ So I'd throw up in my sleeve, as quietly as I could manage to. It was all bile anyway. I don't know if the guy next to me noticed, but I can't imagine he didn't.

40/ My dealer's place was in West Hollywood and as we flew over, all I could think was that I wished I could just parachute out there, instead of having to fly all the to LAX and drive back up.

41/ I was so bedraggled and disgusting and shaky and ashamed when I finally staggered up to the house.

42/ Knowing I had left that trip early, that was one of a number of factors that I am pretty sure contributed to me ending up so apathetic I became homeless.

43/ It was too shameful, too hard to look at- that I'd missed one of the last chances I would have to spend time with my grandpa before he died.

44/ But not all of my withdrawals were so terrible.

45/ The second time I went to fish in Alaska, I had been planning on quitting well before my flight.

46/ Of course, that didn't happen.

My last hit was the morning of my flight.

47/ But when I got up there, to my surprise- I didn't actually feel all that bad!

48/ I had found something I wanted to do more than I wanted to use heroin!

And the withdrawal symptoms, they were still there -- but they were manageable.

49/ There were two other times that happened, in what turned out to be a decade of using.

50/ Once was during another trip- I felt a bit sniffly, a bit sore. But overall I was okay! The mild symptoms I did experience were not constant.

Once again, I had found something I wanted to do more than I wanted to use heroin- and once again my physical withdrawal lessened.

51/ And the third time... The third time, I'll come back to.

First, what else would you guys be interested in hearing about?

I'll share some stuff I thought was surprising or interesting, but feel free to ask any questions you might have, and I might address them at the end.

52/ One thing I thought was pretty surprising was how much variance there was in damage to my veins, between heroin, fentanyl, and meth.

Strangely (or so I thought), heroin (black tar, didn't do enough china white to get much data) was by far the worst.

53/ I'd use a vein sometimes only a couple times, and it would just be gone. Fentanyl and meth were both far easier on my veins.

Though my track marks are barely visible now, the veins in my hands and arms never really healed.

54/ As far as procuring this stuff goes, I was a dedicated enough user that I did not leave it up to the availability of the dealers I knew personally.

55/ Buying stuff from street dealers is always risky, but the only time I was completely ripped off was in Skid Row- for the most part, I didn't run into too many problems.

56/ I was going to detail some of the stuff I learned about how to find and cop from street dealers, which I found pretty interesting, but I just realized it could come across as a how-to so I'ma leave that there

57/ Problems almost arose a few times! Once, I had someone coming to meet me in the beach flats area of Santa Cruz. He was coming by car, but I didn't know what kind.

58/ For some time prior to that, I'd been pretty nervous walking around there by myself at night. Not because of the people out, but because cops kept following me real slow.

A car stopped and the door opened. I got in.

It was not my friend.

59/ He was very nice when I realized the mix-up, and that's when I figured out that the cops weren't following me because they knew I was buying drugs!

They were following me because they thought I was street walking!

60/ Being a young white girl made my life MUCH easier than that of my friends. Cops would hassle Hispanic kids who were doing nothing, and I'd walk by high as shit. They wouldn't spare me a second glance.

61/ And I took advantage.

One time, I was waiting for a dealer to come back with the product, late at night. A cop rolled by a one-way street nearby- I knew he'd seen me.

He came back around, but by then I was ready.

62/ Him, from his car: 'Are you okay, miss?'

Me, sitting next to my bright orange and green vespa: 'yeah, I'm just waiting for my mom to come get me.'

'Well, you be careful now!'

63/ I was treated with less suspicion than the white guys I spent time with, less suspicion than the people of color I spent time with, no matter their gender. Consistently.

64/ Heroin has a reputation of hedonism, but that is a complex issue.

My experience was perhaps not the typical one, but still- to this day, I have never met a happy heroin user.

65/ For me, it never felt good except in how it helped me look away from the things that hurt, mentally or physically, for however brief a time.

66/ The best way I've ever heard it described was like 'a warm wash cloth over the mind'.

67/ That's it- no fireworks, no euphoria. At least not for me.

It even (typically) destroyed the sex drive of both myself and others.

68/ It slows down your brain.

You stop feeling so actively stressed over the things that end up becoming problems, or worse problems- because of the habit itself.

69/ When I was homeless, I quit using opiates. That was 2017. The only opiates I've had since then were fentanyl during two hospital visits, the most recent just last week.
I did not enjoy the way it made me feel. I no longer have the kind of pain inside me that opiates address.

70/ I began using methamphetamine after I quit. That's what most homeless people use. Even the ones you might see nodding out on street corners- you nod off when using speed because your sleep gets so disrupted your body just falls asleep sometimes.

71/ Most homeless people do not use heroin, partially because of the reputation it has as something more terrible than meth, but primarily because of simple logistics.

72/ Meth is dirt cheap, far more readily available than heroin.

They have different effects on the brain, but both give the user an illusion of security from the turmoil in their soul.

73/ They keep the mind from gazing directly at our faults, at the vastness of the holes within us.

74/ I met a small number of homeless people who claimed to want to be there, who claimed to be happier without the responsibilities of daily life.

75/ I believed none of them.

76/ Sure, they seemed confident in the truth of their words. I questioned most people I spent time with about what their plans were, how they got to be where they are and whether or not they wanted to stay there.

77/ The few that claimed satisfaction would later act in ways that cast doubt upon those words. They were bitter, they were lonely.

Broken, like I was.

78/ I recognized that about myself- after the injury that had prevented me from being able to work had healed, I knew I could get a job. I just couldn't bring myself to care enough about living.

Especially surrounded by homeless who assaulted and stole from other homeless...

79/ I could no longer see enough good in the world to make it worth the effort of what it would take to start getting my life back in order.

80/ I went through withdrawal so many times, despite how awful it was- because quitting the drugs, or switching the types, did not fix the problems I had inside that gave drugs utility.

81/ I couldn't handle stress, or conflict. Had some pretty crippling anxiety I was totally unaware of.

Even when I had put it aside for a time, I couldn't overcome temptation if it was offered to me, or if I had run into one obstacle too many that day.

82/ Now, I genuinely prefer the feeling of being sober to being high. I wouldn't have been able to quit if I had not found a sense of completeness within myself, first.

83/ The third time my withdrawals were not that bad was the last time I went through them. Funny, no? The pain was never enough to get me to stop, but when I was ready to- there was no pain.

84/ I stopped using fentanyl in 2017. I'd been mainlining it. I had met this guy that I had the kinds of conversations with that I'd had in college- an exciting back and forth on human nature that lasted for a week.

85/ I felt great. Couldn't sleep, had some gastrointestinal issues. But zero other symptoms.

(There was some other stuff going on during and shortly after that time that I've talked about elsewhere, so won't go into detail on here.)

86/ My withdrawal symptoms, while real- only happened when I wasn't really ready to quit. Perhaps if I'd seen a mental health professional who had been able to help me address the anxiety issues I didn't even know I had- I would have been able to quit sooner.

87/ All those physical symptoms, they were my body telling me that just by quitting my use, I wouldn't be immediately addressing the issues prompting me to use.

88/ I don't believe that anyone with that kind of habit ever truly overcomes the shame, the guilt that comes with knowing we're capable of being 'that kind of person'.

89/ As often as I told myself I was only doing myself harm, and could keep a job and was fairly functional- part of me always knew the truth I wouldn't admit to myself.

90/ My parents didn't know anything about it (by the end they had begun to assume I was doing drugs, but they didn't know enough about the effects of various drugs to be certain of which I was using) until this past January, when I reconnected with them.

91/ My closest friends typically knew, a small number of my co-workers. I had less trouble sharing with strangers- less riding on the outcome.

92/ I truly don't believe anyone whose drug use has become damaging to their body, mind, relationships, finances etc is well.

Neither do I really think of it as an illness, in my head.

93/ I think of it as a symptom of unresolved anxiety or trauma of some sort.

94/ It is so easy to withdraw into ourselves when we don't have the knowledge or the ability to heal on our own.

95/ Far easier than it is to reach out, to admit we're struggling with something more challenging than we can face alone.

96/ I'm not just talking about drug use anymore. Some turn to drugs to fill that void, others to food or alcohol or Twitter or video games.

Until those things are no longer enough.

97/ When you see someone having a hard time, please don't take the easy path yourself. It's easy to judge, to castigate, to ignore and dismiss.

98/ Much more difficult to take the time to really listen, even if you disagree with their choices.

Especially if you disagree with their choices.

99/ That's true courage, in my view. True strength. And quite possibly the most beautiful fucking thing there can be in this life.

100/100 Thank you for taking the time to read this. If you gained at all from it, please don't thank me. Instead, find someone who seems in need of a friend, and just listen a bit.

This year has been difficult for all of us, but gets less so the more we're here for one another.