You see, alcohol and benzodiazepines are both Central Nervous System depressants, which is just a fancy way of saying that they slow down your brain function. Every day, for nearly 6 years, I took 2 mg of Klonopin while cultivating a burgeoning addiction to alcohol, turning me into a living, breathing black out machine. What my psychiatrist decided to do was to prescribe me band aid after band aid after band aid until the wound had become infected and gangrenous. Essentially, you take away the band aid and replace it with a surgical suture and some thread. If a client comes into his office with debilitating panic attacks and crippling anxiety, he may prescribe a month's supply of a benzodiazepine to help stop the proverbial bleeding for a second while the two of them work out some of the underlying issues of the client's mental illness and find a non-addictive drug regimen for use over the long term. The way I had the clinical efficacy of Klonopin explained to me by a competent psychiatrist is that drugs like Klonopin are essentially band aids. She's so happy because she just popped 4 mg of Klonopin and can't feel feelings for the next 6 hours What this psychiatrist did not tell me was that Klonopin was a benzodiazepine and, like its pharmaceutical brethren Xanax and Valium, is ridiculously addictive and only meant to be used for short periods of time on account of the likelihood of developing an emotional and physical addiction to the drug after prolonged use. This same psychiatrist also told me I suffered from Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Panic Attacks, for which he gave me a prescription for these delicious little blue pills called Klonopin that were supposed to even me out and stop me from shaking like a chihuahua in a walk-in freezer.
When I was still in high school my psychiatrist diagnosed me with Bipolar disorder because, apparently, it isn't normal for a 17-year old to sneak out of his parents house at 10 o' clock on a Friday night and, without telling anyone, drive 6 hours to Chicago in order to sell a manuscript that he hasn't written to publishers he's never met. In retrospect, it was actually a gigantic blessing that I turned out to be constitutionally incapable of contemporaneously drinking and even pretending to be a productive member of society, as it got me into treatment sooner.Īnother reason why I may be so ineffective a drunk is the fact that I, like roughly 43% of all Americans with a substance use disorder, also suffer from a co-occuring mental illness. At the time, it was infuriating how often my life would cave in on itself and force me to adopt a temporary guise of sober responsibility.
#Schick shadel employment series#
My using history is really a series of uninteresting 1 to 2 months spurts in which I would give up most of my earthly responsibilities in lieu of getting fucked up, only to realize that I'd turned my entire world into a shambles and needed to jump back on the wagon for a spell. I am what you might call a “dysfunctional alcoholic.” A dysfunctional alcoholic is not someone who is particularly bad at being an alcoholic-I think I was pretty solid on that front, at least if speed is any indicator-but rather someone who is bad at being a functional member of society whilst drinking. Luckily for me, my path through alcoholism and addiction involved jumping out of the blocks quick and falling flat on my face almost immediately thereafter. The grandmother who left me her Big Books as heirlooms. The grandmother whose liver gave out before I was born. I wanted the same thing that my grandmother did.
I wanted to feel all of the atoms in my body being slowed to a turgid crawl, blocking up my veins and capillaries until the blood coursing through me moved at the pace of a lazy river. I had wanted it before I even knew what it was that I was wanting. Whether it was drink or drugs, the only thing I was looking for was a respite from myself. I could sit in quiet and not be forced to listen to the whirring drone of my own dysfunction. For a brief few hours, I was impervious to my own thoughts. Not nothing in an empty way, but nothing in a weightless way, as if the physical properties that guided the rest of existence no longer applied to me. The part of it that made me feel like nothing.
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