Mind Games

I want to use so badly right now I can barely concentrate on keeping my fingers on the keyboard.  My thoughts, every emotion, every sense is consumed by this desire.

I know I can't give in to it.  I know that if I give in to this compulsion I would be throwing away everything that I have achieved in the last 8 months.  I know this.  I know that the older I get each relapse gets harder and harder to return from.  Always the knowledge is there, this time I might not come back at all.


And yet sometimes, like now, the desire to use threatens to overpower all logic, all knowledge and all reason.  Feeling like this is horrible.  I feel stupid, weak, dirty, cheap, ashamed, and a failure for feeling this way, and yet I can't make it stop.  I'm embarrassed to write and admit this.  After battling addiction my entire adult life, after everything I've been through and put others through, after acquiring all of the tools necessary to beat this....I still haven't beaten it.

I don't think it's a war that can be beat.  I might win battles every day by making the right choices, but the overall war will never be won.  I'll never not be an addict.

I just needed to vent while I was in the thick of things.  I know this craving will ease up eventually.  But goddamn fuck it's hard to not obsessively think and feel all of this while it's going on.

Today I choose abstinence but the devil monkey on my shoulder is trying to convince me that I'm being silly.  Mind games.  It gets to the point of not being able to trust myself, my judgement or anything I know to be right.  When in the thick of it, all memories of the pain, desperation, degradation, and misery conveniently fade away and detach from my brain as if it were someone else's memories, and surely *I* would *never* allow that to happen to *me* because I'm so much stronger and smarter now.  Surely just once in a while would never hurt, eh?  After all you still drink and can control it, that proves the point!

Mind fucking games.  This is what opiate addiction is like.  Doesn't matter if it's heroin, vicodin, morphine, codeine, oxycontin, percocet, or any of the rest of them......opiates fuck up and permanently rewire your brain for life.  Last night in a group conversation on facebook we contemplated if we could travel back in time, where would we go - I would go back to that fateful night in 1994 where I was offered to try heroin for the first time and stop myself.  Fanciful thinking, that.  It has done nothing but make my life miserable and yet I still. fucking. want. it.

Vent over.