I didn’t expect the days leading up to my nine year sobriety anniversary to be this… intense. Some is the full moon and all that entails, and the dark moon in Lilith.
The part I had control over was adding one AA technique, “Rigorous Honesty.” i have a lot of things to get off of my chest now that I can type again. The illnesses were that bad. That much brain damage plus loss of all muscle tone in body, meant aching hands after a few tweets. At which point I’d completely lost track of whatever I was trying so say.
Writing exercises such as this substack are really helping me get back into it. Also being able to think about different audiences for different types of expression. Using Twitter for rigorous honesty got… more stressful then helpful.
I think “chill the fuck out” is the usual sobriety aid I’m going to return to. The stress from all that humiliating and completely whack shit in the 12 steps is so conducive to relapse that that’s why AA still exists. It perpetuates the problems it is supposed to cure.
Like much psychiatric medication, especially antipsychotics that were made to be such heavy sedatives that they destroy what mind and body is left of the patient to keep them from breeding, moving, thinking, reading, driving, etc…. My domestic partner chose suicide over staying married to me after enough nonconsensual Haldol shots from the low income clinic turned the woman she marrried into an alcoholic vegetable.
Why was I going to the clinics for the poorest of the poor? Who essentially treat their clients as lab rats. Experiment with new meds as a sideline project. Forced me take medications far more powerful and destructive then any recreational drug I have ever done.
You’d have to ask my parents. Who didn’t supply me with heath insurance. I remember driving around with my father, once I’d moved back to San Diego. He was looking for a homeless shelter to drop me off at. So I could get psychiatric medication. Why? He’s an attorney. Something seemed off. You’d have to ask him about that.
My graduate school experience and my first marriage suffered for being in non consensual medication trials. Cruel county clinics. My parents retired. Traveled the world for many years. In style. They could have paid for my health insurance. They chose not to.
I think it was a suicide pact, given retrograde memory loss is a side effect of too much Klonopin. I was the one unfortunate enough to live. My domestic partner died. Enough former friends made it clear that I should have died. Was now dead to them.
My mother is in Borneo right now. I’ve though about that Goya painting of the Titan eating it’s child alive. Metaphoric to their peculiar allocation of resources. Getting sober meant using the Medicare I finally had after the two year waiting period post getting disability.
The change to my mental health once I was in private care was was huge. Being able to be the person I became then, while I had been in grad school and married? Could have saved her life. Made me employable. Usually CalArts MFA graduates taught high school. Community college, were adjuct professors. I never could.
You need headshots to waitress in L.A.
I was a starving bony batshit disaster I was by the time I stumbled into the Social Securiy office office to apply. In many ways I still am. Starved for love, not food. Still with that mouth herpes that appeared in early puberty. Stress still makes them go apeshit.
I’m not pointing fingers and drawing conclusions. You are. You might even be in a position to help. I am too enmeshed in my survival depending on their favor. Time is on my side, though, while little else seems to be.
Oh, did I spill that tea on you there, sitting too close for comfort? Is is burning? Scalding? Does it hurt? Well, I just don’t know why you “won’t just avail yourself of health care?”
Andrea Lambert 