I can’t stay on your life support,
There’s a shortage in the switch,
I can’t stay on your morphine,
‘Cause it’s making me itch
I said I tried to call the nurse again
But she’s being a little bitch,
I think I’ll get outta here, where I can
Run just as fast as I can
To the middle of nowhere
To the middle of my frustrated fears
And I swear you’re just like a pill
Instead of makin’ me better,
You keep makin’ me ill
Pink
Ex hubby and I agreed on a few things.
Very few, but a few nonetheless.
He’d had a bad habit of dating opioid addicted strippers. My problem was I dated alcoholics. Mean ones.
We kinda bonded over this. Surviving it, the horror stories of relationships turned wars. Battle of us versus the pill or bottle depending.
He barely drank, cheated an awful lot though. Not sure if that was a step up or a shimmy sideways.
Survey says shimmy.
I was a step up for him, I was clean and a waitress at the time, an EX stripper.
I wasn’t a saint, more of a ‘been there done that, I’m a good girl now’.
Until I wasn’t.
I have never done heroin. Hillbilly heroin yes, morphine and its derivatives and that is where it ended. I could not even begin to imagine how sweet that high would have been to a girl like me whose head is rarely quiet. I can imagine the oblivion. Loved the tingling sensation on my skin, I fuck a lot to get that feeling. I fuss sometimes about how people can condemn some things without trying them, but I knew that white horse would drag me to my death so I stayed away.
It’s so funny. My stubbornness has saved me from and condemned me to hell depending on the day and the circumstance.
I was so committed to not being like his other girls that I refused pain medication after my accident, you know, the one that left me unable to think or walk right.
I had to get rushed in for an MRI and they asked me what I was taking for pain, I said nothing and immediately got a shot of morphine in my IV drip. They wanted to make sure it wasn’t the pain making me unable to remember anything. My threshold had been breached and I was going crazy from trying to manage.
But I was stubborn and I was careful and above all respectful.
I got through it with some Tylenol 3’s.
Sometime in the beginning of our relationship, really early on, we discussed how dating an addict is akin to dating a chronic cheater.
Stay with me here.
Someone or something is always more important than the person they are with.
I watched a woman I know, drive away and leave a girl to get beaten by her ex because said ex was a coke dealer and the one driving away didn’t want to disrupt her supply of drugs.
That shit changes you. Priorities become skewed and nothing else matters.
There is no Dana only Zuul. (Ghostbusters)
I am about to contradict the ever loving shit out of myself but bear with me here.
I still do not believe that a healthy relationship is comprised of two people who are so into each other that nothing else matters, that in itself is an addiction and not advised.
Love yourself, have your own life and then invite someone in who can work with you and not make a mess of this thing you have built for yourself, then you can build together.
But when you have to take a back seat to heroin, cocaine, work, alcohol whatever form their escapism takes you start to question your own worth. Is your life so bad that you have to drown yourself in other things? Am I not enough to compensate for how shit life can be? I strive to be sanctuary and a warm safe place. If you have to look elsewhere for comfort and joy, I end up feeling like shit about myself by proxy.
Can’t be helped.
Case and point. The guy I dated for 5 years before ex hubby, ex hubby the first I guess. Worked Monday to Friday. As the weekend approached he’d stop at the beer store, 6 beers after work Thursday, Friday? Hammered to the point of incoherency by 9 or 10 pm. Saturday day drinking to kill Friday’s hangover so Sunday was a write off too.
Let me get this straight…I couldn’t be a waitress because it kept me out nights and we didn’t get to see each other but he could drink himself blind on the two days we did get to hang out?
Shoulda left way before I did.
History repeated.
Same with the farm life. Shoulda woulda coulda left, but I didn’t.
I responded to his actual cheating with some actual cheating of my own, and some leaving and some more cheating.
Then I got my boobs done and my hands on some opiates.
For 90 days I didn’t feel a thing.
Sisterwife was a junkie in her own right, I watched her eyes glaze over, I watched her health deteriorate as she assaulted her one, working, donated kidney with wave after wave of whatever drugs she could get her hands on.
And no one but me seemed to see it. I got tired of yelling ‘are you blind, she’s not docile, she’s fucking high.’
I couldn’t beat them, so I joined her. Spring 2011 is a blur. Pretty sure nothing good happened anyways. How could it?
The summer came, I got a job and straightened myself out. By the fall I left.
I stayed straight, until 2 years later, I found myself dating yet another douchebag who couldn’t even change a tire or keep a job. Got my hands on some Percocet and started checking out every night so I didn’t have to acknowledge this piece of shit taking up half of my bed.
You can check out anytime you like but you can never leave. (The Eagles)
I thought I couldn’t leave, felt trapped, tried to escape anyway I could. And in effect I was cheating. Mentally leaving the relationship before I tossed his freeloading body out the door.
Now?
I know better.
The concept of “alone” is not some terrifying foreign concept.
If I start getting the itch to check out, I’ll just leave.