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This was originally posted 2018, Aug 03

I am slightly over a month away from the one year mark of my unintended benzo withdrawal. It has really been on my mind lately. I lost the majority of my memories from last fall and part of last winter. I still have memory issues.

Hang on, I’m sorry. That’s way too complicated of a way to start this post. Let’s go back and talk about what happened and then I’ll get to what I’ve been thinking about.

About two and a half years ago I hit a very low point, emotionally. My job wasn’t going well, my mother was sick, and I really didn’t feel like I had enough (or any) control over the trajectory of my life. I eventually admitted that I needed outside help. I found a group that could treat both my brain and my emotions. <strong>Therapy is wonderful</strong>. I can’t recommend it enough. Between my therapist (She’s a goddess, I swear.) and my psychiatrist, things were on the upswing.

Now let’s talk about where the benzos came into the story. That takes us even farther back. The FIRST first time was without a prescription at some point in my teens when I lived in Tucson. It was never about getting high. At the time it was to try and help me sleep (I’m a lifelong insomniac. Fun!), but fast-forward to being an adult. I was finally sleeping better, but still having a lot of anxiety. It’s something I’ve struggled with as long as I can remember. So my GP at the time prescribed a very low dose of a benzo. ONLY for absolute emergencies. Fine. That was around 2009. I’d go multiple years at a time without needing to fill the prescription. I rarely ever took it. But I took it when I needed it.

We’ve now caught up to where I was on the upswing. While not being aware of its addictive properties, I’d been told repeatedly by many people that the benzo I was taking can affect the person’s memory, as well as increase the possibility of getting dementia later in life. So I was feeling better. With my medical people I lowered my dose, but was still cutting pills into quarter segments to take a smaller dose. So they prescribed an even LOWER dose. This was all over the coarse of two or three months. Not a very long time.

All of my medical professionals warned me to stop taking the benzo. Not a single fucking one of them told me not to just stop taking them. I’m not a hard drug user. There was no reason at any point in my life I’d have the knowledge to not do what I did. It was up to those medical professionals to tell me. But they didn’t.

So when I felt better, I stopped.

I don’t know how long it took for the initial withdrawal to kick in, only how long it took to understand what was happening to me. It wasn’t an act of “I am going to stop taking this.” Because I took it when needed, I simply stopped needing it and therefore taking it. To make things more confusing, I was also switching one of my other meds at the same time. One was being swapped for something similar. So there was a lot going on in my brain all at once.

What I do know is that I went from being the most emotionally stable I had been in over ten years to being in a never-ending panic that also felt like I was on some sort of psychedelic drug. I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t eat. I would be freezing cold then instantly be covered head to toe in sweat then back to cold again a few minutes later. I couldn’t sleep, although I would occasionally have crazy fever dreams/delusions. I was about 72 hours into that when a physicians assistant finally recognized that I was in a benzo withdrawal. My options at that point were to start taking either the same benzo (or a similar one) but in an even smaller dose to taper off, or I could just ride it out.  I was TERRIFIED of going through all of that again, so I chose to ride it out. A year later I do truly wish I’d made the other choice. This has been an incredibly difficult year emotionally (and as a result of that, physically). The first week or so was pretty much a continuous panic. Not a bunch in a row. It. Never. Stopped. My world literally felt like it was ending around me. One of the hardest/worst parts was knowing that all of the work I’d done with therapy was gone.

Not just gone but everything was so much worse than it had been before. The panic finally did stop, but it came back hard and it came back often. Panic was an ugly family member who liked to just show up randomly.

It’s gotten better but it’s been a hell of a journey. First it was every few days. Then it was every few weeks. Now it’s every few months. Hopefully it will stop someday.

Y’all, that withdrawal messed up my brain. I have hopes that it’s not all permanent. But let’s step back and took at the bigger picture here.

To treat my panic, my physician (No longer my physician.) gave me something that if I were to stop, would make my panic worse. Basically chaining me to that drug for life. With no warning.

<strong>With no fucking warning, y’all.</strong>

My therapist showed me a great online support group and I learned that what happened to me is COMMON.

<strong>So now we get back to what I’ve been thinking about.</strong>

I want to be loud about what happened. It happened to me. It’s happened to a TON of other people. <strong>BUT NO ONE FUCKING TALKS ABOUT IT, SO THE PEOPLE WHO HAVEN’T EXPERIENCED IT YET DON’T KNOW. This has to stop. And I think I want to stop it with me.</strong>

I don’t know how. It’s going to take a lot of thinking and planning and organization and work, but I think I’m willing to do that. <strong>People need to know what these <span style=”text-decoration: underline;”>LEGAL</span> prescription drugs do to people. </strong>I didn’t go through a withdrawal because I stopped getting high. I went through it because I didn’t need the medicine anymore and no one had told me the safe way to stop it.

When I was a kid, somewhere between 6 and 10, a friend had a sleepover birthday party. It had the usual parts of said party, and at one point the birthday girl wanted to watch a movie or show or something, so we were all crowded in front of a TV.

I freaked out. Like, legitimately freaked out.

Let’s go back a bit and explain why.

First, I was in trouble for something at the time I was at the party My punishment for pretty much anything meant no television. I sat with the other girls for a few minutes and became TERRIFIED of my mother finding out, and I had no idea what a 2nd or 3rd level punishment would include. I went and found an adult and made them call my mother for permission for me to watch TV. I was legitimately surprised that she was OK with it, but that was more than likely a fast decision on what would make her look the “best” to this other girl’s parents.

It became a family joke, and I’ve told the story many times over the years, but it wasn’t until literally this morning I realized how abnormal that entire situation was. And it got me thinking about WHY I was so worried about breaking the rule.

I was actually terrified of her. Think about it outside of the context of this blog post. A small child, at another child’s birthday, so worried about the punishment for breaking a rule, that I have zero positive memories of the party. I have the same lack of good memories from our trip to Disney in Florida. I’ve always assumed it was because it was shortly before my parents got divorced and they were just shitty and I picked up on it. I’m pretty certain that trip had the same absolute fear of punishment from her.

It’s just not fucking funny, and I shouldn’t have to be working to convince myself of that.

How fucked up is that, y’all? Not only did she beat me down (Emotionally, I was never punished physically after the last time I was spanked at 5 or 6. That’s a story for another blog post.) so damned much that I was too afraid of her to enjoy most positive situations, but she gaslit me so fucking hard that it’s taken this long for me to realize they were both COMPLETELY her fault.

I keep randomly unpacking shit like this, and it’s always about 6/10 feel better for realizing something/being incredibly angry and sad that she did it to me. All of it. My therapist has to remind me at least once a month that I was a child and didn’t deserve any of what she did to me (minus standard bullshit teenagers do to piss off their parents and feel big). Not a single bit of it. I can’t tell you how fucking hard that is. I have to struggle with it every moment of my life, walking around with forty years of guilt trying to shove me down even from the fucking grave. Which means I have to constantly think about what she did. 

It takes a lot of spoons, which is something else I have to constantly remind myself. This struggle is hard and it makes sense that I can’t just brush it off all of the time, and that is OK. The forgiving myself part is the part I am the worst at. I am my own biggest enemy, minus, of course, my mother.

The last relationship I was in before husband did not end well. The funny thing is that what stuck with me is not the one you’d expect. For the sake of this story, let’s call him Sterling. That is not his name but I’m not going to give that here.

I do know he was on a dating website and answering ads while he still lived with me and the chance of him having actually cheated on me are really damned high.

Those both suck. A LOT. There’s no way around that. But those aren’t the things that stuck the most. I was the one who ended things. He just one day stopped answering the phone and texts. The day after, when I finally got him on the phone, I ended things Rolling Stones style. It took a few days, then he finally came over to get his last handful of things he’d left. I gathered the courage to press him for what the hell had happened.

He didn’t know how to answer, or he didn’t know what to say. I still don’t know that one, either. I know this because of his answer. He told me he’d fallen out of love with me because I’d been greedy. 

That answer took me by surprise and I asked him how. He told me he thought I’d only been with him for his money.

It went about like this:

This requires us backing up a few months in the story. As mentioned above, we did live together for a few months. While he lived with me, I paid for everything. EVERYTHING. He was the one with a job, I was unemployed. But I paid all of the rent and all of the bills. He paid for his shitty cheap beers.

So anyway, when he slammed that one on me, I was already not in a good place mentally. I’d broken up with someone else for him. It was the end of a relationship, and I was being treated really poorly and it was long-distance at his choosing. He’d moved back across the country to live with his mother. Sterling was the one who told me “You deserve better than that. I’d have never left you like that because you’re worth so much more than how he treats you.”

When it became obvious that he no longer loved me, it also meant that I was not actually worthy of the things he’d said I was worthy of. Any of it. I sunk down HARD quickly. 

My reaction to “You are greedy.” should have been “What in the literal fuck are you talking about?!” but I was already so fucking broken from how he’d treated me that I just took it along with the chest-crushing guilt that went along with it.

That was 2005. I don’t know what it will take to fix this one. I know I’m worth so much more than him. I know I didn’t deserve to be cheated on.

But my brain is still completely stuck on him thinking I’m greedy. There’s no way he actually thought that, but you convince my brain of that. I’ve not been able to. 

And it sucks. It impacts my relationship with husband any time money is in the discussion. I get extremely defensive at the idea of being told how to handle my cash, and there are times when that’s extremely inconvenient. We’re married. We need to talk about money. But it fucking slays me each and every time. The subject alone makes me feel like I’m once again being told that I’m greedy.

My point is that his very small statement made one of the biggest negative impacts on my life and my emotional well-being. It was nothing to him. He may not even remember the conversation. But it’s just cemented into my brain.

Remember when you tell someone anything, those words often have meanings beyond the part that’s said aloud.

I hate this post. I hate having to make this post. But it’s so important to me that I’m open about the struggles that I have mentally, and I hope that I can make at least one person think twice about saying something hurtful, even if that’s not how you meant it.

Once, many years ago in Tucson, I went with some friends to the drive-in movie. We were there with two or three other cars full of people.

Between the two movies, a guy I don’t know opens my back door and then proceeds to basically rip out a chunk of my back seat (that was not meant to even go down, let alone be removed).

He’s standing there with the chunk of seat and turns and looks at me and basically mumbles that he’s in the wrong car (NO FUCKING SHIT) and hands me the seat piece.

Why, dude? I don’t think I ever got that part of my seat back in properly.

The end. That’s the post. I figure if I’m going to write here it’s going to be a lot of random crap, so here you go.

My life has been fucking weird. It’s been challenging in weird ways, both from fate and from my own doing.

My biggest enemy has always been myself. I still have a lot of bad days, some really bad. But the rest of my days have been so much better. It took a lot of years of really hard work, and I will have to fight myself for the rest of my life.

But, I figured out HOW to fight.
And I’m slowly getting better at it.

Beyond that, the people who fate has pushed me in the direction of have mostly been truly wonderful. I’ve been so damned lucky to have people who are willing to fight for me and help me see that I’m worth fighting for. 

Financially, my life has changed in ways that I genuinely never thought would be possible after the questionable choices and moves that I’ve made. I have a job that appreciates me and actually pays me a salary that makes me know I am appreciated. I have a husband who, bless his fucking soul, has pushed me from day one to be better with my money. He has helped keep me grounded, at least as grounded as I ever get.

I am just SO fucking grateful.
I’m so grateful for all of it.

I’m grateful for the forgiveness I’ve been given, the knowledge that I’ve gained, and the love I’ve been shown. I’m grateful for friends who are patient with and kind to me. I’m grateful for the soulmates who have shared their lives with me. I’m grateful for incredible, annoying, smelly, difficult, and otherwise expensive pets who have graced me with their lives into mine. 

So, to everything and everyone who has impacted my life, both good and bad:

THANK YOU.