Drugs. Drugs suck. Drugs are bad….m’kay? I can remember it as if it were yesterday. My friends bought me an ecstasy pill for my eighteenth birthday. Fabulous birthday present, right? I was never into drugs. I smoked pot here and there but wasn’t a big fan. It would make me paranoid and jittery but everyone else was having fun so I thought why not do it. I had nice friends and they never peer pressured me into anything. All I wanted was to have as much fun as they were all having. Unfortunately, I had to learn the hard way not to do drugs. In this journal entry, I was actually on my way to college for the first time. Instead of writing about how excited I was to finally be leaving my hellhole of a house, I was busy recalling my bad trip on ecstasy. Reading back at this entry now, my words did no justice for what I felt that night. I stopped the entry abruptly and never wrote about the rest of the night, however I can remember clear as day how that night played out. Here is the entry recapping one of the worst nights of my entire life:
Hey- well- today is August 26th, the day has come and I’m off to college now. I’m on my way there now with Rachel, Dude, and Mom. Rachel and I are driving in her car. I’m excited but very nervous. I think there’s something wrong with me. I’m having these panic attacks and they are so scary. Yesterday I started shaking because I was so nervous or something. I can’t really explain. It started when I did E. I’m so scared of drugs now because that feeling comes back to me. I have to tell you about that experience. Well, a couple of days after by b-day, I tried E for the first time. I thought it would hit me at once, but it didn’t. I had to make myself feel it by spinning or laying down. I thought it wasn’t hitting me. After a couple of hours I thought I wasn’t feeling it so I smoked and that was a bad mistake. I didn’t realize how much I had smoked, not to mention that it was really strong. I sat at Joe’s house on the couch and I couldn’t move. I gave him (Eric) a hug and I was paralyzed. I couldn’t move off his body and it just got worse. Everybody was moving but in like stages at a time. All I could think of was that the feeling was going to last forever and I hated it so much. Then Eric asked if I was feeling good and I said no. Then I felt like it was worse then because everybody knew that I felt bad. I was trying so hard to hold it in, crying. I thought I would bug out. My teeth started chattering, but only I felt it. And my body was all shaking inside and then it was captured with warmth, and heat that held the pain inside of me. I felt like things were growing on my face. After awhile of laying there paralyzed, Kara told me we were going outside because she knew I felt bad. It was such a relief to get out of the house with everyone in there. I couldn’t take too many people and the dancing and the music.
The entry ends there. That night changed my entire life. I honestly think that anxiety was in my future regardless of doing E but being on a drug and tripping out made the anxiety worse and many of my future anxiety attacks brought me back to that night of feeling out of control and losing my mind. Thank God for my friend Kara. She knew me well enough to know I was not ok. She took me outside and we walked the block back and forth with what felt like an eternity until it was time to go home. I remember telling her my mind felt like a movie that was replaying in my head over and over. I kept babbling about how I felt and she listened. What a good friend she was, and still is today. When it was time to go back inside, I can recall not being able to get up the stairs to the apartment in the house where everyone was. It was as if someone was holding my legs down and I couldn’t climb the steps. The amount of anxiety that house gave me was debilitating. That was the first time I had experienced anxiety association with places and things. There was a lot more anxiety and associations in my future. For now, or then really, I made it home safely and went to sleep. I recall waking up the next morning being so thankful the drug was out of my system and thinking “I’ll never do that again!”
Moral of story/blog…drugs are bad, m’kay?