Early "Recovery" Journal: High-Risk Homosexual Behavior (ICD Code Z72.52)

"I'm a stranger everywhere I go because I'm strange to myself."

Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

In Prozac Nation and More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction, Elizabeth Wurtzel changed the way that we talk about our inner lives. From chapped lips due to depression blowjobs to relatives believing that she had IBS because of how often she went to the bathroom to snort Ritalin, she held nothing back. She was a Harvard / Yale Law grad and the quintessential New Yorker, and her frank, sometimes grating, and always apt observations have really stuck with me. I have this strange, strong feeling that Elizabeth Wurtzel is in the room with me as I write this now - like a saint that I call upon before heading to the gallows.

I am at least semiconscious for the first time since 2018.

My partner and small animals recognize me for me again. I can dream, and I can remember.

I've been in a walking benzo and opioid coma for the past eight years. I've been loaded on phenobarb, pentobarb (so retro); alprazolam, bromazolam, clonazepam, diazepam, estazolam, the fucking ABC's of benzos; oxycodone, fentanyl, methadone (my beloved heroin, alas, has been out of reach).

I summon the pungent smell of Tylox, China's answer to 5-mg Percs, which wafts up when you tear open the packages to devour tens of them in a matter of minutes (with a glass of red wine and three 30-mg phenobarb tablets).

I don't sleep on my right side anymore. My liver cringes just thinking about Tylox.

Destination anywhere but here, I've always practiced in reference to my native neurochemistry. I didn't really understand that beyond some point, I wouldn't have the option to return, but I wouldn't have cared even if I did.

My chemopartners have comforted me, and they have done a number on me, too. I've been as close with them as I've ever been with any human being - that's for sure.

Asshole presidents have come and gone and come again; my hair has been shot through with gray; my gray and white matter have been shot through with God knows what - probably perforated by those cute little Olney's lesions that you see in rat brains from antidrug commercials.

I've taught whole schools' worth of students; written and recorded thousands of hours of content; watched a pandemic blossom like a blue-black flower that left lockdown in its wilted wake.

I woke up with half a smile and rotten teeth. I woke up with nightmares that are just memories of experiences that I didn't know I'd had.

I remember schools and hospitals, and I remember the pills and the needles and the precious, warm and waning feeling of dissolving into a womb-like fog.

I'm waking up, and I am in a dream.

***

I've been "stabilized" on buprenorphine for almost eight weeks (tomorrow will mark eight weeks exactly of no fentanyl, no methadone - nothing other than the bupe; no benzos or barbs for going on three years, and no one is more shocked about that than me).

I have no fucking idea what I'm doing.

I walk all the time in the woods near my apartment and the conservation area behind my mom's house.

I run six to twelve miles every morning. Later on in the day, I walk three to five miles, sometimes twice, sometimes three times. It's like if I go far enough, fast enough, I can escape myself.

("You can catch up with yourself / If you run," from "Paper Wings," except I'm trying to do the opposite).

I feel like walking into the Upstate forest, bonfire-bright with fall foliage that extends uninterrupted all the way to Canada, and disappearing into those woods.

I walk through my tiny hometown when the New England Gothic vibe strobes strongest, and I love and hate it at the same time. The contrary emotions annihilate each other like matter and antimatter; I feel numb and floaty.

I don't have a suicidal bone in my body, but I receive random, unsolicited images of my dead body hanging from a certain tree in a special spot in the nature park behind my mom's house.

I see my face from an angle that you can never see your own face from. My skin is ash gray.

I know I'd never do it, but if I did, that's how I would go.

When I see these scenes, I feel like they've happened already.

I have this unsettling feeling lately, which has to do with that sharp pang that I used to feel when I was growing up and I would walk through the woods in the fall and winter. That hungry hollowness was later labeled BPD, but now I think that maybe it was all the anguish that my future held, reaching back through space and time to lash and encompass me, thereby guaranteeing its own existence.

I shelter that special pang, which is - along with my writing voice - perhaps the only thing that has been constant in my 37 years of being me.

(During one year when I was still in China, I got my age wrong for six months. I'd missed a birthday, and people were too bemused to point it out to me even when I was filling out official paperwork).

I know that Heaven isn't being me, surrounded by my loved ones, singing hymns to God in my stupid gay voice forever. Rather, I think that Hell is never being released from being me.

I receive visions of myself thirty stories up, in a chic club overlooking one of the great traffic circles of Beijing, neon-messaged as though the signals were meant for me, like I could read my future in the patterns of cars and buses and the doomed, encroached-upon bicyclists.

I am happiest alone, like I was that night.

I remember resting in a simple bed with Peng and two of his guy friends, Blue and Xiaolu, all of us drunk and stuffed with food and laughing. We'd come to this modest cottage in Shídù (十渡), a holiday destination in the hills outside Beijing.

I couldn't understand them - I couldn't understand myself - but they understood me.

They shifted so that I was laying in the middle.

We went rafting down fake rapids, and one adorable Chinese boy kept seeking me out and splashing me.

"Don't go after just one uncle!" His mother chided. But she smiled, and her son kept smiling, and then I smiled again, and in that moment, I was me.

***

I write and I write, and sometimes I don't write at all.

I write about Christ coming down off the cross because he decides that humanity isn't worth the torture.

I write about the son of God, verified by a Vatican blood test, dying of a fentanyl overdose in Upstate New York. In this story, the earth around the grave of God contains a miraculous cure for dopesickness, but those who partake of it must stay close to it or both they and the cure will fade away.

I write about Adam and Eve - restless, ribless Adam, now a junkie in and out of detox; acne-ridden and refrigerator-shaped Eve, now Evie, rocking an OnlyFans ("World's oldest woman joins world's oldest profession").

Lilith, now a dominatrix with a doctorate in biochemistry and a history of psych-ward showdowns, arrives to deal with Mr. Viper.

Mr. Viper is a Chinese businessman with a snappish snake in place of his male member, which issues black, bubonic discharge and, when it bites someone, conjures visions of despair, depredation, sordid soul-ruin.

"How did God feel, watching his sweet children defile themselves?" Mr. Viper asks the women.

I, too, have desecrated myself. My life could be one of Mr. Viper's visions.

Lilith's tarantula familiar inches down the wall. During Viper's little death, it flings itself upon him and delivers the big death, too.

Lilith must pay a paralyzing price.

We all do, I think, in the end.

We all pay a steep price just to be here, to be human, to keep existing.

***

Methadone killed whatever testosterone my body was capable of producing (and let's face it, I wasn't Arnold Schwarzenegger to begin with).

I haven't had sex of any type in three years. Not even when I visited Jay in London for New Year's.

Opioids made me a eunuch, but that effect is wearing off now, too.

I download a cruising app and text back and forth with hot, hung, forward men who promise to bind me, spank me, fuck me like it's rape. (CNC, consensual non-consent, is the PC term for it now).

I don't know why I want that, but I do.

Maybe to punish myself. Maybe to generate sensory overload that will give me a blessed break from being Brian. Maybe because I'm sick on some level that can't be helped - it's just a part of me.

For the first time in years, I can't focus because I'm so turned on. I'm like a real man, in other words. Or at least something that resembles one.

I long for it, but I don't go through with it.

I've had so little real sex in my life - that's sick, too.

So little real connection.

One of the men from the app is a professor at the community college next to my apartment complex.

He is two inches taller than me and Nordic-looking, with a tired and handsome face. He sends me a picture of his taut body, both threat- and promise-laden.

I imagine us meeting and fucking - unpro of course, because raw is reality for me.

I rarely protect myself in any way. It's as close as I have to a credo. Make sure that Brian is maximally risky so that interesting shit happens to him to keep the plot moving forward.

Don't even get me started on my thoughts on lube.

I could write an ode to my hatred of lube. To slather cold, slippery fluid on my ass or cock before we hook up, it is fucking anathema to me.

All sex deeply disgusts me.

"Should I wear a condom?" He asks in this imagined encounter.

"Why don't I just hang a tarp between us, and we can hump like idiots on either side of it?" I respond.

Whoever thought up condoms and lube - they should be shot twice and then once more, for good measure.

The Nordic semi-professor asks to join me for one of my evening walks around campus, and I agree. We don't set a date, though, and I'm not inclined to follow up.

I don't think that it will go where I thought that I hoped it would go, but even the possibility of that serves some important function for me right now.

If I were on benzos, I'd have done it already.

God, I miss benzos.

***

I'm discontinuing the bupe before too long, fam. Maybe one more Sublocade shot, then la commedia chimica è finita per me.

The shot isn't working right, anyway. My bupe to norbupe ratios are off, and they're not high enough to indicate a sufficient maintenance dose.

Nicole, the PA, agrees that my metabolism is tricky because of my Graves' Disease. Also, I exercise frequently, and I have a fairly thin body type, so there's not that much fat for the bupe to be absorbed into.

I'm over it. I have cravings, but they're mostly for benzos and coke and amphetamines. When my brain knows that one route is blocked, it immediately detours down others.

But I don't use, and most of the time, I don't even feel close to using.

I'm 85% of the way there, and I know what I need to do to make it the rest of the way. The bupe and the clonidine have to go, and the occasional, glassy-eyed gabapentin does, too.

I want my parents to see that at least one of their sons can be self-supporting, can live in reality, before they die.

Fucked up as I am, Brian in the middle, I am probably their best bet, so I have to follow the middle path forward and try to find my way back to myself.

I don't think I'll ever own a house. I don't know if I'll ever even own a car.

I remember success stories from meetings. I tell myself that people who were further behind than me have made it out and turned it around.

But I don't think that I believe in those possibilities for me.

I've written before about how sometimes, it seems like there's another Brian who is subconsciously controlling me. How I'm only aware of his machinations when they come to fruition.

Lately, it's occurred to me that Dark Brian, my hungry and protective shadow, might have spent the past three years digitizing my life in blog, YouTube, and TikTok format to make a sort of memorial to us.

There's only one reason for a memorial, and I feel dread when I think of things that way.

*** I wrote this journal at a low point and decided that I wouldn't post it until I felt better. I feel better now.

My neurochemical nature means that I will always oscillate between high highs and low lows, and I know how to ride them out.

I love you guys, and I hope that you're doing better than I was when I wrote this.

Si vales, valeo is one of my favorite Latin salutations. ("If you are well, I am well").

Be good, guys.

B.