Forced Drug Addiction

 It's always surreal to me when I remember who I became addicted to benzodiazepines because it's the kind of thing you wouldn't think could happen, at least not to a kid you grew up well off in suburbia like I did.  I've posted about my struggles with mental illness but I don't think I've properly chronicled how I stuck on anti-anxiety drugs.  In short, I was made a drug addict by an incompetent GP.  

It was 1992 and I was having crushing anxiety issues at college.  Internal things were happening I didn't understand and external factors included my parents recent separation and the emotional trauma of a mentally ill mother calling me up from out of state making me feel even more horrible and depressed than I had been.  Turns out a lot of the anxiety was clinical OCD combined with growing up with social anxiety and avoidant habits (which I feel grew into Avoidant Personality Disorder) but I was completely clueless to psychiatry at that time because the American school system refuses to teach it.  I guess it would be too "offensive" to American crazies, of which there are millions, to actually try to teach young people about mental health.  ANYWAY, I went to a doctor for anxiety and depression, not knowing yet I had bipolar disorder.  I started taking Klonopin for anxiety.  Just a little.  I can't even remember why?  I had ZERO clue about benozs and that they were narcotics.  I also started taking some Prozac and somehow the narrative that the Prozac and the benzos were the same thing got blasted into my mind.  The GP and others in this practice were telling me all these wonderful things about medication.  I started taking the meds, fully intending to not take them forever.  At some point, I got diagnosed by this GP as having either depression or whatever that would need meds forever.  So here I am, 19 years old, being told I had to take drugs forever.  By then, the Prozac would trigger the mania I didn't know I had.  The incompetent GP didn't notice the symptoms when I told him the drugs were making me jump out of my skin.  Any competent doctor would immediately see the drugs were triggering mania but he wasn't competent.  I'll never forget his response.  "It's you, not the drugs."  By then, I just wanted to get off all the shit but the doctor said I couldn't or I'd have a seizure.  He meant the benzos.  I had no clue what he meant.  It was further reinforced that I could never get off the drugs.  They meant the Prozac.  Combine all this with a crazy, guilt ridden mother who was also taking psyche meds and I had it further drilled into my head that my problems were a chemical imbalance.  I feel that was my mother's way of trying to absolve herself of any parenting guilt.  "I didn't do anything!  It's all a chemical imbalance!" but that's just speculation.  So, if the drugs were the way to solve my problems, I'd need more was my reasoning.  This is when I got the "right combination" and "cocktail" talk the psychiatric profession uses.  So, I concluded drugs, including an increasing amount of benzos, would solve my problems.  That is a TEXTBOOK thought process which leads to and perpetuates addiction.  So now I'm trapped in hell.  I'm addicted to benzos but the doctors, thinking I'm trying to "get off my meds," won't phase me down.  I was also not informed of ANY side effects.  This was in 1992 when doctors essentially lied to patients they were experimenting on.  All I got was "wonder drug" and "magic bullet" and all that.  Looking back at it, I think the people who said these things were trying to be helpful and positive but they were negligent not telling me about the side effects of benzos, which are well known.  I had that stoned look and feel, that haunted quality benzos induce and began to have MAJOR memory problems.  I still have those problems to this day.  Doctor didn't tell me anything about any of this.  I had to suffer along the way.  This is what cracks in the medical system are all about.  If you get a bad doctor, you're fucked.  That my incompetent mother proposed him to me isn't surprising at all and I'm just coming to grips that  had incompetence FORCED ON ME.  I did what I was told because I didn't know any better by people who were guessing.  It took my own determination to get me off benzos.  I made it happen.  No one was interested in helping after my Dad's first few impotent tries.  Then again, I think Dad wanted me  off the Prozac.  When I said a few years later I was having memory problems, he said, "You look all right to me."  This is what I was dealing with.  So I eventually got off the benzos 100% by my own initiative and I have still have trauma and nightmares from those days from 1992-1996.  I'm now 100% against forced drugging because the idiots who do it don't care about patients.  They want to "protect society" or something.  They make way too many mistakes.  I do find it funny I was apparently a test subject with anti-depressants.  I thought I was a human being trying to live a life and be happy.  Now there are a billion side effects mentioned about anti-depressants.  Nice to know my lonely suffering and trauma helped with that, medical system!!  Yes, this was rambling.  No, I don't care.  

What can be considered "Normal" vs. "Abnormal" (Emphasis on American Context)

 People often tend to think of "Normal vs. Abnormal" based on instinctive observance, usually braced by personal experience.  Most people, even if extremely different, consider themselves normal because they're normal to themselves, normal in this case meaning usual and ordinary to the individual's life.  In a border definition, normal can be grounded in Kant's Categorical Imperative.  What is overwhelmingly considered normal is normal.  I would also include healthy with normal.  What is overwhelmingly HEALTHY is normal.  Americans, especially, love making things as they go and living in romantic fantasy worlds.  In that context, Americans are more than fine with THEIR majority being considered normal, even if that majority is unhealthy.  I argue what is unhealthy cannot be considered normal, is the majority in a democracy thinks it so.  We're talking about human psychiatry, brain health and time tested genetic realities and behaviors.  So what is healthy, keeping in mind that it's improbable anyone has perfect genetics.  

A)  My definition of health is both genetic and behavioral.  Some people just have faultier genes than others.  I put myself in that category (and to show I'm not playing favorites) as I have bipolar disorder, clinical OCD and other various kinks.  The person who's genetically abnormal is, to put it bluntly, screwed.  This person, through no fault of their own, inherited defects from their parents when they were nothing but tiny little embryos.  They can find ways to behave perfectly normally but will always have the predisposition to mutate (aka grow in abnormal ways.)  My argument here is not to say whether this is a proper adaptive advantage in terms of evolution (like turning into an X-Man.)   It's just to say that defective genes will lead to defective health, thus migrating (as it were) the human away from strong physical health.  As humans are a species that has existed and evolved for thousands of years, I can only conclude that most people overall have genes that are at least strong enough to function consistently well.  As over 90% of people are employed, the vast majority of those jobs being steady, I can conclude those people can be considered relatively healthy, as they wouldn't be able to work steadily otherwise, and thus can be considered "normal."  

B) The second definition of health is commonly known to everyone as basic behavior, meaning you don't need to be a geneticist to understand it as we all do it on a daily basis.  Behavioral health comes down to the choices people make.  People with more defective genes (again, myself included) often struggle to make good decisions based on health as their genetic programming twists and turns them into odd and disorderly behaviors.  Substance abuse is now considered a disorder born of bad genes.  Obviously, the substance abuser pursues unhealthy behaviors.  In this person, genetics and behavior overlap.  The defective genes lead to defective, unhealthy and, thus, abnormal behavior.  Behavior as abnormality in this context refers more to people with stronger genes who, for whatever reason, pursue more abnormal behaviors.  This is the classic "nurture over nature."  Perhaps a person is perfectly physically strong and healthy yet pursue destructive behaviors through peer pressures and Group Think.  This is EXTREMELY common in the United States and other democracies where whatever group wins an election or a vote think they have the right to order people around.  We see that most prominently in things such as forced liberalism.  People considered sane and normal don't want their kids to see drag shows (which ARE adult entertainment) yet, if you get certain people in power, those parents face enormous social pressure to make their children go.  In my view, this is the corruptive, unhealthy and, thus, abnormal dysfunction in democracies.  The right of the individual to say no to something they know is harmful and destructive to them is rejected in the name of making a mass of unhealthy, abnormal people who've banded together feel a sense of existential happiness and belonging.  Of course, if it's forced, it's not really legitimate, just like saying you did something with a gun to your head isn't a legitimate confession.  The normal, healthy, stronger person, through no fault of their own, is forced to comply with aberrant behaviors that can only weaken and hurt them.  This is blatantly immoral.  Even if a group of people with defective genes feels isolated and picked on, this doesn't give them the right to hurt innocent people who've committed no sin by being the recipient of proper, healthy, normal genes passed down by previous generations.  

I threw in some "moral vs immoral" with my argument there but it all basically overlaps.  What is destructive and abnormal can also be considered immoral and what is healthy and normal can also be considered normal.  I'm not making value judgments towards people who are truly different.  I'm in that group, myself, due to my genetic reality, one that I didn't ask for.  In this context, however, moral and immoral can be a slippery slope.  If an extremely odd person who believes and acts transgender acts out in a way THEY consider good and normal because it's normal to THEM, can they truly be considered immoral just because it's unhealthy?  My conclusion to that is it all comes down to conscious awareness and moral choice.  Like all people, if transgender people do things they consider morally wrong, they are morally wrong.  If they do abnormal, unhealthy things because they don't know any better, they're not morally wrong.  They're tragic.  

Thanks for reading this far!  I often don't go back to edit and streamline these posts so I hope I didn't ramble too much.  

A Spiritual Perspective on Instinct

Instinct is thought of as the expression of physical perceptions and movements to things sensed.  It's not considered rational or thoughtful.  We react at times because our bodies are trained a certain way.  As we are immaterial souls in physical bodies, I feel our spiritual impressions, those parts of us that are soul, also learn instinctively.  When we're in our souls, which usually just comes from being like when we're meditating or just not trying to reason, we perceive the great beyond, the eternal void.  In a state of purity, that is separated from our animal sides.  Unfortunately, we can't live our lives as our immaterial souls as we're bound by our physical pains, lusts, desires, etc.  I feel that when we're aware of what our souls are and have been in touch with them for any amount of time, our souls become instinctive in interacting with our physical bodies.  Freud would probably call that combining the Id with the Superego.  We don't just naturally recoil from a hot stove.  We SPIRITUALLY recoil from things considered abhorrent or perverted.  We don't just reject corruption because it's physically different.  We reject it because it's borne of various levels of perversion which the immaterial soul, which cannot be physically perverse, recognizes from experience.  I believe the soul evolves in human form.  If that's considered reincarnation, that's fine.  Over that enormous amount of time, we grow as spiritual beings as well as physical ones.  We may be a physical tabula rosa but we are not a spiritual one.  It seems likely every soul alive has learned something positively spiritually that they've carried over from evolution to evolution.  I know from experience that we often lose those instincts depending on our physical realities.  If we have abusive parents, we're probably going to become dysfunctional and, consumed with anger, last out at the physical world.  Even though that programming may be no fault of our own, we've become perverted and corrupted by it and we forget our soulful instincts to be in a state of spiritual grace.  I feel religion exists as a kind of rudder to help us focus and refocus on God and the soul.  The material world corrupts us and the religious world (if operating properly), keeps us on course.  When we reject that guidance, we become materialistic and increasingly physically animalistic.  I have experienced all those states in this life.  The disconnect from the soul, if continued long enough, invariably leads to addiction and other forms of dependence.  We have to get through life somehow and, if we aren't physically connected with our spiritual instincts, we become dark inside and decay.  Political power is all about moral and spiritual decay, which is why its adherents choose physical and financial dominance in the from of sadism as a way of trying to be happy.  Their perverted physical instincts have won and they've become spiritually useless.  

The genetically flawed (of which I'm one) are the greatest tragedy.  The body really only exists to help us express our souls and our spiritual sides.  In that way, it just needs to be functional and healthy.  People with twisted genes like me have to deal with genetic perversion only a daily basis, which forces us to drift farther and farther from our internal souls.  It's the equivalent of needing to cross a bridge to be happy but there are constant walls being constructed in the way.  We have spiritual instincts but they're often blocked by many things that just won't get out of our ways.  Those blockages lead to spiritual pain and hopelessness.  It's a tough responsibility to keep trying to remove those blockages to be the best spiritual beings we can be, to access our souls.  We have to cope as best we can, knowing we can't be where we want to be all the time because we can't be healthy enough to do so.  I understand the physical lessons of being a disabled person.  Are there spiritual lessons to be learned from it?  I think so.  I've learned that the soul and the light within are what really matter but I don't want to become Manichean, thinking that the physical world is evil and the light within good though I can definitely see why Manicheans think as they as I age.  Evil is rampant in the world and the light within is perpetually in a state of goodness.  IF we refine our spiritual instincts and try to BE with them as often as possible, we can bridge the gap as a society to a more beneficial level.  We have to learn to reject the evils of the physical while living our physical lives day to day with proper spiritual instincts.  We can't just disconnect.  We have to bring good to this world in the form of ourselves.  Thank you for reading!  

Money

 Of all the things in my life, money and everything to do with it probably confused me the most.  I say that in a spiritual sense.  As I have become an enormously spiritual person, I see money as an evil.  Not a necessary evil.  Just an evil.  I think money is disgusting and repulsive.  It's an immortal tool people use to dominate and control others.  It's a vessel for producing pain.  For me, acts of kindness are free and should be free.  I commit acts of kindness without any thought of payment because that's where the pure spirt of goodness lies IMO.  I fully understand the basics of economics and how money is seen by us arrogant humans as a wonderful invention meant to facilitate the flow of goods and services blah blah blah.  Economics is cold, empty and robotic, three reasons why I've always hated it.  It's lifeless materialism.  All this said, I worry about my life as I'm disabled and have no job thus I have no money.  This is the confusing part.  I know my feelings about it but I still have to live in this shitty world and I don't want to be thrown out on the street.  So making money is apparently important.  How do I do so?  Or do I sit back and let God (meaning family) take care of me my whole life?  Try as I might, I can't not be a nihilist about money.  It's so important to so many people and it just makes me sick.  The times in my life I've pursued money, I've had prescription drug addictions and did it merely to live and because it was just want people do, which makes me feel like a coward.  That makes me think money is a product of nothing but physical evolution, which is illusion and fleeting.  I hate rich people who exist just to make money.  I want to take their money not for myself but to just destroy it and ask them who they feel then.  I bet they'd have no calling at all.  The next day they'd wake up and ask what they need to do to make more money.  It's the Id impulse.  Humans scurry like lizards to make enough to anesthetize themselves to the pains of life or make tons to dish pain out.  As I get older, I can't not see life in a much more Manichean way.   All that really matters is the spirit, the light in us all.  All the physical does is clutter and corrupt us.  Or am I just a dumb asshole who doesn't get anything?  Younger Jeff Riley would look at me as confused deadbeat philosopher, which is what I've become.  Younger Jeff would hate older Jeff as older Jeff hates younger Jeff.  I hate what I once was.  

Purpose

 As someone who's had the "normal" procedure of a human life denied to him, I very frequently seek a purpose for myself and my life.  By normal, I mean the life of a normal person.  Spouse, job, kids, age, grandkids, death.  As a bipolar person who can't work a full time job and hasn't made a penny as a writer, I have to almost constantly assess and reassess my purpose in life as to not fall into a great depression.  As I began failing physically in the 1990s for the first time, I had no coping mechanisms or education or awareness of what I was or what I was to be.  I was very much a materialist and felt like my life would be dictated by such materialism.  As my health failed, those ambitions and aspirations faded and disappeared and I was left adrift mentally, emotionally and spiritually.  I had a hard reality forced on me and became totally lost for what I felt like my destiny/fate would be.  By destiny/fate, I mean that instinctive sense of why we're here on Earth, each as individuals.  I'm not referring to nihilists, which so many people are (nihilism being people who believe we're here to live and die and that's it with no purpose.)  I'm talking the idea that we're all here for a reason.  My reason for being here is not to have kids and spread my genes as that would be a disaster, right not both for me and the world.  I've thought perhaps my purpose is to be an entertainer as I am a naturally gifted writer and storyteller but the works I have online are largely ignored.  It's also the wrong era for me as I find that white male writers are increasingly ignored and minority writers and women are pushed forward.  That said, I'm also in a minority group as a bipolar person but the book I've written based on my experiences with mental illness has also met with no reaction.  I've only finished a third of the story and maybe I'm meant to finish it all.  Time will tell.  As is, I have no desire to finish a story I already know just to have it completely ignored by everyone else.  

So my purpose for being on this Earth isn't physical and, thus far, doesn't appear to be creative so what is it?  I've been on meds for bipolar disorder and have been for years.  It doesn't seem like there's any purpose in my symptoms for study as I just pretty much take my meds and talk to my doctor once every three months for more meds.  Perhaps my purpose is over my cancer treatments.  Maybe the experimental injections I'm getting will pave the way for new treatments.  Maybe it's important that I be the one to get the shots.  

Any which way I look at it, I can't help but conclude my purpose hasn't materialized yet.  At age 50, with two cancer surgeries behind me, riddled with clinical OCD and Bipolar I and seemingly no future in the classic sense, I have no idea what that could be.  If I'm being a nihilist, I would conclude my life is meaningless and I'm only here because I'm not not here but I consider that thought process defeatist.  There's a reason for me to be here and it can't have arrived yet.  It may be for something very important though I definitely don't see that for me, personally.  Though a very interesting person, I'm very much a grain of sand on the beach, possibly more valuable as a guinea pig than anything else.  If so, the doctors who create the treatments are the stars and the ones who are truly valuable and it takes nothing special to get jabbed twice a week with needles to make sure my cancer doesn't spread.  So we'll see.  I feel I'll know it when it happens.  I hope I will.  

I hate myself...

 ...during those years, too.  How could I have been so stupid to let all that happen to me and then to do it to myself?  

My fake life- 1992-1996

 I can this period my fake life because I was in full denial about my growing mental problems.  Unable to cope with what would be diagnosed as my Bipolar Disorder and very chronic OCD, I crafted a fake life with a fake future for myself during those years, one marked by rampant psychiatric drug use and abuse and the lie that it had "fixed me" and that I wasn't crazy.  In short, I popped pills and went about my business, only caring if I felt okay/not depressed and completely unconcerned with diagnoses and actually trying to fix problems.  I'm so adrift during those years, completely unable to cope with my growing disability, which would become overwhelming, and convincing myself I can have a normal life like everyone else.  Hey, I had just some depression and anxiety!  Give me some anti-depressants and benzos and I'm good to go!  I'm normal!  That's how I lied to myself.  In my defense, I also got some terrible advice from my GP (who I resent to this day) and I came to identify with my symptoms.  The anti-depressants cycled the mania I didn't know I had into overdrive.  One misdiagnosis later and I was convinced I was some sort of god, that I was a superior being.  Hey, my GP said those crazy thoughts I was having were really me and my brain is telling me I'm a god so I must be a god!!  I was also manipulated by a drug addicted mother which kept me a drug addict for those four years.  I look back on it it now and it's hell on Earth.  I'm trapped in a dark, manic dead zone, like a permanent mixed episode.  I can't help but be resentful as i was failed by everyone during the most important time of my life, when it was time for me to go out into the world and have a life.  I resent my mother for her endless meddling and manipulating.  Think Hillary Clinton trying to keep someone on her team and that's my lying mother.  My Dad didn't understand and quit when my Mom left him.  He even had a girlfriend and went to her kid's hockey games while rejecting me.  It clear to me this little kid was a sports replacement now that I was done playing baseball in HS.  Darkness and anger and depression.  Only started getting better after my seizure and near death experience in 1996.  I was woken up.  I've long since accepted my problems and I'm permanently on meds now.  I hate those years so much and I hate several of the people in my life during those years so much.  

How we define "Good" and "Evil"

 There are two different ways we look at the ideas of good and evil.  The first is an irrational, illogical ideology based on our own biases.  We consider ourselves good and anyone we don't like evil, regardless of behaviors.  This is all too common in the American Republic.  Millions of Americans see themselves as good and Donald Trump as evil for no other reason then they don't like the guy.  What they do and what he does is irrelevant.  He's just bad and they're just good just because.  Obviously, that view of good and evil is thoughtless and irrelevant.  It's good and bad as black and white regardless of other factors.  It's brainless "either/or" with nothing else in it.  The second way is the proper way of looking at such concepts, as being catch all categories for certain traits.  When we think of good, we think of various qualities that can be shoved into the term.  Good means responsible, giving, just to the less fortunate, honest, helpful, non-abusive, etc.  Evil includes things like murder, rape, manipulation, lying, etc.  The levels of Hell in Dante's Inferno is a great example of how to separate the traits considered evil into various tiers.  I feel what a person is labelled (if we can use that term) depends on how much of each quality they have, keeping in mind that the vast majority of human activity is based on just regular behaviors not included in either category.  There's no good or evil way to go to the grocery store.  As humans, we go because we need food.  There's no good or evil to it (unless we describe the meeting of our basic needs as good.  The flip side of that can be seeing overindulgence in our basic needs as being evil.)   Such labelling is like various points on a spectrum.  The more positive qualities we have, the farther towards good we go.  The more negative, the farther we go towards evil.  It's much easier to condemn a person as evil based on one trait.  An unrepentant murderer can be considered evil, even if he or she is almost saintly in every other way.  It's much tougher to qualify a person as good based on one quality.  Just because a person is extremely giving or nice or helpful doesn't mean they're good if they're also an abusive liar.  We have much greater standards for people being good.  They need A LOT of good qualities to be on that list.  We frequently hear someone being built up as good then someone who knows them chimes in, "Yeah, but they lie all the time."  Thus, they stop becoming good in our perception because we rarely use the term "less good."  We don't say a person is good but they're less good than others, though there are some colorful expressions intelligent people use occasionally.  I'm reminded of Frederick Douglass calling Abe Lincoln, "A first rate second rate man," a perfect way of saying he's a good man but only to a point.  He's "sort of" good.  There's also a comedic expression going around by the American establishment that the US "isn't as bad" as other nations.  We're bad, we're just not as bad!  😄  So what a proper thinker sees as good and evil is involved with much thought and depth.  It's frequently stated simply but it's actually complicated and involves multiple insights.  That separates it from the borderline personality view of good and evil, the "anti-Donald Trump" way of looking at it.  When discussing these ideas, if our goal is to learn anything, we have to make sure we know who we're speaking to, as some will understand good vs. evil in one of the two ways illustrated.  The "we're just good and they're just bad" perception that dominates modern politics leads to nothing, while the philosophical and intellectual way of looking at it can bear much fruit.  Thanks for reading!