DannyT said:

i got the drug rehab ultimatum a few times.  ma'dukes got stabbed by dirty needles in my room years ago.  went to rehab once, left after a couple days.  they told me to not bother coming home.  few days later they came and got me.  got the ultimatum again, told them to fuck off and started hiding my habits better.

*edit*  not too many regrets on that note.  i would have merked myself by now if i didn't self medicate.

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EllisDSox said:

Seems fairly clear to me from certain things you're saying that it's the lack of autonomy that's stifling you. Much as it's a lot easier to let yourself be looked after, past a certain age that you passed a long time ago, being babysat totally erodes your sense of self worth, and the longer it goes on, the worse things will get.

On a gut response, I'd say take your life in your own hands, get clean outside of AA, take on the loans, and put yourself in a position where you're forced to be as strong as you'd like to. Maybe there's a middle ground, i.e. going to the rehab, making a massive effort at it, and then making sure you run your own life, but I don't know your parents, so I can't say for sure if this is possible.

Is it an all or nothing for them? Will they basically seek to run your life entirely, and see it as their right to do so in exchange for the financial support? If so, this all comes down to whether you can survive however much more time you have to, living with the debilitating effects of feeling cloistered, as a trade off for money help. Given that, in some small way at least, your sanity is partially at risk here, I'd say just shoulder the debts and live as your own man.

There weren't addiction issues in my case, but I've been very close to mental collapse, and the more I allowed myself to be weak, accept help and let people run my life for me, the more childish and pitiful I felt. It was only taking the initially terrifying steps towards reclaiming my life that brought me back to myself, and raised my confidence levels to what they once were (and beyond, eventually).

Are you 100% sure you can quit K2 without rehab? If that's the case, and going to rehab is purely an act of deference to your parents' wishes, then I think it's clear what you have to do. Sanity with debts is better than financial security and mental instability, quite frankly.

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DannyT said:

i got the drug rehab ultimatum a few times.  ma'dukes got stabbed by dirty needles in my room years ago.  went to rehab once, left after a couple days.  they told me to not bother coming home.  few days later they came and got me.  got the ultimatum again, told them to fuck off and started hiding my habits better.

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Everlong said:

How about you just stop smoking k2, it's not hard.

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nooneman said:

Free college is an absolutely amazing deal that you'll never get again. Even though you have to go through some complete BS to get it, it's worth it.

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Shins said:

Everlong said:

How about you just stop smoking k2, it's not hard.

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seriously.

trust me here, quitting K2 for awhile is a lot easier than living in poverty for years because you have a shit job.

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I'll be making 80-90 a year to start, minimum, almost guaranteed job. The thing is I won't really start making actual money till I'm like 30 and interest on those starts as soon as you graduate undergrad .

I can quit K2. It's easy. It's just lumping soft drugs like alcohol and weed with it just makes the whole situation wobbly. That's what I hate about AA: Oh, we're powerless! We can't do it!  Frankly, every time I've sat in AA, even when I've enjoyed it and grown from it personally (which finally gave me the strength to say "No, I'm not fucking going to AA"), AA just feels... like someone you care about holding your hand while you're wheeled to the execution chamber. It's coming to terms with an unnecessarily permanent rut and I don't want to be in there with them.


I'd think the better plan would be for me to... oh, work with the psychiatrist I've been seeing for 1.5 years and his substance abuse counselor on the plan we already had in place, but they must have seen the show intervention since then. Maybe they'd go for it if I went to see my old psych at the counseling center... I get 8-10 free sessions/semester and it would be a good chance to have a contact I trust there to help me keep my habits in check, to be accountable to, and to help me rediscover who I was and could hopefully be again.

Envix said:

DannyT said:

i got the drug rehab ultimatum a few times.  ma'dukes got stabbed by dirty needles in my room years ago.  went to rehab once, left after a couple days.  they told me to not bother coming home.  few days later they came and got me.  got the ultimatum again, told them to fuck off and started hiding my habits better.

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says he's going to start hiding his habits better

has picture of himself shooting up as his avatar

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millzy said:

i was forced into hospitalization from ages 11-13 because i was put on high doses of tricyclics. in actuality there wasn't anything wrong with me aside from situational depression stemmed by losing my grandmother to cancer, but the meds made me go nuts. i lost a lot of myself in those places and was terrorized with the threat of going back for just doing normal teenage stuff like getting angry and yelling at my parents over some trivial bullshit.

i was caught with some weed and some inhalants when i was 15 and then it was time for military school. i told them to go fuck themselves and ran away. i came back about eight months later and they left it alone from then on.

i don't regret leaving, and if i would've been able to flee the first time i definitely would've done that. i don't think i'll forgive my parents in their lifetime for what they did to me, but perhaps in my own lifetime i will.

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Salomon said:

so your parents are going to give you money to go to school AND give you money for a vacation to stop smoking dirty ass spice?


and you're mad about this?

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st1llnox said:

DannyT said:

i got the drug rehab ultimatum a few times.  ma'dukes got stabbed by dirty needles in my room years ago.  went to rehab once, left after a couple days.  they told me to not bother coming home.  few days later they came and got me.  got the ultimatum again, told them to fuck off and started hiding my habits better.

*edit*  not too many regrets on that note.  i would have merked myself by now if i didn't self medicate.

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Danny, what're "ma'dukes"? And what is "merked"?

EllisDSox said:

Seems fairly clear to me from certain things you're saying that it's the lack of autonomy that's stifling you. Much as it's a lot easier to let yourself be looked after, past a certain age that you passed a long time ago, being babysat totally erodes your sense of self worth, and the longer it goes on, the worse things will get.

On a gut response, I'd say take your life in your own hands, get clean outside of AA, take on the loans, and put yourself in a position where you're forced to be as strong as you'd like to. Maybe there's a middle ground, i.e. going to the rehab, making a massive effort at it, and then making sure you run your own life, but I don't know your parents, so I can't say for sure if this is possible.

Is it an all or nothing for them? Will they basically seek to run your life entirely, and see it as their right to do so in exchange for the financial support? If so, this all comes down to whether you can survive however much more time you have to, living with the debilitating effects of feeling cloistered, as a trade off for money help. Given that, in some small way at least, your sanity is partially at risk here, I'd say just shoulder the debts and live as your own man.

There weren't addiction issues in my case, but I've been very close to mental collapse, and the more I allowed myself to be weak, accept help and let people run my life for me, the more childish and pitiful I felt. It was only taking the initially terrifying steps towards reclaiming my life that brought me back to myself, and raised my confidence levels to what they once were (and beyond, eventually).

Are you 100% sure you can quit K2 without rehab? If that's the case, and going to rehab is purely an act of deference to your parents' wishes, then I think it's clear what you have to do. Sanity with debts is better than financial security and mental instability, quite frankly.

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Wow, this is like... the advice I'd have given me if I had come up. I don't like easy. A kingdom unearned is a land of shadow. Really, I could plot my demise over the last year and it started (and almost ended a ocuple months ago) when I was getting "help" I didn't want or need.

I even made it clear to the admissions lady that I would only be going so that I don't have to do porn to pay for college and that I have no interest in complete abstinence from weed and alcohol, but that I fully acknowledge that synthetic cannibinoids and RCs will kill me if I don't stop.

And I can stop, and have before, but then all there is when the smoke clears is boredom and the ashes of opportunity, so I get bored and do it again. I hate weankness and the K2 addiction is an Achilles's heel for male autonomy. I CAN do it without, especially with a positive semester planned out that keeps me occupied and both intellectually and socially fulfilled. Living in a hotel with my parents, being driven and almost followed to classes that I didn't want to take and that fucked up my degree plan did neither of these and at one point I was just so miserable and humiliated I thought I couldn't go on. I believe a lot of this "help", besides creating room for weakness (the other side would see it as enabling), took what I like in life outside of drugs away and for the first time in my life I was self-medicating: I wanted to dumb myself down and knock myself out of commission till it was all over.

I'm sure there's room for a middle ground, but they've basically already decided they want me back in the dorms at age 22 and that they're keeping the car they gave me (its in their name).

God I need to go get Fight Club on blu ray right now.

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