Hello everyone! It feels good to be back. I know it has been a long time and I have been bursting to share ideas but the time hasn´t felt quite right. I wanted to ensure I was mentally fit and strong before I continued with a fresh start for the blog.
Although writing the blog sometimes feels like self indulgent waffle, I still feel compelled to write and share my experiences with the hope of resonating with people struggling with the same issues.
I am always open to receiving messages from people who want to ask questions or even just to offload and have someone to talk to. In fact, I enjoy connecting with people and being an ear to talk to. Over the years I have spoken to many people about these issues and it really did blow my mind to learn how many people struggle on a daily basis.
For some odd reason, it seems that a fundamental part of the human existence is suffering and the overcoming of the challenges that face us, so we can sculpt ourselves into people we are proud of.
This is my mission
It has taken me a long time to rebuild myself and recuperate the relationships and trust I had with people but I feel blessed for the whole experience and feel like I was given the chance to start life from scratch again and weed out the behaviours and vices that were ruining my life.
Many times I’ve come close, in moments of despair, to abandoning the whole project. I shudder and cringe when I think back to the person I was when I started this whole process and I still find it difficult to read old posts. But I can’t and I won’t abandon it. I can’t delete who I was, I can’t delete the things I said, or the way I behaved. I’ve just been learning to accept it all as part of growing up.
Through the last few months of 2019, and then for about eight months in 2020, I went pretty mental, as many people know. Up until that point I’d always kept myself teetering on the edge of sanity but during this period of 10 months or so, I let myself fall over the edge into the realms of psychosis and mania.
Psychology had always interested me and from a young age I had read all about drugs and how the brain adapts and can play tricks on us, so it was an interesting experience.
A friend recently told me that when I came back from Brazil, I went to his house and told him I was going to go insane – so I’m still not sure how much of it was a conscious choice. I am still discovering more about what went down during this period and it was only through speaking with different friends and family that I realised the full impact of my actions.
During this period I experienced a lot of crazy things but I am so grateful for this because it pushed my boundaries of perception to the limits and gave me an insight into the levels of mental illness that many people experience throughout their lives. My emotions were stretched to what felt like the max in many different directions and I feel like I learned so much about the different archetypes that live within.
Although this experience was extremely painful, scary, ecastatic, manic and depressive, I truly believe that it has now given me perspective on the important things in life and given me a level of calm that I never had before. I now understand where rock bottom is and I know that whatever happens to me I can recover and deal with it.
This gives me peace and confidence
I believe I gained a level of self awareness that I was seriously lacking. In fact, I had always had a child-like level of self awareness where I was unable (or unwilling) to understand the impact of my actions. An example of this is below:
During my psychotic period, for a time, I thought some people might try and come and kill me, so I wrote a will, not thinking that this may signal to my friends that I was going to kill myself – which was never on the cards.
I thought that pretty much everyone and everything was conspiring against me and I was pretty horrible to most people around me. It took people a while to be able to trust me again after this. I found out a few years later that a few friends had set up a chat to try and keep an eye on me. At least my paranoia thinking people were conspiring against me had some basis of truth! Just kidding… I am very grateful to those involved.
At one point I heard a joker-type thing laughing in my head and felt a click in my brain and then was convinced that I had turned myself schizophrenic. I had this information about schizophrenia flying around my head and began to believe that this click was my brain switching states permanently.
However, the most interesting experience was probably lying in bed one night, trying to sleep and looking up and seeing a burning ring of fire on the ceiling, with a devil’s arm coming through it trying to pull me into this hole. Needless to say, I could not sleep that night and had no desire to ever go to bed after that again!
There were also some crazy dreams where I saw my dead grandfather come up to me and then crumple into ashes in front of me. Another dream that stands out was a girl from primary school who I hadn’t spoken to since I was about 11 come to me and speak a poem to me which I managed to write down in a semi conscious state. At one point, I also spent about 36 hours in bed in and out of consciousness writing a 17000 word “dissertation” which I have never been able to bring myself to read. I fear that it is full of hate and anger and reading it would cause me a lot of pain.
I lost friends and a lot of respect from people during this period. I also lost my relationship with my family, which was probably the hardest part. I lost all of my money and ended up in about €15,000 worth of debt during periods of mania when I sold all my crypto and started manically buying things on Amazon and blasting money on all sorts of unneccesary things. I also lost 20 kilos of body weight in about 4 or 5 months.
It’s odd because during that time, especially the spending of all my money and losing my bodyweight, I felt like I was purging and truly resetting myself so I could rebuild from nothing. It was strangely purifying.
One other very odd experience I had during this time was having a dream that the stock market crashed and I woke up in a daze, half asleep and sold all my crypto (not worth much at the time). Then, about an hour or so later, they dropped by about 30-40% in value! It was bizarre because I hadnt been paying any attention to the market for a long time or doing any trading.
This is all just scratching the surface of what went down in that period, but the point of this article isn’t really to go down that route. It’s simply to fill the gap between getting clean and now.
P.s – Sorry Mum!
The period since then has been a dedicated to transformation.
I stopped taking drugs and came off Atomoxetine Stratera in August 2020, (ADHD Medication), when I was 26 and a half years old. The penny drop moment and reason for me stopping drugs was that I had a party at my apartment and a friend of a friend came with her mum. We spoke about my projects and my plans and what I was trying to do, but she could see I was off my face on drugs. She asked me why I still was taking drugs if I had all these plans and ambitions and I told her because they helped me and they gave me ideas and helped me to express myself.
I told her they were teaching me things.
She told me that might have been true at one point, but now that I already had all the answers I needed – I didn’t need to continue.
And she was right.
The answers are already inside of us all.
I knew what I wanted and what I needed to do from the moment I started. It was just a case of having the courage to do it.
When I stopped taking drugs, I fell into a two year depression. A state of total anhedonia. I had been hammering ketamine, ecstasy pills and MDMA powder, as well as the ADHD medication Atomoxetine, which has an impact on serotonin levels. Because of this, my serotonin system was absolutely destroyed. Fortunately, I knew what was happening to me and I knew why as I had read about the serotonin system and the effect of drugs on the brain.
To read more about Strattera (Atomoxetine) and ADHD medication click here
It is said that the serotonin system can take sometimes a year to recover and in the worst case scenario, sometimes it never fully recovers b ut I didn’t think that I’d have used it heavily enough or for long enough to do irreparable permanent damage. Nonetheless, this was of course still a concern.
It started to become clear to me why people turn to suicide in these states because it truly does turn your whole world dark. My memory of my whole life was poisoned and warped into an inaccurately negative and depressive version where nothing felt real and I was questioning my relationships with everyone and everything. Fortuntately, love and an inherently optimistic nature helped me through this and I managed to keep hold of some little glimmer of hope. Even though it was absolute hell I was also fascinated by the whole process so I wasn’t going to give up.
Therefore, for about 18 months I experienced basically no pleasure. The goal was to experience true sobriety and retrain the fiendish desire so I wanted to remove all consumable pleasure from my life. It also felt somewhat like a self-inflicted punishment for selfishness and bad choices.
As well as drugs and alcohol I stopped caffeine, sugar, gluten, all animal products, all fizzy drinks and virtually all processed food for about three years. I knew that in this state of depression, with no drugs to stimulate dopamine, that if I was to continue with caffeine, sugar, gluten, or any products which stimulated the brain, I would just latch onto those things and start a new cycle all over again. I had been through these cycles all my life. For once, I just wanted to be pure.
This was as horrible as it sounds – at first.
To read more about what its like to be completely sober click here
I had no quick fixes or jolts of pleasure. No tasty treats. No morning pick-me-ups. No thirst quenching drinks to distract from the depressive pain of existence. However, I held out hope that one day it would get better.
And one day it did.
One day, I noticed a small positive feeling, and I clutched onto that and nurtured it for all it was worth and knew then there was more to come. Then after a while, each day became very, very, very slightly better. Until, after about 18 months, I laughed for the first time properly.
Me and my girlfriend both looked at each other, and we realized this was a big moment. The amount we laugh, I believe, is a direct representation of our mental state. Even now, when I properly laugh it is a memorable experience and something I cherish. It seems to be continually on the increase which I am grateful for!
I am going to end this blog here as its only supposed to be an intro to fill the gaps. I will go into depth further in future posts and update about my current life and businesses!
Overall life is going great and I wake up each day excited for the day and go to bed exhausted and satisfied!
Get In Contact
I would love to hear your thoughts on this post and am always open to questions, suggestions or any other comments.
Leave a comment on the article or, if you prefer, send me an email to conor@thequestforwisdom.com
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If you follow the link below you will see a page with more information and if you click on MMM Peer support groups you will be able to contact any of the groups and join a session.
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