Welcome to Gaia! ::

As some of you older members are aware, a good friend of mine died just over a year ago now. Cause of death was (almost certainly accidental) heroin overdose. He was a junkie, and had been off and on in the decade or so that I'd known him. In many ways, his death was sort of inevidable. He had demons he could just never seem to conquor.

I had a very complicated relationship with my friend. He was largely responsible for my early drug problems and promisciuty, but he was also my first love of sorts (although we were never romantically involved) and helped me get clean. There was also the fact that this kid and I saw each other at our very worst, and there's a profound intimacy forged with someone who doesn't just know your deepest darkest secrets, but was by your side when they happened and cleaned the blood and vomit off your mouth and pulled the needle out of your arm afterwards.

I'm not over his death. I tried to kill myself on the one year anniversary of his death. For better or worse, I stopped halfway through putting a lethal dose of heroin in my vein. I'm still not sure if I'm glad I chickened out.

I just want to stop feeling this way. It's been over a year. I want to stop being so angry and sad and missing him so ******** much. I want to stop hating myself for not saving him the way he saved me. I want to stop being angry at him for being so goddamn careless and not realising that he coulnd't throw away his life when I still needed him. I want to stop hating God for ignoring my prayers to help my friend and letting him die on me. I want to be able to feel happy, or at least halfway content, without being so high I can't see straight. I want to stop dreaming about him only to wake up and realise that he's not next to me, or on my sofa, or down the road. And I don't know how to make this all stop, except being high all the time or dying. But I can't do either of those things to the people still alive who love and care about me. I need to be strong for them, but I'm just so tired of being strong. I'm not strong. I'm weak as hell. And I don't know how much longer I can be trying to call on strength I just flat-out don't have.

(if you don't want to read this, just skip to the end, i don't mind at all)
admitting your not strong is the first step...the next step is asking God to help you,
we are nothing without God, and once you realize that, then all it takes is the humility to beg for His help...
i'm really sorry for all this pain you're going through, and i know you don't want my help, but i can tell you exactly what you need to do to make things better,

suffering is a part of life, we all know that, but there are two ways to suffer, one way is to suffer willingly, to accept it and offer it up and unite it to the sufferings of Jesus, in which case you actually suffer less and have joy even in your suffering, and then the second way to suffer is unwillingly, to fight our sufferings and reject them, by which we actually still suffer and suffer even more than if we accepted it...
suffering is unavoidable, but we can learn to accept it, to suffer for someone or with someone develops a great deal of love in our hearts, especially when it's for God, and you know that, you said something to the same effect when you said: "there's a profound intimacy forged with someone who doesn't just know your deepest darkest secrets, but was by your side when they happened and cleaned the blood and vomit off your mouth and pulled the needle out of your arm afterwards. "

to love in this world means we will suffer, it is only in heaven that we will never suffer again, and you can ensure your heaven, you can guarantee your place in heaven, anyone can, it just takes these three steps - knowledge, desire, action.
first we must learn, we must know what we want before we can even desire it, we must know about God, about heaven, about virtue, and then not just about them, but about their benefits and their joys,
and when we know of it, we will desire it, and then we must move forward and act on it, by praying, meditating, spiritual reading, taking part in the sacraments, mortifying our senses, doing penances, practicing our virtues...well, you get the idea...
it's the interior life that is most important, knowledge is nothing without action, if we only study our religion and do not live it, then we are wasting our time,

well, i'm sure this can't be making you feel better, so let me just cut to the chase, when i said "i can tell you exactly what you need to do to make things better" i wanted to suggest reading these -
http://www.directionforourtimes.com/docs/booklet-tragedy.pdf
http://www.directionforourtimes.com/docs/booklet-suicide.pdf

they will help you far more then i can even hope to,
i won't pretend, i know i'm no good at comforting others, i never have been, i always seem to make things worse, but i desire so much to comfort others when i see them in pain...so i just really hope that reading these books will help you,
and if you are interested in those, here is where they came from -
http://www.directionforourtimes.com/onlinelibrary.html
http://directionforourtimes.com/onlinevolumes.html

I'm a city boy. Walking is what I do. cool Also, I wrapped our car around a pole a couple weeks ago, so I don't have much choice as of late.

Thanks to everyone for the replies and prayers. It really means a lot to me.

My problem with turning to the Church is...well, it's a variety of problems. First is that I haven't been to mass or confession in over a year. And I mean, I know it's better late than never, but being out of practise has always added a certain awkwardness and anxiousness for me.

Second is that I've always felt very unsure of myself within religious communities. I'm a homosexual drug addict digging himself down a hole of self-destruction over the death of his junkie prostitute best friend. I guess part of me fears rejection, but more than that...I guess it's just that I assume no practising Catholic can possibly relate to what I'm going through, and much of what I've been through in the past. And perhaps that's narrow-minded of me, but I've yet to meet a practising Catholic with a background in any way similar to my own. Though admittedly, even when I was going to church, I generally avoided socialising for fear of how people would react upon actually getting to know me.

It's not that I'm especially ashamed of who I am. Indeed, I take a great amount of pride in certain aspects of my life and the obstacles I've overcome to get where I am. But I've been dismissed as a f*****t junkie slut by enough conservative folk to make me tread with caution in religious communities, and it's a mental block I'll have to work to overcome to feel safe and comfortable in Catholic community again.

Something my partner has suggested is looking into open-minded but perhaps religion-friendly drug/mental illness rehab programmes...an idea which I've been resisting for several months, but as I'm sitting here suffering through opiate withdrawals for the third time in two months, I'm starting to consider the possibility that I may be in over my head and seeking out professional help may not be such a bad idea after all. I'm still not completely sold, but I'm considering it.

I'm a fiercly independent person, and it's difficult for me to admit defeat and accept outside help for my problems, but lately I'm being sort of forced to realise that I can't keep living as I have been and that I'm really hurting the people around me who love me, so I need to do whatever it takes to pull myself together.

Aww, thank you, Serikiyo. Your words really mean a lot to me. I'm sorry to hear about your struggles with your illness, but I'm really happy to hear that you seem to be dealing with it so admirably.

Though I'm sure it's nowhere near the sort of pain you deal with, I can relate to how much it sucks to be constantly physically uncomfortable. I've abused my body so much and made myself so physically weak that just about everything makes my muscles sore. I also always seem to end up sleeping in some terrible position and waking up with my neck so out of whack that it's excruciatingly painful for me to turn my head a certain way. Which is one of many, many things I love about opiates. They're powerful pain killers, which is their legal intended purpose, so in addition to feeling happy and content and emotionally functional, being high was also the only relief I got from my physical discomforts.

But, an update.

I'm through withdrawing (physically, at least) and have remained opiate-free. I have good days and bad days psychologically, but overall am feeling more optimistic. I'm beginning to re-connect with my friends, most of whom I isolated myself from when I was using heavily. I feel incredibly guilty for what I've put my partner through but am amazingly thankful that he's handled this ordeal with so much compassion and good humour. (When he was sitting with me keeping me awake after my overdose, he put "Still Alive" from Portal on loop through his computer speakers. lol )

I'm working on undoing the damage I've done to my body. My immune system is pretty shot and I'm skeletally thin, but I can keep food down now, so I'm eating like a horse and taking long walks.

I had a dream about my dead friend the other night. He was trying to shoot me up with heroin, but seemed to lack all depth perception and kept missing my arm all together and squirting the contents of the syringe all over the floor, at which point we'd both fall down laughing. This process repeated several times until he looked up at me and said "You know we can't do this anymore, right?" And then I woke up. Now, I'm not big on reading into dreams too much, but my second reaction upon waking up (right after "I want Theo and heroin") was...I don't really know how to describe it, but I guess and intense feeling of peacefulness. I felt sad and nostalgic, but not depressed, and I realised I was smiling.

Again, I don't know what it means or if it has any significance at all, but I thought I'd share.

Thanks, kikkaku. You've always been so lovely to me. What you've been going through can't be easy for you, but I really admire you for how you're coping with it.

And what you say is very true. I think a large part of why I've been struggling so much with Theo's death over the past six months or so is because when he first died I didn't really deal with it at all. I didn't really let myself hurt or mourn the way I needed to. I downplayed how much he meant to me and just tried to convince myself that it wasn't a big deal and that I was fine and just tried to continue with life as usual. Beyond dealing with it in the imedient sense of telling some people what had happened and attended his funeral, I just...didn't talk about it. I didn't talk about him. I just tried to forget about the whole thing.

I feel that there's a great deal of social pressure, especially for men, to be sort of emotionally numb and not openly express grief or sadness. Being openly sad or upset is seen by many as a sign of weakness, and I thought I was being strong by ignoring the fact that someone I loved deeply was gone from my life forever.

Then several months ago, I just totally broke down to a close friend of mine. For the first time since shortly after Theo's death, I talked about my relationship with him and the struggles I had trying to save him, and how I felt about his death. I just cried and talked and yelled and let myself hurt...for eight hours. And that sort of opened the floodgates, and I was feeling all these things that I'd been squashing for months and had no idea how to deal with it, because, of course, I didn't want to feel those things. Because they hurt. And admitting those things and letting myself feel those things hurt so much and crying and breaking down like that made me feel so weak and helpless and pathetic. And I didn't know how to deal with those feelings crashing down all at once, and the only ways I could think to deal with them was either wanting to die or just find some way to make them stop at any cost...hence all the drugs and the suicide attempt.