On day twelve.

I've been keeping myself busy with work, school, filling up my days with things I enjoy doing. I'm not just sitting around thinking about how badly I want to be intoxicated. The cravings are there while I'm working, or while I'm studying, while I'm walking, reading, knitting, drawing, etc. I never went to work intoxicated, but everything else that I'm doing currently that I enjoy, even going to school -- I used to do all of that while intoxicated. It's difficult to keep the cravings out of my head because these are still things I enjoy doing while sober, there is just a connection with drug use attached.

I know it's a lot of work, I was able to sober up last year for the summer and fall, but I wasn't doing heroin when I sobered up last year, so it was definitely much, much, much easier. I'm not hoping for it to fade away, I know I need to work for it, but I feel extremely stressed as of late, and drugs were a way I used to handle that. I'm trying to learn new strategies of handling the stress, which is probably the hardest part. That's why I keep relapsing... I try new ways of handling stress and I find they don't work as well as I want them to. Sometimes it just seems that it's easier to return to drug use and then once I'm back to using, I remember why I quit in the first place, but by then I've stepped too far back into my addiction.

I also have an addiction to self-injury, that was my very first addiction. My very first way of learning how to deal with stress. I find if I'm not intoxicated, it's a lot harder to push away the cravings to self-harm. I haven't cut myself in about 19months, but that was also a battle to get under control. Again, intoxication helped get rid of those cravings. I've been thinking about cutting again. I don't want to do it, but there's just an intense urge to do it sometimes. The urges feel like being hit by a train, they're so sudden at times.

I'm trying to juggle a lot of things at once right now: keeping up with school, it's our busiest time of the year at work, trying to figure out what I'm doing after I graduate in May, trying to find a new job, pushing away addictions, keeping up with bills, and more x_x it's overwhelming to say the least... but I wasn't getting anywhere by keeping drugs in my life, I couldn't focus on what to do with my life after graduation, and now I'm graduating in about a month and I'm trying to get things figured out by then... ridiculous. I had ideas in my head, but they were just ideas, there were no actions taken to get these ideas into motion, I was so paralyzed by intoxication. It's time for action.