Let me start out with the following: I pick at my skin when I do dxm too often. Not sure why but the fact is, it ends up making me look a bit like a stereotypical meth user. I just would feel like I looked so frazzled when I was doing as much dxm as I was at my worst (an amount I cannot even really remember - a couple of third plat trips per week usually combined with maybe 1 or 2 1st or 2nd plats.) I was using dxm hbr at the time in the form of robotablets which I would typically order off the internet as I was insistent that I never wanted to try drinking syrup (In hindsight, I should have - it feels much “gentler”, not sure how to explain this but it makes me go a bit less crazy during the comedown - all of my dxm use after I moved into my apartment was in polistirex form) I feel like my hair is sticking out/my head feels odd on dxm and the day after. I would often look in the mirror and barely recognize the person there. It looked like an entirely different, evil version of myself to me. I think I even had a name for her though I can’t remember it. I think I may have possibly been having a psychotic episode at the time because I also frequently thought I was being followed, that everyone was against me/seeking to get me kicked out of university housing (ended up leaving on my own partially due to this paranoia and moving into an overpriced apartment where I slept on a pile of blankets for a while until I got an air mattress) I became so paranoid of others that I was actually genuinely ready to live in my car and leech off of university wifi to finish assignments until I could find a place to stay. I will say, being away from that many people has done wonders for my mental health because I simply get too paranoid. Whether that’s an actual improvement in mental health or simply avoiding my issues is another topic altogether. Another belief that I had during this period was that I was a prophet of god tasked with spreading the knowledge I had received directly from him with the rest of the world, and that I would be hated for delivering my message (some sort of persecution complex - I’m not even normally religious) I went through a period of self harm again during this period. The prophet delusion began after a particularly large dose of dxm and lasted for around 2 weeks. I would also see “auras” or “frequencies” coming off of random objects and become convinced that this was because they contained some kind of monitoring device or mind influencing device. I was in a few group chats online that were essentially conspiracy theory chats and upon hearing this they told me to buy copper tape and line clothes with it, which, I did. By the time it delivered I no longer believed in this so strongly that I felt the need to use it and now have copper lined tape just sitting around.
I think a part of the reason dxm has always been appealing to me has to do with the fact that I don’t get the same bad physical effects a lot of people seem to get - I’ve only ever thrown up on dxm a couple of times, once willingly after I decided I didn’t want to trip/had taken too much (This was done more recently where I really began to want to stop…)
The worst thing that dxm ever convinced me do was call my mother on it/coming off of it the day after I took 900 mg, because I thought I was dying. I couldn’t talk and was slurring so bad that she thought I had attempted suicide (She didn’t know what I was on). The pain in her voice is something that will never leave me for as long as I live. I also would often have some violent thoughts on dxm most regularly involving “what I would do” if “they” “came knocking on my door” they being a cop, the student advisor, roommates, etc. The worst part of the dxm is the comedown/ “afterglow”. I still don’t know how people describe that as an afterglow. At best I feel horrible and my long distance vision is gone. These days when I get that I’m terrified that it won’t end for weeks because sometimes it doesn’t. The 2 week long ordeal after my 900 mg dose was the worst two weeks of my life. Every single morning, I would feel “reset” and like my symptoms, which had decreased throughout the day yesterday, were all back. I wore the same clothes every day, didn’t shower, and would eat sporadically, usually going 1-2 days without any food and then eating either a package of cookies or a pizza and throwing it up (I was also severely bulimic at the time, still am though to a lesser extent.) My voice was always this fucked up voice that idk how to describe…the pitch is just all off, I think I slur some too.
I have no idea how I passed my classes that semester or the next. I would skip spanish constantly until I realized I would autofail it if I missed 2 more classes, at which point I always would go, leading me to even go visibly high on dxm once. I believe they could tell. I got pretty good grades for that semester, really, better than the ones I made this semester at least. This semester I was still regularly using dxm (In lower amounts though - had I been using it like I was the semester before I 100% would have ended up in a mental hospital.) for most of it and also doing several other impulsive things that resulted in me getting a C in every class I took.
It’s now summer and I have a job. I know that I have to be sober from at least dxm for this because regardless of how much I THINK it won’t, dxm WILL make me not care about skipping it when I’m in that comedown. The afterglow/comedown makes me feel extremely suppressed often to the point of being suicidal.
I wish my job would give me 60+ hour workweeks. I want no free time because I don’t know what to do with myself when I have time. I don’t like being alone with my thoughts and it makes me want to do anything to be in a different mindset, anything in this case being dxm and alcohol. Alcohol is something I would also like to never drink again because I am pretty sure I have nearly died drinking because I drink alone and once I get started that part of the brain that says “Stop you don’t want to die” just goes off, or I even get into a mindset of “I’ll drink till I’m dead”. I think I’m alive because I eventually get too drunk to open another bottle.
I am not currently suicidal and feel lucky to be alive, because I also had a habit of going outside and walking while this drunk or high. I would usually do this at night and while this is probably the reason that I never got hit by a car I could easily have been raped or kidnapped, and am lucky to live in a safe area. I feel like I’ve lost half a year of my life to a drug usually only used by teenagers. The most shocking thing was how quickly things got extremely bad, believe this is likely due to the fact that my mother has schizoaffective disorder and the possibility that I’ve inherited some latent mental illness that could be triggered by drug use.
I know that my counter says I was sober as of about one week ago - I’ve been sort of tapering the dxm use but never really went under once per week, which, as long as I kept it to a friday or saturday, was enough to leave me a mostly-sort of - functional human being, but I want to stop both because I still feel kind of fuzzy by monday (the difference becomes really apparent by the end of the week) and I now feel an need to be anything but sober every weekend. It literally triggers a bad mood in me when I am sober over the weekend because I am used to not having to spend 2 days with nothing to do while sober and thoughts start creeping in because normally I would be too fucked up to really be capable of those thoughts.
I’ve done cocaine, benzos, delta-8 and shrooms and not a single one of those has ever felt as addictive as dxm, and I feel ridiculous because IT’S A HIGHSCHOOLER DRUG FFS(Though I’m certain the cocaine and benzos likely would have been had I had frequent access to them)