WardLord

After my first psychotic episode, I chalked it up to being drunk as fuck and getting no sleep. It made sense at the time, I mean it is what happened but unfortunately it became the new normal for me. I had my own barracks room to myself because the roomate I was assigned lived with his girlfriend out in town and only kept some of his gear in the room. So I did whatever the hell I wanted without bothering anybody. I would stay up and drink until the early morning watching episodes of Dexter. I didnt think I was causing much harm to my body. I was only twenty years old and I would bounce back with two or three hours of sleep and perform fairly well at work for the most part. I was a rifleman by trade but I had been sent to an office job because they needed a warm body who could do computer shit and field shit. I am still terrible with technology but learned a bunch on the fly to keep from being screamed at. So I am learning a completely new job while getting two hours of sleep during the week all while very quickly becoming a bonifide boozer. My sweat smelled like PBR or vodka depending but not too many people noticed unless I had a rough night. In the military people try really hard to cover for their friends and subordinates because it keeps everybody out of trouble. Most safety briefs comprised of the Sergeant Major telling us that if he didn't have good friends around him he would have been arrested many times, that is the reality for almost everybody in the Marines. We take care of each other, and the way almost all of us grew up, we don't talk about what happened. The next psychotic rampage I went on involved LSD and tequila and my friends took as good of care of me as they could. I went to a rave in Balboa Park in San Diego at the World Beat Center. It was a blast and I had taken some acid for the first time. I did not really tell anybody I did it I just took it and had a wonderful time while I was there. I did not really know what to expect of the trip except that I would see some cool shit. I really enjoyed it while the lights and the music were hitting my system. We got back to the hotel and I started drinking, nobody knew that I had taken the acid until I started getting pretty drunk and wobbly while peaking from the gel tab I had ingested. Everyone looked like a goblin to me, their eyes were droopy and skin cracked and I felt like I was in danger so I kept drinking thinking some how that it would fix it. I ended up blacking out and starting several fights at the party and throwing plates in the hotel and smashing glasses and dancing in the glass with my bare feet. It cut me up pretty good and my friends threw me in the shower while I was screaming at them that I was going to kill them. There is a video of me getting choked unconcious by someone at the party and throwing up all over the place after I had already taken a shower. Everyone was mad as fuck at me and rightfully so, I should have never taken the acid in the state of mind I was in, I should have never drank while tripping and frying my system even further. My friends took care of me instead of throwing me out on the street or calling the cops. They fought the guy that choked me out and stood up for me. I wonder sometimes what would have happened if they had kicked me out of the hotel. They took care of me many other nights but none were that bad until later in 2016 on Labor Day weekend. I felt horrible about the anger I was causing my friends by being such a liability anywhere we went. They set up an intervention of sorts where they told me they were going to have to tell the higher ups to send me to rehab if I didn't chill the fuck out. I hated that I had caused so many problems when I was just trying to have a good time. I hated myself and treated the people around me like garbage. So I decided to turn it down a few pegs and it worked for a few months. Then I got a DUI, everyone was asleep at a bonfire that I had went to and I decided I needed to go get something to eat around 6am. I almost made it to Denny's before I got blue lighted. It was my first time being arrested and it wouldn't be my last. The arresting officer asked me if I wanted to do the field sobriety test and I told him I was going to fail but might as well try it out. I did okay with the test but everybody involved knew I was going to jail because I was still only twenty years old. I am so grateful that I was arrested instead of running somebody over trying to get a breakfast burrito. I had a few years of not driving ahead of me to think about how shitty those kinds of choices were and how I could have hurt many people my whole life. I had always driven drunk. I never thought twice about it at all. Now every time I got in an uber or had to walk a few miles to go get something to eat I was cursing my poor judgement. I have just recently been taking off of probation in the state of California and can now cross the border into Canada without being turned away. Five years later I have a new appreciation for some rules being there for a good reason at the time of this arrest I was made at the world and embarrased that I had gotten caught. I was reduced in rank, pay, and was put on thirty days restriction and thirty days labor by my unit. In the civilian world, I had to get a lawyer, my truck out of impound, and pay over five thousand dolars in fines and court fees that I did not have. I was broke, I was a scared little boy in a big boy world. I tried to play it off like I didn't care, like I was tough and owning up to mistakes. I felt like a fraud and I wanted to go home. While on restriction I started doing a cough and cold medicine called Tripple Cs by those of us who abused the OTC medication. If you take the whole pack of sixteen pills you will trip pretty fucking hard. I didn't know that it could cause liver and kidney failure or I would have taken more. I wanted to die but didn't really have words for it. I would take tripple cs a few times a week and drink budlight until the wee hours. I wasn't supposed to be drinking, I wasn't supposed to be doing anything. It didn't really affect my ability to listen to the people in charge of me that day or to carry out the tasks. So I started doing it more and more often during the day and just giggling to myself because I was high as fuck and functioning okay at work. Our batallion Sergeant Major held a safety brief the Friday that I was going to be let off of restriction with no incident. I was pretty excited to just get out of the barracks and had no plans of getting into trouble, and then he asked if any Marine was aware of a drug called tripple c's. Of course nobody raised their hand because even if you knew you didn't want to be the one to have to explain in front of seven hundred of your peers and superiors. He explained that one of his childhood friend's daughter had overdosed and passed away after taking eight tripple c's one night that week and that he would be making them take the medicine out of the Post Exchange because he noticed the shelf was bare and he didn't want any of us to die from being a dumbass and trying to get high. Little did he or anyone else know that I had taken three packs by myself the night before. I felt disapointed that I wasn't dead. Its a hard feeling to explain, finding out you probably should have crossed over Jordan the night before yet there I was at 5pm the next day getting ready for the weekend feeling fine. I decided I probably shouldn't kill myself on purpose but the riding it til the wheels fell off approach seemed like fun. I didn't want to die in that moment, I just did not want to keep going on, so I decided I would party within the limits of acceptable with my friends and in my own company push those limits to death's doorstep as often as possible. I didn't want people to be mad at me when I was gone. I wanted them to think of me as I wanted to view myself, a normal dude just trying to have fun. The more I stayed up alone in my room, drugs or no drugs, beer or otherwise I was seeing weird things in the corners of the room. My laptop would appear to float in the air as if I was using the force. I would brush my teeth and in my bathroom mirror I would see goblins perched in my shower. I would hear voices that sounded Demonic that would laugh and tell me I was going to meet them soon. I didn't want to tell anybody because they would either laugh it off that I saw gobblins or they would make me go to rehab. I was doing outpatient rehab refferals and getting ready to go to classes and I was ready to either get cleaned up or kill myself. I was starting to see more shit during the day and I wasn't using anything that day, but its a hard thing to explain to anybody. One way or the other I was going to make it stop. and I couldn't decide if death or sober living and getting help was worse.