rhyce

[rhyce]

When you’ve had a dog from birth, to old age, to eventual death and that dog is “your dog” and you’ve had a close, special connection with them for their entire life then you can still feel them laying down on the bed next to you at times.  Especially during the “twilight sleep” when you’re not completely asleep but not awake either. I have two dogs I was very close to, Missy and Roxy. I feel them all the time, they still come to me and sleep next to me at night.  It’s something you couldn’t understand if you’ve never had a loving pet by your side for yours. Just something i’ve been thinking about.  After my NDE on the 13th i’ve been feeling their presence a lot more lately.

[rhyce]

Overdose

I overdosed on fent last night, Friday 13th 2021.  It was my first time ever overdosing on anything. I’ve smoked fentanyl a few times before and have been an avid “dragon chaser” for a while now, so I thought I was in the clear when I took just two fits off the foil. I wasn’t planning on doing more than that. Just two. My friend and I had just met up with our plug and we were sitting in the carls jr. parking lot smoking and talking in my car, having fun when all of a sudden I just blacked out and my head slunched over. She called our plug back up and he brought his gf. It took the 3 of them over an hour to get me back. They were slapping me and pouring cold water on my face while another one was feeling my pulse. Once she could no longer feel a pulse and my lips turned blue they did CPR and I think they broke my chest plate bone, it’s real sore and bruised today.. According to my friends I was dead. They did the breath of life or whatever you want to call it, mouth to mouth while another was doing CPR.  All I remember is sitting in the driver seat of my car, sun going down, clouds overhead, chilling out having fun, talking with my friend. Then the next minute waking up in the passenger seat, drenched in water as the rain poured down and thunder struck in the dark of night. I don’t know why they didn’t call for an ambulance, you can call in anonymously and walk away. But they got me back to life and I guess that’s all that matters. 

[rhyce]

How long do you have to be free from H till you can confidently say you've kicked it? I have been drug free for two weeks with no cravings!

Okay, I'm lying, obviously I have cravings, but if I keep busy and stop thinking about it I forget about the cravings pretty fast.

I feel great! 🙂

[rhyce]

I want to better my life but I don't know where to start.

[rhyce]

“It’s always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.”

— Michael Chabon

[rhyce]

I'm going to just get straight to the point. That "opportunity" I was talking about that will change my life for the better is now looking like it's going to be impossible to achieve.

The plan was to go live with my brother, the one who "lives a thousand miles away, in the heavily populated area along the coast". I talked with him about moving in with him and his wife. They are all for it. I was going to save up money and move out there. But I quickly realized that I can't just move out there without a long term plan. They would house me for a while but I wouldn't and couldn't just live with them forever. And there's no way I can make it living in one of the most expensive places to live with a job where I'm only making minimum wage. I would quickly drown out there....

I don't know what to do anymore.

I feel stuck. I need a long term plan or else this just isn't going to work.

That's all for now.

[rhyce]

I have always used music as a coping method. Ever since I was a child I've had this idea that I was going to be some major musician growing up. I would picture myself on a stage in front of thousands of adoring fans all watching me sing and play the guitar. Sometimes the venue was as big as madison square garden, other times it was as small, but still as well known, as CBGB's. I still think about what that would be like from time to time..

I didn't have a great start to adulthood. My first car would always break down. My home life was a wreck. Apparently there was this college savings that my mom and step dad spent at the casinos. I had this debilitating disease that required me to be on chemo. I had life long traumas that occured early on in life. I've never worked a job where I've made more than $10 an hour, and every paycheck I'd have some one or some company hounding me for money. I tried out college, for a semester, I got scared of student loan debt and dropped out so that I could pay off all the debt before the 6 month grace period even started. I've kicked around the idea of trade school, but quickly realized that in order for something like that to work I would need to either be physically fit or be great at math, both of which I'm not. I tried being a server at a restaurant, had to quit after the first year because of the physical toll on my body. I worked at a few call centers, the hate I dealt with from the customers on the phone was something I could certainly deal with everyday, but the hate from my co-workers in the toxic environment was beating me down so much so that I started having panic attacks. I've tried out many odd jobs, a lot of seasonal jobs, many dead-end jobs. It seems like everything I do I just want to quickly push through the day, endure what all I can, then the moment I was off the clock I could finally go grab my guitar and be myself again.

These mentally and physically tiring jobs are picking apart at my soul. They're making me lose my inspiration, my spark, my will to keep on going in life. They have a way of bogging one down to the point where you become nothing but an empty shell.

When you get to a point where you don't know which is worse, your home life or your work life, that's when you need to start making some serious changes. But where to even start? A physically ill 27 yr old woman who is equipped with nothing but a highschool diploma, mental trauma, bad home life baggage and a desire for nothing but the arts really doesn't have a good chance at making it in this world. I don't know why my spirit had never been broken. I am not naìeve to my situation, I know it's bad, but I've always hold out onto hope for the future. I've always thought that if I could just get through today then tomorrow will be better. Tomorrow is hardly ever better but there's some innate, primal aspect to my mind that will not allow me to give up and accept the way things are. Even during the times that I've attempted and obviously failed at suicide it wasn't because I've given up, it was because I wanted to be in a better place and looked at that as a shortcut to achieving it.

This opportunity that I have is going to be hell to achieve, it seems almost impossible to obtain, but I'm still looking forward to it and I'm still looking at it as a definite thing that will absolutely happen for me, even though I have no idea how the hell I'm going to get there.

This is getting too long, I'll go over the opportunity in all it's detail next time, but in the meantime..

That's all for now

[rhyce]

When my brother R. came out here for that week I told him about my addiction. I showed him my foils and straws and he threw them away. It felt empowering to see this big fat stack of foils that had burnt up h I had smoked be thrown out. I don't know why I let the old ones sit around to collect dust but it surprised me to see the sheer amount of them all be stacked up together. Getting rid of this drug paraphernalia felt like I had a huge weight lifted off my shoulders, it became easy to turn down offers to go pick up. I have what I thought were life long friends now blocked on my phone and I haven't craved any since that day.

A little back story about my brother R.- For the majority of my life he has lived a thousand miles away in a heavily populated area along the coast. He is a military veteran who went to Iraq following the events of 9/11, he spent a great deal of time in college and now has his Ph.D, he's an author, a motivational leader and he has inspired many people to better themselves. He has always been the one person I really had to look up to, even though we don't live in the same state and go long periods of time without talking, I've always looked at him as someone who I know I could always trust and aspire to be like.

He, unfortunately, was only a child during our dad's meth addiction years, (it was the 80's, I wasn't born yet) he told me stories about how him and his mom would have to hide from our dad when he got mad. He always thought R.'s mom was cheating on him (a paranoia that would follow him in his next relationship, with my mom) and one time in a meth induced state, he kicked in his neighbors door, while said neighbor was at work, because he could hear something inside the neighbors appartment and was sure what he was hearing was his wife and the neighbor "doing it". Turns out what he was hearing was the neighbors parrot in a cage. He was so high that he called the police on himself. Shortly after leaving jail dad left his family in that "heavily populated area along the coast" to go move to the midwest and that's where he met my mom and then I was born. But going back on topic here.... R.'s life did not start out great. Last week he told me the story of the first time he got drunk AT FIVE YEARS OLD. It was gaven to him by his mom and our dad during a party.

He grew up without a sense of direction. But that most certainly didn't prevent him from being the best version of him that he could possibly be. By the time he was the age I am now he already accomplished so much. Now what does that say about me?... I guess you could say I'm lazy, give up easily and have no motivation. But I want you to really know and understand what I'm up against before you make that assumption. It is true that I don't have a sense of direction myself, and I'm quick to bury my face in my pillow while metaphorically screaming "why me!" But I always pick myself back up again and I'm known to look for alternate routes to achieve my goals when the original plan gets bombed.

On the next post (that will be uploaded shortly after this one) I'm going to explain in more detail WHY my plans have always fallen through in the past, why I so desperately want to change that, and finally, the next post after that will be the exciting opportunity I have been given and why I'm excstatic, yet also nervous about it.

So yeah, that's NOT all for now, so stay tuned.

[rhyce]

This post is meant for you to get a good understanding on what my home life is like. I want to make it very clear what I'm dealing with before I explain the opportunity I have to get out of this mess.

Okay so, I'll begin with what all happened last October. It involves hard drugs, mental illness, a homicide investigation and toxic parents.

To begin this story I have to briefly go back to march of last year. And I promise, I'll be brief, there's a lot to touch up on here. Okay so, one of my best friends who I've known since way back in the day (we live 3 houses away from eachother, we were best friends growing up) confessed a murder to me around March of 2020. This friend is someone who Iive barely spoken to in recent times because she's on meth and is just crazy. She's not really a good friend anymore but she needed someone to talk to that night so I was there for her. I quickly realized she was in a meth psychosis at the time, so none of what she said really made any sense to begin with. I thought she was full of shit. She basically told me she drowned someone in a river just days, or weeks (couldn't get a clear answer) before we spoke. She explained in erratic detail, jumping from one subject to another, she was super paranoid. I just thought she was crazy and needed to calm down. I didn't believe any of the shit she was saying. And between March and October of last year it sort of became a silly thing amongst me and my family members to bring up "hey remember when K. killed that guy" yeah right. Sure. We would joke about it. She's this scrawny, paper thin meth head who is known to make up elaborate stories. There once was a time when I was deeply bothered by her meth use, I even staged an intervention for her. But she is far beyond that now, so humor is really the best way to cope with my best friend ruining her life to drugs. Call it what you want, but for me, it's a way to cope with it. Anyhow, going back to October 2020. My mom out of the blue said she was going to call the police station and report the "murder" after we had just got done having one of our "laugh about K. for being crazy" sessions. Tried talking her out of it, said she was just going to be wasting everyone's time, K. clearly didn't murder anyone, but she was adamant and called anyhow.

Jump forward to the next day and my mom and I are in an investigation room, talking to the police about the situation. Why was my mom there when she wasn't even involved? Good question. I never got a clear answer out of her. She just wanted to be there. So, the investigator starts asking me questions and very early on my mom would cut me off to add some completey irrelevant information that doesn't even pertain to the subject. She would fidgit in her seat the entire time just dying for a chance to talk. The investigator had to cut her off numerous times so he can hear what I had to say. I was getting pissed, didn't want to be there, a few hours pass and I had to go to the bathroom. Came back in the room and my mom was talking to the investigator about that time I was raped in 2010. Completey threw me off. I ask what the hell is going on. They both say they're just "establishing a timeline". Mom continues to talk about it, investigator see's that I'm clearly uncomfortable with the subject, cuts her off and begins to get back on track. I almost walked out of the room at that moment. If he hadn't of changed the subject I would have. She knows I don't like anyone knowing about that. Some time passes, he's asking me what all K. told me that night, mom still cutting me off. At some point mom tells him I was an outcast growing up. Completey not even true. I always had friends, I was bullied a lot, but I always had a group I belonged to. (later on the investigator and I would speak over the phone and he said it's not right for a parent to say that about their child. It felt good to finally have someone see things from my side and have my back). Speeding things up here, the investigation ends with my mom FAKE CRYING on cue. She said "we love K. we don't want to see anything bad happened to her". Totally not true. She doesn't give a damn about K. I look over to see the investigators reaction, he can tell it was a fake show of affection, I secretly feel glad that someone else can see right through it (that rarely ever happens). We go home.

The next few days is an all out psychological war between me and my mom. The investigator calls mom and says if I have to go back n talk to him some more then he don't want mom there. Mom tells me the exact opposite. I have suspicions. I call investigator myself, he clarifies, says he never said that and he really doesn't want her there anymore. It's just unnecessary to have her there. She wasn't even involved in it to begin with. He was mad she kept cutting me off. He doesn't want her there. I go to mom and tell her I spoke with him myself and that he doesn't want her there next time. Huge fucking mistake on my end. She don't like that answer. She becomes manipulative, huge argument ensues. The argument lasts for days. Gets to a point where I have to tell investigator what's going on and ask him if I could cease all involvement moving forward. I don't want to be a part of this anymore. He agrees, says it's okay, that he doesn't even think she commited the murder anyway and that he has enough info from me. That ends my involvement with the police. She's still a wreck, blows it way out of proportion. I can't deal with it anymore. Go back to live with my dad.

Okay so, when I get to my dad's house I see things are not going any better there either. My brother is having a series of episodes that we later come to know is caused by paranoid pschytsophrenia. It gets violent at times. It's super draining. It's not fun at all. It's literally hell.

Going back to the present time; my brother still had these episodes. Hasn't seen any improvement. We've had to call the police on him a lot, he's been in and out of mental facilities. He can no longer drive bc he caused two hit and runs both in the same day. In an episode where he no longer knew what was going on he went outside and stomped in the roof of his car, tore up the headliner, broke his rear view mirrors, and just completey ruined his vehicle.

So here's where the good part comes in. My dad is desperate for help with my brother. He calls my oldest brother, who lives a thousand miles away, oldest brother, we will call him R. flies out here, stays here for a week and he actually just left two days ago. He was out here to help with our brother, but I tell him a little bit of what's going on with me as well. He offers me an opportunity. I am both ecstatic and stressed about it. But it will be for the good, if I can pull it off.

This is already getting too long. I'll talk in detail about this opportunity next time.

That's all for now.

[rhyce]

I turned down two offers to go pick up yesterday. Two offers from two different people. They both were going to pay. All I had to do was drive them there and they'd pay for it. One said "I'm going to hook you up good for this", the other said "I will get you well, I'll take care of you till we both run out". They're both good on their word too, they've taken care of me and our addiction many times in the past. But I had to pass up on it this time. I'm tired of doing h. I'm ready to move on to bigger and much more exciting things in life.

So here's the story.. I was around the age of 13. I was super depressed all the time. A lot of fucked up shit was going on in my life so I really didn't ever have anything to look forward to. I didn't have anyone I could rely on or talk to about things. I was on my own. Music was my comfort.

So, this story takes place when I was 13. The year was 2006. My devices I had for listening to music on was an ipod that never had any music downloaded onto it, because my parents always said no when I asked (so why even buy my the damn ipod if you're not going to pay for the music?? Seems counterintuitive, but idk, that's just me) And I had a Sony CD walkman. I would mainly listen to cd's on the walkman. I obtained the cd's in a lot of different ways. Both of my parents had their own collections of cd's that I would often sift through and pull out what I wanted. I also had friends who would trade cd's. It was an elusive, underground black market cd trading business that operated in the very back section of the school bus. Lol. Anyway, there was this one particular cd floating around one day, it was a pretty badly scratched up mixed cd that had two nirvana songs and the rest were shitty, bland songs that I can't remember. I listened to it and immediately fell in love with the two nirvana songs. I quickly agreed to what would appear to be a bad deal on my end (the metallica black album in perfectly good condition for a scratched up mix cd that would always skip sections of the song at just the wrong time) so that I could get ahold of this cd to have for my own personal arsenal. I loved that cd! For about 5 days. Then it went missing.

I was so devastated. I didn't have much growing up, so what I did have I would always make sure to take very good care of. This cd was one of the most important things in my life at that time. Those two nirvana songs sent me on a hunt to listen to every single nirvana song ever in existence, I wanted to know everything about the band, I had become obcessed. I would sit in my room and listen to those two songs on repeat for hours at a time, I memorized every lyric by heart (which is not easy to do with a nirvana song), I couldn't get enough of it. Every lyric, every riff, was just like nothing I've ever heard before. So this cd was not something I would quickly forget about. I was desperate to have it back.

When I say I looked everywhere for this cd I literally mean every single place it could have possibly been at. I looked in all the common places, in all the unlikely places, I looked everywhere. I'm not going to list them all but you have an idea. I couldn't find it. I was feeling defeated.

Finally I broke down and threw myself on the ground in my bedroom and started to cry out of frustration as I prayed. I was just so damn desperate to have it back that I prayed to God and even said out loud something along the lines of "if anyone can hear me, God, ghosts, ancestors, fairies, anyone!! please help me find this". I felt so completey hopeless. I was laying there on my back, in the middle of my bed room when I turned over to look under my bed. It was a spot I had already looked at plenty of times before but everytime I looked there nothing had changed. It was just an empty floor. But this time when I looked (I wasn't even looking for it, I just happened to look in that direction) I saw a cd laying face down, a little off to the side, directly under my bed. There was no way that cd could have ended up there. I knew there was nothing there just a few minutes beforehand. But there it was.

The cd wasn't even one that I had owned before. I asked all my friends and my brother about it and they don't ever remember knowing that cd even existed.

The cd was an original copy of the nirvana nevermind album. Up until that point I never owned an original nirvana cd, all I had was that one mix tape with the two songs (which by the were heart shaped box and all apologies, those two songs weren't even on the same album). So yeah, I had no idea where this came from. Still don't know. But that cd became a major part of my life.

I would listen to that album, in its entirety, many times over. I would try and re-create the riffs on my guitar. I had many many sad, depressing nights where I was either hungry, trying to drown out the sound of angry yelling, trying to forget about my lonliness and the heartaches I dealt with that day, or sometimes all 3 where I would lay in bed crying, while listening to that album on repeat for hours. That cd shaped the person who I am today. I wouldn't be the same without it.

Next time I post I'll elaborate more on what I was talking about in my first post. About this exciting opportunity I have been given and why it means so much to me.

But that's all for now.

[rhyce]

I had many life defining moments at the age of 12. That's the age I started drinking, started doing drugs, first time I tried to commit suicide and that's the age I started playing guitar.

If you've read my previous post you'll know I had a rare form of scleroderma. What I didn't mention though was that I had to be on chemo for it. It was a shot of chemo that i would take every morning before school. It would put me in a pissed off mood that would set the tone for the whole day. It would drain me of all energy, made me incredibly hungry, incredibly tired and would leave a bad taste in my mouth that I couldn't get rid of. I would feel like absolute death walking into school, it was like my soul was just drained from me. I would sit in class trying not to fall asleep while hoping no one could hear my stomach growling. I couldn't focus much on my classes but I remember having a shit ton of homework those first few years of middle school. I would be up for hours every night just trying to make sure all my homework was complete. Since there was so much work to do my main focus was on getting it all done rather than focusing on the actual work itself. So my grades were always d's and f's. I eventually gave up on trying to make sure it was all done right around the time that my school realized they were sending out too much homework for us. So by the time I was in the 8th grade the school no longer gave us assignments specifically to do at home but I stopped caring by then and had a lot of work that never turned in. I was largely overlooked in school. It was determined that I had dyslexia and some sort of learning disorder with math but nothing was ever done about that. I could never keep up with what was going on in class anyhow, with the chemo and all the sick days. I had to put on fmla for being out of school too many days for doctor appts and for the days that I was just so completey drained that k couldn't get out of bed.

My anger is what fueled me most days. I was fed up with the constant doses of chemo, being hungry all the damn time, not knowing what was going on in class, the bullying, my home life. There was no one I could confide in. So I write. All the time. I would write in a journal about my life, I would write short stories, poems (one of which was published), I would write out song lyrics that I came up with and guitar tablature for those songs, I would write about any and every thing. Still do actually. I love writing. But sometimes it's not enough, sometimes the weight of the world would get to me and that's when I tried to commit suicide at 12.

It was a botched pill overdose. I can't exactly remember what I took but all it did was give me a severe headache and made me throw up a lot. I never told anyone about it.

Soon after that I started smoking pot with my dad, and then I would smoke pot with my entire dad's side of the family. Aunt, uncle's, cousins, grandparents, everytime there was a family event I would smoke with them from an early age. I also started to drink alcohol around that time, at those family gatherings and with friends. It started out with just beer but quickly moved on to other, harder drinks. By the time I was 15 I had already tried extacy, coke, opiates and shrooms with different friends and people I'd met at parties. I went to parties a lot, it was a fun way to escape the pressures I felt at home. But I stopped going to parties at 16 when I was drugged and raped. That's around the age when I quit being so naìeve and stopped believing that just because people are nice to you doesn't mean they have your best interest at heart.

I'm going to elaborate more on why music and the creative arts, in general is so important to me and I'm going to share a story of something really bizarre that happened to me around the age of 13.

But I will save that for another post, this one is already getting too long.

So that's all for now.

[rhyce]

When I was a child I contracted a rare disease, a rare form a scleroderma. The disease deteriorated parts of my muscle tissue. I was relentlessly pick on at school for it. I was about 6, maybe 7 when the disease was first discovered. It started off looking like a bruise on my jaw, but it quickly spread and ruined the muscle and tissue on the whole left side of my jaw.

Around the same time that we discovering what was going on with me my parents divorced. It was a nasty divorce, the kind where both sides try to get you to pick which parent to live with by bribing you with what they could and they would both get real graphic in describing all the horrible thing the other parent had done and why you shouldn't go live with them. I'm an adult now and they're both still like this. I didn't chose a parent, I didn't listen to them when they would talk ill of eachother. Instead, I would move back and forth from house to another. When it would become insufferable at one place I'd go move in with the other. It was hell growing up that way.

Here was my options: live at mom's where the place is in a constant state of disarray, trash and cloths and everything strewn about the place. Personal needs going unmet. No one would wash my clothes for me, clean and vacuum my room, make me take a shower, there was never food in the house. When I would get fed up and try to pull out the vacuum, or try to figure out how to operate the washing machine my mom would stop me because I was too young to figure it out and would probably mess something up. So I just had to deal with constantly dirty cloths. I figured out how to work the shower myself, but would never have my own shampoo and conditioner, so would have to borrow it from her. Being constantly called needy everytime I would ask for basic items at the store. Being told I was weak everytime I cried. Being largely unheard, unseen, unfed, left to myself in my room where I would have nothing to do but focus on my drawings and music.

Or I could live at dads: my dad, who never got over my mom. He would always get in these fits where he'd start yelling and cussing at no-one and everyone. Every morning I would hear him wake up and start yelling things about my mom, calling her a whore and all sorts of other things. He would get himself so worked up that he would spend all day perpetually pissed off. I would have to walk on egg shells all day. If I did one thing wrong, or even raised my voice a little he would go on an endless rant where he would yell at me and cuss me out over it. I wasn't aloud to state my opinions around him. Wasn't aloud to tell him he was wrong. Wasn't aloud to make a mess either, because unlike my mom he kept his house very clean (despite the black mold growing in the shower, he would get so pissed everytime I mentioned it. Kinda like a "if you ignore it then it'll go away" sort of thing) everything has it's own spot it belongs at. If you move one thing but forget to put it back then you'll be yelled at.

I think my parents major flaws are my mom's narcissism (I'll elaborate later) and my dad's past drug problem with meth, that must have ruined his brain in some way to make him a clean freak and perpetually angry all the damn time.

They are both toxic people, who I can barely get along with. They don't know me very well because for the most part, I chose to not engage with either of them. I do still love them though and that will never change, but I don't like them (most of the time). If that makes any sense. They both have their moments, that's for sure. Like any human, they both have their good qualities and their bad qualities, just unfortunately for me I've seen the best and worst of those qualities and I'm not impressed.

I guess next time I post I'll elaborate more on my childhood, how music was the only consistent thing in my life and I'll start talking about my experience with drugs and alcohol at an early age.

That's all for now.

[rhyce]

I made this tumblr so I could be open, rae and anonymous. I doubt anyone will read any of this but it's therapeutic nonetheless bc I'll be able to go back and read what I've wrote.

A little about me; I'm a recently recovering h addict. I liked to chase the dragon, never banged, didn't like cheese, all I did was chase it. If you know what I mean, if you don't know what I mean then oh well. I know what I mean. Anyway, my life is depressing (for many reasons) but I've had a recent opportunity come up that will change things for the best.

I'm a 27 yr old who lives in the midwest. My life has always been filled with depressing set backs, trauma, abuse, toxic ppl, bad vibes, bullying, sadness, despair, etc. But that's all about to change.

I'll make some posts where I go deeper into my past, and I'll talk more about this amazing opportunity I can't afford to miss out on. If anyone happens to read this, and my follow-up posts then cool, you're in for a depressing ride, if not, then atleast I'll have it to look back on when I'm doing better in the future.

That's all for now.