graceland's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lending a Helping Hand I partied too hard this weekend, I was physically exhausted this morning. I don't know how I lived like that for more than 10 years, I can't even do it for a night anymore. Before I left on Friday, I had a talk with a friend I work with who parties hard. I don't go out with her all that much, because I rarely "party" anymore, but we hang every so often and I know what she's up to. She started freaking out on Friday, having an anxiety attack at work and I had to quietly talk her down in a corner. She's on medication for depression but also goes out and rips rails every week. I mentioned to her that's not letting the medication work and worse, she probably forgets to take it altogether or uses it to come down. I spoke with her because about a week ago she didn't show up to work until around 3PM on a Friday. It was a slow day and her supervisors weren't there, so it was passable. Today she didn't show up again. I knew the deal. People noticed. I had to track her down. Calling her mobile and her land line, e-mailing her friends to find out if anyone had seen her in the last 24-hours. After I sent out the APB, she called me within 20 minutes. She was a mess, crying so hard she couldn't breathe. Telling me that she thinks something is physically wrong with her, she can't get out of bed, she's so depressed. She's like an after school special and if she hadn't been in such a precarious state, I would have told her so. I would have told her to get off the drugs, this is just a bad crash and that it would pass, but you can't tell someone that when they are in it. When you are in that spiral, you are fragile like no other time. You are so desparate to feel better that you might just take everything you have on you, hoping that increasing the dosage might finally make the feeling go away and then what happens is that it does go away, all of the feeling goes away and so do you, because your heart goes into cardiac arrest and you die. No one ever thinks it could happen to them, including me, until it feels like it's happening and instead of remaining calm, you freak the fuck out. So here I am at work, wanting to shout, GET CLEAN, but instead talking in my soft voice, making light jokes, soothing, reminding her to breathe. Relax. If she were a close friend, I'd step right in, but I'm not in that position. Because I'm not with her most of the time and I don't party with her, I honestly don't know how much she's using. She said she didn't use at all this weekend, I know that's a lie. So I covered for her at work. I can't be doing that again. I'm heading out of town for a few days and when I come back, I am going to have to sit her down and I am really not looking forward to that. I've done this for other people. I've had it done to me, it's not fun being on either side.
I'm pretty sure she's at that point though. The one where it gets so bad that you either recognize it and step away from it or you jump into the hole and get swallowed. I've buried enough friends and associates. I'm not going to do that again if I don't have to. Call me selfish. 7:51 p.m. - 2004-05-03 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||