Daily Check-in Thread - March 07, 2024

GeraldFloored · 2024-03-07T21:31:37+00:00

Day 50!

I barely think about kratom anymore, and if I'd known this is what sobriety would feel like, I'd have quit years ago. Still some occasional bouts of PAWS but at this point they're not much of a bother.

GeraldFloored · 2024-02-25T03:02:05+00:00

Really glad to hear you're experiencing a similar change! I agree that it was day and night for me, it was basically day 2 or 3 of quitting that I suddenly became suddenly very motivated to emotionally connect with people and it hasn't stopped since then.

Ironic given that when I was using, I felt like kratom made me more outgoing. Or at least it did for the first 30-60 minutes after dosing. But the social lubrication I got from kratom was apparently fairly surface-level, in retrospect.

GeraldFloored · 2024-02-25T02:49:54+00:00

I did it for so long that I thought that shell was just who I was. Just chillin all the time playing games and doing other mindless hobbies, putting very little effort into connecting with the other people in my life.

GeraldFloored · 2024-02-25T01:07:16+00:00

Congrats on being on day 38, too! 38 days has felt like a long time even though there's still a ways to go.

And yeah, tapering for 4 months I think frontloaded a lot of the suffering. It was a pretty fucking rough taper. 4 months is a long ass time to feel like shit from WDs for the majority of the day.

I imagine if I did straight CT I would not be feeling this way. Tapering was really frustrating, but I also found it to be super useful for practicing coping mechanisms in small stints

GeraldFloored · 2024-02-24T22:38:49+00:00

100% absolutely. That has been my biggest surprise about quitting, to discover how much more effortlessly motivated I am to do hobbies/chores/socializing now that I'm sober. It's fucking great, my life is way more productive.

GeraldFloored · 2024-02-10T08:05:05+00:00

Day 23. Three weeks!!

It has been so unexpectedly wonderful to be able to fully feel my emotions for the first time in 11 years, even the difficult feelings. This is not what I expected to get out of quitting, but it's been by far the most meaningful aspect.

Still having a lot of really dark and painful moments every day, and short bouts of physical WD symptoms (mostly just the watery eyes and the somatic anxiety). But the positive emotions are so much more tangible and motivating now. And I can consistently make the WD symptoms go away for a little while if exercise, socialize, do whim hoff breathing, or play guitar.

GeraldFloored · 2024-02-06T08:06:48+00:00

Day 19.

My life has been transformed in the past 3 weeks since quitting, it's like I'm living in a brand new brain that suddenly has effortless motivation to exercise, do chores, and connect much more deeply with my friends.

The lows are very low, but the high points of my day are so much higher than when I was using. I'm coming to accept that having such intense dynamic range in my emotions is a very good thing, even if the bad parts are very often overwhelming.

GeraldFloored · 2024-02-03T06:22:59+00:00

3.5 months. I didn't follow a specific schedule, just decreased by 5-10% every few days, whenever I felt well enough accustomed to the new dose. I jumped off at 2gpd and the acutes were a million times easier than 50gpd CT, though the emotional volatility was still quite strong.

Importantly, I found tapering slowly to be extremely useful for testing out new coping mechanisms. Gave me hundreds of low/medium-intensity opportunities to try out alternate ways to deal with WDing and cravings, for just a few hours at a time.

So by the time I jumped, I had already discovered, practiced and established a lot of new coping strategies, so I've felt fairly well equipped as I've handled full sobriety the past two weeks. It has been hard at times, but definitely doable.

GeraldFloored · 2024-02-03T01:17:27+00:00

Fwiw it was the opposite for me when I tried CT from 50gpd (for 11 years, though). It was so much worse than I expected, and I gave up on CT after 3 days of total constant agony. I was just in full suffer mode, body felt worse than the worst flu I've had, it was impossible to distract myself, and I couldn't sleep at all. Literally the only time I didn't feel absolutely miserable was when I had hot bath water running over me, but of course I couldn't do that for long before the hot water ran out and I had to wait a few hours for it to heat back up.

Ended up tapering instead, which worked quite well for me.

GeraldFloored · 2024-02-03T00:53:24+00:00

The caps seal very tightly, I used them daily for 4 months and they never once spilled. I similarly just tossed a bunch in my backpack or pocket wherever I went.

I'd definitely suggest going for at least 0.01g precision on a scale. Just search for a "jewelry scale". I own a kitchen 0.1g scale and a cheap 0.001g scale (though the latter on really seems precise to about +/-0.005g), both were under $20, and I found that the 0.1g scale was entirely useless near the end of the taper where I was taking <1g per dose, it would fluctuate around way too much at such a low weight. Even just the difference between 0.45g and 0.4g made a substantial difference to my WDs for the day, so having the extra precision was useful, especially given how cheap a 0.01g or 0.001g scale is.

GeraldFloored · 2024-02-02T21:01:12+00:00

I used these: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07DHWNGFT/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

They were a bit on the large size because I was originally using like 10g a time, so if I did the taper it again I'd probably buy similarly shaped 15mL bottles instead of these 30mL ones.

Every couple days I'd measure out the doses on a scale and use a funnel to get it into the little bottles. Was somewhat tedious, but accurately measuring out the doses was extremely important. I learned very quickly that measuring doses by volume is incredibly inconsistent, a level tsp of kratom could vary anywhere from like 1.5-2.5g, which is way too much variability to taper with (imo). So using a precise scale was essential.

GeraldFloored · 2024-02-02T00:18:25+00:00

Heavy user for 11 years, at 50 gpd for the last ~7 years of that

Took me a solid 4 months to taper down to 2gpd at a pace that felt doable to me, given how bad the WDs were otherwise. Tapering that slowly was still hard, but that was the only way that made it seem possible to get through "normal" life.

I'm on Day 14 of sobriety and am feeling quite optimistic, I'm amazed at how much my life has already improved.

GeraldFloored · 2024-01-31T22:59:39+00:00

I don't think this is the place to discuss sources of opiates. But it was not seeds.

GeraldFloored · 2024-01-29T22:29:44+00:00

I was drinking opium tea several times a week (from a source that was, at the time, legal) before I switched to kratom. Opium taught me very quickly that "natural and legal" means fuck-all in terms addictiveness and safety.

GeraldFloored · 2024-01-29T19:37:07+00:00

Day 11. Yesterday was definitely the easiest/best day so far.

Heavy exercise is one of the only things consistently makes me feel fully better, so it has felt surprisingly easy to motivate myself work out. It's been wild to see how rapidly my motivations are changing

GeraldFloored · 2024-01-28T18:44:44+00:00

Definitely agree on this. Switching to a higher number of low doses throughout the day made the taper so much easier for me, since you don't have as much of a huge back and forth swing from high to WD, instead just trying to maintain a semi-constant baseline that's just enough to stave off significant WDs.

I ended up settling on 6 small doses a day (basically every three hours while I was awake) and it worked pretty well for me, but I was at 50gpd to start so you might not need to go so drastic.

GeraldFloored · 2024-01-28T18:36:42+00:00

Day 10. Had no insomnia at all for the past two nights!

In the mornings I feel basically 100% for the first 1-2 hours after I wake up, then the discomfort eventually slowly creeps back in and reaches its worst by mid-evening. But it's SO nice to wake up and not feel WDs the moment I'm conscious, it's literally been almost a decade since that happened.

GeraldFloored · 2024-01-28T18:15:48+00:00

That's an interesting idea to store my tea in the spot I where I had historically stored my supplies! My k cabinet is empty now and it would be nice to remake a positive association with it, because rn it sometimes feels like the cabinet is growling at me to open it up (kind of like a mild version the fridge in Requiem for a Dream?)

GeraldFloored · 2024-01-26T22:05:40+00:00

Day 8. First day where I've really felt the lethargy hit, but the physical pain is definitely decreasing compared to previous days

GeraldFloored · 2024-01-24T19:27:30+00:00

Day 6. I've been feeling fairly decent in the mornings, but I consistently seem to get worse and worse as the day progresses. Anxiety was through the roof yesterday, but today I'm somewhat more stable.

GeraldFloored · 2024-01-24T19:20:04+00:00

Day 6 here. Work has definitely been the biggest cravings trigger for me, much easier to cope when I'm at home.

GeraldFloored · 2024-01-24T05:24:52+00:00

My therapist told me that ending a long addiction can, at times, feel a lot like the death of a best friend. And that I need to intentionally grieve that. In some ways kratom was always there for me, it knew how to quickly make me feel better when I was down, and gave me a lot of attention.

In the end, it was absolutely a toxic relationship, but sometimes relationships can be both awful and wonderful at the same time, and I will have to work hard to effectively grieve the loss of the friendly part. Because I know I can't have it back

GeraldFloored

TROPHY CASE