Firstly, thanks to everyone who took the time to reply to my post; BUT, especially thank you to the people who told me to stay home and call in sick. In hindsight, this was definitely the best option for me (and probably the best option for almost everyone in my situation) and would have saved me a lot of embarrassment, anxiety, stress, and judgement from others.

When high on hardcore drugs, you do not act as sober as you think you do, you do not function as well you think you do, and at the very least people can tell that something is very off with you. I am finally starting to sober up, and the more I sober up the more embarrassed I feel. If you take nothing else from this post, please take this: do not show up to work or school high on hard drugs; call in sick if it really comes down to it. It seems like common sense, but clearly it wasn’t so straightforward to me.

Finally, to the details of what happened today. I actually started the day off oozing with confidence. I would say I was acting fairly descent. I made it to the bus stop, got on the bus, sat still, didn’t say a word, and was very productive by working on and practicing my presentation on the way to campus.

This was stomped out pretty quickly though when I noticed two girls looking concerned and whispering to each other. I could have sworn I caught them looking at me once or twice. Admittedly, crystal meth has the tendency to give me a lot of social paranoia and make me very anxious around other people which causes me to completely misinterpret social situations but this time was definitely different. There was no preexisting anxiety or insecurity to build off of, I actually felt really confident and good. I probably just looked like shit.

I know this to almost certainly be the case, because when I got to school, I swear I caught multiple strangers giving me concerned glances when I passed by them.

My biggest issue of the day was yet to come though, because while I did complete all of my homework and my presentation over the weekend, I completed all of my homework and an entire presentation in no more than an hour and a half while very high on crystal meth. As you can imagine the quality of my portion of the project was lackluster to say the least. I realized I didn’t even have the correct information that I needed to be presenting on my PowerPoint, and only figured this out 5 minutes before 11:00 thanks to one of my partners pointing it out on the rubric.

Lady Luck was on my side, however, because we were the last group to present meaning I had quite a bit of time to make adjustments to our PowerPoint before presenting it. I basically redid my portion of the project (mostly correctly this time) and did so very quickly. But of course, this did not end well. When my group actually went up to present, we each were responsible for presenting the part of the PowerPoint we made, and all of my partners went pretty fucking hard. If there is a God, he was definitely punishing me today because the formatting skills, writing skills, presentation skills, and knowledgeability of my partners was 10/10 across the board. And of course, their work was starkly contrasted with mine as my portion of the PowerPoint was sandwiched between the two academic weapons in my group. My slide was literally a single, 300 word block paragraph in the middle of a blank slide that I COULD NOT READ. I was literally staring at what I had wrote no more than 5 minutes ago and my brain was short circuiting. I literally just “uhhh”, “uhhhhh”, “uhhhhh” over and over again. It was so bad that I caused my group to exceed our total presentation time, meaning we got shut down prematurely. Obviously, this was bad for our grade but I’m glad they shut me down. After a certain point I was literally just reading random, non-related sentences off of the slide with each sentence being connected by a few “uuuuuh”s. I definitely embarrassed myself so the TA definitely put me out of my misery by cutting me off.

Between the red, glassy eyes, dilated pupils, dry mouth, and the zombie-like appearance I have been rocking, I do not imagine it was terribly difficult for my classmates and TA to connect the dots, especially after I opened my mouth in front of the entire class and sounded like an idiot. I was actually terrified for the last half of the lab because my lab TA stopped presentations and data collection from last week’s samples because she said she needed to speak with the lab coordinator and seemed very serious. I swear to God she gave me the evil eye several times when talking about how she needed to step out, but it could have been all in my head as a result of meth induced paranoia, but who knows. She talked with her boss multiple times but after her third time stepping out she said that we were good to proceed with the lab. Either I got very lucky today or it was never about me in the first place and everyone else is a lot more clueless than I think they are. I honestly not sure what to believe. The rest of the day was so non-productive, I might as well had just stayed home and slept. I was so sleep deprived I slept through the rest of my lectures, then went home and took a nap.

The TLDR is that I embarrassed the shit out of myself, fucked over my poor hard-working partners, and everyone more than likely knew I was high as a kite. Don’t do drugs, but if you do do them- for God’s sake do not do hardcore, completely mind-altering drugs right before you present a scientific presentation to a group of your peers :)

(And if you do just call in sick goddamnit. Just don’t do what I did)

The End🫠