i’m two days off cannabis now, planning for an 8 week tolerance break to really downregulate those cb1 receptors because i don’t get high anymore, like at all, and it fucking blows. i know i’m a medical patient and so everyone expects me to be like “oh you know, i only use it for the medical effects.” but no, i’m not going sit here and spout untruths. i am a human being that likes to get high and the fact that i am not getting high from cannabis anymore is actually bothering me and i refuse to be shamed for responsibly using a substance for not purely medical reasons. it helps with my chronic pain and i focus better when i smoke, but if i’m not getting high from 99% liquid diamond concentrate, that’s a massive tolerance level that could eventually extend to the cannabis no longer serving its medical purpose for me.
the biggest thing is that without the repetitive motion of vaping all day, i’m desperately missing some of that kinesthetic sensory input and it’s resulting in me starting to pick my skin again. as anyone who has dermatillomania knows, the trance you enter from skin picking is unrealistically calming and soothing. like i cannot describe how at peace i feel when i’m picking it. it’s like it satisfies every sensory need i have at once (repetitive motion, pain stimulation, feeling blood flow) and my whole body just relaxes into this unbreakable trance. i once picked the same spot on my lip for 8 hours without stopping because i didn’t even realise i was doing it (i foolishly believed i had been good about picking that day before i started bleeding). and for what it’s worth, i still have an open lesion on my lip from that picking session because i’ve picked it back open more times than i can count.
so here comes the double-edged sword. there’s another activity that satisfies all three sensory needs: cutting. what i’m realising as i get older is that cutting isn’t just an emotional release for me. there is an aspect of emotional release. for instance, as i watch the cuts bleed it feels like the bad feelings are leaving my body through bleeding. but there’s also as potent sensory component. for instance, my cuts are materially different from the average self-harmer because the average self-harm is attempting to cause harm. i am not attempting to cause harm. i am trying to feel a painful sensation that results in bleeding. it is a very specific and different drive from other self-harmers and it also leads me to harm myself using different techniques. many self-harmers attempt to cut for depth, aiming to break the layers of the epidermis until they can see inside their body. i don’t want that. i want to feel as much pain and have the pain linger as much as possible, and when you move down the layers of the epidermis they become less sensitive because there are less nerves in the lower layers of the epidermis.
this means that compared to most other self-harmers, my cuts are just physically different in size, shape, and placement because i am not actually trying to harm myself as much as possible. there is no catharsis for me in causing massive damage to my body. i understand why that feeling exists for those who feel it, but it’s not my experience.
a lot of times people read my cutting as “less bad” or “for attention” because i don’t aim to cut deep, but they’re missing the whole point. i’m not cutting shallow because i’m suffering less, i’m trying to elicit a different sensation and applying someone else’s rules will only lead you to misunderstand my actions.
you might wonder why i’ve decided to make a post explicitly about controversial topics like drug use and self-harm. why now? why not before? well as my previous post (which is now stickied to the top of the blog) said, this portion of the blog is going to be taking a different form, focusing on the harder disabled truths, shedding light on the real circumstances that disabled people live in and how they make that work for them. other social media platforms that i’m using focus on other things, like disabled joys and disabled excellence, but this space, this blog, this page. this is my vent space, a place where i can be as unwell as i want to be and demand that everyone witness it because that’s why this blog exists now. to beg people to bear witness to a life they’ve spent years trying to bury in demonisation.