ANSWER THE QUESTION

by Lisa

What substance can I not do without? I used to think “nothing”.

But.

When I was changing insurance plans, I goofed and picked one that my longtime MD didn’t accept. At that time, I had been taking Klonopin for about seven years. The only primary care provider in my area turned out to be staffed by three tired nurses and one perfectly fresh-from-school nurse practitioner who would not prescribe anything that started with “schedule” and ended with any number below “six”. She told me to go to the emergency room if I really couldn’t sleep.

I have never been able to sleep. Really.

Five days and less than fifteen hours of sleep later, I went. The ER doctor leaned into the room where I sat, not fully entering, and asked if I felt like I might harm myself. No.

I felt like a criminal. I did not get a prescription.

I had gone through trials of every other sleep med for five nights at a time before Klonopin. I went home with all of them in a big bag: Lunesta, Wellbutrin, other things with reassuring, peaceful names. These were the golden days of free samples. Some of them worked for a night or two, one made me do horizontal gymnastics in my sleep, and one made me eat bites out of a block of cheese from the fridge and leave it on the kitchen counter. I blamed the kids, but it was the Ambien.

None of the sleep things made sleep reliably happen, so my doctor prescribed something else. She took it herself. She said she was a “sleep worrier”,  like me. That was reassuring. I had never slept better than the first night I took that pill.

I have been taking Klonopin for fourteen years now. I didn’t know it was something people abused until I watched a celebrity intervention show and this actress had a makeup bag full of carefully sorted pills. Mine were in there, little blue circles of sleep. I wondered how the effects could be entertaining, how anyone could think of taking a handful? Does something different happen to a woman who takes six (or sixteen) a day instead of one or two? How does she stay awake, or not die? I didn’t understand tolerance then.

Now I understand the real question: what is she trying to escape?

That’s always the thing. It’s not that taking a certain pill or combination of pills is so much fun, it’s that taking them prevents another thing from coming up.

I am careful to take the prescribed amount or less. I am also careful not to run out, and that used to scare me. Not the running out, but the way I made sure to refill before the bottle was empty. There was a game of chicken with me and that bottle: would it last 30 days as prescribed, or 45? 60? Could I take half-of-a-half for a whole two months? How little was enough? How could I prove to myself that I was the boss of that bottle?

I have gotten over that nonsense.

And now I know why I don’t sleep and what I need to escape: bad things happen at night. That is my lived experience–that is my truth. I’ll take a pill to shut it down, this useless vigilance, and I will not let myself run out because I need to sleep. I am not the boss of the vigilance sometimes, especially in the dark. It’s trying to keep me safe.

Sometimes it’s really this simple.