Suicide Isn’t a Rock Bottom: It’s a Trapdoor

What Lies Beneath Level 0?

I can’t drop into my body. I can’t be here now. I’m being held hostage in my mind by the consequences of my actions, trauma, my current circumstances. Bullshit aside—my life feels like an active dumpster fire.

Before I continue, let me squash a notion that’s more persistent than glitter in carpet: meth doesn’t have withdrawal? Get bent. People say it’s just some bad moods and extra sleep, perhaps some annoying brain zaps. What they mean is, they smoked meth for a while, maybe boofed or scharfed it. They didn’t IV it daily for nearly two decades. The withdrawal isn’t just a week of sleep and binge eating—it’s an exorcism. Brain fog, splitting headaches, exhaustion, restless legs, skin-crawling itches, and nightmares that feel like snuff films. And for women? It hits different. Hormones hijack everything: cognition, emotional regulation, and recovery trajectory. We don’t just detox—we drag our bodies back from the edge through a swamp of unresearched chaos.

I laugh while typing this. Not a funny-ha-ha laugh, the kind that unsettles rooms. It’s a scene featuring the deranged arsonist, head slightly tilted, laughing with her mouth wide open, body stiff, eyes and brow void of emotion, never blinking as her eyes lock with yours. A woman who just snapped. If you're scared, it’s probably a good sign. I’m unhinged.

I've been dragging myself through the sludge, and I’d rather step barefoot on a Lego made of trauma. Irony isn’t wasted on the masochist I’ve apparently hired as my inner voice. A while ago, I published something self-congratulatory about being grateful for heartbreak, because back then, pain reminded me I was still alive. But the last two weeks, I’ve been begging death to step in and finish the job.

I get it. I wrote about the neurobiology of recovery, the depression, the anhedonia, the crashing hopelessness. It didn’t catch me off guard. I expected this. But that doesn’t make it easier. It’s like reading the weather report and still being surprised when the storm rips the roof off your house.

I’ve been forced to go a week off the DOPE Protocol—out of peptides, out of supplements, out of routine. The silver lining? Now I have the clearest baseline imaginable. This is the control sample. This is how bad it gets. When I restart the protocol next week, I’ll know exactly what it’s saving me from.

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Recovery culture traps us with its shiny preoccupation with “forward”, obsessed with avoiding relapse to the point of borderline toxic positivity. Like healing is a straight line on a chart. It’s not. Sometimes, to move forward, you need to sit in the wreckage and remember where the fire started.

This pain? It’s familiar. Childhood was so dark, it had me carrying a flashlight at high noon. Diagnosed with depression at ten, medicated before puberty, numbing with diet pills at eleven. By twelve, I’d found illicit drugs, and suddenly I didn’t need meds, or food.

Now, two decades later, I’m back in what people like to call "rock bottom,” often touted as necessary for the addict to realise the severity of their situation. But I call bullshit. In tough-love circles, they swear by it, but these are often people who’ve never been here. People who speak about us, without us. Rock bottom is not a prerequisite for recovery. It doesn’t illuminate. It doesn’t inspire. You know you’re fucked long before you reach this mythical, sanitized checkpoint. The sick twist? There is no rock at the bottom! No foundation. No redemption bounce. Just layers. Deeper and darker each time.

Sleepwalking through the weekend, I floated between blackout and dream state. Three people were in contact—none in the same hemisphere. Human connection is a luxury I could text but not touch. And in these moments, texts don’t hug you. Screens don’t smell like safety. I needed someone to be present with me in the room, another nervous system to attune to, a hand on my shoulder, to accompany the voice telling me to “put it down.” I needed someone to assure me that they were here, that they weren’t going anywhere. Hearing the words in my earbuds, even with them visible on screen, can be supportive, but this weekend, I needed to be held, not just in verbs, but in arms. I needed to soak someone’s sleeve in tears and mucus, have my oily hair brushed out of my face. I needed to feel breath in my hair as they rested their face on the back of my head. I needed silent comfort, I needed to feel safe as I sobbed and wailed, without apology or explanation, without being questioned or offered well-intentioned clichés.

Somewhere in that lonely dream-meets-reality-daze, I took action—the only action that felt accessible in that moment. Already inebriated, I consumed a crafty cocktail of benzos, dissociatives and other depressants, all contra-indicated due to major life-threatening interactions.

I tried to die.

Not a cry for help. Not a symbolic gesture. I engineered a pharmacological suicide that, on paper, should have left me in a coma, at best. Dead, ideally. But no. I gained consciousness. And in that liminal space, she stopped by—my soul sister. No soft light. No harp music. No poetic visit to Christmas past or future. Just her tuning me, voice sharp as ever, dragging me for filth. Telling me I am pathetic, performative, a victim with no imagination. She didn’t come to save me. She came to roast me. She told me I’d failed even at dying. That I was exhausting, melodramatic, and should’ve left a better note. She was right.

When I woke up, I wasn’t relieved. I was gutted. I felt like shit, sticky and sweaty. No running water. Another 24 hours later, I finally reached out. The first person I contacted interrupted me before I could finish my first sentence to ramble on about her big issue; the second left me on read. The third—sweet irony—wanted to know if I could help her score cocaine. My humanity reduced to a utility. The most significant effort at connection? Couldn’t help himself; even in my darkest moments, he’s still pulling my strings and messing with my head and heart, slipping subtle suggestions like precious dew drops on a Mohave morning, and the second I tried to close that loop, to end the brutal, likely intentional and calculated shots at my sanity and agency that goddamn nearly ruined me? You guessed it; He dissolved like a mirage, along with the promise of salvation, in the desert sun.

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This one’s his:

So yeah. Rock Bottom isn’t a magical vending machine that dispenses second chances. It’s a toxic myth peddled by propaganda readers who’ve never been here. Who think suffering is a ladder to redemption. But it’s not. It’s a spiral staircase with no railings.

The world keeps lowering the bar, and I keep tripping over it in slow motion.

Rock bottom isn’t where you start over. It’s where you meet the version of yourself that stopped believing in rescue.

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⛦・⚸ ・Ω

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