I recently posted this but it's my story of addiction and bipolar which destroyed my life:
OK, I can be verbose, but this got long even by my standards. I understand if it's far more than you were asking for. But here you go:
I'm still new here, but I've discussed on other threads what brought me here. But since it seems to help me write about it - it's given me some clarity about the host of feelings and emotions that drive my suicidal ideation -- I'll share it again here, perhaps adding a few new details. The basic issue is that I suffer from powerful feelings of shame, remorse, loss, isolation and failure. These feelings and emotions are the result of having basically thrown away what was a very satisfying life. More than satisfying, it was a life that was a periods filled with joy. I was always a popular young person (high school class favorite in the book having been class president three times, etc.). I was friends with all kinds of groups in highschool, the potheads ( I smoked), the nerds (I was smart), jocks (not sure why, was never athletic), etc. So my early years were fairly happy (though i was never as happy as people might have assumed given my popularity. I always suffered a feeling of inferiority and loneliness.
Enter first big issue: Drugs and alcohol helped enormously with the feelings of inferiority and loneliness. So I quickly began to abuse them and was clearly alcoholic by the end of high school. Went to college and did real well the first year and the promptly failed out when I discovered cocaine. SO I joined the army and was successful there -- though alcohol caused me a few problems there. After army went back to college - including winning a prestigious fellowship to study in France for a year. Went on to graduate school and was a star. Until my drinking reared it's head again so I didn't end of finishing my Ph.D. until I joined AA.
AA worked really well for me and in my view rewarded my sobriety with a life far greater than I could have imagined. Got a great university teaching job that I really succeeded at, married my old college sweetheart, had a beautiful and amazingly loving daughter. My professional success continued, I travelled the world, worked for a period in a high level way for the UN in Africa. I had it all. Love in my life. A spirituality from AA that was important to me and ed to me actually care about others, to give back to society (especially newcomers to AA). I had a lot of friends, respect of my community, and felt like I was making a modest but important (to me at least) contribution to making the world a better place.
Then I after about 15 years of sobriety I began taking prescription amphetamines to manage an apparent case of ADD. At first it was great and I became even more productive at work. But eventually the euphoria of Ritalin became more important than my improved concentration. I very quickly began to abuse it, taking more and more (my doctor was easy to convince I had things under control since he knew I had "beaten" alcohol). Here's where it get's shitty. Without really being aware of it, all these amphetamines was driving me into massive mania (I'm bipolar). My mania was heavily characterized by hypersexuality (not an uncommon manifestation of bipolar mania). The backstory is unimportant but on a trip to Switzerland I found myself (truly unintentionally) in the red light district. After several propositions (and in a way totally contrary to my well publicize humanitarian values) I finally relented and had a wild. mind-blowing sexual experience (which involved the use of some cocaine). Shortly after I made a trip to Canada where I sought out an escort. Again pretty mind blowing but this time we stayed in contact and began what I know now was a two year fake "relationship" in which I started sending her money regularly, sexting extensively and in my deranged mind falling in love. When things started to sour I started seeing escorts in my own community. I also had a growing online presence in the cheating/online sex community I must have made contact with someone that knew my wife because she got an email explaining that I was online looking for ways to cheat on her. Within the span of say a year after she received that email I had lost my marriage (she found online horribly explicit descriptions of my sexual behavior online), my job at the university (I had started taking meth and my dealer sent an email to my VP and as result they seized my computer and found all the details of my meth buying as well as my explicit communications with escorts). I was shortly later arrested for meth possession (the day before I was scheduled to enter a treatment facility). The local papers covered my arrest. All was lost. My family (the ex understandably got full custody) was gone, my career was in shambles, my reputation was in tatters, my income was cut but a huge degree (the only job I could find was selling cars and I sucked at it). I was faced with foreclosure so I was forced to find another teaching job in another country 10,000 miles away. I now still make a fraction of what I did, can't pay student loans or a big IRS debt. I'm lost. I'm alone. I can feel my daughter pulling away (she's harder and harder to connect with on skype). And my daughter is the only thing that kept me from killing myself as things spiraled downward.
My life is now one of terrible loneliness. I am filled with overwhelming shame for my atrocious behavior that must have devastated my wife. I shamed my daughter with the public coverage of my arrest. I lost the respect of many (many friends don't know about my sexual misbehaviors so they forgive me for my drug addiction). I just can't seem to be able to handle the weight of shame, remorse, regret, sense of incredible loss and the increasing fear that I'm losing the love of my daughter. I lost half of my retirement account in the divorce and spent the other half to live on for a year. I now have nothing for retirement and being 53 years old now and earning as little as I do I I can't expect to avoid an old age of poverty and isolation
So in sum, I had a life that was wonderful beyond measure. And in the span of two years I engaged in such terrible behavior that I lost it all. And I am now increasingly of the mind that the only release from these unbearable pains is the release of death.
