I have always been a headstrong woman (or a bloody-minded bitch, depending on who you listen to!) I’m also a study in contrasts - my personality by turns quiet and accepting, then loud and questioning. I am cautious in some ways, a flagrant tester of the boundaries in others…

Sometimes, in moments of introspection, I wonder where these seemingly contradictory traits come from.

Watching the Pope’s funeral with my dad a month or so back was an eye-opener in a number of ways. It taught me (or perhaps just reminded me?) a lot about my dad, and a lot about myself.

I had known since childhood that my dad (an engineer, and the son of an engineer himself) had gone to a Catholic school. Somehow, though, even though we were never religious in the least, I’d never thought to ask why he had gone to that school until I grew up. The answer surprised me.
“Because it was a good school, and because my father, your grandfather, went there,” my father told me.
“But why did he go there? We aren’t Catholic.”
“Well, actually, your grandfather was Catholic. But he asked so many questions, that the Church threatened him with excommunication.” I looked at my father in surprise. “Eventually, your grandfather saved them the trouble and left the church of his own accord.”
I smiled, recognising a lot of myself in this headstrong behaviour.

So, I come from a long line of people who take things apart and put them back together again. I also come from a long line of people who stand to one side, study things intently, and then yell out, “Yeah, but WHY?” The first idea explains (at least partially) my drug abuse. I suppose I’ve been taking myself apart (some would say, quite literally) for a long time now. The second idea – the “yeah, but why?” - explains many of my traits, and indeed, I suppose it explains this blog.

…And don’t I sound so magnificently self-aware. The myth of Peripat. The perpetual seeker, the wanderer, the storyteller, the junky. I am all of these things at once. And sometimes I feel like none of them at all.

My apologies to those who have read, and liked, what they have found here so far. I apologise for the lack of new content of late, but this is soon to be rectified witha vengeance (along with ironing out the layout of this here blog, which is admittedly buggy, slapdash and incomplete).
Writing about a topic like one’s own dalliances with hard drugs is a difficult thing to do, and I want to do the best I can, without pulling punches when needed.
To my detractors: leaving me comments in all capital letters, liberally laced with expletives, will get you deleted. Please, go join a support group if you need to. But leave me alone to blog, you sanctimonious small-minded people.
To my supporters: I apologise for the backlog of comments which were awaiting moderation, I hadn’t realised there were quite so many. Since I’m writing here on a 3-year-old laptop computer which just required a brand new hard-drive, as you can imagine, my productive computer time has been limited over the past few weeks. But now, onwards and upwards…

The following reflections upon a theme are reconstructed from notes in my pen-and-paper journal, and while that was written mainly for myself, I herewith have adapted it in an attempt to explain some of the allure of strong opiates, from the perspective of someone (i.e. yours truly) who has never really known when to stop chasing that bliss.

The relative cool of the evening, the stillness of the air - not even the hint of a breeze - the hundreds of stars visible in the clear and cloudless sky beyond my back porch…
Somehow all of these things, combined with the slow curl of smoke from my cigarette, make me turn my mind towards introspection, and of writing down the musings that come to me on this dark autumnal night.

The not-inconsiderable amount of heroin which I have injected in the past half-hour, only adds to my pensive mood. The heroin also, however, holds me currently in her tender, all-too-seductive charms and breathes to me, silently, her sweet nothings… or is it the blissful absence of pain which soothes my racing mind long enough for me to commit my thoughts to paper?

It would, right now, be all too easy to lie back and submit to the lassitude of the drug, to ease into that state known as “going on the nod”. It is, this particular batch, very good gear.

Heroin is rarely, if ever, a purely euphoric high; rather, it floods the endorphin receptors in the brain with the kind of unspeakably wonderful feeling that one gets when lying in a lover’s arms, just after a particularly intense session of the best, most intimate kind of physical lovemaking. I liken the shot in the arm to the first thrust of love, the initial euphoria as an orgasm which evelops mind, blood and body in a kind of silent exhultation… but like the sexual act (or the emotional entanglements which ensue), heroin is bad for me. Both can play havoc on my mind and emotions long after the shooting of the smack or the consummation of the sexual act… yet despite the guilt, I continue (albeit sporadically) to indulge. So… is this the mark of an addictive personality? Perhaps.

But this, regardless, is the buzz that heroin can bring, this is the sense of floating peace which I crave from the off-white, powdery rock - Lady H, my drug of choice. So beautiful it is, yet so terribly fleeting; but even now, so curiously seductive. And the true “high”, so elusive - maybe one in fifty shots, for me, will result in this particular sort of dreamlike perfection. Nights like these, they remind me all too clearly why I seem unable (or just unwilling?) to give up for good that maddenly fickle mistress, the White Lady. And while it is true that chemical addiction is a battle I have fought (and lost) more than once in my nine or so years of using, nowadays I can keep it at bay by using the drug only on average once or twice a fortnight.

Once experienced, the “Perfect Hit” is one of those things (spoken about with awe, by many users) that we heroin users find a very difficult experience to forget. It remains something that we who use the drug, however irregularly, that we continue to search for. It is, truly, a search for the elusive, some would say the illusive - despite the law of diminishing returns, which would state in this case that we are chasing something we will never quite have again.
But on nights like this, I believe I have come close to that Holy Grail. Stoned enough for bliss, not stoned enough to nod out and miss all the good parts… and certainly not stoned enough to overdose and thereby “drop” (i.e., to stop breathing) - something I have only ever done once, thank goodness.

I look around the room as I write what will become the first words of this chronicle of my past and present.

I am typing on a laptop computer that is three years old, and has done many thousands of miles of travel with me (and has never been hocked, no, not even once!) The bed has CDs scattered across it, along with a couple of remote controls (even though the TV and DVD/CD player are practically within reach of the bed.) Pieces of paper are scattered about, too - Magistrates Court documents, telephone numbers, last year’s diaries, the employment section of last Saturday’s newspaper. Several pens, a couple of fluffy stuffed animals, and various miscellaneous items round out the mess on my bed. The limited floorspace is taken up by a pedestal fan, a few pairs of shoes, more paper, and a couple of art projects I’ve been working (or not working) on, for weeks.

There is hardly a flat surface in this room which doesn’t have stuff stacked on it.

Tidying up has always been rather low on my priorities.

And yet there is, somewhere, an order to this seeming chaos – just as there has been an order to my life, despite the chaos therein.

I am thirty-two years old. I have few possessions, save for the clutter in this room - even the furniture is not mine – and almost no money.

Why do I have no money? The answer to that question is a simple one: because I spent it all, mostly on heroin. I’m not especially proud of this fact, and this is why I called my blog by the name you see above. Don’t Try This At Home, Kids. I know the value of advice, however - and I know that many of you won’t listen to that advice. I’ve listened to what I wanted to over the years, and I’m sure you’ll do the same. In this blog, I will also be trying to impart some of the knowledge I learned as a needle-exchange worker, because I firmly believe that if you can’t be “good”, then be good at it.

But this is the story of my past. My future, of course, will never be the same. The future has its own mysteries. What I will mainly be concerned with here, is history.