It came back at night, hours past when he should have been asleep. rswfire was in the camper, awake inside a body that had already done this once and had, he thought, finished doing it. The withdrawal symptoms had returned after more than a week — not the full weight of the first three days, but enough that he was sitting up recording instead of lying down. He had asked ChatGPT about it and been told this was normal, that neurotransmitters rebalance unevenly, that a return was within range. The information settled the question of whether it was happening. It did not settle anything else.
He described those first three days plainly, because he had not described them before. No sleep at all. Lying in bed moving through physical symptoms with nothing to do but move through them. He had tried what there was to try — sleep audio from YouTube, over-the-counter medications to manage symptoms, sedatives to force the issue. None of it worked. By the second night he states he was desperate for sleep and still did not get it. By the third he was past desperation into flat frustration and still did not get it. He was glad when it ended. He had filed it as ended. And now, on the far side of a week, some fraction of it was back, and what he kept returning to was not the discomfort but the fact that he had not known this was possible. I feel so uninformed.
That word turned him toward his doctor — a man he has known for decades, who told him this was a very mild opioid and very easy to get off of. Those were his words, rswfire says, and he repeats them because the sentence has become evidence. He had made a video once about being careful what you tell your doctor if you move into an RV, about what happened to him after he did. The doctor now calls that a misunderstanding with his staff. rswfire states he does not believe that. He also states he sees no reason to say so out loud — the man is trying to make nice, and telling him would accomplish nothing. So the disbelief stays where it is, held and unspent. What he cannot resolve is the shape of it: this doctor is not incompetent. Which means, by rswfire's own reasoning, he knew what he was saying was not true. I don't know what to make of that.
From there the audit widened on its own. That RV video had drawn more views than anything else he'd made, and its comment field had filled with material he wouldn't engage — conspiracy-theorist territory, rabbit holes he states he does not go down. He had left the comments alone. Sitting in the camper at that hour, with one verified inaccuracy from a trusted source in hand, he found himself asking whether those commenters had been right, and stating outright that he doesn't know how to make sense of it. He did not conclude they were. He noted the question had become askable, which it had not been before.
Then he made decisions, and made them cleanly. He is supposed to take a cholesterol medication and a blood pressure medication; he says he never really has, that adherence has come in two-week stretches his whole life and then stopped. He is going to stop entirely. He moved into the camper, he says, with the intention of completely changing the way he lives, and he is going to get healthy the natural way — a thing he states he believes to the core of his being. I don't want to take any medications ever again. If the doctor was not honest about this, he reasons, there is no basis for trusting he was honest about anything. He attached his own disclaimer to all of it: he is in the middle of something, and he doesn't know that anyone should trust what he's saying right now.
That accounting leaves one medication standing, and he named it precisely: a quarter milligram of clonazepam, once a day, for twenty years. He was twenty-seven when he had his first panic attack, when the fear of choking to death arrived and the thoughts made eating impossible without believing he was about to die. At the peak he was taking a milligram and a half daily. The reduction to a quarter happened without his trying — he says he simply noticed one day that he barely took any of it anymore, and cannot account for how. The fear had never left during those decades; what changed was that it stopped being able to control him. Now, he states, the thoughts are gone. Not managed. Gone.
Which puts the last dose in front of him and nothing to do about it tonight. Twenty years of it means withdrawal from it too, and he is not willing to stack that on top of what his body is already running. I'm not going to compound my problems right now. So I don't know what to do. He left it there — the final taper named, deferred, unscheduled. What he did not leave open was the other thing. He is never seeing that doctor again. He is not sure he will ever see any doctor again, and states he never thought he'd be the kind of person who says that, and that after this he doesn't see how he could think any differently. Then the frustration again, twice, steady: he wants to get back to his old self, and he says he truly misses him.