On my lonely way of tapering
I just want to share my feelings and thoughts, since there is nobody in my social environment with Kratom experience. Everybody around me is just so much into healthy nutrition and functioning without any helping substances. I felt like an alian, trying to speak about my situation. However I always said that Kratom is a fantastic herbal supplement giving the opportunity to avoid antidep medicin or pain killers.
I started 6 years ago with small doses around 1 g, building up to 3g 3-4 times a day, EVERY day. K helped me primarily with my melancholic mood drops, giving energy and positive feelings. I could be more social, leading to better relations to my colleagues, I manged through a long working day with patient contact, being empathic and friendly instead of tired and annoyed. It even helped to manage my arthros pain. I convinced myself all the time, this is not a drug, it is good for my body, why questioning it?
While I felt I am a better person, the person I want to be, I lost myself somehow and there was always that inner criticism - why do you need that stuff for living, secretly hidden in my bag, the planning of best time slots with regard to food intake, how many g. I felt embarrassed, but I tried to accept it as something I just have to live with.
But then, somehow I was wondering if something bad was happening, I felt tired all the time. I experienced energy drops between the doses, shorter effects and maybe a foggy mind, harder to go deep in thoughts, not shure. I became more hard on people (partly also a relief!). A constant light depression. And I started questioning K and I started reading here. Could it be the K - turning against me??
Without K I would not manage my day. Digestion irregularities were normal. I was looking forward to the next dose to get back...not the energy kick anymore, of course .... just the normal working mode ability! Before meeting someone I would need my dose K just to manage the social action and keep myself from feeling tired or overwhelmed during the date. During a longer date I would go to toilet and take more K.
I am not proud of telling this but I feel I have to. Writing this (what I have never told anybody) feels sad and I somehow think it is part of my process to share this with you, understanding people.
I decided to stopin the middle of the day, curious what would happen, naive!I In the following night I was awake after 2 hours of sleep. Scary! I realized the facts. I read about tapering, so I did that, and after one week I reduced probably too much, I am at half a dose. I might have some tough working shifts ahead of me and I am wondering how I will manage when the outside world puts its expectations on me, or myself doing it.
I tried to write a list of the bad things of Kratom (a tip from somebody here), but to be honest, it helped me so much, it is hard to do it. I cannot condemn it simply as poison, cannot build up a hate. But I am curious how I will feel without it, being myself in real again. Then I have to cope with the reasons why I started to take it and try to handle them in a different way.......(I am a 50+)