🌑 The Bitter Residue
- Stimulants (whether prescribed or recreational) often wire people into cycles of hyper‑drive, vigilance, and control. Over years, that can calcify into irritability, suspicion, or withdrawal.
- Even after quitting, the nervous system doesn’t immediately reset. The body may stop craving, but the social reflexes shaped by years of use: impatience, defensiveness, and isolation linger.
- That’s why you see artists and everyday people alike carrying a kind of anti‑social armor long after the chemical is gone.
🌕 The Long Recovery Arc
- It took me nearly a decade to return to my original kindness. This is how deeply stimulants can etch behavioral grooves.
- Healing isn’t just detox; it’s re‑learning trust, patience, and communal rhythm. That takes years because it’s about rewiring identity, not just chemistry.
During my early 20’s I fell for what many musicians, especially those in the Rock & Roll tradition fall for. The myth that we need stimulants to be our best. That couldn’t be farthest from the truth. Stimulants and simply the fast-paced behavior instilled upon us by corporate education, stunt our growth, by getting us into ridged behavior patterns.
For me, I found myself stuck in the same musical scale, and even the same chord progressions. Id rerecord the same rigid vocal takes, without improvision variation, then wonder why I couldn’t choose between the best recording.
A potentially equal impediment was the fast pace inspired by social media. There was a pressure to create create create at rapid pace, with the fear of being forgotten if we didn’t release the song, art, or video we hurried together that day. We did things not for enjoyment, but for assumed potential social merrit, even though the social media sites were gradually showing our posts to less and less friends, taking social media itself from a free to monitized service, just be seen by you’re already existing friends. Numbers would go down with us thinking we were doing something wrong, when really what was being pressured on us was to purchase their promoted posts. We see the same thing happening even on E retailers like Ebay. Normal payments were slowed down, opening the possibility for you to now pay to get your payments on time. Same with listings. Now the top listings aren’t the most relevant results to your search, but sponsored results. This is affecting us subliminally as a society, where we’re increasingly seeing monetization of the gifted human experience.
My growth came after detoxing from all substances including caffeine, mainstream social media, (I kept Goodreads to publish quotes at an eased pace), and building endurance. To endure silence. To free myself from gratifications influence upon creation. To drop out of polluting up with the jones, to find I have all the time in the world to think, grow, and create.
That endurance grows with the quality of our creations. We have to uproot our fears to find peace. Especially the stock programmed fears of capitalism. There is no homelessness. Our right to grow cannot be caged, we can grow anywhere under any conditions, however novel and unexpecting even to us that growth may be.
With each new creation, we overcome that initial fear of starting. I remember for months It was too intimidating to open up FL Studio, where I produce music. If I could return to those days, I’d lay down stepping stones to ease that process. Accepting that the first draft isn’t always the final draft. That the first creation is often a blueprint to inspire anew. Sometimes they happen instantly. Sometimes, its about exploration. Give yourself time to find new sounds. Never stop searching for new music. Never get imprisoned in one defining genre. It’s all music, even silence.