You

Eventually you’ll do anything to keep your mind off the loneliness. And eventually you’ll turn to drugs. Uppers are a bad choice – you’ve got nothing to be awake for anyway without something keeping you up and working working working. The hallucinogens can too easily flip from colourful light show into hours of acid-laced introspection. Alcohol will leave you hungover and, if you’re anything like me, wondering why your arms are covered in blood and your floor is covered in vomit. Ketamine might work, or its cough-mixture cousin, dextromethorphan; both are suitably numbing anaesthetics first and hallucinogens second. Take enough of either and even if you’re with people you won’t notice they’re there.

But for loneliness, the too perfect drugs are the opiates, offering a numbing, warm blanket of loveliness, a comforting hug in the middle of months in which the only touch from another human being is the shop assistant handing you your change. The cost of entry is potential addiction, and the price for avoiding this is whole days spent wishing you were getting high. You compromise your use, not as infrequently as you told yourself you would, but not every day. Not enough to develop a real habit.

This is only a hobby, right?

And so there’s plenty of days when you can’t get high because if you get high that often it’ll become your profession. A junkie is just someone for whom getting high has become a job. And remember: A junkie is just as smart as you think you are. Hell,they were probably just as careful as you’re trying to be. You feel bad enough anyway most of the time, the last thing you need is to have to get high to feel like crap. So you’ll stay careful, right? Because the moment this stops being a hobby and becomes your unpaid job, you’re screwed.

So, on the days when you can’t see your invisible friends with names like codeine and morphine, you’ll spend your time distracting yourself from the loneliness and the fact that you can’t use the only thing that really makes you feel better. You’ll take days to organise your music collection, looking up each band to make sure you get the genre right. And what year did that album come out? And do they officially use the word “the” in their name? And you’ll watch TV series from start to finish. Some hobbies are easier to stop than others.

Actually thinking about anything is best kept to your hour-long, weekly session with your therapist. You do your best to avoid thinking about how you feel the rest of the time, because most of the time nothing good comes of it. Start thinking about things and you’ll end up doing something stupid with a razor-blade. Every line of thought eventually ends in a suicide note, so you cut them off – sometimes literally – before they get that far. Writing suicide notes is the only thing that makes you cry these days, but you still tend to carry that constant refrain of I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry in your head all the time. I’m sorry I’m such a screw up. I’m sorry I turned out like this, drug-abusing benefit scrounger. I’m sorry that even though you’d never tell me, I know in the middle of the night when you can’t sleep, you must worry that I’m hanging from a rope all alone in my flat. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

So you distract yourself, from the loneliness and all the thoughts. And maybe the pills and therapy will work and you’ll get better enough to start being around people again and not think about dying all the time. But until then you strke the balance between destroying yourself and coping and, frankly, some of the time it can be hard to tell which is which.