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I lasted 27 days before I started taking kratom again.

Around November 5th I saw the writing on the wall that Trump was probably going to win. I thought I might as well get myself ready in case kratom got scheduled. The idea was that I was gonna try to prove to everyone that I do worse without it, that I take kratom as herbal medicine and not a drug. I got quite a lot more anxious, way more depressed, and all I really had to do about it was drawing art. With good seeming relative to the objectives we have at the time, if the objective is to have more drawings then it'd make sense to quit. Thing is, I'm entirely ambivalent about that. I just want to be happy, to be content enough that I'm not compelled to ruin this tiny sliver of life that I have.

By the end of the experiment I only had 50 dollars left in my bank account, and I had no idea how that happened. I was impulsively spending money left and right, on project after project, trying to outrun my mind. I was eating out a bunch, ripping up the receipts and gluing them to my drawings. Suddenly it was like every tiny thing mattered just as much, so I started hoarding all of them. Butterflies I made out of paper straw holders at Dairy Queen, a sphere I hammered from aluminum foil that wrapped my burrito from La Bamba, gilded nothingness clad with destiny. It was like all the productivity you'd see from a manic episode except I felt like shit for every second of it. I even made a movie! It's a weird movie, it doesn't have 3 acts or a script, but I've never seen anything like it. I edited the thing sorta like Cope Time, and that one's inspired by Lord Spoda videos.

If you're looking for a lot of art in a short amount of time, something I can't sustain longer than a month before risking homelessness, then maybe you should hide all my kratom. I'll probably go broke during an extended mental breakdown, and that's probably going to be all she wrote. I need to be content in order to sustain this, and it's clear to me now that I wouldn't have been able to hold a job for two years if I wasn't on kratom. Like seriously, toward the end I was genuinely considering quitting and getting on disability. I totally could get it, I've got a disabled right arm and an autism diagnosis. All I'd realistically have to do is arbitrarily check myself into a psych ward for a week then tell the state that I had an episode and there's no way that I'll ever be able to work again after it. Piece of cake.

I'd never try that if I simply didn't give a shit about anything. If escaping from wiping toilets felt like it had the stakes of escaping a nazi regime then I'd be taking lots of drastic measures. With something like kratom I just don't give enough of a shit to try to fix what isn't broken, and my bank account seems to reflect that.