What things did I do that I hardly believe I did when I look back at them.

I'm very ashamed at how I would smoke weed all during my work day when I worked in Monterey. I would leave early, leave during the day to go to the dispensary, take very long lunches, and have endless excuses for needed to go out for coffee or walk my dog. In short I am very ashamed of my unprofessional conduct. I'm also very unhappy about the things I did and the treatment that I put up with from Mark. The weed would make me very isolated and socially anxious but at the same time I needed to be social in order to make my weed connections. So i put up with Mark in order to have him buy the weed for me. When I was drunk I could be very sexually promiscuous. But at the same time I believe in loyalty and fidelity, so I'm very ashamed at how I behaved in that regard. Basically I lived against my own most important values and found many ways to justify why I was doing this. But deep inside I knew that it was part of surviving the addiction. It's almost as if another being, a demon inside of me, had control over my actions and constantly talked me into doing things I didn't want to do. It's still hard for me to accept that I was the one who did these things. It is much easier to see it as a demon living within me. But I don't want to avoid the responsibility of having done what I did. Because that in itself was part of my addiction. I don't really believe in the bible or traditional christian beliefs, but my experience of addiction was very much like being at the hands of an evil presence that was living in my brain. As if I was possessed by this monster and forced to act on his behalf.

Did I believe I could control my using? What were some of my experiences with this and how were my efforts unsuccessful?

I think that when it came to smoking weed I did not ever feel that I could control my using, although I did try multiple times to set rules about when I could use. However I never had any degree of success with this so it seems like from the very beginning I knew I was addicted. I have played around with controlling my alcohol use however and for a very long time I have labored under the impression that I have some small degree of control over alcohol. In the past, for example I have limited my alcohol use to one the evenings, only when when Diana had someone to take care of her and only at home, which prevented unwanted sexual encounters that I might have gotten involved in at bars. When I did not have someone to take care of Diana I would limit my alcohol use to only 6 or 7 shots, at the end of the night and after I had taken my medication. This would allow me to drink myself to sleep pretty effectively. However the next day the hangover from those shots would be enough to keep me away from alcohol because I was too sick to drink and had all the other accompanying hangover problems. The worst of these is my anger, headaches and stomach problems. By the afternoon I would be craving alcohol again and could not abstain from it when the evening came. Often I would be counting the minutes until I could safely use. This was a vast improvement over other times when I would drink until I passed out and could not be woken or when my liver would ache to the point where I knew I needed to go to a hospital. I didn't go to the hospital because I was ashamed of how much I had drunk. My habits with smoking spice were just as bad as the weed smoking. I would often miss work because I had gotten up and got so involved in smoking spice that I was very late and would talk myself into calling in sick or saying I would work from home. I mostly just wanted to be able to smoke all day. Then if I did go to work I would get incredibly stoned before hand since I would not have access to the drug for a period of time. Then I would almost always leave work early. The last hour would drag by minute by minute until I could safely leave to go smoke.