I knew there wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to fall asleep. I had the pills Sam had given me, which would have quickly put me to sleep and placed me on the road to recovery. But if I was going to break the cycle of dependence on the meds, I reasoned that the shortest distance between two points was a line. Just quit cold turkey, I thought, and bear the consequences. It wasn’t like I was trying to come off of morphine or cocaine. How bad could it get? How long could the pain and discomfort persist? Not for long, I hoped. I wanted nothing more to do with psychiatrists and their cynical drug treatment plans: Just dope ‘em up and send them on their way. More important, however, was rediscovering my one and true self. As I saw it, the only way to accomplish that was to withdraw completely from the meds. If it turned out I was just too crazy for society to tolerate, I’d sell everything I own and go live in some hippy commune in the California Mountains. If there weren’t any communes anymore, I’d go to Tibet and practice Buddhism.
