Relief • (Sixx:A.M)

Van Nuys

NIKKI's P.O.V:

Addictions are tricky diseases. You can really only know the progression of one if you've been through it yourself, and I know the way that it creeps up on you. It creeps very slowly at first, and tricks you into believing that it will help you in the long run, but we all know that it continues to spit that bullshit out at you until it fuckin' kills you.

Once you begin to spiral down that dark hole, it's extremely hard to get yourself out. If you're not careful, you will find yourself face down in the bottom of the pit before you can even blink. You ask yourself, "How did I let myself get here? I thought I could control it!" It's a lie. Addictions lie. That's what they do. They'll feed you lies until the end of time.

They'll continue to feed you lies, even as your behaviors escalate and your mental state diminishes. They'll feed you lies even when you know that they're lies, but you can't even help yourself any-more. You still end up giving in, even when it becomes miserable.

Your moods begin to spiral out of control and you'll end up having explosive breakdowns, resulting in breaking things and sometimes even hurting yourself, but you still give in.

Your behaviors become more dangerous and life-threatening, sometimes even scaring you, but you still give in.

You notice all of the signs of deterioration within yourself, and sometimes you wish you could stop all of it, but you still end up giving in.

The addiction overpowers everything.

Things can get worse than you ever imagined they would get, but in the end, if you're too sucked into the illness, that side of your brain is going to be stronger than your rational side.

The reason that I'm saying all of this is because I'm terrified that James might be at this stage of his illness, and the things that I've been noticing are more than concerning at this point.

I know for a fact that a lot more is happening behind closed doors than I can see from the outside.

I don't see James outside of performing, ever, and the first word that pops into my head is depression. This would worry me for anyone, but because this has to do with James, it's even more so. James doesn't have regular depressive days... He has depressive episodes because of his Bipolar, and when he has these episodes, they are... concerning. He's told me about them. He's explained how dark things get in his head when he's at a low point, and how his motivation for things completely diminish, along with his will to live.

It's hard to remember these facts, but I don't push the reality away, even if it's tough to face at times. It has always worried me when I've noticed his mania shifting into depression, but it's worrying me even more this time around because it hasn't seemed to happen for a good amount of time.

What's even more concerning is knowing that his moods are shifting, and he's stuck in the midst of an addiction. Addictions bring so much despair and hopelessness to people, even if they weren't depressed in the first place, so if you already have diagnosed depression, it will only get worse when you add in the darkness and pure torment of the addiction itself.

I know when I was sick, my moods were extremely unstable. The longer that I was stuck in my addiction, the worse my depression got, and there were times where I had episodes of extreme anger. I've broken things in my house, like records that I had framed on my walls, because I had sudden bursts of frustration and didn't know how to regulate myself. There were times that I blew up the speakers of my TV because I was hallucinating from too much cocaine, and thought that there was an intruder invading my space. There was even a handful of times that I inflicted physical pain on myself because there were so many difficult emotions that I didn't know how to handle.