Recovery is changing my feelings about music events
waking down
Join Date: Dec 2013
Posts: 4,641
Everybody's different, so I say don't push yourself too far out of your comfort zone if you don't want to feel pushed.
I've been finding that the same things that bother me about big shows and festivals now happen to be the same things that bothered me when I was using: Bathrooms, rude people, excessive smoke.
The one difference is I now sometimes have anxiety - just a little - about being dosed against my will. It hasn't been enough to keep me away, but I have been dosed against my will back when I was still using, and I wasn't happy about it, but it wasn't like I was clean and sober at the time.
I saw Dead & Co last weekend, and I believe I was mildly impaired from secondhand weed smoke. Not real pleased about it, but I don't feel like my sobriety or recovery is affected. During a Tipper show at a festival a couple of weeks ago I had to move back because so many people were smoking DMT around me I was starting to get high. That, too, was short-lived, and only reinforced my desire to remain clean and sober.
So, there are risks being around drug users. One concern is infectious disease, or people maybe dropping their spikes in the grass near their tents. I get creeped out sometimes when people are really out there.
In the past couple of weeks at these festivals I have been offered alcohol (in various forms), weed, K, L, X, DMT, shrooms, various pills, and drugs I've never even heard of - and I want no part in any of them. I've found a good way to get ravers to respect my sobriety is to just tell them I'm a junkie. Somehow that gets respect, and they admire that I still show up for the music and don't judge them for their enthusiasm (for or due to their drug use).
The odd thing is I still love the music, and as long as people are kind, I don't mind dancing with trippers. Obnoxiously drunk people are by far the worst, and I just move away.
One of the things I was loving about the camping festival is the morning yoga and the talks about spirituality and consciousness. I never experienced that part of the fests when I was using because I was always up all night and dead to the world during all the morning and mid-day lectures and yoga and art workshops... If you want to meet quality and clear people at a fest, get up in the morning and gravitate toward activities that require a certain level of cerebral functioning and ability to communicate.
But again, each to his own. My wife has no desire to see live music and admits she only tolerated it because she was self-medicating. I can't imagine giving up on live music - especially because I play...
I've been finding that the same things that bother me about big shows and festivals now happen to be the same things that bothered me when I was using: Bathrooms, rude people, excessive smoke.
The one difference is I now sometimes have anxiety - just a little - about being dosed against my will. It hasn't been enough to keep me away, but I have been dosed against my will back when I was still using, and I wasn't happy about it, but it wasn't like I was clean and sober at the time.
I saw Dead & Co last weekend, and I believe I was mildly impaired from secondhand weed smoke. Not real pleased about it, but I don't feel like my sobriety or recovery is affected. During a Tipper show at a festival a couple of weeks ago I had to move back because so many people were smoking DMT around me I was starting to get high. That, too, was short-lived, and only reinforced my desire to remain clean and sober.
So, there are risks being around drug users. One concern is infectious disease, or people maybe dropping their spikes in the grass near their tents. I get creeped out sometimes when people are really out there.
In the past couple of weeks at these festivals I have been offered alcohol (in various forms), weed, K, L, X, DMT, shrooms, various pills, and drugs I've never even heard of - and I want no part in any of them. I've found a good way to get ravers to respect my sobriety is to just tell them I'm a junkie. Somehow that gets respect, and they admire that I still show up for the music and don't judge them for their enthusiasm (for or due to their drug use).
The odd thing is I still love the music, and as long as people are kind, I don't mind dancing with trippers. Obnoxiously drunk people are by far the worst, and I just move away.
One of the things I was loving about the camping festival is the morning yoga and the talks about spirituality and consciousness. I never experienced that part of the fests when I was using because I was always up all night and dead to the world during all the morning and mid-day lectures and yoga and art workshops... If you want to meet quality and clear people at a fest, get up in the morning and gravitate toward activities that require a certain level of cerebral functioning and ability to communicate.
But again, each to his own. My wife has no desire to see live music and admits she only tolerated it because she was self-medicating. I can't imagine giving up on live music - especially because I play...
Member
Join Date: May 2014
Posts: 319
Originally Posted by endlesspatience 
So the majority of concerts I've been to are in London. My favourite venues are Brixton Academy and Shepherd's Bush Empire. They are quite small, the sound is great and the atmosphere's generally terrific. Out of the many hundreds of live bands I've seen, here's a quick taster of some of my favourites in no particular order: Nick Cave, Bjork, Prince, James Brown, McCartney, REM, Smiths, Tom Waits, White Stripes and everything with Jack White in it, Bob Dylan, Kings of Leon, Arctic Monkeys and lots of soul and reggae acts which really require another list.
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