3 years of smoking weed every day taught me a lot.
And in the end, I learned how and why I had to stop.
Let me explain.
It was the summer of 2022. My brother and I had just moved into a new townhouse, I lived in the basement and it was BUMPING. I had cool LED lights, a 75” tv, amazing couches and I loved my space. And one day, my brother brought home an edible.
At the time, those D8 vape pens were becoming a craze, and I was increasingly curious about the Devil’s Lettuce. I had been good my entire life, and I wanted to be a little naughty and try something new.
We took the edibles, and nothing happened. It was not enough THC to move the needle but I didn’t know this.
The next night, I did what every noob does, and I took 3. I sat and waited. 3 hours go by and nothing happens. So I go to sleep. Then I woke up in the middle of the night, tired, sleepy, confused, and high for the first time. I had no idea what was going on. I stumbled out of bed, the room was spinning, my vision felt like it was in 10 FPS, somehow I made it to the bathroom and my mind was so weird. I kept zoning out, staring at the wall, wondering where I was, why I had to pee so hard, and why it was taking SO LONG for the pee to come out. I felt like I was standing there for an hour and nothing was happening.
Then I cried. “Am I stupid? Is this what it feels like to be stupid? What if I broke my brain? What if I am like this forever. What if I am stupid forever?”
Then somewhere in the back of my mind, I smirked. “Damn…. Is this really what it’s like to be stupid? Damn. No wonder stupid people are stupid.”
I finish the pee that lasted for a long time, go back to bed, and fall into a dreamless slumber.
The next day hit me like a sack of bricks. I have never done any kind of drug or alcohol in my life. I crawl out of bed feeling… for lack of better words… hungover. My body was heavy, I was so tired, my energy felt like I was sunk in tar.
I thanked god that it was a Sunday and not a weekend work day.
I reflected on the odd experience the night before with curiosity and filed it away for later.
About two weeks later, I ran into an old friend who also just so happened to try cannibus for the first time, and had a magical experience. We agreed to smoke together, and the next weekend we were huddled up in my back yard, I took a hit of the vape pen, and waited.
I had no idea what would happen. But I finally realized something was different when I lost all sense of time. How long had I been standing in the back yard? I looked up at my brother and friend… they were talking. No… I was talking. What was I talking about again? Had I been talking for a long time? How did we end up outside… and then…. Pizza.
Oh my god.
The pure. Unadulterated joy of pizza. The warm melty cheese, the explosion of grease and juices in your mouth as that first perfect bite went down your thoat, and a sudden LOVE for food.
What followed after that was essentially…. A 28 year old man living a teenage rebellion on the weekends, every single weekend, with weed, movies, junk food, and pizza. I had never been to parties, never did “drugs” before, never had fun, never just relaxed and let go.
It was fun. And that was how I fell in love with Cannibus.
That’s how they get you.
After that… weekends turned into “a few times a week” turned into “every night, just a bowl” turned into “oh… am I a pothead?” My setup became more elaborate. Within a few months I had 5 different plugs and I knew everyone who smoked. I didn’t even have to buy it, people just gave it to me. It became a bit of a running joke. I bought a $700 German Gravity Bong and sailed to new heights.
Eventually the party aspect gave way to life. My friend couldn’t come over as much, and my brother didn’t smoke as much as I did. So I just smoked by myself in the basement. At the time I was exploring ideas of astral projection and out of body experiences, and I became curious about if weed could help me with this.
I started smoking every night and going into meditation. I would sit there for hours in one position, just feeling every sensation in my body, thinking about things, reflecting on my past, having strange thoughts and feeling like I was having epiphany’s. Cannibus is often referred to as a shadow teacher in the plant medicine world. She has much to teach you if you know how to work with it. She is the plant of illusion. Those illusions will teach you a lot about yourself and life, but they will also lie to you. These ideas can lead you to believing that you are changing your life and making progress through learning… but the learning never leads to anything if it is never integrated into action.
A few months into this, I watched a movie, and cried. I was stunned. I had not felt… emotions…. In a very long time. My heart was opening. I knew the cannibus was doing it. But I didn’t know how, and I didn’t know why, and I didn’t even know that I had been emotionally repressed to begin with.
This eventually led me to mushrooms. It seemed like the logical next step. I wanted to know more. Cannibus gave me a peek into altered states of consciousness, but I knew there was more and I was hungry. However, the mushrooms will need their own story.
Cannibus eventually became something more than fun, something more than a way to connect and feel. Eventually, it became my comfort. After I left that townhouse and moved to Texas, I entered a very lonely, isolated chapter of my life. I was on my own, and I was living a story that said the suffering was making me a better person. That I was working hard, and learning new things, and I was going to be a millionaire when my business finally got off the ground. But the thing I kept avoiding was the truth…. I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know how to run a business, but I convinced myself that I was a business owner in the making. I had claimed that identity, so my mind could not accept a reality that contradicted this.
And in the evenings, when I slept in my car and convinced myself that “this is the way” (Thanks to a book I had read, Rich Dad Poor Dad where the author literally talks about sleeping in your car) I celebrated the falling apart of my life. I listened to podcasts and other business owners all discuss this… uncomfortable in-between phase where you leave you old life behind, and step into the new one.
And every night, while I slept in a truck that I could not afford, and parked in the corner of a walmart parking lot. I smoked.
The smoke helped me. It passed the time, I didn’t noticed it. It blunted the emotional weight, and it gave me beautiful illusions of progress to ease my suffering. I often scrolled through instagram, having fully submerged myself into the spiritual woo woo world, and I would watch tarot readers whisper beautiful lies into my ear that ‘it’s all working out” and “your fortune is just around the corner” and I clung to every word.
To face reality would have been too difficult. And Cannibus was there to help me each step of the way.
I thought Cannibus kept me sane, but it helped me disassociate from my own pain. During that time I often left my body in a disassociated state, watching everything that happened around me but never fulling coming into my body to experience it. I strategically avoided the difficult things. I thought this made me better than my past self. I thought that being able to step back and watch life like this was a super power. That a lesser man would have crumbled into a sniveling mess much sooner.
No… that is just called de-realization. Also induced by heavy Cannibus and meditation practices.
I existed in this mental bubble, watching life unfold around me as I waited for life to be safe to rejoin. And yet. The longer I stayed here, the worse life seemed to get.
Eventually, life did shift. I was led to a better place. I got a job, lost it, got another one, lost it, then finally got the one that stayed. It was just enough to keep me afloat and alive. God protected me from myself during this time.
However, I had severely damaged my nervous system by this point, as well as my mental and emotional capacity. I had put myself into a deep state of disassociated survival mode, where I was so disconnected from my own body that I could give 110% of my energy to the new business. Not only would this eventually lead to crippling burnout within a year, but It also left me as an empty husk at the end of the night.
For a year, I would go to work, and then come home, and sit in my garage, and smoke weed, doomscroll, and feel myself fall apart. Isolated. Lonely. And completely convinced that nothing was wrong, that I was stronger then this feeling.
Then my dog died.
And I fell into a deep depression with no way out.
Then I got burned out at work. And the one lifeline keeping me going, was also poisoning me.
And it was all my fault, because I had no idea what I was doing to myself.
Cannibus took me to a new low.
I decided I needed to quit.
Only problem was…. Now that I wanted to stop. I couldn’t.
If I stopped, I had to face my life. I had to sit with myself in the absence of weed. I had smoked every day for almost 3 years, and now, I was expected to stop when I had no life outside of work?
This was going to be hard. Impossible even.
It would take me nearly 15 months to get to a place that I could even consider quitting. And it only happened when I started building a life I wanted to live, not from trying to escape the life I was living.
You cannot avoid a cliff by staring right at it. You have to avoid the cliff by looking at a new place to go.
The final lesson that Cannibus taught me was about my dopamine system. For a long time I struggled to find a “why” to quit. But I found my why when I kept getting depressed, when my neurotransmitters were imbalanced, when my dopamine was so depleted by weed that nothing in life gave me pleasure anymore. When the only thing my brain wanted was more weed, and I couldn’t make myself want to do anything else.
I suddenly saw it. The big, invisible hand guiding my life. Dopamine. I remember sitting at my computer reading some articles that completely defined my entire relationship to life, and the two magic words that would completely change my relationship to myself.
“Executive Dysfunction.”
Two little words that I had heard a million times before but never understood. And now I did.
When I finally stopped smoking I had to sit in the pain of 3 weeks of dopamine receptor regeneration. For 3 weeks I was numb, bored, in agony, and my body was begging for smoke. I remember sitting on the couch feeling like everything, including the kitchen sink, was being used by my brain to convince me to go smoke.
I do not know how I said no. I truly do not know. All I knew, was that I wanted something else more. Anything else. I held the line, and sat in the agony and waited for signal to finally leave. I was in the middle of a storm, but I would not move.
Finally… 3 weeks later on a Saturday morning, I woke up with fresh eyes. I wanted to go shopping. And go out to eat for breakfast. And I wanted new shoes, I also needed a new watch, and some shirts. I also had to call a friend…….
My brain was working again. Dopamine had been restored to a new baseline. My previous shopping addiction had been reinstated, but I was overjoyed. I can work on that problem now… but smoking? That was gone.
It’s been 3 months since I stopped, and my brain hasn’t reached for it since. I now have a healthy respect for it, and its ability to completely hijack my dopamine system and consume my life. Now I have my why. I’m not avoiding something I want, I’m avoiding only wanting one thing…. And that is incredibly dangerous to living a well balanced, successful life.
To be honest, I don’t know if I will smoke again, I don’t know if I can. But as for today, I would not wish that upon myself ever again. Smoking helped me, but it also put me in a pit of despair. And I might have been able to fix my life sooner if I had not smoked as much as I did. But then on the other hand, if I hadn’t smoked as much as I did, then I would have never learned about neurotransmitters and how my brain works. Dopamine sensitivity has been running my life long before weed came in. It made my college life incredibly unsuccessful and difficult, made my working life difficult, and without the structure that my early family life provided, I was entirely unable to make it out on my own.
Little by little, I see the map a bit more each day, and I learn new tricks to navigate. Perhaps actual ADHD medication would help, but I can’t help but thinking that it is not a solution, it’s a crutch.