Written by, Anonymous

I am a marijuana addict because when using pot, it was the most important thing in my life. More important than anyone or anything. It helped to suppress all the inadequacies I felt. It helped me not to feel the pain of not living up to expectations. It enabled me not to worry about anything. It helped me to not care about the things I really cared about. It enabled me to stay in my own little world of reality and not deal with emotional feelings that would continually come up when I wasn’t smoking. It would drive the fear away, but after a while it would return.

Pot helped me not worry about not having a relationship with women, even though I wanted this to happen. Because of negative feelings about myself, I always thought deep down that I was worthless and didn’t deserve to be happy. Instead of dealing with these issues I would smoke pot and they would go away. Therefore, I never learned many social skills or much problem solving. Problems would come up and they would seem too huge to deal with. I would smoke pot and look for the answers after smoking , because then the problems seemed smaller. But, in reality, they were only day to day issues that could be resolved if dealt with instead of running away from them. I would smoke and not deal with them and let them fester inside until I thought I just can’t handle it and I would run from them as far as possible, try not to think about them, or go somewhere where I could start all over, escape and hope that that would teach me how to deal with them next time – but the next time, they would continue and I would do the same thing over and over until it was killing me.

Later, I started to turn to other things (i.e., alcohol, cocaine, gambling) in the hope that these things would give me pleasure, or at least let me not care about the problems that followed me wherever I went so that these feelings I carried around would go away. They didn’t. All the alcohol and drugs did was push me farther down to the point that I finally thought there has got to be a better way. I gave in and sought help. 

Published in A New Leaf – October 1991