By Haley B.
I didn’t know what marijuana was until I was in high school. When I learned about it, I was completely against it for many reasons. For one, it was illegal and I was as straight-laced as a 14-year-old could possibly be. Two, it sounded terrifying to lose control of yourself with a drug. Third, I was convinced that it had the potential to become addictive, despite my classmates’ claims that it was impossible. Fast forward to college, when I tried it for the first time. The first time made me feel nothing but paranoia, guilt, and shame. I ended up crying for hours. The next time I tried it, I felt all of the good things. Even still, I didn’t get the hype. I didn’t smoke marijuana again for years.
When the pandemic started in 2020, my mental health suffered. I was working as a nurse and it was terrifying, stressful, and depressing. My girlfriend (now wife) and I decided to take a trip to Washington DC to buy marijuana to help us decompress, because it wasn’t legal for recreational use in Virginia at the time. The entire experience was thrilling for me. I had this person that I was madly in love with and she wanted to show me how “gifting” marijuana worked in DC. It was the exact kind of adventure that I wanted to have with her. We bought some vapes, took a few hits, and headed to the Metro. On the long escalator ride down, it hit me hard. At first, I was paranoid, thinking that I was going to fall down the escalator stairs. Then, the magic took over. I spent the Metro ride trying to act “normal,” but I had a serious case of the giggles. We spent the rest of the weekend in the hotel room, getting high and eating. That was the first of many trips to DC with the primary purpose being to buy and smoke weed.
The addiction snuck up on me. I really loved how I felt when I smoked. I felt like it made everything lighter, more euphoric. My anxiety and depression were relieved. When I was high, I was the person that I always wanted to be – the young and carefree person that I had never been able to get in touch with. I really loved who I was when I was high. I started using it more and more on my days off from work. With each visit to DC, we’d buy larger amounts of marijuana to take home with us. It quickly became something that I tried to ration between trips.
After a while, I couldn’t ration it anymore. I’d yearn for more trips to DC. I’d run out soon after a trip and I became obsessed with finding more. So, that’s exactly what I did. I found “dispensaries” close to home that sold synthetic marijuana. That shit was potent and mind-blowing. At that point, my use started to become out of control. Soon, I was getting high and staying high all day. I started to become incredibly ashamed and embarrassed by what I was doing. I knew I shouldn’t be using so much, but I thought I had been faced with too much pain, so I deserved to feel good. I often bounced back and forth between being the victim that deserved to be high, and being ashamed and concerned about my behavior. I was definitely embarrassed. I hid and lied about my use. I lost sight of who I was, what my values were.
Somewhere soon after my wife’s first suicide attempt, the marijuana started to turn on me in new ways. I started using even larger amounts of marijuana than ever before to numb the incredible amount of pain and distress that came along with my wife’s mental illness. I became an angry, resentful, and irritable person. I started getting physically sick from the amount of marijuana I was consuming. That didn’t stop me, though. I continued on this way for another year and a half while trying to care for both my wife and our toddler son, all while neglecting myself.
During my last few months of use, all of the negative parts of smoking became incredibly amplified. It became clear how seriously addicted and dependent I had become on marijuana. I wanted to change, but I didn’t know how. Each trip to the dispensary was “the last time.” I tried to keep myself from going back by sucking on vapes that still had the tiniest amount of marijuana left in them. Each time, I ended up right back in line at the dispensary to buy more. I knew I needed help. I began working with my therapist to try to cut back on my use, but it still felt impossible. It wasn’t long until I started lying to my therapist about the progress I was making to cut back on my use. Who had I become?
My wife and I planned a trip to Poland to visit her friends and family. With marijuana being illegal there, I knew that I needed to wean myself off before our trip. I tried to kick my motivation into high gear. Again, I was trying and trying to give marijuana up once and for all, but I just couldn’t do it. I was so scared. I ended up cutting back on my use, but did not manage to quit prior to our trip. I went through detox for the entire two weeks that I was away. It turned a vacation that should have been wonderful into a total nightmare. I knew that I never wanted to go through the physical and emotional pain of quitting again. However, I was headed back to the US a week earlier than my wife and son, and I was confident that without the accountability from my wife, I would pick up as soon as I got back home. I knew I needed to find support in order to keep me sober.
When the plane touched down on US soil, I did the only thing that I could think to do. I did a Google search to try to find support from people that were experiencing the same struggle with marijuana that I had. That’s when I found Marijuana Anonymous. Miraculously, there was a newcomer MA session later that day, just a few hours after I discovered MA even existed. I knew this had to be divine intervention. I attended the newcomer session and several meetings later that evening. It quickly became clear that I found the place and the people that I needed in order to help keep me going on my sobriety journey. I was home.
