Written by, Ian H.
I started smoking weed at thirteen, 1996. A few years after my parents divorced and my father began his transition. I didn’t have words for what I was feeling, so I found something that turned the volume down. By the time I enlisted, I told myself the Army was going to fix me. For a few years it almost did — I stayed clean through basic, through my first duty station, my first deployment. Then I found Spice. Synthetic, untraceable, sold at the gas station off base. I used it whenever I could get away with it. I told myself it wasn’t real weed, so it wasn’t a real problem.
When I got back from Afghanistan, the drinking and the Spice stopped being something I did and became something that ran me. It didn’t happen all at once. It was a slow closing of a door — fewer places I could go, fewer people I could see — until one morning I realized I couldn’t leave my house. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t. The anxiety sat on my chest, and under it was a depression that told me this was just who I was now. That was the bottom: not a single wreck, but a life quietly shrinking to the size of one room.
I found Marijuana Anonymous years after. I got over a year sober working the program, and I hit the wall every atheist hits in these rooms: Step Two. A power greater than myself. I couldn’t picture a god, and I wasn’t going to fake one to make the program comfortable. What I found instead was Murphy, my dog, who died two years ago. She was with me through my first months out of uniform, when I didn’t know how to be a civilian or a person who wasn’t using. She didn’t care about my rank or my discharge papers or what I’d done overseas. She just needed me to get up, feed her, walk her, be present for something other than myself. That was the first power greater than myself I ever trusted. It still is.
I’m twenty-five days sober right now, after a relapse. I’m not going to dress that up — it’s humbling to be back here after having real time. But long-term recovery, I’m learning, isn’t a straight line; it’s coming back. I still think of Murphy when Step Two comes up in a meeting. I don’t need a name for God. I needed something that loved me without conditions long enough to teach me how to do it myself. Twenty-five days in, that’s still what I’m working from.
