This year began the 3rd decade of my life. I'm really holding out for the third time lucky to kick in. Today is also the day I quit weed, hopefully breaking free from my habitual use of it. So i suppose i'm also not waiting for luck at all, but trying to be strong enough to exert some life changing willpower over my mistakes, to bring me back to who i am.
It's been an off and on cycle since I started back when i was 15. I fell in with what I thought was a good crowd of friends, people who treated me fairly and didn’t mock me too much (or at least more than I could bear). It was all I'd ever hoped to get in school; Just a few kids I could knock around with, talk about books, play games and spend the weekends at each other's homes taking turns to share our PC or consoles. It went well for a time,Playing halo until the early hours of the morning and spending our lunch breaks listening to harry potter audiobooks. But then someone got the idea to try weed.
I remember when it first got brought up; we were playing cards on a lunch table in the dartmouth block. It was quite an open corridor, central for lunch time traffic and I remember being paranoid the discussion would be overheard. I was the odd one out, the one who wouldn't just agree with the hierarchy of the group. See it was John that suggested it, and John was the rugby team captain from a rough village. Not the sort of fellow used to people saying no to him, but I did, I argued it. It didn’t last long. I waited a week or so, hoping that the notion would fizzle out, but it seemed everyone but me was determined to break bad and try a drug. So began a fortnight of peer pressure and subtle manipulation to get me in on the idea.
I remember crying on my bed, staring at the design of the ceiling paper, convinced that I would lose my only friends if I didn't say yes to this. The peer pressure crippled me, and social anxiety wracked me for days.
Now, I come from a single parent household, and so the lads knew the best opportunity would be a weekend at mine. Half the parent means half the risk. We would Have a seemingly innocuous gaming session playing halo and then when my mum headed to bed, we would roll up and try cannabis for the first time.
The decision was made. I would compromise my values of sobriety and clean lungs. Now when I commit to something, I give it my all. So when the question arose, who would roll it up i said i would. We would wrap the paper around a pencil at first. Gently topping up the joint from the top down. It was messy but it worked. As such I instantly became respected and indispensable to the group.
I don't want to regale stories of being stoned, of how strange it was to feel your toes tingle. Or how funny youtube became. Most people know what it's like to have a joint. Before long we were pooling our pocket money and standing out waiting on “dealers time”. I remember arguments about who paid the most, because I was poorer than the others and $10 was much harder to come by for me. There were arguments about who was ‘smoking it right’ and wasting it. My friends conduct while at my house became at times utterly disrespectful and i remember at one time outright demanding one of them leave.
I don’t look back on those times as fond childhood memories, and whilst at the time it was fun, the cost to my life and myself has been too great to measure.
Smoking weed was the first time I compromised myself to become something I wasn't to fit in, and how I began sleepwalking through my own life, casting shade on who I was as an individual.
I can’t honestly say i wouldn’t have ended up trying drugs later in life, i am open minded and inquisitive and rarely take a rule or a law at face value - i prefer to construct my own moral coding and decide if the law or restriction has merit. I would argue to this day that the legalisation and further research of all illicit substances would benefit humanity. However one thing is clear to me- i would not have smoked at such a young age.
If i take an honest look at my family history, its pretty clear alcoholism runs rife through it, buty more so the ‘addictive gene’. I don't know why but as a kid I saw patterns in people's behaviour very easily and could tell that certain people were chained into some bad habits. Perhaps that's how I allowed myself the leeway to continue using cannabis in spite of me knowing it's bad for me. At the time I only really thought about how bad smoking was for the lungs. I never paused for a second to consider the mental health ramifications. The lethargy, the apathy, the temper, the ‘dumbness’ that kicks in when your short term memory is no longer reliable. Its a waste of a human to use it every day, and those that do seem to suffer the same things I did in different measures and to different severities.
One of my issues is I'm far too clever by half, and so even with me being a zombie can pass as a half decent person. I held jobs, I got my bills paid. But I also lost jobs, and spent my money stupidly. I was brought up with a pretty poor example of how to handle your money, and I knew how damaging it was from an early age (again, much too young). I Was smart enough to know what to avoid. I have always said that i was given more examples of what NOT to do, and things to AVOID in life than i was given a nurturing example. This was in part down to being positioned against the only healthy parental figure i had, my father, by a venomous grandmother and vindictive mother. Divorces hurt. The other parts were poor role models through my mother's string of boyfriends, and the traumatic experiences that brings.
Deep inside myself, was a knowing, an understanding of the things I must avoid in order to escape the same traps my mother, and her side of the family had fallen into. Weed clouded that part of me, and eroded my will to commit to being a better version of myself.
I was also unable to study in higher education, after spending my teenage years hearing about how smart i was, and having people ask me what i want to do with myself out of a genuine intrigue into my intellect, i was starved of any challenge that might have further honed my mind. Instead i kept my habitual use of cannabis and worked as a laborer for my uncle- following the EXACT same life path of my bullies and the ne'er-do-wells of my area with one heart wrenching caveat- I wasn't getting a qualification, i wasn't attending a vocational college. So even the kids who had no options outside of manual labour - were a step above me on their career paths.
I was discouraged from 6th form by both my family “what are you doing there” and the bullies, having fabricated accusations of racism by an 11 year old, so that his cousins - 3 of them- would jump me after school. To this day I have a recurring back injury from that assault. No justice was served on either side of that. The police botched the arrest and ended up pepper spraying a disabled autistic kid so charges were dropped. I never got a penny from them to replace the bicycle they destroyed. And I was never helped by my family to get into more productive avenues of education. I was being punished for my sins. At 16 and 17 through to my early 20’s i was an outcast in my family. Happy to point the finger at the mistake I'd made as a 15 year old. Happy to condemn me to the addict within me - that i had inherited from them all both in genetics and in behavioural examples. I was left to go it alone. No olive branches, no safety net. Just a reminder of how much i had fucked up, because it conveniently distracted them from how poor a road i had been set on.
I might add that outside of a divorced home, I also lost my grandmother to terminal cancer, followed shortly by my grandfather's rapid decline, all of which preceded the slow and rapid decline of my mother's health leading to ANOTHER diagnosis of terminal cancer.
As such they had their own crosses to bear, and a wayward teenager never made it high on their list of problems, instead the victim mentality that justified their addictive behaviours further sunk its claws in to justify their attitudes that I was inflicting upon them- that this was my problem.
Now i do acknowledge my part in this, dont get me wrong i am aware of how acutely stupid it was, and how poorly i conducted myself as a result of my habitual cannabis use. I have beaten myself up enough over it, and have done everything I can to repair that damage. Sadly it's too late to reclaim some things. I'm trying to move forward with a healthy glance back at the steps I took, and the influences that set me on that road. But in reflection: The years between birth and 23 were filled with constant trauma and stress for me. This is not even MENTIONING the fact that im 6ft 9, and the consequences of bullying and the pains of being so tall.
The previous paragraph serves as examples of what kept me down, of why it wasn't easy to stop, and how slippery the slope of drug use became. I saw friends taking stronger stuff. Thankfully I kept myself out of those situations knowing the harmful nature of peer pressure. I didn't want those things normalised, I tried to be a voice of reason only to be laughed at and mocked for having a stick up my ass. Cocaine and ‘pills’ in general were man made chemicals - at least weed grew from soil. I could trust that about it. I suppose i managed to keep myself somewhat on the straight and narrow, given how many examples of stronger substances ruining lives i’ve seen. Things could have been MUCH MUCH worse.
I’m not sure where to go from here, unsure as to what to say next. I wanted to write an open letter to myself and anyone who would read it as catharsis about my addiction and ultimately my defeat of it.
I think it's worth mentioning how many times i’ve quit it. Sometimes I would simply run out of money, other times my tolerance would get so high and it was costing too much money, other times I would snap into realisations of its dangers and move away from it. Sometimes i even realised that some of the mental health issues i struggled with were it’s fault and would try and purge myself of its influence. But time and again i would forget those realisations and the difficulties of life would lead me back to it. The sweet numbness that makes you forget your suffering - all the while making life harder for you and guaranteeing you will suffer more.
It was a difficult task to separate the Depression, the anxiety, the mania, the ADHD, the sneaking suspicion that I'm high functioning autistic. (All i mean by that is you wouldn't be able to tell). I didnt know what i was born with, what developed because of my childhood, and what I did to myself through using cannabis. But as i got older, one thing became clearer. I dont think like everyone else, I think faster than everyone else, and I care about things other people dont.
I'm not ‘normal’ And my baseline of sobriety is a VERY difficult place to exist without a proper support network. I’ve got to function, ive got to hold down a job. I cant stop when im having days of hypersensitivity. I cant not go into work when my mania has kept me awake until 4 in the morning. I have to pretend like I'm normal, and weed was a way of making my mind quieter and making that task seem surmountable.
I’m free of it now, and after a brief hiccup due to covid and the insanity that being at home all day and loosing my job, i’ve managed to kick the addiction in the teeth. I’ve never felt SURE i will never touch it again. I suppose thats because i’ve never vowed to never smoke it again in any meaningful way before. But this time its been promised, sworn, with explicit words that are etched into the fabric of who i am.
My coping mechanisms are this, the writing, the open hearted pouring of my self into words.
Music- learning bass, and Lifting - getting stronger. They all help keep me stable and enable me to wrestle the demons of mental instability and ‘not being like everyone else’.
Thanks for making it this far, if you did. If you feel addicted to ANYTHING, in ANY way and would like some help. I’m here for you, perhaps in an unqualified way, but also perhaps, in the most qualified way. I know what its like.
Go with peace.
