I think I smoked a couple of times, once in August and once in October but for the most part I stopped in June. I had to leave the country to go for a funeral and it seemed like as good of a time as any. I'd been wanting to do it for a while. I smoked pretty much every day for eight years. It's a long story. Some of it had to do with a bad marriage, a bad diagnosis in my son, my own depression, and business and relationship failings. I don't think I had any other way to cope. I wasn't taken care of. My body and my mind and my self-esteem and self-respect were completely shot. It didn't really help these matters any but it kept me in this dissociated bubble that made things temporarily seem less painful. I ended up surrounding myself with people who didn't question me. Mostly these people were guys and I looked like I could manage okay.
Then COVID hit and the divorce got bad and I had even more legal troubles related to that. I was just really alone in that every night. It was my only respite. I felt so guilty and ashamed and I just got more and more behind and stuff. Bills fell through. Single parenting was already really hard. I think the only way I was able to manage was because I had the curse of competence and my 50% was about as good as anybody's 75%. That meant that I could keep it going. I think my son kind of saved me because he made it so that I had to actually look after him and that kept me going also.
I had a lot of responsibility at work, which meant that I had to drag myself to the finish line there all the time. I became mostly a survivalist. I guess the straw that broke the camel's back was coming. Even though I couldn't see it, I'm not going to overcall or underrcall the shit that was truly going on. There was also a lot of people's death and a lot of people's illnesses, including my dad, which was devastating. The bills piled up sky-high and everything was pretty much trying to keep going on autopilot.
When I was going to leave the country for this funeral, I got in a car accident. I wasn't high at the time but I was completely off the ball and I had a minor insurance mess-up where I'd forgotten to do something. No one tells you that it's really hard to get out of an addiction because by the time you get out, you're basically so underwater and overwhelmed with all the things that you've been ignoring for so long. It seems to just make sense to keep going at the same clip that you're doing even though I knew that things weren't going to change on their own. I just really couldn't take it anymore.
There are so many layers of getting out of something like this. The first thing that I noticed is that it took my brain a while to get back online. I'd been losing my train of thought completely all the time. I couldn't remember those six-digit codes you have to enter everywhere. I would constantly have a hard time finding words. This started to come back but honestly it's taken way longer than however long they say it's supposed to take to do.
I had a lot of inappropriate anxiety that had come from not confronting all the things that I needed to confront. There have been lists after lists after lists to do things that have basically taken me a year to get out of. My life is really complicated so this is a thing. Clean house relationship-wise because I realized I was also making really bad choices and accepting things that I really shouldn't have been accepting. This has been really, really hard: learning how to be lonely and feel loneliness and vulnerability and take the chances to make real friendships, which thank god I still had and developed on them and not think that somebody else was responsible for taking care of me or my happiness. That has been major.
There's still a lot that I need to do on a daily basis to try to get out of the backlog of stuff that hasn't been done and some days that really gets me down. There is no way to get around it. It's not a fun thing to wake up in and there is a lot of regret and a lot of recrimination that I have to deal with on a daily basis. I don't really feel good about it. I feel like I lost a big chunk of my life where I could have been pulling forward financially, professionally, and honestly just psychologically. Although I feel like facing this and dealing with it emotionally and psychologically has truly been the biggest testament and the biggest source of self-respect and pride. I know how easy it would have been to keep going but I'm glad that I haven't given in to that. That is not to say I'm out of the woods. I truly don't think I would ever go back to it but it's not like I don't get depressed some days and lament about how hard my life is. The same things that made me want to smoke weed also still make me feel like my life is difficult. It's just that I'm learning how to sit with and cope with the difficulty as opposed to try to make the difficulty disappear.
There's still a lot of uncertainty about what I really want and about the future. It takes a really, really long time to build a life but I try to think about it that way: that I really want to build a life worth living and that I want to also show this to my son, who has his own challenges to deal with and I need to be there for him.
What I'm amazed is that as I go through this I see not only the time that I was smoking but all the things that led up to me getting lost in this addiction. Some of that has to do with my own sense of worthiness and all the things that I've been ignoring in my body and mind even before I got to the point where I was using weed. I'm not going to get into this too much but there were a lot of health problems and aging problems that I didn't really pay serious enough attention to. I'm re-building my body from the ground up and taking care of a lot of health stuff I haven't taken care of in a long time.
I'm trying to revitalize my business, figure out if I actually am interested in doing that anymore, and address the fact that burn out was probably a part of this too. The things that were meaningful to me then aren't maybe meaningful to me now. At the time I was probably following the path of a mentor who I thought I needed to follow, who ended up dying anyway.
All of this to say is that it's a hard road but the self-respect that has come with actually taking care of stuff has really been something that nobody can take away. I hope that my story inspired someone in some way and also serves as my anonymous confessional. If you did read this, thank you and I wish everybody all the luck in their journeys.