In the six months since I wrote about my journey to quitting weed, I can’t tell you how many friends and acquaintances have approached me at parties or DMed me on Instagram about wanting to do the same thing. Though I’m not sure I’m qualified to help anyone else gauge their boundaries with marijuana, it’s an honor whenever someone trusts me with the information that their relationship with weed is starting to feel out of control. I certainly don’t think I could have logged my own seven months of weed sobriety without friends and strangers from my 12-step group to talk to about what I was going through.
I had my first edible exactly 14 years ago, diving into a plate of THC-laced brownies my college friends had somehow procured, with no regard for dosage or strength, on 4/20. I would end up climbing a tree in the middle of our freshman quad during a festive campus barbecue, a hot dog in each hand. (To this day, I still don’t remember how I did this.)
For years, I told myself my edible use couldn’t possibly be a problem, since all I did high was act stupid, eat a little too much, watch bad TV, and go to sleep. There were no stolen cars, no secret affairs, no dramatic act-outs, and none of the guilt, shame, or fear that attended my hazy, early 20s memories of drinking too much or mixing alcohol with pills.
Instead, there was the slow erosion of people’s trust in me to show up when I said I would, and the formation of friendships that were less about quantity or quality of time spent together and more about ingesting as much weed as humanly possible in each other’s company. For almost a decade and a half, in the name of “enhancing the experience,” I didn’t enter a museum, theme park, zoo, or aquarium fully sober—to the point that visiting the Met a few months ago without drugs in my system brought me to happy, disbelieving tears at how transporting the experience still was.
I try as hard as I can to “play the tape forward” (a 12-step-ism, like resisting the temptation to “pick up”) and remind myself that the likeliest outcome of getting high again would be a guilt-infused bout of binge eating, not communing with the divine or writing the great American novel. Still, sometimes the old urge beckons—and when it does, I’m slowly getting better at running a bath, calling a friend, initiating a baking project, or checking Grounded, my sobriety-logging app. (They’re not paying me, but when I’m tempted to return to weed, just looking at how long I’ve gone without it—and how much money I’ve saved in so doing—can be enough to jolt me back to reality.) That’s sort of the essence of the sobriety ball game: nobody’s promised anything in this world, least of all lasting clear-headedness, and I have to fight for every moment of respite from the old push-pull cycle of smoking, “cutting back,” flopping, and starting up again that defined so much of my 20s.
Is that effort exhausting? Kind of, yes—which is something I try to impress upon the people who talk to me about their own desire to quit weed. But the important parts of the things I miss about cutting loose on the sacred stoner holiday that is 4/20 with my friends—the camaraderie, the appetite, the fun—are still available to me sober. “Put your mind where your body is,” someone advises Mary Karr, one of my very favorite sober writers, in her 2009 memoir Lit. I’m trying to every day—and for now, it feels like some of the most important work I can do.
#WeedSober
