Weed Changed My Life, and I Gave It Up
My complicated but ultimately positive relationship with cannabis
The first time I started really smoking weed, it was to avoid drinking, and it worked.
Picture: It’s the summer of 2015, and I’m in the Divorce Shelter, a week or so before that scene actually happened. Zac Brown Band is playing on the widescreen TV in the den. Outside, it’s cloudy but warm. My throat hurts from chain smoking. I’m sitting on the sofa, sobbing, and Lilly and Sophia1 are on either side of me, gently restraining me from getting up.
“You can’t go back to her, Kaz,” says Lilly.
“She’s hurting them,” I bawl into my hands. Piper has just texted me several photos of our two children on the kitchen floor of her house. They’re distraught, their faces tight with confusion and fear. Thing 1 is just three years old, and Thing 2 is a year and a half. Piper’s most recent text reads:
“This is what you’re doing to them.”
“I know,” says Lilly, pain on her own face. Her own soon to be ex-wife is putting her through insane guilt trips about their daughter as well. The previous day it had been her in the center of the sofa, while Sophia and I talked her out of what she knew she shouldn’t do, and couldn’t bear not doing.
“But you know that if you go over there it will be worse,” Lilly continued. “She’ll hit you again, and the kids will hurt even more.”
I respond in wordless sobs. Lilly is right, of course. The one time I’d gone back to help with the kids, Piper had spiraled into a violent tirade that sent me fleeing the house a second time, telling her I wouldn’t be alone with her without witnesses going forward. Lilly is right, and it hurts worse than when I’d hit bottom. My children’s cries echo around my skull, their frightened faces from when I’d left hitting me like a hammer, over and over and over. It feels like my blood is on fire.
“I want a drink,” I mumble through my hands. “God damn it, now I want to drink, I’m going to relapse again, I-”
“Stop,” Lilly says forcefully. Sophia had gotten up at some point, and hands Lilly a packed weed pipe and a lighter. “Smoke,” Lilly says, pushing both into my hands. “Smoke until the feelings go away. You can’t do anything about her right now. Just do it.”
Miserably, I do. We’d done the same thing for Lilly, and for Sophia when her fiancé texted similarly abusive tirades. I hold in the smoke as long as I can, clenching down on the burn, gripping the pain like a lifeline. Then I do it again. And again.
Twenty minutes later, I’m so high the only thing I can focus on is my ears ringing. We watch The Hangover while Sophia and Lilly make out and I stare at the screen near-senseless. Eventually I stumble upstairs and pass out.
I moved into my own apartment after two months, and as I dated more, I stopped smoking both weed and cigarettes. I didn’t have my own connection for weed, and wasn’t that interested in acquiring one. It made sense to cut costs anyway; the divorce was miserable.
The initial hell had passed: there was no longer any danger of me going back to Piper. But I still slid into panic attacks practically every time Piper texted me. She said anything she could think up to hurt me: that she was leaving the state with the kids and not coming back, that she couldn’t go grocery shopping by herself so the kids would starve, that I shouldn’t see them at all because they just got upset after I did. My divorce lawyer said several times Piper was the worst estranged spouse she’d ever seen, and she’d seen a lot.
For most of my second marriage, I lived in a fog. I dropped off the map from my own clients and business partners, sometimes for weeks at a time. I spent too much time playing video games, so I stopped playing video games, then wound up just staring off into space for hours at a time. Any time Piper started messaging I knew it would be bad, and that it would get worse. She changed the kids’ bus schedules without telling me, accused me of stealing Thing 1’s medications, and refused to let me see them on Father’s Day and other holidays. Many times I hid in a corner in my bedroom closet, or under the covers, unable to face the thought of living with whatever Piper was doing at the moment.
Then I started smoking weed again, and weirdly, things started to change.
It started by happenstance: I and some colleagues tried to get a cannabis dispensary license as part of Illinois’ decriminalization law. This of course meant a lot of discussions with people currently selling weed, and thus weed was suddenly available to me all the time. So I started smoking it.
I quickly learned that sativa just gave me a headache and crawling anxiety, but indica strangely seemed to make me more productive. The thoughts that kept spinning out of control in my head were quieter when I was high, and they moved slower. Yes, my thoughts in general also moved slower, but working slowly was better than not working at all because I was paralyzed. So I started working again, paying more attention, returning calls, and being sociable.
After about six months of that, I came out to myself, partially because I was too high to care about being afraid of my bisexuality. Like an unstopped dam, other possibilities started to occur to me. Slowed to a trot, my racing thoughts seemed a lot like trauma responses. The fact that I would often hunch over and mutter to myself angrily at some searing memory or other seemed awfully close to having flashbacks.
Perhaps most importantly, because I was thinking more slowly, my mind didn’t snap shut in a flare of terror and denial when I thought about a lot of memories that now seemed a lot like abuse, and assault.
As 2021 turned into 2022, I got a medical cannabis card, and tested out various rates and forms of consumption. I also worked through several medication regimens with my psychiatrist, who confirmed I definitely have severe PTSD, and ADD on top of that. He also warned me that, in his words, “the science isn’t there yet” on cannabis. I already knew that; I had previously worked on cannabis legalization and had a broad familiarity with the research. But it was also good to learn what to watch out for: declining sleep, irritability, and thoughts that seemed unusually paranoid.
I was high as a kite when I ended my second marriage a bit over a year ago. My throat was raw from vaping way too much, specifically to steel myself for what I thought would be an onslaught of pleading. To my shock, Karen went in a very different direction, shouting homophobic abuse and calling her father in the middle of it. It went about as well as could be expected, in retrospect: rather than numb me to do what needed to be done, the weed slowed me down from reacting to Karen’s rising attempts to bait me into shouting abuse back at her.
For most of the summer of 2023, I vaped weed heavily and often. “I’m basically low-key high all the time,” I said to my partner Marie on our first date, to her arched eyebrow. Weed numbed me to the overwhelming flying monkey attacks from Karen, numbed me to my mother’s rising pressure to reconcile to her, numbed me to my writer’s group spinning out of control because my sex life had taken over much of it.
Then, after I had finally secured a post-divorce apartment and escaped from the most immediate financial crises, I took stock. The summer had been a total mess, a smear of frantic flings, chaotic finances, and spiraling alienation from people who had sided with Karen. That was fine; it was still a long way from my terrible first divorce, and I was finally managing to deal with Piper without collapsing into a ball of paralyzed anxiety.
But I still needed to get it together. My sleep was going very badly, even with a heavy dose of Trazodone. I didn’t feel paranoid about my life, exactly, but I realized that I needed to be sure that I wasn’t while rebuilding my social circle and life. And I also needed to bring my thoughts back to a normal-ish speed. It was one thing to lose a summer to rebound flings and bisexual sluttery in a weed-soaked haze; it was quite another to make that a long term plan.
It wasn’t hard to accept I’d become dependent on weed: I already had an alcohol dependency, and a tobacco dependency. I didn’t even feel bad about it. Problems and costs included, weed did the job I wanted it to do. It was messy and dramatic, but I managed to charge through the gantlet of an abusive narcissist’s smear campaign and familial alienation intact.
I just had much better tools by then for managing myself: gabapentin for anxiety, Ritalin for ADD, a good night’s sleep for exhaustion. And if I had better tools to manage myself than weed, all weed was doing was slowing me down.
So I stopped. I still think weed is great and more people should try it. It’s a flawed tool for a number of problems and conditions, and it’s also much better than the zero tools or toxic tools many people think are their only options. It’s a lot less harmful than alcohol, which isn’t a tool for anything.
I also shouldn’t use weed now. I have addictive behavior patterns; there’s no point in denying it. If I offer my brain the option of checking out, my brain’s going to check out with enthusiasm. And as the sober months have passed, a lot of things improved. I’m kinder, more receptive to input and discomfort, I get the sleep I should, and I operate at a normal daily pace. That doesn’t mean anyone else should stop using weed. It just means that with the cards I was dealt and the choices I’ve made, it’s best if I don’t.
Weed changed my life for the better. I honestly don’t know how else I would have coped with my sociopathic first ex-wife in those early months if I hadn’t just slowed down what were in retrospect intense flashbacks, panic attacks, and trauma responses. I don’t know how else I would have finally, haltingly admitted the plain fact that I have a lot of trauma to begin with, and that it’s okay to manage it as such. In all honesty, more people like me should try it.
And when it’s time to stop, there’s nothing else to do but stop.
Pseudonymous, obviously