journey to quitting weed<\/a>, I can\u2019t 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\u2019m not sure I\u2019m qualified to help anyone else gauge their boundaries with marijuana, it\u2019s an honor whenever someone trusts me with the information that their relationship with weed is starting to feel out of control. I certainly don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\nI 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\u2019t remember how I did this.)<\/p>\n
For years, I told myself my edible use couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
Instead, there was the slow erosion of people\u2019s 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\u2019s company. For almost a decade and a half, in the name of \u201cenhancing the experience,\u201d I didn\u2019t enter a museum, theme park, zoo, or aquarium fully sober\u2014to 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.<\/p>\n
I try as hard as I can to \u201cplay the tape forward\u201d (a 12-step-ism, like resisting the temptation to \u201cpick up\u201d) 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\u2014and when it does, I\u2019m slowly getting better at running a bath, calling a friend, initiating a baking project, or checking Grounded, my sobriety-logging app. (They\u2019re not paying me, but when I\u2019m tempted to return to weed, just looking at how long I\u2019ve gone without it\u2014and how much money I\u2019ve saved in so doing\u2014can be enough to jolt me back to reality.) That\u2019s sort of the essence of the sobriety ball game: nobody\u2019s 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, \u201ccutting back,\u201d flopping, and starting up again that defined so much of my 20s.<\/p>\n
Is that effort exhausting? Kind of, yes\u2014which 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\u2014the camaraderie, the appetite, the fun\u2014are still available to me sober. \u201cPut your mind where your body is,\u201d someone advises Mary Karr, one of my very favorite sober writers, in her 2009 memoir Lit.<\/em> I\u2019m trying to every day\u2014and for now, it feels like some of the most important work I can do.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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