The first time I smoked weed and got high I was 15 years old. I was with three friends at a public park in broad daylight, laughing in awe at the shape-shifting playground set in front of us. I remember laughing so hard that my face hurt and my abs were sore. The playground looked to me like a giant chameleon’s side profile, its eye a plastic full moon staring off, set just before the slide, which was its tongue. Obviously. It was an absolutely euphoric feeling, one that I have never got back, despite the fact that I spent the next 18 years chasing after it.
I was not one of those teenagers who smoked weed every day. What I knew at the time, even from the very beginning of my experience with using cannabis, was that I liked weed enough that it could easily become a huge problem for me. I had social anxiety that left me feeling paralyzed constantly. Marijuana helped me get out of my own head at first, to silence the voices always telling me I was unwelcome and unwanted. I never got high before work or before school. As a teenager, I was able to contain my weed smoking to only weekends and parties. I never bought weed but always took a hit or two where I could get it. It wasn’t until college that things started to get out of control.
My freshman dorm roommate and I clicked instantly; we were both potheads, and he had brought a bowl and a stash with him on move-in day. That night, we got high behind a dumpster in the back of our dorm building. I would go on to get high every day for the next 8 years. I was getting high before class, after class, before going out, after coming home, before and after seeing my family or friends or whatever guy I was sleeping with. I was getting high before going to the bank, before the grocery store, before long drives. I got high before both mundane tasks and monumental life events. I got high before graduation, before job interviews, before funerals and weddings and birthday parties. I was stuck in a loop of getting high to feel normal; I had convinced myself I needed it to feel better, to level myself out.
I finally got a taste of sobriety in 2018 when I went back to school and had to pass a drug test. I was admitted to a rigorous, full-time, hospital-based program, which didn’t leave much time for getting high and hanging out. Two years later, I graduated, passed my licensing boards, and joined the work force, just in time for the global pandemic. I was under such a tremendous amount of stress that I returned to the bowl to find some respite of relaxation after long, difficult days working in the hospital.
In early 2021, I was diagnosed with testicular cancer. I used weed more heavily in that six month period after my diagnosis than I had in years, to cope with both the psychological stress from my cancer diagnosis and the physical side effects from chemotherapy. In hindsight, weed didn’t help alleviate any of these symptoms. It actually exacerbated my chemotherapy induced nausea. It exacerbated pains in my mouth and my bones, side effects from the chemotherapy. It made me feel much more detached from myself at a time when I was supposed to be mentally strong. But in the moment, my addict brain had convinced me it was helping. I didn’t think for a second about confronting this life-altering experience without the help of my dear friend Mary Jane. I finished chemotherapy that April, and continued smoking weed heavily for the rest of the year. It was like I never took those two years off. By December, I decided I had had enough. I decided to start 2022 on a clean slate and quit cold turkey. But this was just the beginning of a long, bumpy road toward actual, long-lasting sobriety.
I left my full-time hospital job in March 2022 to become a contract worker. This change required taking new work contracts every 3-6 months, which required passing a new drug test for each new facility. This was enough to keep me on the sober path. But more than that, life was so exciting at this time. I felt like I was living – really, truly living – for the first time in my life. I was sober and not out of obligation but because I wanted to, which was a high in itself. I was learning a lot about myself in this new phase of life, just coming off surviving a terminal illness. I was living on my own for the first time, and with my boyfriend (now husband) and our dogs. Working contracts afforded me a ton of freedom like being able to make my own schedule, negotiate my pay and work three or four day work schedules. I had more free time than ever before, and I wasn’t using it to smoke weed. Everything was bright and new and exciting. I didn’t even think about weed. My now-husband continued to smoke weed around me and I wasn’t tempted at all. I thought I was done for good, but in 2023 we had moved to Colorado for a work contract, and I decided I could have one edible, just once. After all, you can’t move to Colorado and not visit a dispensary, right? My addict brain told me I had earned this. That one edible shattered the brick wall I had built between myself and my addiction.
In mid-2023, we moved back home to the east coast, and I took a good but demanding full-time position in an orthopedic hospital. I returned very quickly to old habits, like smoking weed after work in the evenings and all day and night on my days off. There was something about being back in my home state that caused me to ease back into a part of myself that felt so familiar and comfortable. I didn’t even think to resist it. Soon I was getting high right after work, on the walk from the hospital to the train, and wake-and-baking on the weekends. Want to shoot your day off right in the face? Hit the bowl as soon as you wake up. Weekends flew by because I spent them blazed from dawn to dusk. Time became an illusion and I felt I was not in control of my own life anymore.
A year later I took a new job doing an advanced modality that required a lot of learning and training. I put the bowl down again, and found that, beyond the initial dread of sobering up I felt while I was already stoned, quitting was as remarkably easy as I remembered it being. I was good for most of 2024, until election night. That night sent me spiraling, hurling back toward old habits like a boomerang, except this time, I was using entirely for the purpose of escaping a reality I was deeply unsettled by. As you can expect, this got out of hand very, very quickly. I was spending upwards of $200 every week at the dispensary. I was coughing and wheezing and sleeping terribly. For three months, I was wake-and-baking on days off, and because I was working a 3 day schedule again, I was stoned more often than I wasn’t.
In February 2025, I decided to quit again. I stayed off weed for six months, until I was given a THC seltzer on a family vacation. That began another daily habit of THC drinks and edibles that lasted me through the end of the year. I thought I was okay using only edibles and not smoking any cannabis or vapes, even though every week I needed more gummies and tinctures and weed chocolates to feel anything. This progressively got worse, culminating in my smoking a joint on New Year’s Eve to level up my high, and oh boy, did it work.
The first month and a half of 2026 were a complete haze where I was smoking nearly every day, from sun-up to sundown. It was like all my previous episodes of sliding in and out of weed use, but this time, much more accelerated. I went from 0 to 100, basically overnight. By mid-February, I couldn’t do it anymore. I was feeling like shit all the time. I was constantly coughing and wheezing. I sounded like I had a respiratory disease all the time. I was spending a ton of money at the dispensary. What was I even smoking for? At this point in my life, after all I’ve been through, having been sober and not sober, I know when I am at my best. I know what’s best for me. So why was I still doing this to myself? It was time for me to quit, for good this time.
Marijuana addiction is one that is often minimized in our culture. It’s something people tend to scoff at when you mention it, and say something like “that’s not a real thing.” It took me a long, long time to even admit to myself that it had become a problem for me. An addiction. It’s not like weed was keeping me from achieving things in my life. I have a job, a roof over my head, pets I take care of. It’s like that scene in Half Baked where Bob Saget asks Dave Chapelle, “you ever suck some dick for marijuana?” I hadn’t, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t causing problems for me.
I had lost a sense of personal identity that wasn’t tied to this drug and ensuing habit. It was a ritual that kept me chained. If I was running low on weed and needed to get more, my entire life had to stop so I could get it. Before the days of dispensaries and legal weed, this involved hitting up the weed man, and if he wasn’t around, it was a stressful struggle of texting friends and acquaintances to find a connect, and pray that he or she was available, supplied and nearby. I would always choose to smoke weed if I had the opportunity to, over doing anything else, even things that, all things considered, I really enjoyed. If I were traveling on a plane and couldn’t bring weed with me, I was stressing from the beginning of the trip. I would do my best to try to find weed wherever I went, and many times, I succeeded, but at what cost? Why did I need to get high at the Airbnb in New Orleans? At the Airbnb in Mexico City? On the beach in Maui? On the beach in North Carolina? Why couldn’t I just get high on life and enjoy the vibrancy and novelty of being in an unfamiliar city? Because I am an addict. If there was an opportunity to smoke weed, I was going to sniff it out. If I were out and about with family, enjoying a beautiful day or exploring an outdoor farmer’s market under the sun, all that was on my mind was how I was going to get so high when I got home. Some days it felt like I wasn’t myself until I was able to get high and spend some time alone — to recharge, I told myself.
I recently hit the 100 day mark since the last time I smoked or consumed cannabis in any form, and I feel fantastic. I am breathing better, sleeping better, exercising better, thinking more deeply, practicing gratitude, opening myself up to new opportunities both personally and professionally, and living my life with an open mind and open heart. I wasn’t like this when I was getting high, when my top priority was getting and staying high. I don’t really think about weed much these days, and writing this piece was the first time in a while that I thought deeply about its place in my life.
100 days is an achievement, of course, but in the big picture, it’s not that much time. I wrote this piece, in part, to hold myself accountable, so that I don’t even think about possibly considering going back to using in any capacity, for any reason. I know myself and who I am and I know what I can and cannot do, but as any addict knows, one thing that my brain will do is lie. It will tell me that I am allowed something as a one-time treat, knowing full well it’s not going to happen just once. Approaching sobriety from this perspective, this framework that I am an addict and that I need to treat this like an addiction has made it easier to commit without sliding back into old habits. The definition of it all has made it easier to face. It’s giving it a sense of permanence. This has been a long road with many stops and detours, and I’m still on that road and will always be, but the wheels are all attached now.
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