The Tamesis
In the six months since I wrote about my journey to quit smoking, I can’t tell you how many friends and acquaintances have approached me at parties or DMed me on Instagram wanting to do the same thing. While I’m not sure I’m qualified to help others gauge their boundaries with cannabis, it’s an honor every time someone trusts me and tells me that their relationship with cannabis is starting to spiral out of control. I certainly don’t think I would have been able to document my seven months of quitting smoking without friends and strangers in my 12-step group to talk to about what I was going through.
Exactly 14 years ago, the first time I ate anything, on April 20th, I ate a plate of THC-laced brownies that a friend of mine from college had somehow purchased, regardless of dosage or strength. During festive campus barbecues, I would end up climbing a tree in the middle of the freshman quad, holding a hot dog in each hand. (To this day, I still can’t remember how I did it.)
For years I told myself that my edible use couldn’t possibly be a problem because all I did was act stupid, eat too much, watch crappy TV, and go to bed. There were no stolen cars, no secret affairs, no drama, and no guilt, shame, or fear that accompanied the hazy memories of my early 20s of drinking too much or mixing alcohol with drugs.
Instead, people’s trust in me slowly eroded when I said I would show up, and friendships formed became less about the quantity or quality of time spent together and more about smoking as much weed as possible in each other’s company. In the name of “enhancing the experience,” I have not entered a museum, theme park, zoo, or aquarium fully sober for nearly fifteen years—so much so that when I visited the Met a few months ago without drugs in my system, I shed tears of blissful disbelief at how moving the experience still was.
I tried my best to “play the tape forward” (12-step doctrine, as in resisting the temptation to “pick up”), and reminded myself that the most likely outcome of getting high again was a guilt-ridden binge rather than communing with God or writing the Great American Novel. Still, sometimes the old urge calls—and when it does, I slowly get better at taking a shower, calling a friend, starting a baking project, or checking my sobriety-logging app, Grounded. (They didn’t pay me, but when I wanted to get back to smoking weed, just seeing how long I’d been off — and how much money I’d saved doing so — was enough to bring me back to reality.) That’s the nature of the sobriety ball game: No one in this world promises anything, especially lasting sobriety, and I have to fight for every moment of respite from the old push-pull cycle of smoking, “cutting back,” failing, starting over, that defined much of my 20s.
Is such an effort tiring? Sort of, yeah – that’s the impression I try to impress on people who talk to me about wanting to quit weed. But the big parts of what I miss about spending the sacred stoner holiday with friends on 4/20—the camaraderie, the appetite, the fun—can still be recalled in my sobriety. “Put your mind where your body is,” someone advised in the 2009 memoir by Mary Karr, one of my favorite sober writers ignite. I’m working on it every day — and right now, it feels like the most important job I can do.
