Let’s Get Real

ON THIS DAY EIGHT YEARS ago, I stepped out from under the shadow of a decades-long cannabis addiction. And I haven’t been the same man since.

Thank God.

What brought me to that point was twofold: I decided that 1) I was being selfish to the ones I most love by robbing them of my alert and unaltered presence, and 2) I just didn’t like feeling stupid all the time anymore.

Looking back, I realize that cannabis had structured my existence in some scary ways. I planned my life around it, spent my money on it, self-sabotaged with it, and turned into a raving jerk when I was deprived of it. What I didn’t know at the time was that these behaviors are all symptomatic of addiction.

In two ways, I was lucky. Given my double reason for quitting, doing so was both natural and logical. But long before then, I had also indulged in another drug-of-choice: writing, especially of short stories. I had discovered the latter love years before I became sober, and when I did arise from my self-induced fog to find life more enjoyable, I discovered that writing was more enjoyable too. (There’s a reason Stephen King advises writers to “do it for the buzz.”)

I did have some nonsmoking gaps in my life — some pretty long ones in fact, and arguably my most productive — but they didn’t seem to “take,” as I always went back to the bong eventually. And I’m working on not feeling embarrassed that it took me so long (most of my life!) to wake up and smell the reality. But I also feel proud, very proud, that I’ve gone eight years without artificially altering my consciousness (I also quit drinking at the same time, but as alcohol had never been problematic for me it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal).

So how does my life feel without cannabis? Cleaner. Less furtive. More joyful. More complexly intense (and intensely complex). Less hypocritical, in the sense that I feel I can finally become the man I’ve always wished I could be but before sobriety could only pay lip service: more ethical, able to to keep my word, to be relied upon, to make a difference, to matter.

Above all, it feels good. I wouldn’t exchange it for anything.