What Quitting Pot Feels Like
I’m not against pot, not in the slightest.
I’m a comedian. How can I be against pot?
But I don’t do it anymore. I quit a couple years ago, and I want to talk to you about that.
Pot is like anything else. It’s great for some people, it’s fun for many, but it isn’t for everyone. Is pot for me? Sure — sometimes. In fact, it helped me get through many difficult things. It made good days better and rough days durable.
I quit pot during a difficult time in life. It was the realest time in my life. Prior to that I smoked and ate and vaped it nearly every single day for years.
I thought that when I quit I would immediately have super energy. Like, I would feel amazing simply by breathing. In a previous post I talked about how I began smoking cigars and cigarillos during this time, which is not recommended.
I did not feel amazing.
With everything going on at that time, it’s entirely reasonable that I would feel crumby, to say the least.
But my expectations didn’t line up with how it went.
I did my best to not make it any harder than it had to be. I got rid of all my paraphernalia. I didn’t hang out with anyone who was smoking. I think I would’ve been fine if I did, but it didn’t interest me. I didn’t stop smoking just to hang around people who smoked. No judgment on anyone who does.
Did I miss pot? Sometimes, for sure. I like the way I felt on it, most of the time. I like how it kept nightmares away at night. I like how it helped me concentrate on minute things. I like how it made it easier to deal with most people, how it filled up the empty parts at work, how it acted like a buffer between other people and me.
It felt like a superpower.
I could ignore physical pain a helluva lot easier with it. I could ignore mental anguish easier too. I could block everything out and work 14, 15 hours a day, no problem. As long as I had some water and some snacks.
Ya gotta have snacks.
But I noticed that when I quit, all these things I had ignored for years would not let me ignore them anymore.
The pain. My snappiness. The reality of my actual behavior. Memories of missed chances. Brutal tragedies I endured. Losses.
I’m not special in that regard.
I did not like myself, and that could not be ignored anymore either.
So I stopped ignoring it.
Some folks want to tell you self-care is getting jerked off after a nice massage, and it can be. But real self-care is as ugly as the wounds you have.
For a while in my case, self-care included pot. It can help with trauma. But it can also make trauma worse, especially if you don’t do other things to directly address it. In short, I learned that “hurt people hurt people” is not an empty saying. It became my reality. And what’s worse is I never intended for that to happen.
But it did.
“If you’re looking for self-help, why would you read a book written by someone else? That’s not self-help. That’s help!”
- George Carlin
I needed help.
Not help quitting weed. Quitting weed is easy: you just stop smoking it. But I needed help dealing with things that had piled up under my subconscious rug and were now rolling around like demented racoons.
I needed help being better.
I put myself in therapy and went for a year.
I have long believed the self-examined life is not worth living. I also believed that all the pain I had could be transmitted into something else, something better, something productive and worthwhile and valuable to others. I still hold both of those beliefs.
But when I quit, I was in a situation where I had so many things to deal with it was overwhelming.
Sadness is good. It’s necessary. So is grief.
I had trouble processing my emotions. In turn I made a series of bad decisions, and that made it even more difficult to process my emotions. There are easily millions of people who understand how things like this can spiral downward.
I don’t blame pot or alcohol or tobacco. I don’t blame society, God or Satan, or the relationships I had. I blame myself, entirely.
Pot is good. In the right amounts, with the right person, for the right reasons. Pot is good for me — sometimes.
I will likely use it again. It’s a lot of fun.
But for me, I have more important things to do right now. I enjoy not smoking it, or eating it, or vaping it. (I was never a huge fan of the vapes.)
It’s not a matter of addiction. It’s a matter of removing something that held me back from seeing myself as I really was.
I felt like shit for a long time.
I did feel energized on weed, even when I smoked indica. (Hybrids and indicas were my choice. I don’t like the way sativas feel.)
But apparently not doing drugs isn’t the same as doing drugs.
Everything was harder. Working out, talking to people, sleeping without nightmares, eating.
Yes, I have the crutch of cigarillos and cigars, and that is a health problem. It is a dangerous psychoactive, but it often keeps me from being actively psycho. I like Minor Threat but I never claimed to be straight-edge.
People like 50 Cent inspire me, on many different levels. I love the fact that he rarely drinks and doesn’t do drugs, that instead he is obsessed with success. I love the fact that Whitney Cummings talks about emotional wellbeing. I love the fact that Bill Hicks got sober in the middle of his career, and that Bill Burr talks openly about his relationship with anger. I also love Bill Maher’s longtime advocacy on the issue of pot.
Whoa, that’s a lotta Bills.
I’ll end this with a quote from a highly fucked-up movie.
Life is beautiful. Really, it is. Full of beauty and illusions. Life is great. Without it you’d be dead.
- Gummo (1997)
