Background

I started smoking at some point in 2010. I had a close friend in my college days, who was into it – before then, like I’m sure many other people, I swore up and down that I would never touch drugs. But, as a survival mechanism, I had learned to make new friends quickly and resolutely whenever I found myself in a new environment – a new school, later a new job, a new company, and so forth. I didn’t know anyone when I graduated highschool and entered college, so I attached myself to the first person who did not mind my presence. He was an impressive man, holding two degrees, one in English and one in Philosophy, with strong punk tendencies. It was at his place, while listening to Joy Division, that I really started getting into weed.

The pleasures

At first, what I enjoyed the most about it was the feeling of being high. Weed summoned strong feelings of nostalgia for my home country of Belarus, which I had left at the age of 10 to move to Canada. I remember having smoked, walking outside, and vividly imagining walking in the rural part of Belarus, in places I spent much time and was very fond of in my childhood. Smoking was a new, and rather wonderful – magical, even – experience. Food, as many a smoker would attest, tasted so much better on weed. Music sounded so much crisper. Imagination ran wild, and emotions were pleasantly dulled, with a firm bias towards comfy complacency.

The entrenchment

Then came 2013, and I joined a startup. At first, I was too busy to smoke, but soon, that feeling made way for a new one – that of great difficulty in shutting down my brain when I wanted to go to sleep. So I turned to weed in order to calm myself and stop thinking about the product and the company. Smoking became a regular thing.

By the time the startup fell apart in 2016, I did not realize it, but I was already well into addiction territory with weed. I smoked multiple times a day. As would become a theme later, I stopped seeing being high as something nice that I liked to do, and instead, as my default state. It felt wrong not to be. When did I stop feeling the many pleasures of the drug? I don’t really remember. They were lost gradually, so gradually that I barely noticed myself. Each one left me until all I was left with was an absent, numb feeling when I smoked.

The pains

These, too, came gradually. The first and most immediate effect was the loss of my dreams. I put significant stock in my dreams, and when I realized I no longer got them (or remembered them), I was disturbed. But being numb outweighed the seeming fancy of dreaming, so I let it go.

Within a few years, weed convinced me that I always had bad memory. Forgetting what I was saying in the middle of a sentence became a common thing. I recalled the times my parents would tell me I have a terrible memory as a kid, and used that as an excuse to pay no attention to my fading mental acuity.

The creativity that I experienced while coding high also gave way to vegging out and being unable to force myself to even start getting tasks done. Weed, as Randy from South Park famously said, makes you okay with being bored – and I was unbelievably okay with it. Bit by bit, the gifts of weed turned into noticeable holes in my life.

The escape

I tried to quit several times, but was always drawn back. “I’ll just smoke on the weekend”, I’d say to myself – which would inevitably turn into “well, I smoked on the weekend, so I might as well smoke during the week”. Some people famously use the “I can quit whenever I want, I just don’t want to” line of reasoning, but I was firmly in the “I want to” camp, and nonetheless, I was not able to ditch the drug.

To be continued…