Not Just a Stoner
By EmilyIt was as if I was walking through thick stalks of tall green plants, their leaves crisscrossing the sky above me. A fog weighted with the sharp smell of skunk hung in the air and clouded my vision. Among the plants, some caterpillars were munching on flowers. I could almost hear them say “Hey, bud. That’s mine. Imma eat this shit till the day I die.” Their death would arrive soon if they kept munching, leaving brown and decayed buds in their path. They knew this, yet they stayed and kept eating. A giant would soon be coming for them, smashing their bodies between his fingers. I could almost hear the pops of their bodies as they were crushed, and their sudden screams. I took another hit in remembrance of their life hopes and dreams.
The caterpillars believed that they had found heaven. They felt no pain as they ate and ate and ate. They slept snugly in green camouflage, eating until they turned the flowers brown. The giant followed their fecal trail. They told me they needed these flowers because the flowers made life more beautiful, more tolerable, and they called the flowers their medicine. It cured everything, even anxiety. They curled blissfully in their paranoid delusions, imagining the giant stepping closer to them as he checked his crop. They even sang songs in harmony, proclaiming the virtues of “eating weed every day.” They created entire genres of music with festivals dedicated to this practice. They said it was natural and non-addictive, even though they couldn’t imagine a day without it. They could stop whenever they wanted to, but somehow that day never arrived. Weed could cure cancer if big pharma would get out of the way. It could cure opiate addiction, they’d say. It became a God to them, worshipped through ritual, objects, and sacrifice. Weed gave them life, they said. I know it gave me life, so I agreed with them.
Weed gave me an identity. It gave me a community. At that time in my life, I became one of those stoned-out caterpillars, never reaching the chrysalis stage of my growth, never becoming a butterfly. For that moment in time, I was content. Smoking weed was the way I made friends, the way I related to my husband, the way I entertained myself, the way I relaxed. I wanted to quit, but I knew that quitting would change my world drastically. And it has.
I would smoke weed while driving down the freeway on my way to anywhere. I lived a fantasy of functionality, even as ash filled my hourglass bong and bits of resin clogged the center. As time passed, no amount of rubbing alcohol or 420 Cleaner could clear away the sticky tar, so I could start all over. Yes, I wanted to. We all do in the beginning. If only we can maintain sobriety for a few months, then we can be “normal” and only use on the weekends. Maybe we try that method but we realize that a weekend eventually turns into a week, then a month, and one puff will turn into a bowl then into a bag, and another bag, and another bag. Or maybe we actually realize that we are addicts and that means never touching drugs or alcohol again.
As for me, I hated the word addict. Yes, I could acknowledge that I had an addiction to weed, but I qualified it with “just weed.” I resented Kaiser for drug testing me throughout my pregnancy after I tested positive for marijuana at my first appointment. “They’re treating me like an addict,” I said. When I imagined an addict, I saw someone with a needle in her arm who had no money, no home, no life outside of using. That was not me. I somehow accomplished a lot while being high all day and drunk most nights. To the outside world, I had my shit together. I was going places. I owned a house, I was married, had a child, graduated from college, got into graduate school, tutored, and ran the university’s literary journal. I had gained respect on the outside, but on the inside I had very little self-respect. I was a perfectionist who self-destructed daily.
My name is Emily, and I am an cannabis addict. One day I was finally able to make that statement, and those words granted me more freedom than I could ever have imagined. Before that point, I had tried to quit on my own by doing a “conscious smoking” exercise, where I would continue to use like always, but I would name out loud what I was experiencing. I discovered this technique on a meditation app. I would say, “Coughing, sore throat, weird taste in my mouth, weird smell on my fingers, ash under my fingernail, paranoia, forgetfulness, shame” and so on. It was a way to reprogram my brain into realizing that weed did not improve my life in the way that I thought it did. Realizing that I was more anxious, stressed, and overthinking when I was high than when I was not, was a big breakthrough for me. I would obsess over some mistake I had made that day, get high to feel better, but then I would end up dwelling on the mistake anyway. That’s where pot, food, television, and the smartphone came in. I would stay up late, stuck in this cycle of distraction. I needed to distract myself more and more when I smoked because my problems didn’t go away. So I kept my emotions numbed under layers of chemicals and diversions.
I was stuck in this loop, and I knew it. It was painful to start my evening not wanting to smoke, drink, eat, and distract my night away, yet always ending up in that same place on the couch once my young son fell asleep. At least I was able to stay clean during the day and push off smoking until as late as I could at night.
One night, I noticed that the last time I smoked was on a Thursday at about 9:00 PM. I wasn’t planning to, but that night I said, “Fuck it,” and loaded the bong. I was pissed at myself and sat on my bed watching the room slowly change. Limiting myself to a bowl a day revealed to me the effects of being high. It’s easy to forget what being high actually is like when you’re stuck in the haze of 24/7 usage. My vision would become blurry, my heart would race, and the shame and paranoia would come for another visit. I would take out my journal and write about how pissed I was. My handwriting would get worse. I’d misspell words. Pot made me dumb.
I realized that I had been dumbing myself down for about ten years. I was always a smart kid, which in its own way is isolating. I wanted to be normal, to fit in, like most kids do. I always struggled to make friends, but I discovered that when you go to a party you don’t really need to make friends with anyone as long as you drink, smoke pot or do drugs.
When I first started dating my husband, I desperately wanted his friends to like me. The first time I was alone with his friend from high school, she said, “I’m not book smart, like you, but I’m street smart.” I don’t know where that comment came from, but I took it as an insult. I should have taken it as a compliment instead. I guessed that something I said, probably a word she didn’t know, made her feel inferior, which made her defensive. In that moment, the idea that I ought to become an alcohol and drug aficionado began to take shape. Maybe I was thinking if I did that, I could bond better with her, or fit in, and be a regular person.
Before trying weed, I drank a lot. At sixteen, I discovered the underage drinking scene and by eighteen I was taking shots of rum by myself in my apartment and smoking cigarettes. I only drank on the weekends at that point. Part of me knew not to drink daily because my dad was an alcoholic. I was warned about addiction running in our family, but it didn’t stop my parents from partaking, so it didn’t stop me either. Drinking and smoking became familiar ways for me to deal with my problems. Watch a movie or show sometime and pay attention to what the characters do when something bad happens. Most of the time they reach for something: food, drugs, pot or alcohol. The other characters will act like it’s normal behavior. In a way, it is. Whether the shows and movies are reflecting society back to us or whether we are imitating art is the question.
There is definitely a lifestyle of addiction being pushed on us. When I drive around sober now, I pay attention to the billboards. Most of them are alcohol advertisements. In the beginning, I had to stop looking at the billboards. My craving for beer was still too strong. But once I was able to look past those cravings, I noticed how those advertisements were operating on my mind. Most of them imply that you need alcohol to feel good or to relax or to have a good time. If you’re not paying attention, you might believe them. The weed billboards are the worst. Granted, I voted for marijuana legalization, and generally, I do not think that it is a bad thing. Weed itself is not bad, nor is alcohol. But for addicts, both of them can be a literal or a living death sentence.
I was driving to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting in Del Paso Heights and passed two marijuana billboards down the street from the meeting. “Good thing I’m going to a meeting,” I thought. One of them was for a delivery service. Nowadays, you don’t even need to go to a dispensary or a dealer anymore. You can order a pizza for delivery, then call up the weed delivery service, and have a nice night watching Netflix and getting high. You don’t have to bug your dealer or invite over that one guy you don’t like but who always has a bag to share. It makes me kind of glad that I don’t smoke anymore. It would be easier to numb out even more than it used to be.
While driving, I noticed a billboard for a marijuana delivery service called Eaze had replaced a health care ad, and on the opposite side of the freeway was a billboard for a casino. Triggers are everywhere. Eaze’s slogan is “Enjoy the moment.” We laughed about that at a Marijuana Anonymous meeting, knowing full well that the user is escaping the moment more than enjoying it. I recently saw a new billboard on Marconi Street on my way to an MA meeting for a marijuana delivery service called Humble Root with a pineapple whose leaves were shaped like a pot leaf. A billboard for a dispensary called Hugs is at the entrance to the bridge on Capital City Freeway. It shows a young woman with dreadlocks, a black hat, and a big smile. The Tower Bridge is behind her. She looks so full of joy that it makes me miss being high. Driving in the opposite direction of Capital City Freeway, another billboard advertises a dispensary called RCP with the slogan “Feel Better” and an old white couple pictured on it. Considering how many people of color are in prison for selling weed and the racist history of our marijuana laws, this irony is not lost on me. I tried to point this out to my mom, but she didn’t get it. The image of white hippie stoners as representative of the culture of weed is engraved in her mind and leaves her no room for reality.
The names of these dispensaries and delivery services are deliberately designed to soften the image of weed and to entice people to use it. Hugs makes it sound like smoking weed is like getting a big smoky hug. RCP has the slogan “Feel Better,” implying that smoking will solve the user’s problems. RCP used to be a medical marijuana only dispensary. Since weed became legal, they kept the same slogan because now it can effectively manipulate all kinds of customers. Eaze and its slogan “Enjoy the moment” imply that weed will make the users’ lives easier and more enjoyable, especially since they get to sit at home and await a friendly knock on the door with their ounce of purple haze hand delivered. Humble Root might be a play on Humboldt County, the weed capital of California. In MA we talk a lot about humility. It means “a modest or low view of one's own importance; humbleness.” Addicts tend to be control freaks and egomaniacs. It’s often what leads us to addiction. Or perhaps during our active addiction, we develop these egocentric traits. To become humble is difficult for most people, but especially for addicts. We’re so used to being the center of our stoned-out universe, not seeing how our being high affects those around us. Many of us rationalize our addiction by thinking, “I’m just getting high in my house by myself, so I’m not hurting anyone.” Ultimately, addicts are hurting themselves, but also they hurt the friends and family they no longer reach out to because they’ve developed a life of self-centered isolation in their own privately defined world. So, the name Humble Root is ironic because using weed often plays a direct role in one’s active addiction, which is not a road to humility. It’s a road to being self-centered. Recovery is the road to humility, not abusing weed.
Movies, television shows, and music are also filled with triggers for us addicts. Someone shared at an MA meeting that he was watching a movie about two brothers who took different paths in life, and he was enjoying it until one of the brothers became a pot farmer with a huge grow house. The image of hundreds of pot plants was enough for him to want to turn off the movie. It’s not just the image, but the sensory memories that come rushing back: the smell, the heat, the sticky crystals left on your fingers. One night, my husband turned on a new South Park episode where Randy becomes a pot farmer, and I had to leave the room when the cartoon image of his pot farm filled the screen, followed by poorly drawn buds. I couldn’t even laugh. I choose not to listen to reggae lately because it reminds me of reggae music festivals, and how so many of the songs center around weed. I even choose not to listen to “Pure Morning” a song by Placebo because the lyrics say, “A friend in need is a friend indeed, but a friend with weed is better.” That’s one of my favorite songs, but now it reminds me of getting high and my old mentality, believing that weed made my life better.
My dad is now in Alcoholics Anonymous. He told me that when he sees a bottle of alcohol now, he pictures a skull-and-crossbones on the label. We need to do those kinds of mental tricks to remind us why we need to stay away from that substance. The old cravings never truly leave us. For example, when I go outside I often smell weed everywhere. The familiar smell is comforting even as my gut knots with fear, the fear of using again. The fear that I’m not strong enough to resist it. I used to get mad when I would smell weed in the air because I can’t use it anymore. Actually, today I look at it differently. I choose not to use weed anymore. The shift from “can’t” to “I choose not to” has made all the difference. “Can’t” flairs up the rebellious part in me, while “choose not to” reminds me that I made a choice to stop because weed no longer works in my life. AA talks about “playing the tape” as a way to stay sober. This means that you imagine what it would be like to drink or do drugs again and what would happen if you did. When I do this, “play the tape,” I’m reminded of the shame and destruction it would create for me. Then the idea of drinking and/or using pot again loses its luster.
After that last bowl on that Thursday night, I went to a Marijuana Anonymous meeting. I had been trying to quit on my own for about a year, and I got down to a bowl a day, but I could never go an entire day without smoking. My husband took our son on a camping trip that weekend, and even though I had all these wonderful productive plans for my weekend alone, I knew that I would eventually binge on weed. It’s what I had always done when I was alone. But I didn’t want to do that anymore. I couldn’t live with the shame. So, on that Friday evening, out of desperation, I looked up Marijuana Anonymous. I didn’t even know if such a thing existed, but it seemed like there was an Anonymous group for everything. So I figured it must exist. Sure enough, there was an MA meeting that night at 7:00 PM. I got in the car. I went straight there.
The meeting was in a small room at a church with about five men. Part of me didn’t care that I was the only woman in the room. I was surrounded by people who identified as marijuana addicts, and that was good. I certainly knew plenty of marijuana addicts, but none of them acted like it was a problem in their lives. Instead, they saw it as a way of life. But I was starting to have a problem with that outlook.
In the MA meeting, I felt nervous at first, but I was comforted by listening to other people talk about how they had an uncontrollable desire to use weed. I almost cried when they read out loud “The Twelve Questions:”
1. Has smoking pot stopped being fun?
2. Do you ever get high alone?
3. Is it hard for you to imagine a life without marijuana?
4. Do you find that your friends are determined by your marijuana use?
5. Do you smoke marijuana to avoid dealing with your problems?
6. Do you smoke pot to cope with your feelings?
7. Does your marijuana use let you live in a privately defined world?
8. Have you ever failed to keep promises you made about cutting down or controlling your dope smoking?
9. Has your use of marijuana caused problems with memory, concentration, or motivation?
10. When your stash is nearly empty, do you feel anxious or worried about how to get more?
11. Do you plan your life around your marijuana use?
12. Have friends or relatives ever complained that your pot smoking is damaging your relationship with them?
If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you may have a problem with marijuana.
I answered yes to all of them.
At that meeting, I wasn’t eligible for a 24-hour sobriety chip yet, but I received a wooden welcome chip, which says, “A Life With Hope, Marijuana Anonymous” with the MA symbol on one side and “Together We Can Do What We Could Not Do Alone, Welcome” on the other side. I still keep this chip in my purse. Its smooth surface gives me comfort between the tips of my fingers.
In any addiction, there is a feeling of being alone. Addiction is a disease of isolation. I used to think it was silly that addicts and alcoholics called it a disease. Technically it isn’t, not in the way cancer is. But to addicts and alcoholics, this is a metaphor and a reminder that your addiction does not go away with clean and sober time. It also reduces your shame, because if addiction is a disease, then it is not a moral defect. Today, neuroscience has learned more about addiction, showing us that it does reshape one’s brain, making it difficult for addicts and alcoholics to become “normal” again. Here’s an analogy: a pickle cannot turn back into a cucumber. So addicts have pickled themselves with drugs, pot and/or alcohol to the point where they can’t go back to the brain they had before. I am that “pickle.”
Even though Narcotics Anonymous is for all types of drug use, Marijuana Anonymous was created specifically for marijuana addicts who often feel shame for being addicted to “just marijuana.” Our culture tends to downplay the effects of weed. In the past, there was a time when the effects of smoking weed were overdramatized, like in the movie Reefer Madness (1936). This film came out a year before the Marijuana Tax Act (1937), whose campaign was led by Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. That legislation paved the way for today’s Drug Enforcement Administration. Anslinger created a narrative saying that marijuana was dangerous and made people crazy. His motives appeared to be racial because he claimed untruthfully that it was mostly used by Mexicans and black people, making “them forget their place in the fabric of American society.” The name marijuana also has a racist history. Back then, most people called it cannabis. Anslinger chose the word “marihuana” instead, because that name has Spanish roots. In this way, he flared up the racial anxieties of America and used them to structure his false narrative around weed, leading to its illegalization, and eventually to its FDA Schedule 1 status, which helped to usher in the War on Drugs in the 1970’s.
The narratives about weed tend to be extreme. Either it is all good or it’s all bad. Actually, it’s a bit of both. It depends on the individuals using it and how much they’re using. The movie Reefer Madness shows characters getting high on weed like it’s meth. It is an exaggeration. But there is such a thing as marijuana-induced psychosis. I have met people through Marijuana Anonymous who have experienced this kind of psychosis. It’s believed that the higher THC levels in the newer strains of weed are causing a higher rate of addiction and psychosis. Also, having a history of mental health issues and family addiction can make a person more susceptible to addiction and marijuana-induced psychosis when they get high.
Then there’s the myth about weed not being addictive. I described to my counselor how I was surprised by the detox effects I experienced from weed, and he said, “Yes, there can be a psychological addiction.” That’s an understatement! I realized that part of the reason I had a hard time quitting was because I was experiencing withdrawals. My body had become dependent on that stuff. Years ago, I remember having a conversation with a friend about how I had to smoke weed in the morning in order to have an appetite for breakfast. She said that she needed to do the same thing. We didn’t seem to realize then that we had become full-blown addicts. We believed we were just stoners.
There is another myth being perpetuated by weed culture that it can cure cancer. Weed can help cancer patients deal with the nauseous effects of chemotherapy, but it cannot cure cancer itself. Some people believe weed can cure cancer because THC can kill cancer cells in a petri dish. But that says very little because bleach can kill cancer cells in a petri dish. That doesn’t mean patients should be given bleach to cure their cancer. I used to buy into this thinking because it justified my using weed every day.
There was an anthropological study done in Jamaica on pregnant women who used marijuana. The findings showed that the kids of these mothers were just fine and were sometimes smarter than the kids who were not exposed to marijuana. I found out about this study after watching an eight-month pregnant woman take rips off a two-foot bong. I sat in wonder as she did it without shame. I watched her about five-year-old son run around the smoky room, seeming normal and fine. Learning about that study justified what she did in my own mind for a while, and it justified when I myself used weed early in my own pregnancy. However, Kaiser told me that using weed during my pregnancy would cause developmental problems in my child. I wonder if they were right as my son today struggles to speak as well as his classmates.
Weed culture also claims that marijuana can cure opiate addiction. In MA we read “The Dangers of Cross Addiction” at every meeting. Just because people quit the drug of their choice, doesn’t mean that they’re cured because they are now using something else. However, on Facebook, there is a video from NowThis spreading this lie. Yes, weed can help people get off opiates, but they’re still numbing out with weed and actively using it as another drug. It doesn’t “cure” opiate addiction; the person’s addiction just takes a different shape.
I read an article from Runners World about running while high on edibles. The author admitted that he had taken the practice too far because he would get so high that he could run for hours and not feel his body begging him to stop. He even found himself addicted to running while high. The moral of the article was to not eat edibles that are too strong. But it should have been don’t eat edibles and run. Period. “How did this viewpoint get published in a health magazine?” I thought. The perspective was it’s all natural and cool to get loaded before a run, even though in actuality it’s dehydrating, decreases motor function, and detaches runners from their bodies. That’s weed culture. They find ways to justify using.
When I came home after my first MA meeting, I cried with the realization that I was an addict and I needed to stop. I had taken using pot too far. On the way home I thought about smoking it, but that didn’t feel right. AA has a saying: “A belly full of booze and a head full of AA is a bad thing.” MA was that extra push I needed to stop. I decided I wanted to go to the next meeting with 24-hours of clean time. I took a bath and felt my detox beginning. My stomach cramped, my headached, and I felt emotional. I knew smoking would make it all go away, but then it would all come back again. Plus, I would have to deal with my guilt about using it once again. So I chose not to use pot.
For about three weeks while quitting weed, I had digestive issues, lack of appetite, headaches, sleeplessness, brain fog, and extreme mood swings. That thirty-day sobriety chip was my light at the end of a dark tunnel. I got myself to meetings every day. There are only four MA meetings in the Sacramento area, so I had to supplement with NA, which is a good program too, and I got to hear a lot of tough stories, but I liked being around my fellow recovering stoners.
At first, the 12 steps of recovery felt overwhelming to me. They’re the same 12 steps for the AA and NA programs, but the language is adapted for the MA program. The whole God thing made me uncomfortable, but most of the MA and NA literature uses “Higher Power” instead, which leaves the definition up to the individual. Some people decide that the group consciousness of addicts helping each other is their Higher Power.
For the first few weeks I just read the stories in the back of MA’s book, Life with Hope. I began reading them that first night of sobriety after my first meeting. I especially connected to one story called “Freedom to be Me.” The title itself spoke to me since I was living in a cloud, letting weed and the community and identity I had created around it control my life. In fact, I didn’t know who I was without pot or alcohol. This one particular paragraph in the story stung me in the chest as I read it:
“My only long-standing career goal in life has been to write fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The closest I’ve gotten to that was becoming a technical writer, which I have done professionally for over ten years. Most of my stoned-out creative writing dreams and plans have thus far stayed in my head or gotten scattered around as barely decipherable notes on scraps of paper, gathering dust in obscurity. I’ve heard a great truth for me: ‘Marijuana gave me wings to fly, and took away the sky.’ I became a master at making wonderful plans and never carrying through on those plans.”
The author of that paragraph and story was 47 when he wrote that. I decided that I did not want to be 47-years-old and looking back on my career with similar regrets. MA has an app with all the literature on it, so I kept this paragraph up on my phone for a few weeks. Whenever I felt like shit or like I wanted to use again, I looked at this paragraph and remembered why I needed to stop.
You’d think my son would have been the primary reason for me to stop. Actually, he was. I felt some shame about using before he came along, but I was only in charge of myself, so it was easy for me to make excuses. But once I became a mother, I had to do a lot more mental gymnastics to make what I was doing seem okay. There were never enough excuses to make my feelings of guilt disappear. I have a friend who said that smoking weed makes her a better mom because it relaxes her. At that point, I had already begun to question what I was doing and I wanted to stop. After my friend said this to me one day, that weed makes her a better mother, she looked at me, waiting for my approval as the biggest stoner in our group. But I looked away. I just couldn’t go along with her delusion.
As my son grew and became more energetic, I found it harder to keep up with him. I’d smoke to make myself a “calmer mom,” but I was actually less patient and less present. There were times when I would sneak away, and he would find me and knock on the door to the garage as I tried to smoke a bowl as fast as I could. No amount of weed can erase the pain of hearing his little knocks and his little voice repeating, “Mama.”
After my son was born, I had every intention of using and drinking again. I asked the nurse if I would continue to be drug tested now that he was born. I knew I shouldn’t have asked her that, but my paranoia and desire to use were too strong. She said no, but that I should find better ways to relax, like taking a bath.
As I began to cut back, I wanted to end the day with a cup of tea and a bath, and that was my goal, but it never felt like enough. Only squares do that, I thought. I would still feel the pull to go out into the garage and smoke a quick bowl even after having my relaxing cup of tea and my bath. When I was finally detoxing, the cup of tea and a bath became my essentials. I had to form a new habit in place of my weed, beer, and food cycle. For weeks, tea and hot baths were the only things that made me feel good.
I thought that after having a kid I would automatically grow up. In reality, I wanted to use more. Using was how I had always dealt with my stress in the past. Being a new parent is stressful. Newborns do not care if you’re tired, hungry, depressed, or high. They demand attention, love, and care at all times. Addiction is a disease of selfishness, though I had never seen myself as a selfish person. Children are like mirrors. They show you who you truly are. Your reaction to them will reveal your hidden nature and all those childhood wounds that you thought you had buried. Having a child has awakened me and forced me to grow up, just not as fast as I thought it would. Before I was able to grow up, I needed to accept my own change and growth.
When I was high, I was stuck, and hiding in plain sight. There was no room for any growth when I was stuck in the mud. I had to act normal even though I was baked. I was baked because I wanted to be cool and different, but I didn’t want anyone to notice. “Fuckin idiot,” I’d say. I had been calling myself an idiot a lot lately. “I know, I know. I should forgive myself,” I’d say instead.
But when I finally got sober it was like a veil was lifted. I saw how damaged I was. I saw how I numbed out all the time and that diminished my potential. I saw how broken my marriage was. It hadn’t been working for years, but I didn’t allow myself to feel this reality or see it. I just kept hoping that things would get better and that it was normal for the parents of a young child to struggle. I came to recognize that even before we had a child, we had not been able to connect on a deeper level emotionally or intellectually. My husband complained about how we didn’t have enough sex, so I felt obligated to give it to him. I made sure I was high and drunk when we did it. This made it better. When I had sex with him while being sober, I tried to find the pleasure in it, but instead I was bored. I knew every move he was going to make.
I met my husband when I was nineteen. At that time, I was lost, going to fashion school because I wanted to be creative. My family had moved to Washington state, while I stayed in Sacramento. It was then that my husband introduced me to the weed lifestyle. The first time he asked me if I wanted to wake-and-bake, I told him that I only smoked on the weekends. But it didn’t take me long for me to try it and to start wake-and-baking, that is, smoking weed every day. He introduced me to a new world where you can party every day while still maintaining your responsibilities. He also introduced me to hiking and camping, all while being high and drunk, of course. I was gradually indoctrinated into his black and white, yes or no structure of the world. It was safe. I felt safe from my emotions and from thinking too deeply. It’s true, I was in a haze, but he liked me that way.
Ironically, when I got sober later, he made my sobriety all about himself. He figured that now that I was in recovery that I would force him down the same path. I knew he was going to feel that way, so I told him over and over that he didn’t need to change. This was something I was doing for myself and for our son. However, I had to start setting some boundaries with his weed smoking and his drinking. So I asked him not to smoke or drink around me. As an addict, this was a problem for him.
One afternoon, he took our son out frisbee golfing with his friend and he drank a couple of strong beers. He always did this. But when I went to bed with him that night and smelled the beer on him, knowing that he had just come back from a father-son outing, I knew something had to change. I asked him the next day to stop drinking and smoking around our son because he was only two years old and he needed us to be good influences. My husband flipped out and accused me of trying to change him. He couldn’t see it as me simply asking him to better himself for our child.
At that point, I had been going to a meeting every day for about three weeks. One day he said “You go to your meetings and get peddled sobriety bullshit.” That sentence reminded me of recent months when he told me that I was being brainwashed by the media and the university whenever we disagreed about political and social issues. Later, he even said that we should stop talking about politics altogether. Any sign of change or growth he saw in me he had to squash.
I vented about his outbursts at a meeting. A woman came up to me afterwards and said, “That’s emotional abuse.” Once she said this, it dawned on me that he had been emotionally and verbally abusing me for years, but I was too numbed out from weed to see it or feel it. He wanted control.
I knew my husband was afraid of losing me. He told me when we first started dating that girls like me don’t stick around very long. I suppose I took that statement as a challenge and tried to stay with him. Ironically, he pushed me away for years, protecting himself from the self-fulfilling prophecy that I was bound to leave him. Stubbornly, I kept holding on, like how my mother held onto my alcoholic father. I took his abuse just like she did, not seeing my own worth. For months before I became sober, my husband told me that we should get a divorce because we had nothing in common and our relationship was broken. I wanted to keep trying, hoping that things would get better. After he told me that I was being “peddled sobriety bullshit,” a floodgate of thoughts and emotions were released. I saw his manipulation and realized that I had thought he was an immature idiot for years. “That’s just how guys are,” I would tell myself. My mother would say things like, “Oh, yeah. Your father used to do that too,” which I should have seen as a red flag. They have been together twenty-nine years and still contemplate divorce even as commitment and loyalty are welded onto their ring fingers. The passing of time does not equal success.
I finally told my husband for the first time in our nine years together that I thought our relationship was over. At first, he agreed and began to pack up his stuff. Then he came back into the living room and said that he didn’t want to separate or get a divorce, even though he had used the word divorce freely for months. He used the word as a weapon, while I was using it as my truth. At that point, I didn’t trust the words that came out of his mouth, and I believed his actions even less.
Finally, he tried to change and improve himself. He said that me wanting to leave him gave him the opportunity to look at himself. He went to anger management, read self-help books, and took our marriage counseling seriously. I wanted to make the marriage work for our son. But when I envisioned our son not in the equation, my leaving felt free and easy. When I remembered that I did have a son with him, I felt incredible guilt for not loving his father any more. I decided that I needed to work harder. I needed to try. Maybe the love I once felt for him would come back.
Our marriage counselor said that when the Titanic was heading for the iceberg, they couldn’t turn it around because it takes too much time and effort to turn such a large ship; it was too late. She said that the same is true with relationships. If the relationship has gone in the same direction for too long, it takes time for the relationship to turn around. I had already given nine years to the relationship, so I supposed I could give more. My husband tried being nicer to me by becoming interested in what I had to stay, which felt foreign to me, and by giving me money, which in the past he used to withhold, and by making dinner and cleaning, which he used to feel resentment about. He even got clean and sober. That was a big step.
One day, in anger, I told him that he was an addict living the fantasy of functionality, which is the wrong thing to say to an addict. It pissed him off, and he accused me of trying to change him. That seemed ironic because I had changed so much for him. I had molded myself into the person I thought he wanted me to be, and still he always asked for more changes. But if I asked for a change, then he said that I should love him unconditionally. When I first tried to leave him, he cleaned up his act. But I told him that going into recovery had to be for him, not for the sake of saving our marriage. This is true in general. Recovery must be for yourself, or it won’t last. He swore to me that he quit smoking and drinking for himself and for our son.
At that time, he came to a few MA meetings with me, but he would never go on his own. One day I told him in the safe space of our marriage counselor’s office that I didn’t want him coming to my meetings anymore. He only came when he had a sobriety birthday, taking a chip and fumbling through his answer to, “How did you do it?” That question means which tools of the program did you use to stay clean and sober? My sponsor asked him this a couple of times as she handed him his chip. But he kept repeating that he just felt guilty and wanted to save his marriage. With every clap in celebration of his sobriety I heard his phrase “You’re getting peddled sobriety bullshit” repeating in my mind. I kept telling myself that I should feel happy because he was making changes, but it was too little too late. Our marriage counselor explained that if there are embers still burning in our relationship, then counseling can blow on those embers and spark a flame. However, as we did her communication exercises and homework, interest in the counseling and the relationship began to leave me. I reached a point where I didn’t care about what my husband had to say. I didn’t even want to go on a date with him. I didn’t want to be in the same room with him. No embers were left, only ashes.
I don’t know exactly when, but at some point, our relationship had died. Maybe it was as far back as when our son was born, and my husband wouldn’t help me with the baby. He refused to help in the middle of the night, claiming that as a welder he had a dangerous job and needed his sleep. So I was perpetually exhausted, sometimes yelling at my son then crying as he wailed and scrunched his red newborn face. Meanwhile, my husband got a round of applause from me every time he changed a diaper. I said: “You’re such a good dad.” I wanted to hold onto a dream: our fairytale ending and our child. In actuality, it took the existence of our child to help me wake up. Without my son, I might still be chugging along like always. I should have ended that relationship years ago when it wasn’t so hard, before a child was hanging in the balance. Instead, I was too complacent in my uncomfortable comfort zone.
One day I reached the last straw. After I learned my husband had read my journal, I moved out of the house. He said that he read it because he didn’t trust me, while I had been telling him for months that I didn’t trust him. His goal, he explained, was to gain back my trust and win me back. He worried that the only reason I would stop working on our marriage was because there was another man in the picture. So he went snooping through the chaotic thoughts I had scribbled in my journal to find out if this was the case.
The truth is that yes, I had developed feelings for someone else. His insecure imagination suggested that I was having an affair and sleeping with another man during the times I had told him I was at school or somewhere else. His body deflated when I told him that I had only been flirting with someone else. At that point, I had already planned on moving out and filing for divorce a week later. But after hearing the truth, he wanted me out right away. “You’re in limerence,” he spat at me. I laughed at his classic emotional abuse tactic and his cute pseudo-psychological diagnosis. I knew that I was not in love with this person, but my husband wanted to make me feel delusional and unaware of my own feelings.
The weekend I moved out, I went to an NA meeting. I spent a day trying to relax, read, and take a nap, but my mind was swirling with thoughts. I felt a pull to go to a meeting, so I went to one in Carmichael that I hadn’t attended before. The meeting had a speaker followed by the typical period of sharing. The speaker was a doctor. She had been a heroin user and lived the fantasy of functionality until her habit finally took over her life. Addiction affects all aspects of one’s life. She spoke about how she would try to find the differences between herself and the members of NA, changing her definition of what an addict was to justify her own usage. She said in truth, it’s about the similarities we have as addicts, not the differences. We’re all addicts, and we all get it, no matter which drug we used. She also said that sometimes when life feels like it’s falling apart, it is actually falling together.
A member from MA was at that meeting too. Hearing this particular speaker felt like a Higher Power moment for me, like my Higher Power was showing me that I wasn’t alone and that I was on the right path, even though it felt like my life was falling apart. We went out to tea after the meeting and we talked about the importance of developing friendships in recovery. So many of us lose friendships, relationships, and even family members once we become sober.
Having this fellowship and being in recovery have given me a whole new way of life and a new community. Today, I have women in the program who I can call and they know exactly what I’m going through. Now, I secretary the same MA meeting I went to that first time, and I am working the twelve steps with my sponsor, who is a woman in her sixties. She smoked weed since she was thirteen years old and she finally quit seven years ago. As she struggles to leave her own marriage, she gives me a gentle nudge to leave mine now, while I’m still young, and while my son is too young to remember any of this.
I’m grateful to be in recovery now, and to have access to others whose life stories and experience I can benefit from. They give me hope and a new perspective on how to live while staying clean and sober. I have learned so much from them and it has changed my life for the better. I’m no longer stuck in my caterpillar cocoon, munching on flower buds and living in a constant haze. I am no longer hiding and denying reality. I no longer depend on weed to give me a sense of life. Instead, I’m developing my life to its fullest potential. I’m facing my life as an authentic adult. I’m fully present in the world, building a solid program of recovery.