It’s day 58 of my 90 day smoke break and I can officially say this is the longest I’ve gone without THC in about a decade.
I didn’t have many expectations for how this process was going to go – I find it easier to try new things that way. What I certainly didn’t expect was for this break to get harder the longer it went on, or for old problems I’d forgotten about to resurface.
I first started consuming weed with regularity in my senior year of college. Before that, it wasn’t available to me enough to become a smoker. After I graduated, I started using vape cartridges (not something I would do now, but all I had access to at the time.)
When I lived on my own, my night bowl was a ritual to help me sleep. I’ve been a poor sleeper for much of my life and it wasn’t until weed came around that I began to fall asleep with relative ease and stay asleep. Smoking before bed helped decrease the amount of time it took me to fall asleep and kept me asleep through the bumps and bangs that come with apartment living.
Recently I’ve been struggling with sleep. There have been several nights where it’s taken me over two hours to fall asleep and even more where it’s taken 90+ minutes. I’d forgotten how hard it used to be to shut down my brain and fall asleep – but it’s all come rushing back now.
In the same vein, I’d forgotten how noisy my brain could be. Learning about inattentive ADHD a few years ago was a game-changer to me – all of the activity was in my head. It was weed that helped me realize that my brain was a noisy, anxious place to be and weed that helped me deal with that. In the past few weeks, my brain has been moving non-stop. It doesn’t quiet down during walks or meditations, yoga or bedtime. My thoughts are not passing clouds or dishes I can place on a conveyer belt; they’re an endless merry-go-round powered by consciousness.
After years of mindfulness, meditation and journaling, my brain is not the anxious pit it used to be – but my ADHD brain has come back full force without the power of THC to quiet it. Even when I try to aim all of my attention to my breath, relying on box breath and numbered breath to center myself, my thoughts carrying on in the background, effortlessly jumping from one thing to another and back again.
There are days where my brain drives me crazy, like when I’m sitting in shavasana after a vinyasa class or lying in bed listening to the clock strike at 10 and 11 pm. But this constant flurry of activity also delivers me some good ideas. I’ve started several new short stories from ideas that just appeared and have a backlog of blog ideas to attend to. I haven’t had the same issues I’ve had in the past where I’m unable to focus or work without cannabis. So it’s certainly not all bad.
I’ve been taking CBD/CBDa pills this month and I recently added CBN pills at nighttime to try help my noisy brain quiet down and fall asleep faster. It seems to be working, but whether that’s actually the cannabinoids or the placebo effect remains to been seen (although it doesn’t really matter, does it?)
I’ve had people ask why I’m still doing this break and what I hope to get out of it. And the answer is simple: a reframed relationship with cannabis that does not involve smoking four times a day, multiple days a week. What I didn’t expect to find was confirmation in all the ways THC helps me. But I suppose of all the things I could take away from this, that is certainly a good lesson: cannabis does help me in many ways. But it’s my responsibility to keep the relationship healthy and not co-dependent.
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