Sober First; A Time and Place for Altered States

     This past Tuesday, I attended an AA meeting with a friend, partially for support, but mostly out of curiosity about my own position in regards to addiction. While sitting in this meeting, I felt a desire to go up and share, although it's generally outside the tradition for newcomers to share, but sitting in that chair, listening to these people talk about what their lives had become before they chose to get sober resonated with me. I've never had any kind of a problem with drinking, but I had a couple of small realizations while I was there.
     One: I do have an addiction to marijuana. It is an addiction. I've been excusing myself for months after the thought occurred to me that I should probably slow down, telling myself that it's just self-medicating, that it's treating my anxiety, my chronic pain, that it helps me to socialize with others who have the same habits--i.e. pretty much everyone I hang out with. I've always seen these as excuses, but I've been viewing them as perfectly valid excuses. And for as long as I believed these things, they were real. Until I allow myself to see that a clear mind is a better place to be, I would continue to enable myself to use weed to numb and suppress myself.
     Two: I am afraid of facing my actual self. I realized while I was sitting in that meeting that I've pretty much been high around half the time for I think six years. They say that the Devil makes use of idle hands and I do love to be idle... but being high all the time was exacerbating my existing laziness. Marijuana has a unique effect on the human psyche, and I've come to understand that it's a reducer. When one is high, the most common symptoms are a desire to eat, typically comfort foods, things that are easy to prepare, or else require no preparation. Another is sleepiness, and I often used weed to help me sleep for I was convinced I had some mild degree of insomnia although I was never sober long enough to know what it was like to try to fall asleep without it. Lastly, for some, or many, weed increases your libido. Human being are highly complex creatures who participate in a great number of seemingly nonsensical behaviors, but if you get high, you're suddenly reduced to this simple, primitive creature with very basic desires, and much poorer memory.
     There was a great deal of time in my adolescence when I was not at all myself, when I was deeply depressed, and I fully believe marijuana did, in fact, help me to recover from this depression. My mistake was allowing my healing habit to persist beyond it's usefulness, and furthermore, believing that this habit was what did my healing for me. As soon as I started smoking weed, it became the hub of everything I did, with everyone I ever hung out with. I'd get together with my friends and smoke a bowl as we sluffed our classes. While hanging out with my first next boyfriend after the breakup that broke me, we'd look forward to when his mother would leave so that we could get high. If I met someone and learned that they'd never smoked, or that they though lowly of it, I'd lose interest in that person in favor of someone who would get high with me.
     Marijuana is a real medicine, but just the same as any prescription, it can easily be abused, especially when one uses it entirely unsupervised. It didn't take me very long at all once I first started to begin getting high alone. No prescription. No company. No supervision. Just me and whatever pipe I had at the time.
     Marijuana is a major memory suppressant, and this is especially painful for me to consider when I remember that one of the most significant abilities humans have that sets us apart from the rest of the animals on Earth is that we have the capacity to remember, and remember a lot. When I neglected to make a conscious decision about my relationship with weed, I might as well have forfeited my entire mind. Nothing fit together nicely anymore (as if it had before anyway), and everything in my head was grey matter sludge. I ceased to dream at all when I slept, and I kinda got around physically (sexually), because once you're high, if you get turned on, it's over. It's so much harder to be aware of yourself when you have this effect in your system that makes everything soft and fuzzy, and the lines that may have once been so clear are just smudges.
     My having trouble with my memory has always been a tender subject with me, mostly because it was the area of my life where I felt like the biggest failure. Anytime I did something that disappointed someone, it was simply because I couldn't keep track of everything I was meant to remember. "I forgot," became my excuse for everything, and it was entirely true, but I never thought twice about the fact that I was making myself forget every time I lit another bowl, and it was painful to say every time. I hated myself for not remembering better, so I would smoke to numb the pain, and forget again that I messed up.
     I am still in the midst of realizing just how bad things had gotten, all because of this seemingly harmless leafy green flower. When drugs are introduced into a young person's life without anyone to guide them through how to respect and fear drugs the way I think they ought to be now, they can consume you, and this is the nature of addiction:
     Escape. In my youth, I was left emotionally and intellectually alone, and had nothing but my own devices, which I conceived as I saw needs for them. One of these devices was making myself desirable for the sake of having someone's attention. Aged 14, I met someone from a nearby ward from my same church, and his attention became my device for feeling good, and as soon as that person was no longer with me, I had nothing left. Empty and despondent, I clung to the first things beyond that that made me feel good again, and while I thought it would be another boy, I couldn't quite manage to find anyone at the time who would give me their attention consistently, and once I was invited to hotbox a car by some new friends for the first time, I found that weed was the common denominator among all the experiences I had when I felt good again, and weed couldn't get busy or distracted, it couldn't be snatched away by another person who became more interesting or appealing than I was, it wouldn't get bored of me or snap at me. It was a solid foundation of something that let me feel better, because I felt so shitty that I was left searching in the darkness for anything to hold onto.
     It let me escape my feelings of emptiness, of worthlessness, it filled up my lacking of reasons to live. Once I was high, I wanted to eat again. Sleep came more easily and I was no longer laying in bed staring blankly at the black ceiling until dawn, not knowing where the time went or whether or not I'd even slept.
     What I didn't realize at the time were some really difficult truths that I didn't want to face, and so I didn't. One, my mother loves me desperately, and her faith is her life. My mother has always been incredibly steadfast in the church, and although I learned some things about Mormonism that made it seem like a farce to me, it has always been a Light in her life that I also have full access to. I don't have to believe or agree with everything, especially now that I know that each individual on the planet has their own truth, but going to church actually does do me good.
     Two, when you fall for depression, you are surrendering yourself. This entity of darkness is one of Ego, which to some is the same as the Devil himself, and it may seem bigger than you, stronger than you, it may seem like an impossible foe to fend off, but if you let it happen, you become your depression. You, as a person inside your own head, have the human ability to open up the void into which I believe you are meant to grow, and just fuck it all, throw everything into that void like a bottomless drain. It can eat you whole, and you become that drain, and once you're that, everything anyone ever gives you goes down that drain as well. Depression is the quality of being like a metaphysical black hole, and the thing that's hardest to understand, to come to believe, that everyone will tell you, is that you are the master of yourself already. Making the decision to get a grip on yourself and stop up the drain is the hardest thing you may ever need to do in order to save yourself.
     Three: Drugs can help, but nothing can heal you like you can. Drugs only help. There is no cure for depression. There is no cure for the ailment of being human. There is no cure for your bad habits. There are only ointments, salves, medicines, tonics. There are friends who give a shit about you, and given that you don't toss the care they give you down that drain, into your black holiness, you can let that help you too.
     Based on the idea that we are meant to aim to be Christ-like, that whether he was a real human or if he was conceived as a legend, our goal is to understand that we are truly limitless, that our potential is infinite, that Authentic Magic is, in fact, within your grasp. You can use this infinite potential to consume light the way a black hole does, or you can use it to illuminate. If you use it to consume, everything will ultimately disappear, just as you will have.
      When you close your eyes, you might say that you see blackness, and literally, everything is darkened, and darkness is often compared with blackness. However, when you close your eyes a final time, rumor has it that there's a bright white light in the same place where we see darkness as we try to sleep at night. When you fall asleep, what color is the background of your dreams? One could argue that everything you "see" in your subconscious is made of the light therein, and in that way, dark and light are the same. I often think of most spectrums as being cyclical, that if you go far enough in one direction, you come out on the other end and move towards the middle again.
     There's a lot of negative space revolving around drug use, and the heavy stigmatization of this illegal substance I had allowed to control my life is part of the reason it was ever allowed to consume me. Where this negative space was, no one else would go aside from those who were in it with me, and no one had any kind of control or understanding of what was going on. There's no spectrum involving weed in my life because it's all so binary. You're either okay with illicit activity and you like doing drugs because you don't care much about the law and drugs are fun, or you're a law abiding citizen and you still don't know anything about this drug because it has nothing to do with you. But here's my thing: When you look into ancient civilization and early theology in humanity, you will inevitably find evidence that there was likely often psychoactive drug use in these civilizations, the foundations from which we derive everything we religiously believe in. There is still a plethora of indigenous and primitive tribes and peoples who use psychoactive drugs in their day to day lives, and my point there is that the culture and lifestyle of common drug use has persisted through the millennium outside of modernized society where there's a rule for literally everything, established by a person or some people who may have nothing to do with whatever they're making up laws about.
     I don't intend to live my life permanently sober, and in fact I couldn't imagine living such a flat life. I do fully intend to get to know myself better, and being sober in my most basic state of mind is the only way I can truly do this. Just as there is a time and place for all things, much like how many religious people attend church but once a week, I do see a time and place for not only marijuana, but also other psychoactive and psychedelic drugs in my life. These times and places will from now on be approached with the fear and respect that any God deserves, for from my experience, surrendering yourself to the altered states of consciousness these drugs can provide is one and the same as surrendering yourself to your God and whatever His grace offers you in your human experience.

     For a very long time, I had something I could call too much of a good thing, and only now am I beginning to truly moderate my access to this goodness. The relief marijuana can offer you, in addition to the way it compels you to care for yourself as a corporeal being, is absolutely a goodness, but you don't get chemotherapy if you don't have cancer. You shouldn't take sleeping pills if sleep already comes easily to you. If you are not in pain, if you remember to eat, if you feel comfortable with your libido, you don't need to smoke weed. If your leg is not broken, you don't walk with crutches, and if you do, you run the risk of weakening your legs. If you take sleeping pills without sleeplessness, you risk suffering sleeplessness once you stop taking the pills. Humans are incredibly adaptive, and it's long due time I adapted to sobriety first. Diversity in your experience is healthy for you, but your deepest wellness comes from you, not anything else.