Facing Addiction

I was once at this weird get-together. The only person not acting too cool to talk to me was a shabby guy who told me he was bipolar. We got to talking about weed, and he said something like, "If you've ever gotten high, you've had one of the most special, powerful experiences a human can have."

I thought he was right. I also had the growing suspicion that too many of those special, amazing experiences he mentioned were quietly costing me everything else good in my life.

I'd been getting high off and on since I was a teenager. Then came a medical card and four-ish years where I lost all sense of control. On the one hand, some of my weed experiences still felt irreplaceably valuable; on the other, I was undeniably addicted and couldn't seem to stop no matter what I tried.

All I wanted was to get back to using only when I actually chose to, without having to flee the thing forever. And all along, it felt like marijuana itself was showing me, over and over, all the good things that marijuana addiction was keeping me from. I started writing those things down. The idea (foggy as it was): Seeing and sharing a record of how I felt would make it impossible to keep ignoring.

And slowly, embarrassingly, painfully . . . it started to work—mostly.

Facing Addiction is that story: a seventy-day sequence of anecdotes and ideas that took me years to write.

This isn't a program. There are no steps and no one qualified to give them (I don't know anything). Just conversations between me and my high self that helped me not get high so much.