WRITE ABOUT THE WEED

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I have a head full of ten years of AA. I can recite passages from the Big Book by memory. My sobriety date was 420, April 20th 2012. I always joked — 420 never blaze it again. There’s a reason my sobriety date was 420. When I came into AA, I already had experience giving up drinking — I had been “sober” for one year on my own before plunging back into black outs and cops being inside my house for some reason. And by “sober” I mean I hit the bong every single morning and all throughout the day and spent more money on weed than my rent. But I didn’t smoke weed and end up in the hospital or with cops in my house for unknown reasons, and so the weed really was the least of my problems. When I landed in AA I had no intention of stopping. I joked it’s called Alcoholics Anonymous — it says nothing about weed, and I went to meeting reeking of weed smoke.

On April 19th 2012, I was in a hotel room with my mother, my sister, a couple of my mother’s students, and several magnums of wine. I was a couple weeks off booze and going to meetings and I had to call the courthouse the next day about something relating to my domestic violence trial. This hotel room with magnums of wine was some celebration of my professor mother finishing a conference or something like that. It didn’t seem weird that there were multiple magnums and only 5 people, one of whom wasn’t drinking. No one gave a thought to my alcoholism and whether or not this was a good environment for me to be in, of course. As everyone got increasingly shit faced, one of my mother’s students who was quite drunk started talking to me about how I wasn’t drinking and I told her I was in AA. She told me she used to go to meetings and she always wondered what would have happened if she had stuck it out. I told her I was liking it and it was helping me not drink, and I mentioned the weed, how that I was the thing I couldn’t imagine giving up. She asked me Why don’t you just surrender?

I went home that night before the drunken screaming about incest started, and smoked all the weed I had. In the morning, on 420, instead of calling my dealer to reup, I gave my bong to my roommate and went to a meeting where I picked up a 24 hour chip. I didn’t smoke weed again for 11 years and for most of those years I swore I never would. I was intense about AA. I had a homegroup, a sponsor, and I sponsored multiple people. I went to meetings multiple times a week. I did the steps. I recited the shared language. Most of my relationships started inside the rooms. And I credited AA with saving my life. That other path, the one where I didn’t make it to a meeting and just kept drinking, is pretty scary to think about. I don’t know where I would be now but it certainly wouldn’t be here.

And yet, AA wasn’t everything. It offered no trauma informed understanding of addiction. It activated the parts of me that desperately wanted to be good, to be approved of. I loved saying my sobriety time. I loved the distance between me and the fucked up girl I used to be. Being good replaced being bad as a survival strategy but that did little to help me transform my trauma. It kept me stuck in seeking approval and repressing huge aspects of myself that could not thrive in such constriction. I stayed in trauma therapy. I kept searching for answers. I never thought that search would lead to me giving up my sobriety, but that’s exactly where it lead me. I decided to take part in ayahuasca ceremony, despite the cautioning (and stigmatization) from my AA friends. Ayahuasca profoundly changed my life in a way nothing else has. It got under. I then opened myself to using mushrooms in a healing context. The final frontier was deciding that I would use drugs recreationally (because I was tired of everything always having to be for “healing” and I wanted some things to just be for fun), and deciding to smoke weed.

I was with my boyfriend at the time in a little house we were staying at in New Brunswick. He was a pothead and regularly took little smoking breaks. Through an extreme freeze of being unable to ask for the forbidden thing, I finally told him I wanted to smoke. His initial reaction was no. My sobriety, blablabla, etc. I felt a surge of anger within me. I am in charge of myself and I am fucking sick of this shit. I am sick of being treated like a different kind of person, like an addict, who has a spiritual malady, who will never be able to do normal things like smoke a joint with her boyfriend by the ocean in New Brunswick. And so I told him that. I told him it was my decision and he relented and we smoked.