I'm a Stoner, Dottie — A...A...A Pebble?
What was I going to say? Oh shit, I forgot.
Hello! This is Loose Leash, a newsletter you probably forgot you subscribed to several years ago, from writer/director Alicia Lutes. In the wake of a Twitter ban and a unquenchable thirst for attention, we’re back (for now! And also on Bluesky!) on a semi-irregular basis. Please stick around! Or not, it’s your life.
I have been smoking too much weed for years now. I take breaks here and there, but mostly I just cling to it. I love the ritual of rolling a joint; I blend the weed in with these "smoking herbs" I buy from a West Virginia farming collective. The blend I currently have includes marshmallow leaf, rose petals, lemongrass, and something called mullein that I'm going to look up as soon as I finish typing this sentence. (Ha: it's an herb people used to smoke to cure lung ailments.) It tastes nice, it feels nice to sit outside on my patio and smoke a little, chat with the neighbors, watch the dogs play. It's comforting and lovely and relaxes me. Weed helped me to start working out and take care of myself and my body, ironically enough.
In truth, I started smoking weed because I wanted to feel dumb, numb, and forget things. I wanted to sleep, and to not have the occasional night terrors that woke me up, sometimes screaming, in the middle of the night. Often, I would wake up with deep, painful, itchy indents in my palms from my fingernails digging into my skin — a byproduct of the fact that I would end up clenching my hands into fists while my body allegedly rested. I honestly have no idea why. I never had dreams as a kid, only nightmares. I was always tired. I was also a bedwetter until the day I left home for good (18: embarrassing, true), which has nothing to do with weed, but also feels like it colors in the picture of the mental/emotional environment from which I was trying to escape.
I smoked weed for all the reasons you wouldn't want to: to forget things, to escape, to do less, to feel stupid. I was always noticing too much, saying too much, being too smart for my own good. All of these things that caused people to hurt me and/or kept them from loving me, too. Since I was too young. And so I thought maybe if I could chill out AND be a little bit more oblivious and dumber, people would like me more — they'd want to keep me around. Or at least not throw me out or run away. So when I moved to California where it was legal, I started smoking weed on the semi-regular.
Realizing that the coping mechanism was not really doing me any favors anymore — or at least less than it would if I used it less often — didn't come all at once. There's been no big rock bottom. It's been fits and spurts of realization, depending on what's happening in my life. Because I rarely get hiiiiigh-high like you see on TV or at the movies. Most people would not even know I was stoned. I could keep this schtick going forever, if I wanted to, but I'm not exactly sure I do. It's felt like little more than a habit with diminishing returns for awhile now, if I'm being honest. And when I feel good about myself (like I do right now!), I also feel comfortable enough to dissect the pros and cons of something that's been bothering me about myself, like this, and how I should probably reshape and reevaluate my relationship to it.
"Yeah but, in the grand scheme of things, it's not that bad" is a true statement. But multiple things can be true at the same time, and some of those things are enabling excuses. And we all deserve excuses now and again; we deserve to give ourselves a break! But sometimes a break can become something a bit more sinister, or at least no longer beneficial. And that's sort of where I feel like I'm at now.
The problem is: I have an addict's brain and body. I come from generations of them. This means my body and brain feel physically comforted by the repetition and habitual patterns around my smoking behaviors. And the fact that I do know in my heart that I could stop doing this if I really wanted to...makes it very easy for me to pass the buck onto next week. And then all of a sudden I've been smoking weed too much for the past 6 years of my life, give or take a couple breaks here and there.
What I really need to do with it is what I did with food: reorient my relationship to it. In the case of weed, I think that means take a break and then make it only an occasional thing I partake in, rather than the thing that I do every night. And yes, again, I know that smoking a little bit of weed every night isn't the worst thing in the world. For a long time, it truly did me right! And even the times when I first started to smoke too much, good things came out of that (ironically enough: my appreciation for my health and a return to my physical self)! But I also know it's taking things away from me: my memories, my follow through on certain things. My attention span for the things that really, actually need it (aka NOT MY PHONE). And I really want to see if I can sleep, unstressed, without it now. I’ve done so many things to positively change my mental health. I think the EMDR therapy is helping, and I think the growth from that is resulting in…this.
As with most things I put in this newsletter nowadays, I can't help but ask myself, "do I really need to share this out? Is talking about this, like this, right now, in the thick of thinking about it really all that helpful to anyone? Are you just going to make yourself look bad or get yourself in trouble or preclude yourself from getting a new job?" And in truth, I do not know. Maybe? It's certainly possible — I've been on the losing end of ungenerous readings and judgements of my personhood time and time again. But I feel like there's something really important and vital about asserting the messier, middle steps of reality and means to be a person in the middle of things rather than just the end or beginning. After all, most of our life is a series of messy middles, rather than beautiful beginnings or emotional ends. And I think a lot of people refuse to see that, which makes it hard to afford themselves a little grace when they’re in the thick of it — let alone give that grace to other people. Maybe this is my way of trying to fix all that; I’ve always been a fixer and a help-obsessed people pleaser.
I just like the idea of real-timing the process of anything, I guess. Of being the fool who tries (and maybe fails) to articulate what it feels like to be on the journey to greater understanding in real time (*whispers*…but more on that later).
To endeavor to be a human that's autonomous and alive is not a one-size-fits-all experience, or easy for anyone. And so often I've felt so alone in so much of it. Unsure and grasping, alone and awash in feelings and thoughts and things I didn't understand or have the language for, or even the support system to try and wade through them. Whenever I had thoughts or feelings or big ideas, it was always "you're on your own, kid!" And I think that's true for a lot of people my age and older, which makes it feel even scarier and isolating to confront. Especially when it feels like we live in a world that expects us to know exactly what and how we feel about any given thing at any given moment. Particularly when it feels like the younger generations coming up are so much farther ahead on that front (or at least have more of the language and framework to start with). I guess this is my way of saying "oh, to hell with all that!" and trying a new way. If cringe-ily embarrassing myself publicly like this helps someone else feel less ashamed or alone about very human things, I’ll fucking take it.
And maybe next time I’ll do something more adult and practical, like take up knitting.