Cant enjoy weed anymore.
Starting from around the age of 14–15, I smoked weed almost everyday. It was a way of bonding with friends and meeting people.
Everything seemed better when I was high. Watching movies and listening to music was amazing. Jokes were funnier. Food tasted WAY better. Weed gave me this feeling that I was seeing things how they “truly are”. Or at least seeing them with different eyes, a fresh perspective. It was so interesting. It made me feel emotions deeper and gave me a sense of nostalgia when thinking about life, what it means to live and be human.
I would smoke weed before almost any activity and it always made me feel much better. In my 20s I went through some bad situations and fell into a deep depression. I withdrew from the world and this gave me bad social anxiety to go along with my depression. Because I have an addictive mindset I would still try to smoke weed. The weed intensified those feelings of depression and social anxiety and almost inevitably when I would smoke with people I would sneak off and leave because I couldn’t bear to be around them.
I felt like everyone could tell there was something wrong with me, that the whole attention of the room was on me and I was throwing off the positive energy. I was so paranoid of this it almost became a self fulfilling prophecy. When you’re afraid of appearing awkward and start obsessing about it, you start to appear awkward. It’s obviously exaggerated in the mind of a person with social anxiety but there is still some truth to it. Observing and experiencing this creates shame that’s very tough to deal with.
I created a negative feedback loop in my mind. I was searching out confirmation in people‘s reactions to me, for the beliefs I already had from anxiety and depression. If you search for something hard enough, you’ll most likely find it.
I still enjoyed the effects of weed when I was alone for a little while, but even then it eventually just exposed my own misery to myself. Despite this I would go back to it time and time again like someone in an abusive relationship. I knew it was going to bring me WAY down but it was almost as if I was punishing myself.
Fast forward a decade and I have overcome my depression and worked on myself a lot to accomplish many goals. I don’t have social anxiety anymore. I enjoy talking to people, hanging out, and most people would see me as an extrovert.
However, if I smoke weed it brings me back to that time in my life when I experienced so much pain. It doesn’t matter what kind of weed, whether it was Indica or Sativa, if it was legit bud with THC it felt pretty much exactly the same. I’ve tried It in different situations and it just makes me feel like shit. I’ve thought about it a lot because I used to believe that it was just exposing something that still exists in me. I thought if I had really overcome my depression/anxiety I would be able to smoke weed. But I really don’t think that’s true anymore. We carry scars of tough times we’ve been through. For me weed just brings me back to that negative mind state. It doesn’t mean I’m projecting something false when I’m not high. It is actually the opposite. For me what I project when I’m high is false.
An example is when I had bad social anxiety I thought getting laid consistently was the cure. When I overcame my social anxiety and started hooking up with girls, I put this to the test. On a few occasions after sleeping with a girl I would think I “earned“ the right to smoke weed. I obviously had good chemistry with her before, when I wasn’t high. But EVERY single time despite already having had sex with her, after I smoked weed it got awkward. It wasn’t exposing me. It was bringing me down. I finally stopped deciding that weed was a test for my mental health.
This is crazy long and nobody’s probably going to read it but if anyone does and they’re thinking the same way. I want to know your opinions.