Time to be honest with myself [cannabis]

Hello. Here's a long boring post.

26 years old, daily cannabis use for over a year now.

At first, it was great. I hadn't gotten high since i was 20 or so. Now i had the ability and freedom to get high as an adult it was much better, no paranoia about being "caught" or anything like that.

I had a stable but low-paying and rather unpleasant job, yet I found a way through the days, went home and got high and immersed myself in music and such. Getting high felt positive, and I was productive by making music, writing, reading, drawing and planning for the future. I became more social. All the while, I was taking vocational classes at the local college and felt really good about the direction my life was heading.

But then it stopped working.

Slowly found myself getting high every night, as opposed to weekends and days off. I stopped taking my antidepressants. I stopped being able to enjoy things if I wasn't high , like music, but then I would get high and listen to music and not feel anything. That was pretty tragic for me tbh.

Life hit a rut. I quit my job, and took a zero-hours position. Since then, with all this free time on my hands because I can go a week between shifts, I've been getting high even more but have also become way more unhappy.

Through this haze, I did try and make positive steps in the right direction. I managed to barter my skills that I learned at the college to get a place at university to do something genuinely really cool. The kind of thing that I would see someone else do and think "wow that's cool, wish i could do that, how do you even end up doing that anyway?" if you know what i mean. I have been wanting to do this course for ages, before I even started getting high again. But I don't really feel any type of way about it. I should - when I tell people what I'm planning to do, they all seem really impressed, think it's cool, are proud of me, are supportive. But I'm not really doing anything or working hard in preparation for the course which starts later this year.

At this point, I get high out of habit and when I'm high I don't enjoy it - there's no excitement or positivity or appreciation for art or any sense of fun. Just get disappointed and question what I'm doing. What i'm doing to myself. Thinking about how I might be harming my mental health further, about how I should probably stop. I get high and procrastinate.

I think my mental health has always been very poor, as far back as I can remember and have always struggled with being happy or finding any meaning in my existence. After introducing cannabis to my life, I felt a brief surge of positivity and enjoyment but now I think I'm just chasing that initial feeling long after the cannabis has stopped working for me. I always wrote it off, and i'm embarrassed to be writing this, in a way like "i'm just going through a depressive cycle, I don't think the weed use is linked to my current state" or "this is just situational, I'd feel bad weed or no weed"

While there might be some truth in all of this, I'm positive that cannabis isn't exactly helping the situation. Even if it isn't the root cause of all of this, it certainly isn't a good thing for me to be doing. I definitely use it as an escape, but gain no pleasure from it. That's pretty much addiction right? The fact that I know I shouldn't get high, don't want to get high but end up getting high anyway and regretting it. I've gone through all sorts of mental gymnastics to justify this behavior but I'm exhausted now.

I've been reading r/leaves on reddit for a while now, and pretty intently the past few days. I always kinda shrugged it off, like "well i never get high in the morning, or go to work high, i'm not like this guy" etc. but I obviously had enough concern to keep reading. I had a bunch of tabs for posts i wanted to read but last night I opened my browser, while high, and saw everything and felt very emotional. I think I need to stop.

Probably wont be easy as, like I said, i'm a pretty unhappy person and before I latched on to cannabis i had pretty worrying and growing opiate habit. Then benzos with the weed. While i've dropped those two things (although get tempted) I know i'm just one of those people who's gonna have to work hard to not take drugs to escape the misery of life. Yet I feel a great urge to stop completely, despite all my suicidal tendencies and existential, nihilistic dread. On one hand I'm like "who f***ing cares, life's sh** and meaningless so i'm just get high, then die and then nothing" and the other side I know deep down I don't want to be this way. I'd like to experience real, organic, pure and honest emotion and drugs are getting in the way of that.

Wow I've rambled for too long. Basically, can you tell me what I need to hear please. thanks for reading.