This is my first time posting - I am a 30 year old year guy from the UK. Today marks 12 weeks since i cut smoking weed out from my life. It was a necessity but at the time i didnt realise how much so. Looking back I feel saddened and quite ashamed at my usage.
The weeks leading up to me stopping weed were quite stressful and i felt that i had lost alot of control of how i felt and my emotions during that time. I was quite quick to anger and quick to becoming emotional. My levels of anxiety were also only by this point dealt with by smoking alot of weed to numb myself.
I realised things needed to change after lighting up the morning of the day before I quit and getting hit with an incredible bout of anxiety. I decided that the next day that was it for me.
To say i loved weed is an understatement - i am an amateur musician and it was wired into everything i would do through the day in my spare time when I wasn't working. I felt i couldnt make music without it which became a self fulfilling issue for me. My thoughts have now changed to the total opposite and where i would once love the idea of a new strain or rolling up a perfect spliff it now fills me with fear and worry. I would also come home from work and smoke the whole evening and tell myself I needed to so I could relax to be able to work the next day.
Work became a lot hard for me as my short term memory was poor by the last 6 months and I was not able to handle the levels of stress that some aspects of my job place on me. It would make my mental capacity overflow and I had to go home on a 2-3 occasions - obviously to smoke
I only actually smoked weed for 18 months but before that I would drink heavily. Binge drink to be exact. My weed use however quickly became very heavy - I was never one to drink at home by myself but smoking felt less of an issue. For the last 3-4 months before quitting I was maybe smoking between 5-8g a day of what you would call 'loud pack bud - good quality trees basically' depending on what I was doing. If I was at home all day making music it would be 7g+. To put things into perspective I would have my first spliff (maybe 0.8g) with tobacco and would only get a light buzz. I never really felt any effects that at the time I considered 'bad' - I thought I was happy. I would experience mild paranoia occasionally when high but I cant say I ever had a bad experience with weed which made me feel like I could quit easily. Every smoke was enjoyable until maybe the last week of smoking.
The experience of the first week was terrible - I would say the worst of my life to date. Sickness, Feverish dreams and flu like feelings through the day. loss of appetite, intense anxiety, and paranoia and a general fear about life and the future - I also could not feel any enjoyment in anything I was doing - I also stopped making music for a month. My brain function felt very slow and constrained, and I was not able to see past the end of the day. Time felt like it had stopped for me and life was continuing around me.
My head also felt incredibly cloudy and as if i was 1 or 2 steps back from what was happening - having regretably spent time on Google i think maybe this was a level of depersonalisation?
The first month for me now feels like a blur - the incredibly levels of anxiety, and at some points paranoia driven by intrusive thoughts and anxious worries remained with me daily. My mind would race and i would feel as if i was having feverish type dreams through the night and wake quite confused and anxious.
The second month continued much the same - and I have only really found some level of perceived normality this last week? But the anxiety persists - very aggressively in the morning and it drives me to think at times that this new sense of normality is actually just me having lost my mind which is a really upsetting thought.
One thing i have held onto through the process is that i have had a level of insight as to what has been happening. But sadly i havent been able to keep myself from Googling things and i have now developed an incredibly potent anxious feeling and worry about having cause myself long term mental harm and/or having triggered something in my brain that has allowed a repression of schizophrenia to now develop. Its very upsetting and this thought sticks with me at times during the day. It is spurred on by double thinking about sounds I hear or things I may think I see out of the corner of my eye, etc. The more I feed these thoughts the worse they seem to get.
12 weeks today and i do feel better. The past 2-3 days have for the most part been quite good for me. I have been laughing with my partner and enjoying our dog walks, along with enjoying a new box set we are watching - I have spent time reading all of the contributors stories on here and they have helped a lot which has driven me to post myself.
One post that sticks in my mind is that if mental illness was at play here then I would not feel better at all - I would be feeling worse and I try to keep telling myself this. I have also now been to see a therapist and my GP and they have both told me that having a level of insight is something which a disorder would strip me of. I also understand and keep telling myself that I am 30 year old male with no history of psychiatric illness so statistically the likelihood is very low. It is however so hard at times to keep this thought in mind whilst dealing with the symptoms of what I now understand to potentially be PAWS as some seem to cross over quite a lot?
My weed use coincided with a time in my life where I wasn't happy with who I was or what I was doing. It was a friend to me at a lonely time but I now have a wonderful partner who loves me dearly and I have made the changes in my own life for me to feel happier - and today 12 weeks in I do have a feeling of happiness. I have a new dog and I am back making music - sober. I feel quite emotional at the thought that I smoked weed as more than anything now I would like to return to the clear light hearted head I had 2 or so years ago.
I am also meditating twice daily and have been doing so for 6 weeks, and I am now back at the gym (something I gave up whilst smoking having been an avid gym goer my whole life).
Looking back I feel like I took to smoking to deal with feelings of depression and perceived sadness at where I was in life - and at first it helped, but it then sucked me further into the hole without me knowing - a warm embrace that slowly turned into a choking hold. My friends all smoked and it seemed like a good thing to be doing together.
I have just realised that I have written a lot for a first post and I am unsure whether anyone will take the time to read it all however this is in a way cathartic for me too as its the first time I have put down my thoughts and feelings in their entirety.
I feel that bit more connected to the world and my place in it and it is beginning to feel a little bit more like the world i remember leaving behind when i first started smoking. Weed at first made me think i had become 'enlightened' in a way and i could see things more clearly but after time i slowly see now that it made my world become a closed smokey bubble and the world seemed very small.
I am not sure what i am looking for with this post in regard to replies but it does help massively to know people are and have been in the same place as me. I am sure I have left some things out so if you have any questions or suggestions please do go for it.
Thanks for reading - I am commited now to total abstainance for life as all i want is to feel calm and collected enough to enjoy the small things in life without the worry that i have damaged myself.