Just Getting Started (painfully long)

Heyo. I'm new around here, but I feel like I know a couple of you pretty well already. I've been obsessively stalking many of the veterans here. Trying to figure out when the pounding ends, when my joyful spirit will return, when I'll see the colors of the world again.

I always thought I'd one day smoke weed, as I'd been researching it since about the age of 13. All reports and studies told me there was little to no physical withdrawl, and any cognitive impairment caused by weed was temporary and more importantly, negligible. I figured if the difference between sober me and stoned me wasn't noticeable, there's no harm in trying it.

Fast forward to senior year of high school, and it happened. And I enjoyed it. It made everything funnier, brighter, more vivid. However, I realized that this was also a bad thing. While physical addiction was off the table, I have an extremely addictive personality. I've been a serial masturbator for as long as I can remember, and I tend to get set in my ways, regardless of the phase of life I'm in. I smoked pretty infrequently that year, and life was good.

I graduated, and that summer was my first introduction to the now infamous THC Cartridges. Man those things were nice. Less noticeable smell, easy access, no clean up, holy crap. These things were a godsend. I only used them about once a week, which was fine. I eventually dropped the carts because of my upcoming college semester, and subsequently dropped weed entirely for a while. I had no real attachment to weed at this point, so there were no issues physically or mentally. I then started working at a Pizza Hut, which may have put the nail in the coffin for me. There isn't a single person there who isn't stoned 24/7. I eventually joined the fun and started smoking daily, and using edibles on my day off.

Eventually, I got sucked into my job as it was making me decent money, and it allowed me to get high whenever I pleased. I call this kind of lifestyle Stonerism. A life where you do just enough to get by, not fulfilled but content. Not joyful but happy, in a shallow kind of way. Eventually, I realized this was unsustainable. I wanted to get out, but I wasn't sure how. Then, in April of 2020, my dad passed away. This made things tremendously worse. My weed use spiked from stoned most of the time, to all of the time. Eventually, my tolerance got so high that only one thing was good enough.

Those good old THC Carts. My memory of the past 6 months is seriously hazy. I believe I even went through a single gram cart in a day at one point. One day, I snapped out of it. I decided I was done for good, that this blurry, emotionless lifestyle wasn't for me. I want to achieve, I want to excel. I remember who I was in high school and that's who I want to be.

The first few days of quitting weren't even that bad. I'd taken tolerance breaks before, so my feelings were nothing out of the ordinary. Just the usual insomnia, anxiety, and lack of appetite. Unfortunately, this was the calm before the storm. On day 7, something felt very very off. I wanted to cry. My memory seemed worse than usual. My heart was pounding. I had no idea what was happening to me. I figured these weren't even things that could happen during withdrawl, and was confused. The next day I felt worse. I woke up feeling depressed, anxious, my ears were ringing and my libido was gone. I finally did some research about what the hell could be going on, and found this forum.

Hello, PAWS. Nice to meet you. Hopefully we get to know each other pretty well on this journey. I'm on day 16 now and I've never felt so bad in my life. Currently, the worst of it comes in the morning and subsides by the evening. The constant symptoms are bad memory, brain fog, and lack of appetite. Depression and anhedonia are always there as well, but ease up as the days go on.

I have no idea how I'm going to beat this. I've seen some Inspirational stories on here, but some terrifying ones as well. I guess the one thing keeping me going is this: all paths ahead of me lead to a lack of suffering. If I can't function with PAWS, I will return to smoking. I'm 19, I need to get going in life now. I can't afford to take 2 years off of life. I'll be moving in 7 months, and hopefully a lot wiser on my situation by then. However, the idea of returning to smoking is very undesirable. I would prefer to ride this hellish existence out for 2 years, as long as I can function, with the promise of a return to normality.

Thanks for reading. I would love to talk to anyone else going through this, as it is extremely therapeutic to communicate with others that suffer in the same way I do.