Writing not smoking

Sixty days without smoking. A pretty neat milestone.
But I’m not out of the woods just yet. Temptation has a new face now that I’m living with my parents.

We’re on the coast, where I used to smoke all day, every day, on every corner.
My dad drinks a bottle of wine every night while I sit beside him sipping 0.0% beers.

As I crawl out of the nausea hell of the first trimester and get my iron levels back up, I’m starting to feel physically better, fitter, more capable of doing the things I love again. My body is coming back to me.

Apparently Ram Dass once said, “If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family.”
Nothing could hit closer to home right now.

Have you heard of ACA? Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families. Another Twelve Step fellowship. I won’t go into my personal eligibility today – but it’s safe to say I qualify.

I realised that while answering the questions in my Step One workbook yesterday:

Q: Did marijuana turn on me, and if so, when?
A: I don’t think weed has ever been on my side. The only times I enjoyed it were because of the people I was with. Weed didn’t give me joy – connection did. Weed has always, always been against me.

There were the 2.5 years I smoked to drown out my sex-addicted ex’s tantrums begging for blowjobs in the car, keeping me stagnant in a situation I loathed.
There was the first time I ever smoked, getting so paranoid I had to call my sister across London to rescue me from my own mind.
There was the time I gave up on my career, letting weed numb me because pushing through discomfort felt harder than sinking into the couch.
And there was the day I knew I was going to die if I didn’t quit – so I wrote a suicide note on the same paper I later used to roll a spliff.

That’s not alll in the slightest. I filled two A4 pages of handwritten examples of all the ways weed stole ten years of my life – and still, my addict brain has the audacity to whisper that one day I’ll be able to smoke “normally” again.

That’s addiction: a diseas of the mind that alters itself to survive.

I see it in my dad – nine years sober, Twelve Steps completed, and then one day he accepted a drink at a party. Now he drinks alone every night.

Addiction never sleeps; it never forgets your address.

Writing my Step One answers felt like signing a contract with myself. Sure, it’s just ink on paper, easy to shred and pretend never existed – but the act of writing it down forces a confrontation I’ve avoided for years. It makes me admit the truth: the problem was out of control long before I understood it.

Today, I am sixty days clean from weed and all other substances.
But I’m only on day two of recovery.

And that’s the scariest, most hopeful thing I’ve ever written.