Writing not smoking

I’m slow to write here. Partly because it feels like nobody’s reading, and partly because writing about sobriety still makes me cringe. It can feel self-serving. Whiny. Like narrating my own discomfort when no one asked.

But today mattered.

Today I sat down and completed Step Two: I came to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity.

Every time I drift from meetings or start fantasising about some distant, more evolved version of myself – the one who can smoke a joint casually, ceremonially, without consequence – recovery literature seems to intercept me with a sentence like this:

“We were not problem users whose problems went away when we threw away our stash. When we stopped using, we found we had a problem with living; we were addicts.”

No word of a lie.

Because I am in the trenches. Sober. Crying more than I’d like to admit. Overeating. Spending money I don’t have. Obsessing over the same mistakes, replaying them again and again as if repetition might finally yield a different outcome. Longing for the comfort of insanity, because beneath my weed addiction, insanity was familiar. It worked. It numbed. It kept the lights low enough to survive.

This isn’t to say addicts are “crazy” in the way people like to caricature us. But there is something disordered in the mind – a broken compass – and removing the substance doesn’t magically fix that. It just removes the anaesthetic.

What’s hardest to swallow, if I’m honest, is realising that I’m not a special case. I’m not uniquely wounded. I’m not exempt from the patterns that govern everyone else in these rooms. My addict really struggles with that.

So when I logged into my first ACA meeting today – Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families Anonymous – something clicked.

Of course this fits.

Of course I’m 27 going on seven.

Weed didn’t make me immature.

It babysat me.