I Loved Marijuana Until It Came for My Creativity

And what my relationship with psychoactive substances taught me about myself

Photo by Elsa Olofsson on Unsplash

From a young age, it was safe to say that I had an addictive personality. Whether cartoons, candies, or computer games — fleeting indulgences traded turns as objects of my single-minded obsession.

Well before I knew what drugs really were, I wondered what they could do and how they could alter our thinking. As early as elementary school, I harbored an image of myself trying every psychoactive substance known to man. I wanted to know everything there was to know and experience everything there was to experience by the time I left this tiny blue dot.

Before I grasped all of the ways our minds could quicken, slacken, twist, and expand, I wondered what was inside that gated domain called “drugs.” I struggled to shake my curiosity about what exactly those mental distortions might entail. What kinds of experiences could these substances occasion? What insights did they have to offer? What would it be to think… differently?

When I first tried marijuana in the summer leading up to eighth grade, it wasn’t long before I fell in love. Within a year, I became so umbilically attached that I had a hard time getting by without it. But throughout most of my years smoking, it never disrupted my routines so completely that quitting felt necessary. There are few drugs that are easier to integrate. Weekly use can easily devolve into ten-times-daily use just so long as we remain functional enough to fulfill most of our central obligations.

Much of what makes marijuana addiction so deleterious is that it hides in plain sight. Not many weed smokers get to the point of pawning loved ones’ belongings, betraying friends, or actively hurting others. (I did once get as far as selling off a few of my own possessions to pay for weed, but that was the worst it ever got for me.)

Most of the damage that I’ve done with marijuana has been to myself, my motivation, and my ability to orient my life. But because that damage has taken over a decade to mount and become undeniable, I’ve rarely felt regret about continuing to feed my addiction until recently.

As time has gone on, the few benefits that I’ve derived from marijuana use have become harder to access. Instead of social lubrication, it now mostly causes friction. It makes me a less attentive, less meaningful conversationalist.

It helps me with insomnia, but at the expense of being able to remember all of the wonderfully weird places I explore when I sleep. Soul-stirring odysseys disintegrate as my short-term memory fails to resurrect them. Even the lucid dreaming skill that I’ve spent the past few years honing has hit a wall. I often become aware that I’m dreaming as I sleep, exert control over the narrative as it’s playing out, and forget all of the plot points by the time I wake.

The creativity, too, that frequently came coupled with weed has dissipated for me almost completely. Very occasionally, it alters my thinking in a way that elicits quality insights or output. But more often than not now, it makes me lazy and inept. It necessitates naps from which I almost invariably emerge in indecisive fogs. It steals my time, and the hours it takes dilate into entire days.

One of the lessons that marijuana has taught me is that I don’t enjoy drugs that curtail my critical thinking. It’s why I find hallucinogens so endlessly fascinating, and alcohol so depressingly bland. I’ve been prescribed anti-anxiety medications and opioid pain killers at various points in my life, and while they temporarily treated the underlying symptoms for which they were prescribed, the accompanying malaise and confusion were such deal-breakers that I never felt the pull to continue using them recreationally.

As I’ve gotten older, my relationship with weed has taken on more of the side effects that are emblematic of harder drugs. As a result, the magnetism it once held for me has radically waned. If weed had such a crippling impact on me when I first began smoking, I would never have become addicted in the first place. I would have found the high too disagreeable. Too stupefying. Too bad for my lungs to justify the short-lived gains.

I read an article recently about the life trajectories of regular marijuana smokers. It explained that, according to a recent study, people who smoked weed through their twenties did not experience significant hits to the overall arcs of their lives and careers. It was when they continued to smoke into their 30s that the gaps really began to emerge between users and non-users.

“Using data from over 8,000 mothers and 2,000 children about drug use at ages 21 and 30, the team found that [marijuana] was associated with lower success rates based on nine specific criteria, including education, income, home ownership, relationship status, and reported happiness, but only if they continued into adulthood.”

While the study has received its share of criticism, it struck a chord with me because its findings identically align with my own experience. I distinctly see myself becoming another one of those dysfunctional adults if I don’t shift course immediately. I can feel the transformation finalizing with each smoky inhale.

If I continue down this road, by my mid-30s, I’ll be slothful, forgetful, and incapable of formulating my future. I’ll be unsure where I’ve placed my belongings, who I’ve met and what they call themselves, and uncertain of the very words that have left my mouth. Reading the article, I saw myself rapidly becoming the statistic it described. And I felt viscerally, violently opposed to undergoing such a devolution.

So with 6 months to go before I turn 30, I’ve reached as clear a crossroads as I’ve ever come to before. There are two paths sprawled out before me. Down one road is the reality where I let addiction win. I sleepwalk until I’m old and frail and wonder on my deathbed what the fuck I’ve done with my life. How I let so much time escape me. Why I didn’t reach out for life and breathe it in at every opportunity I found.

Then there’s the road where I get clean and pursue my dreams. Where I circumnavigate the globe and write about all of the humbling, confounding, and enlivening things that I encounter. Where I take colossal leaps into unfamiliar places, however daunting or petrifying the vaults. Where I engage as fully as I can with this strange world that I’m a part of.

Ultimately, one of the biggest reasons that I want to change is for my readers. With artificial intelligence on the rise, I fear that the writing profession has a set expiration date. I’m not sure whether it will be three years from now or thirty, but I know that I don’t have forever. And I know that with my limited time, I need the greatest possible command of thoughts, language, and memories if I’m going to offer all that I hope to.

I refuse to let addiction wall me off from the life I imagined for myself — to prevent me from leaving the dent in this world I’ve always wanted to.

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