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I liked Halloween when I was a kid and it wasn't a big deal, just a fun little thing where you dressed up and carved a pumpkin and ate some candy. I don't like it now that it's another exploited money maker and waste generator here in the USA that goes on for an entire month and includes giant yard displays.

(I sound like a grumpy old man!)

My Person is away on a work trip.  He left on Tuesday and won't be back until the 9th, and I am not doing well alone in the house.  It's pathetic how much trouble I have functioning when there's nobody around to see.  I have enough trouble when there IS someone!  I really just want to be a functional person living a decently productive life, but I think it might be too late.  I don't think I can even blame my trauma.  I think I'm just lazy and shouldn't even be here.

If I ever want to be happier and more comfortable with myself, I will have to get better at doing things I don't like to do that I like the results of. 

Larry, thank you very much for your reply.  I started early in life too, and my history with it is long and weird, full of the question of how big a problem it is or isn't, and full of a perpetual longing for it to JUST NOT BE A THING ANYMORE.  Whether that would mean quitting entirely, or whether it would mean continuing to use but being comfortable with it, for it to NOT BE A THING ANYMORE.  Both have been possible in bursts, but neither has ever taken hold for more than a few weeks or maybe months. 

Looking back over my life, I can't say that cannabis has done me more harm than it has done me good, but nor can I say that it has done me more good than harm.  It has probably done me ever so slightly more good than harm in that it hasn't significantly screwed up anything in my life or caused any serious physical health problems and it helps me function and take care of myself, but my ultimate longing is to function and take care of myself without it.  The worst part is that a lot of the time I really don't like the way it makes me feel either, but it's often that very discomfort that prods me to function.  As a person, I tend to be quite inert.  My natural inclination is to do things only when someone else wants, needs or expects me to, and when left to my own devices pretty much stay still, lay low, and distract myself with things that don't require much physical movement (reading, watching TV, messing around on the internet).  Cannabis makes me feel antsy, which makes me move around and do things to soothe the antsy feeling. 

Something I realised a couple of years ago is that I spent most of my life heavily dissociated from my body, barely feeling it at all and having very little understanding of my physical experience. Since then I have been working on developing a relationship with my body, and something I have realised is that cannabis makes me feel my body, which seems to provide something I need to get me up and keep me going. I feel that I should be able to figure out how to accomplish this without having to first make myself feel worse in order to make myself feel better, but I haven't hit on it yet.

Thinking of you, san 

You know, I've tried various substitutes like that, and haven't really had any lasting success.  But then, I've tried a lot of things and not had lasting success.  It's very frustrating.  Yesterday I was searching through my old posts on this forum looking for something (which, frustratingly, I did not find), and I found I've made posts about this subject many times, always saying the same dang things.  Add in a zillion private journals and a thousand conversations with therapists and the one real life friend I feel able to talk to about it, and I'm thinking that I need to stop whining and accept that this is just the way it is for me.

NK, it was illegal for me too until 2018, but that just never stopped me, and I'm not even sure why.  I suppose because I thought it being illegal was stupid, and that staying away from being caught with it was easy enough.

I've never used alcohol on a regular basis.  It's never much agreed with me.  Cannabis is completely different thing for me.  In therapeutic amounts it will give me a mood lift, stimulate my energy and my creativity, and help me connect with my body.  The problem is that it's so hard to keep it to therapeutic doses.  My conditioning to overuse is longstanding and deep.  Tolerance develops, and with increasing doses come increasing negative side effects (excessive appetite, disrupted sleep, increased sensitivity to emotional triggers).  I think part of the problem is that behaviourally I'm hooked on the act of the inhaling. 

The thing is, realistically, cannabis does give me benefits and doesn't really cause me serious problems, just annoyances that make my life a bit less comfortable.  And trying to change habits is also annoying and uncomfortable.  I guess tolerating the familiar discomfort of overuse of cannabis is just easier than tolerating the discomfort of continuously resisting the urges for it.

I don't know.  I can't even believe I'm talking about this.  So much shame!

I've been self-medicating with cannabis for my entire adult life and my relationship with it is uneasy.  It's a medication that has the power to be very helpful if used properly, but my problem is that I have a very hard time not using it compulsively, and when I use it compulsively it still helps but also comes with some really nasty side effects.  I can never figure out how much of a problem my cannabis use really is or isn't.  If I could use it responsibly and moderately, I don't think it would be a problem at all, but that's an ideal I've been chasing unsuccessfully for years.  Sometimes I manage it for some period of time, weeks, months.  But inevitably I backslide.  I am so tired of this being an issue for me!

Thank you for your comments, friends.  They are always appreciated.  Be assured that I do read them and take them in even if I don't respond to them directly.

I feel so fragile, and yet I am holding up pretty well?  I'm getting my work done even though a hundred things about the job trigger me every minute.  I'm leaning more on cannabis than I wish I was, but I'm also leaning on some healthier coping methods like physical exercise and going out to the river and making another faltering but heartfelt attempt to learn how to play the bass guitar.  I'm eating too much food in general, but not crazy too much, and not much junk food.  Go me.  But inside I feel so awful most of the time, so tired of the struggle, so much like I don't want to be here, so trapped between the unhappiness of living and the fear of death.  And the guilt of even thinking about dying and leaving My Person on his own.  My Person and his generous mystifying unconditional love for me.  I have to keep living and have to keep trying to live my best life, because he needs me to, and the only thing I know how to do is do what other people want or need me to. 

When I was a child, I was always looking down at the sidewalk when I was walking.  I think I remember hearing my grandmother the psychotherapist saying something about it indicating that I had low self-esteem, but I think it might have been more that I was always hurrying to keep up (I don't think it ever occurred to my mother to slow down to accommodate a small child) and I was looking down to make sure I didn't trip over anything.  It could also have been that I lived in New York City and hurrying through that environment was too overwhelming for a small child who had no secure attachments and was never soothed with kind words or physical affection.  I think that there were times that my mother did try to engage with me in those ways, but when she did it confused and scared me because I never knew why it was happening.  Looking back (very few specific memories, just vague random flashes of people or places or things and waves of chaotic feeling), I think that my mother remembers herelf as having "paid a lot of attention" to me as a child because she would bring me along with her when she was doing whatever she was doing (shopping for dresses and costume jewellery and make-up, having her hair done, going to the bank, to the knitting shop, to the health club where I did pencil puzzles and word games in the lobby while she developed short-lived biceps, to the grocery store...what else? IT'S ALL SO BLANK!) and she would talk to me while riding the bus.  I imagine that she talked to me a lot when there was nothing else to do.  I think I spent a lot of time waiting around for her to talk to me.  I guess this is why all I ever want to do when I visit people is go along with them while they do whatever they want or need to do.  Also why I have spent so much time waiting around for Other.  Maybe even why I spend so much time distracting myself and have so much trouble being present.

I am fussy and anxious like a small needy child.  A grubby frizzy little mess casting about for a safe warm place.  Only on the inside, of course.  I've got my face on.  My functional human shell, which covers all that up just fine as long as no one looks too closely and no triggers get inside it.  What an exhausting way to live!

Thinking of you and sending good wishes san 

Maybe your words feel tired, too. They are good and hard-working words and I think they serve you well. But neither you nor they can be expected to work at 100 percent all the time. Rest and recuperate.

Interestingly, in the past few days I've noticed that my voice is tired.  It feels obstructed in my throat.  It cracks and I can't speak loudly or sing well.  I'm trying not to hear that my voice has started to sound a bit like my mother's.  I am full of new difficulties expressing myself.  My life must be trying to tell me something but I'm stumped on what it is. 

I used to write and write and write.  Why can't I use my words anymore?

I'm having a genuine existential crisis feeling like I finally understand what all the key problems in my life are and where they came from, and having to deal with the fact that even all that hard-won knowledge doesn't give me the first dang clue about how to solve them.  I feel lost and hopeless and like it's time for me to accept that it's too late to fix this chronic mental pain.  There is no way to keep from having part of me always somewhere else, wanting something else, yearning underneath all the motions of wellness I go through for something that can never be.