Overmedicating To Retraumatise

[Bach]

I've been doing really well not binge eating and not chasing interpersonal drama for my retraumatising compulsions, but I need to stop pretending that I haven't been smoking too much cannabis.  For many years, cannabis was a big Substitute Problem for me.  A big source of toxic shame, and also a driver of another Substitute Problem, my eating disorder.  Using cannabis was something that I did furtively and compulsively for many, many years, like the 13-year-old I was when I started with it.  It never had any particularly reliable helpful effect on me, just a variety of things with which it helped amazingly well at times and worse than not at all at others, carried the drawbacks of fire, smoke and appetite stimulation, and was also always a problem for a million reasons having to do with it being socially frowned upon by so many people and, oh, yeah, ILLEGAL.  But every pharmaceutical I ever tried had terrible side effects and little to no benefit, and marijuana was a comfortable old thing for a long, long time for me to believe I'd be a better person without.  Then medical marijuana became available in my state, and despite my reluctance to "give in to being an addict" and stop "trying to quit", I got a card last year.  At first, it worked really well for me.  Being able to choose specific strains to address specific needs instead of the "pay your money and take your chances" model I operated under for my entire adult life was just amazing, as was not having to get into weird situations and fork over cash for whatever the friend of the friend of the friend had and then use it by throwing it at everything and seeing what stuck.
I was able to use cannabis constructively for several months.  Lately, though, I have reverted.  It's been at least a week now since I started noticing I was becoming undisciplined with my use of marijuana, telling myself I was still okay "because it's not like it used to be" and intending to "smoke less tomorrow."  Today I realised that I am smoking whenever I feel like it without really thinking about it, accelerating, and not only that, I have been smoking the wrong kinds in the wrong amounts at the wrong times, and it has been slamming my body with triggers.  Leave it to me to take something good like medical marijuana and turn it into another tool for my own destruction.

Okay, now that I've admitted it in public, can I please just stop?

[Tee]

  hugs Bach 

[Jazzy]

It's way easier to keep doing/go back to what you used to do... but you can quit! I believe in you! Take care

[Bach]

Was doing a little better with this for a while, have started to do a little worse again, am noting this here now for accountability so that I don't regress further.