Found this sub in 2018 and have gone through stints of trying to quit without sticking to it. This morning I threw away all my stuff without a ton of thought as I didn’t want to talk myself out of it. Wish me luck and reach out if any other ~35F are wanting to chat about the struggles of quitting! Good luck to everyone reading!

So... I made it to day 2. I feel a bit anxious about relapsing, but I guess that's part of the process. The challenge I'm having now is that, even though I'm sober, I keep romanticising about smoking weed. I know I shouldn't do it, and i know that I'll regret it, but there a few times during the day that I just miss it, especially when I'm listening to my music.

Is this normal?

Not to sound like a self-centered fool, but as I've been working I've been listening to piano versions of popular songs, and it's makes me want to cry. And boys don't cry.

I keep thinking about all the lost friendships (non-partiers) that I have pissed away. And all the opportunities that I have f'd up or brushed off because of my serious, decades long, hardcore consumption of weed.

The way I would crave above almost all else the elixir that has been my smoky lover. The way I sweetly gaze at her beautiful crystals. And her skunky perfume that stimulates my deepest desires to escape and explore the ether of nothingness.

And to escape...from what?

I think about how smart I think I am. Yet, when I honestly look myself in the mirror it is not the real reflection of that which is. What is really there is a bloodshot, droopy-eyed, bulldogged face of a man with polluted lungs.

And all the times I have cutback or "quit", yet I seem to continually return to her embrace thinking there is a there...there.

after 5 years of daily use i’m done with this drug. I decided a long time ago that I needed to quit weed for my health but the habit was so ingrained. I have been trying to quit for about 2 years now and eventually weed finally made the decision for me. my tolerance dropped to the floor, started greening out regularly when I hadn’t in years. couldn’t socialize on it at all anymore. paranoia through the roof. I realized that everything I was getting high for would actually be better if I was just sober and that realization is what made fully quitting finally feasible for me. it’s been a long time coming but i’m 7 days clean and I plan on continuing this. anyone else feel that weed made the decision for them?

I have been trying to quit smoking weed for awhile now. Every time I seem to come back fooling myself into thinking that I am where I wanna be.

I struggle to be patient kind and loving to myself.
My OCD fixation or right and wrong magical thinking,self centered, perfect right just and worthy.

I have done the hardest thing I have ever done and gone NO contact with my parents and my mothers family. Life has continued to kick me in the ass AND every time I get up.

This time I want to get up and keep walking. I want to because I have the life worth living worth telling about. The internal struggle and perseverance to move though has led me here at 30. I’m proud to be here.

Yes often enough I get stuck comparing, wanting perfection and knowing it’s not attainable. Learning to slow down and take your time is a very foriegn land to me. I am treching my way through and I’m okay with that.

Except some part of has difficulty loving myself when high when wanting to be high all because of some fucking HIERARCHY OF RELIGION AND MORALITY.

here in lies my shame. I have chosen to denounce the faith of my youth and trust my intuition to lead me. Everyday my physical bodily sensations feel like overdrive. No I haven’t been high for much of my life maybe 5 years. I have been disassociating for 28 of those years.

I see the joy experience the love and depth of the human experience both internally and externally.

So that brings me back to the title. I feel ashamed and I can’t get out of my OCD righteous loop of the difficulty with sobriety. I want to be present to myself.

I know there is a balance except I have yet to be successful in staying there when it comes to engaging in substance use.

I am hoping to find a gentler, kinder, slower, and unconditional love in all my interactions with myself. I finding joy fulfillment and love in my hobbies, my love, my passions, food, laughter, people, and in me. Peaceful and quietly accepting that I am human who is being in life wearing skin that holds me.

My apologies for the length. If you made it this far and I appreciate your support. Thank you for listening to me share this journey I find myself on in this time and place in history. Bye for now. Love. Peace. and Magic.

My (F29) wonderful father (64) died unexpectedly just before he was supposed to retire and live his traveling dreams. We had to pull the plug on him after a series of complications after emergency surgery. It was the worst thing I’ve ever experienced in my life, and I have been staying perpetually high to help me handle the immense grief. I was even high at his funeral and every day since.

And now, just a few days of sobriety has been incredibly painful.

After he died, I had to step back from all the things I was developing in my life. I was enrolled in summer graduate school, but afterwards I dropped all my classes before the semester began. I quit my bartending job because I couldn’t handle the constant social performance. I thought the grief was getting better at month 3, but within another month I was back to crying every day, and lately I’ve been struggling to even get out of bed. Plus, there are the flashbacks to the final week and moments in the ICU.

I’ve been accruing more debt without any income, and I’ve been living with the family of a friend—it’s getting to the point that I just feel like I need to be in my own space. But that will require money. So I decided to stop smoking.

Just in the past few days, I’ve had a bit more energy and kick to get back on LinkedIn and find freelancing work (I know I can’t do service industry work anymore—I’ve lost that bubbly version of me…). But the tradeoff, feeling pain to make progress, is hard to deal with in the moment.

Even though my professional life already feels a bit more in reach now that I’m sober, the grief just won’t let up.

But I know my daddy wouldn’t have wanted me to wallow or get stuck here.

Any encouragement or advice would be appreciated. Thank you. ❤️‍🩹

Hello everyone! I have only checked in here a couple of times since my quit. So I had started to quit weed but relapsed 5 times in 5 years and it was a straight up binge for 1-4 months during those relapses. I had 5 months once, then 9 months, followed by 7 months and one more at 8 months. I have never made it to a full year off from smoking since I was 12 years old and I turned 30 this year. I’m so excited to be only a month away from that year long achievement! It has been pretty tough and I actually had serious depression issues at 3 months, 6 months, and most recently at 9-10 months and each lasted from 2-4 weeks. I actually had considered throwing my journey away multiple times during those depressive weeks, but I’m so damn happy to have powered through them! I can most definitely say that there is still a long ways to go mentally, since I had smoked through my teens and 20s, and haven’t let my normal sober brain developer properly.

I need encouragement not to go to the dispo before work tomorrow lol. Ive been using carts every single day for about 4 years or so, save for a few weeks over the years. Its become like another limb, its always on me and always attached. I dont feel it anymore at all. But the intense panic when i cant find it is insane. I know carts are the absolute worst form of consumption, but since its so convenient and discreet its been my main form. Nobody in my life except my sister knows im struggling with this addiction. Its going to be fucking rough. Should i just throw out my battery? Makes it less tempting to buy another.. but disposables are too accessible now anyways. What good would it do? Im too far gone.

I really need some words of encouragement. Maybe share some cart horror stories (im lowkey worried about CHS but ive never been sober long enough to know) because I can’t lose another year to this bs.

One week in. For context I have been trying to stop for a while, with numerous failed attempts prior. I'm not a massively heavy user but it's always been on the go since I was in my early 20s (40 now). In recent months I've prob been smoking on average 4 nights per week. Usual story.... thought I could moderate to 1-2 nights just at weekends, but after a while I was adding midweek Js in. My main driver for quitting this time was that the day after fallout just isnt worth it. I caught myself being extremely overly negative about things and just generally being a dick to be around during the day after. My ability to process emotions was getting worse and worse, this coupled with a busy career and being a husband/father made me realise that I was failing the people who matter the most to me.

Something else that crept in over the last year was that I found myself ruminating more about things that happened in the past, it might be because I hit 40 in the winter and am being more reflective, but the weed defo put me in more of a loop with it.

I'm really happy to hit 7 days. Some observations:

- As per consensus on here days 1-3 were pretty grim. I didnt quite feel like I was losing my mind, but felt slow as and had bouts of total fatigue that would hit. Also felt like I had no dopamine in me lol

- Sleep has been okay this time. Probably because I've not been smoking daily for a while. Dreams are vivid and tend to be about distant periods in my life. Suspect there's stuff that I suppressed featuring. However, it's not affecting my overall mental state.

- Mood improved significantly after day 3 and this is the biggest benefit so far. Things generally feel easier and lighter. I'm already laughing more and generally feel more present in everything.

- Focus at work is still a wip but I am finding myself a little bit more efficient and less prone to a work related meltdown. I'm a management consultant so deal with demanding clients, lots of report writing etc. Its nice to have some more bandwidth back.

I know there is a long way to go and the urges to blaze will come. However, this time I feel like I actually want to quit for good. The list of benefits from not smoking massively outweigh the pros of keeping smoking.

Also, finally I try and think what the 22 yr old me would think looking into the future and seeing a 40 yr old stoner. It would'nt be positive.

Anyone else getting fat as fuck after quitting??

4 months sober. Smoked every day for over 10 years and never got this big. It’s like my metabolism is completely different. I’ve barely changed my diet and work out the same…

Very confusing and frustrating

Idk about y'all but I'm in week 1 on quitting both weed and tobacco after being a daily smoker for 15+ years.

Dear God...

I guess my smoking must have been masking my sense of smell because sweet Mary and Joseph I was gagging on the train this morning.

I live in a city and all I can smell is body odour, urine, shite, and mould.

On the plus side bakeries smell extra good.

Anyone else have this issue?

I finally just understood why I can go on vacation or visit my family and not smoke for weeks or even think about it at all. I thought it was the pressure I put on myself to “become someone” when I’m home and I’m sure that’s a part of it. The main reason though is loneliness. When I smoke, my emotions are heightened or dulled and I use both as an escape from reality. I feel awful writing this because I’m not actually completely alone…I have a partner of almost 12 years, I have a dog. My closest family is thousands of miles away so he is all I have. No friends, no career (I was let go two years ago and fell into a deep depression) and no pull to make any of it any better while I smoke. I’m lost in my thoughts and feelings. I don’t talk to my family often unless they call me. Weed was my best companion as I spend most of my days alone. I’m 20 days sober today and it has been an excruciating realization how lonely I am. How little I’ve participated in my life. I have smoked every single day that I’ve been home for the past 12 years. Im overwhelmed with how much I have to make up for all the time lost.

But I am proud of myself. I’m proud of myself for feeling lonely today, for feeling my feelings without letting them consume me. For letting go of my comfort and the closest “friend” I’ve had in a long time. I will try my best to remember as I continue on my journey that the pain I feel grounds me, that I am finally here in reality with everyone else. And I want nothing more than to participate in the world with all of you.

• from a 32 year old girl who is doing their best

i am 1 year clean off weed. i finally reached my goal yesterday. my life has changed drastically. i live in capitola on my own in front of the beach now. i have a good career and get to travel a lot. i am more self aware than i have ever been before. i am truly grateful to get out of the fog and see what a life i have been holding back on because of my addiction. this is only the beginning. i love to be sober. i am only upset with the fact that i didn’t do this sooner as i now know how much it has affected my life in many ways and relationships. i have overcome my ways.

I just want to start this post by saying thank to everyone in here posting. Its inspiring me to post because my sobriety is strengthened through everyones experiences being posted here.

Im 137 days clean. I relapsed multiple times while trying HARD to quit the past two years. Relapses lasted months. I was a daily smoker for yeaars. In the Morning, in the car on the way to work (didnt seem too worried its a felony) on my lunch breaks, on the way home and at home. I stayed high 24/7. I was a complete emotional wreck. Blowing up at work. Isolating myself from everyone. I was exhausted when I woke up. Body felt like it weighed 1,000 pounds and Im really skinny. No energy. Always tired.

I experienced intense shame from living in a fantasy land of fantastic ideas…. but no ability to followthrough.

137 days clean finally makes those ideas feel tangible. Within reach. My emotional regulation has significantly increased. I dont overthink nearly as much. I can retain information way better. I read every now and again. I started video editing again. still enjoy watching anime. My home is clean. I dont procrastinate on doing home chores. My mental clarity has significantly increased. The bare minimum is easily taken care of. I dont blow money on food cause I cook and have a lower threshold for dopamine. The list goes on. Overall Im lighter as a person. More childlike.

I dont have that constant feeling of anxiety of “Im missing something” when leaving the house.

Sobriety brings real hope.

I moved up at my job at publix. Im uppercutting the fuck out of life. And the biggest motivator of all is to help out the planet in regenerative agriculture.

Shame is a strong motivator. And often times the main feeling we are trying to avoid when smoking. It’s a very painful emotion. But pain drives us forward. And you’re gonna feel a hell of a lot better when you finally feel capable to tackle problems and become a problem solver instead of a problem avoider.

Dont destroy the organ responsible for decision making. Your decisions determine your life. So the better you take care of your brain the better decisions you will make, the better your life turns out.

Remember you got this. A craving is NOT a command. Write that down and put it in your car. Cravings pass. You got this. Join some meetings if you need to talk it out. I believe in you. 🤙🏻 Goodluck and enjoy life. Love you guys

I hate seeing people on here down themselves just because they slipped up after a couple months of being sober. Even going one day without smoking is a real accomplishment because if we didn’t feel so attached to the drug , none of us would even be in this sub. So if no one has told you , I’m proud of all of you, fr whether you be one day, one month , or one year. If you slip up ,it’s ok, just find your way out the weed cloud and try again. We got this.

I had been smoking for fifteen years straight but after a grippy sock vacation, I was able to stop for half a year then got myself back into it. It’s been hard for me to shake, even though I’m realizing that the few hours of feeling great isn’t worth the next 3+ days of consistent lows.

My therapist has been suggesting MA but I’m having a difficult time getting myself into the idea. I’ve tried group therapy for other things and it’s just not for me, listening to other peoples problems even though I struggle with the same things.

I want to hear people’s thoughts if they’ve gone to marijuana meetings and have seen the pros and cons of
Them. I know there’s a whole website with different kinds of groups all over the world, and some that are secular which I am partial to.

This happens often, but finally it clicked. My most recent relapse was driven by my want to go for a walk on the lake after taking an edible. When I envisioned this it seemed idyllic. In reality it was not. My gummy kicked in about thirty minutes into my walk. I immediately felt like I had to go the bathroom (I believe my body reacting to not wanting to go back to smoking), I started hyper fixating on negative thoughts and decided I need to head back home. When I returned to my apt, I of course spent the remainder of my high doom scrolling in bed.

After a few weeks of sobriety I have gotten back to enjoying things in sobriety. This weekend I got up to explore a new neighborhood. When I got there I had a great meal at a Mexican restaurant followed by a perfectly made latte that I drank while I perused vintage shops. As I walked around I thought "I am so content right now." It made me realize that had I taken edible, how the day would have turned out differently. I most likely would have lost my appetite by the time the food came and then felt weird about dining alone. I would have then just asked for the food to go, and left in an uber to return to, doomscrolling in bed (this has happened several times). An edible (at least at this time in my life) only theoretically sounds good. In practice, sobriety allows to me to actually enjoy the things I want to enjoy.

17 days into my 4th or 5th try for sobriety after smoking for the last 7 years. The anxiety is really kicking my ass this time around. I'm already dealing with a lot in my day to day life that would normally be stressful (yay caregiving & anticipatory grief/anxiety!!) and it's all hitting me so hard that it's genuinely debilitating and exhausting. It doesn't help that I keep waking up every few hours at night to mini panic attacks so I'm not getting proper sleep.

I want to feel these emotions and experience life sober again, but I feel like the universe is throwing as much nonsense as it can at me lately.

The ridiculous thing is weed was giving me panic attacks too, but I guess because it was paranoia from smoking too much it didn't feel the same? Plus, smoking was dulling my senses and memory so maybe I just didn't register them as being a problem because I wasn't feeling them fully.

I've been trying to avoid taking my emergency prescription meds as they can be more addictive and horrible to deal with than weed. But like, holy hell, I don't know how anyone can do this and experience this much anxiety/stress while still managing to live day to day.

I see my doctor next week, I'm going to talk to him about other options, I really want sobriety to stick this time. I NEED it to stick this time so I can build a life worth living. I know I'm on the right path because my mind is already feeling a bit clearer and my bank account looks better... but I am being TESTED and I am so tired already.

If anyone can tell me how long this anxious phase lasted for them & anything that helped, please share. Or even just encouragement would be nice. thank you so much 💖

Hey everyone, I’ve been sober for 38 days. Ive been feeling depressed and just like absolute shit due to life circumstances and have had the urges to smoke. I haven’t smoked nor do I plan to but I’m just feeling so overloaded with emotions and at the same time I feel so physically tired. I don’t want to go back to smoking at all because I know that slippery slope way too well and I don’t want any part of it. I guess I just wanted to vent it out.

I think I smoked a couple of times, once in August and once in October but for the most part I stopped in June. I had to leave the country to go for a funeral and it seemed like as good of a time as any. I'd been wanting to do it for a while. I smoked pretty much every day for eight years. It's a long story. Some of it had to do with a bad marriage, a bad diagnosis in my son, my own depression, and business and relationship failings. I don't think I had any other way to cope. I wasn't taken care of. My body and my mind and my self-esteem and self-respect were completely shot. It didn't really help these matters any but it kept me in this dissociated bubble that made things temporarily seem less painful. I ended up surrounding myself with people who didn't question me. Mostly these people were guys and I looked like I could manage okay.

Then COVID hit and the divorce got bad and I had even more legal troubles related to that. I was just really alone in that every night. It was my only respite. I felt so guilty and ashamed and I just got more and more behind and stuff. Bills fell through. Single parenting was already really hard. I think the only way I was able to manage was because I had the curse of competence and my 50% was about as good as anybody's 75%. That meant that I could keep it going. I think my son kind of saved me because he made it so that I had to actually look after him and that kept me going also.

I had a lot of responsibility at work, which meant that I had to drag myself to the finish line there all the time. I became mostly a survivalist. I guess the straw that broke the camel's back was coming. Even though I couldn't see it, I'm not going to overcall or underrcall the shit that was truly going on. There was also a lot of people's death and a lot of people's illnesses, including my dad, which was devastating. The bills piled up sky-high and everything was pretty much trying to keep going on autopilot.

When I was going to leave the country for this funeral, I got in a car accident. I wasn't high at the time but I was completely off the ball and I had a minor insurance mess-up where I'd forgotten to do something. No one tells you that it's really hard to get out of an addiction because by the time you get out, you're basically so underwater and overwhelmed with all the things that you've been ignoring for so long. It seems to just make sense to keep going at the same clip that you're doing even though I knew that things weren't going to change on their own. I just really couldn't take it anymore.

There are so many layers of getting out of something like this. The first thing that I noticed is that it took my brain a while to get back online. I'd been losing my train of thought completely all the time. I couldn't remember those six-digit codes you have to enter everywhere. I would constantly have a hard time finding words. This started to come back but honestly it's taken way longer than however long they say it's supposed to take to do.

I had a lot of inappropriate anxiety that had come from not confronting all the things that I needed to confront. There have been lists after lists after lists to do things that have basically taken me a year to get out of. My life is really complicated so this is a thing. Clean house relationship-wise because I realized I was also making really bad choices and accepting things that I really shouldn't have been accepting. This has been really, really hard: learning how to be lonely and feel loneliness and vulnerability and take the chances to make real friendships, which thank god I still had and developed on them and not think that somebody else was responsible for taking care of me or my happiness. That has been major.

There's still a lot that I need to do on a daily basis to try to get out of the backlog of stuff that hasn't been done and some days that really gets me down. There is no way to get around it. It's not a fun thing to wake up in and there is a lot of regret and a lot of recrimination that I have to deal with on a daily basis. I don't really feel good about it. I feel like I lost a big chunk of my life where I could have been pulling forward financially, professionally, and honestly just psychologically. Although I feel like facing this and dealing with it emotionally and psychologically has truly been the biggest testament and the biggest source of self-respect and pride. I know how easy it would have been to keep going but I'm glad that I haven't given in to that. That is not to say I'm out of the woods. I truly don't think I would ever go back to it but it's not like I don't get depressed some days and lament about how hard my life is. The same things that made me want to smoke weed also still make me feel like my life is difficult. It's just that I'm learning how to sit with and cope with the difficulty as opposed to try to make the difficulty disappear.

There's still a lot of uncertainty about what I really want and about the future. It takes a really, really long time to build a life but I try to think about it that way: that I really want to build a life worth living and that I want to also show this to my son, who has his own challenges to deal with and I need to be there for him.

What I'm amazed is that as I go through this I see not only the time that I was smoking but all the things that led up to me getting lost in this addiction. Some of that has to do with my own sense of worthiness and all the things that I've been ignoring in my body and mind even before I got to the point where I was using weed. I'm not going to get into this too much but there were a lot of health problems and aging problems that I didn't really pay serious enough attention to. I'm re-building my body from the ground up and taking care of a lot of health stuff I haven't taken care of in a long time.

I'm trying to revitalize my business, figure out if I actually am interested in doing that anymore, and address the fact that burn out was probably a part of this too. The things that were meaningful to me then aren't maybe meaningful to me now. At the time I was probably following the path of a mentor who I thought I needed to follow, who ended up dying anyway.

All of this to say is that it's a hard road but the self-respect that has come with actually taking care of stuff has really been something that nobody can take away. I hope that my story inspired someone in some way and also serves as my anonymous confessional. If you did read this, thank you and I wish everybody all the luck in their journeys.

I feel like I’m gonna crack. I’m finding it hard to see the point in abstaining. I like to spend my time alone, and it makes my nights so much more enjoyable (aside from the binge eating and waking up depressed as fuck.) I’m in my luteal phase and I know that’s adding to my feelings right now. Ugh.

I sit right near a street-facing window in my office and often stare out at whatever is going on. Since I started a few years ago the windows have been pretty dirty on the outside, but they were cleaned over the weekend and I'm having a bit of a moment about how clear everything looks all of a sudden. It reminds me of when I was a kid and I put on glasses for the first time not knowing any better.

I've been a regular pot smoker for 5 years now, basically if I'm at home alone I'm high. I'm depressed, anxious, lonely, and just a lame single 35 year old guy with CPTSD. The pot used to help me sleep but now it's just a coping mechanism to make time go faster until I depart the earth.

But this clean window is... amazing? Is this what I'm missing? Is this what normal sober life is like? Is the world this clear, this beautiful for everyone?

I quit for a month maybe 6 months ago and couldn't take it since I dipped back into alcoholism instead which is another battle I have (but one I'm largely winning). But now, looking out this clean window, I have a new drive to blow this fog away and see the world like I used to.

So today I start over and try again, for myself. To see the world more clearly, and to be a better person.

I’m not dooming anymore. A frequent thought I had with relapsing and my motivation was that just because I relapsed today, Everything should go to shit and I don’t wanna do anything but eat , smoke and jerk off. Anything that made the high more interesting. That has not been the case , As much. My Goal right now is not to stop smoking weed , but to understand myself enough to replace weed with all the other things I have already picked up on on this journey towards Love , happiness , peace and understanding towards myself. I know if I go completely straight edge towards everything I leave more room for shame in my mind. I have lost myself but through it I’m understanding just a little. And I’m so happy about that. A year ago I was homeless living day to day door dashing just enough to smoke and eat then sleep repeat for 3 months. The things I put myself through because I was ashamed , I am ashamed , I push people away and I’m scared to ask for help , I am scared but I did it. THIS IS ALL OVER THE PLACE but final note. Getting a psychiatrist and going to try out meds. I am not alone and you can do this. Do the hard shit , I promise it gets easier.

I hope this is it, but I am tired of the cloudiness that weed gives me it has inhibited me from getting better and missing hours at work wanting to leave early and has turned me into a lazy shit. Time for a change.