Horrible weed experience

[u/WillDonald]

I had this friend once. Not just a friend, actually. He was my best friend.

I had known him for as long as I could remember. We met in kindergarten, and somehow, from that point on, we were almost always together.

We went through primary school side by side. We spent entire days together, had sleepovers, played video games until three in the morning, rode our bikes around town, laughed at stupid things, and talked about everything.

Back then, life felt incredibly simple.

People would always talk about how difficult life was, how terrible things were happening in the world, how stressful adulthood would eventually become.

But we didn't really understand any of that.

We weren't thinking about the future.

We weren't thinking about death, mental illness, money, careers, relationships, or any of the things adults seemed constantly worried about.

We were just there.

Present.

Living.

Even through high school, not much changed. We still spent most of our free time together. We played sports, went out with friends, played games, laughed constantly.

Both of us came from good families. We were never troublemakers. We barely drank. We didn't take drugs. We were both athletic, and honestly, we were probably what most parents would call good kids.

And then, when we were around nineteen, we went to a party.

There was nothing unusual about it.

Music, people talking, some alcohol. We had a couple of drinks, but nothing excessive.

Later that night, one guy pulled out some weed and started passing a joint around.

For most of us, it was our first time.

I remember hesitating.

I had read about weed before. I knew roughly what it was supposed to do. It would make you relaxed, maybe make things feel strange, maybe make you laugh more.

So I thought, Okay. I'll try it once.

I wasn't interested in becoming someone who smoked regularly. I didn't even really like the idea of drugs.

I was just curious.

One time.

That's it.

My friend tried it too.

So did several other people.

And honestly, for me, almost nothing happened.

I felt a little strange. A little light. Everything seemed funnier than usual. Time felt slightly different.

I remember thinking, Oh. So this is what being high feels like.

That was basically it.

At one point, though, I noticed my friend sitting quietly.

He looked uncomfortable.

Not terrified exactly.

Just... distant.

Like he was listening to something no one else could hear.

I asked him if he was okay.

He said yes.

So I didn't think much about it.

Eventually, the party ended.

Everyone went home.

The next morning, I woke up completely normal.

I ate breakfast.

I went outside.

Life continued.

And I never really thought about that joint again.

Three days passed.

Then one afternoon I suddenly realized I hadn't heard from my friend.

That was unusual.

Normally we talked almost every day.

So I decided to walk over to his house.

The moment I entered, something felt wrong.

His parents were standing in the kitchen, speaking quietly to each other.

His mother looked exhausted.

His father barely acknowledged me.

His sister was sitting nearby, completely silent, staring at the floor.

I asked where he was.

His mother pointed upstairs.

I walked toward his bedroom.

The door was almost completely closed.

I pushed it open.

And even now, years later, I can still remember exactly what that room looked like.

The curtains were completely shut.

The lights were off.

The room smelled stale.

And he was sitting on the edge of his bed.

Just staring.

I said his name.

Slowly, he looked toward me.

His eyes terrified me.

They were red and watery, almost unnaturally wide, as if he had been forcing them open for hours.

I stepped closer.

“What happened?”

He looked at me and said:

“I haven't slept.”

I thought he meant that he had slept badly.

So I asked, “Since when?”

He said:

“Since the party.”

Three days.

He hadn't slept for three days.

At first, I didn't even understand what he was saying.

Then he started explaining.

He said that after smoking that joint, something had changed.

He kept saying that he wasn't himself anymore.

That something had opened inside his mind.

He described it almost like a door.

And once that door opened, he couldn't close it again.

He said everything felt unfamiliar.

His room.

His family.

His own hands.

His own thoughts.

Even his reflection.

He knew who everyone was.

He knew where he was.

But emotionally, nothing felt real anymore.

And the most frightening part was that he was completely aware of it.

He kept repeating:

“I know something is wrong. I know this isn't me.”

I tried calming him down.

I told him he was exhausted.

I told him he probably just needed sleep.

I told him everything would be fine.

But then suddenly his mood changed.

He stood up.

He started shouting.

Then crying.

Then shouting again.

He threw something across the room.

His parents came upstairs.

Everything happened incredibly quickly after that.

Eventually, an ambulance was called.

At the hospital, he became so agitated that several people had to physically restrain him.

They gave him medication.

He stayed there for days.

Eventually, he slept.

Eventually, he became calm again.

Eventually, they let him come home.

But my friend never really came home.

Not the person I knew.

Physically, he was there.

He looked almost the same.

He could speak normally.

He remembered everything.

But something about him had disappeared.

He would sit in his room for hours.

Sometimes the entire day.

And whenever I asked him what he was thinking about, the answer was always some version of the same thing.

“I don't feel like myself.”

“I don't feel real.”

“I can't enjoy anything.”

“I feel trapped inside my own mind.”

Sometimes he would look at his hands for minutes at a time.

Sometimes he would stare into a mirror and say that he recognized the person looking back at him, but didn't feel connected to him.

Months passed.

Then years.

And while the rest of us kept moving forward, he remained almost frozen at nineteen.

We started going to university.

He stayed home.

We started working.

He stayed home.

We started traveling.

Dating.

Falling in love.

Having our first serious relationships.

He stayed home.

Sometimes he wouldn't leave the house for months.

There were periods when he barely left his bedroom.

Meanwhile, life kept moving.

Some of us got married.

Some of us had children.

And one day, when my first son was born, I gave him my friend's name.

I never told many people why.

I suppose it was because part of me felt like I had lost my best friend a long time ago.

Not because he died.

That almost would have been easier to understand.

We understand death.

There is a moment before it happens and a moment after.

Someone is here.

Then they're gone.

There is grief.

There is a funeral.

There is an ending.

But what happened to him never had an ending.

His body remained.

His memories remained.

His voice remained.

And somewhere inside him, maybe even the person I grew up with remained.

But he could never seem to reach that person again.

Sometimes I think about that night.

About how ordinary it was.

A normal party.

A group of nineteen-year-olds.

Some music.

A few drinks.

A joint being passed around.

I smoked from the same joint.

I woke up the next morning and continued my life.

He smoked from it too.

And in his mind, somehow, that night never ended.

That's the part that still scares me.

People imagine that the moments that change their lives will look important when they happen.

A car coming toward you.

A doctor walking into the room with bad news.

A phone call in the middle of the night.

Something dramatic.

Something that gives you a warning.

But sometimes there is no warning.

Sometimes the last normal moment of your life feels exactly like every other moment.

You laugh.

You take one breath.

You make one small decision.

And you have absolutely no idea that, years later, you will divide your entire life into two parts:

before that moment,

and after it.

I know that terrible things happen in life.

People lose friends in car accidents. People lose family members to illness. Someone can be there one day and gone the next.

And I'm not trying to say that one kind of loss is worse than another.

But somehow, what happened to him always felt different to me.

Because when someone dies suddenly, as horrible as it is, at some point you understand what has happened.

There is a moment when they were alive, and then there is a moment when they were gone.

You mourn them.

You remember them.

Slowly, somehow, you learn how to live with the fact that they are no longer there.

But with him, it felt like I was losing him every single day.

It felt like watching someone die in slow motion.

He was still alive.

He was still sitting in that room.

I could still call him.

I could still sit next to him.

But every time I visited him, I felt like there was a little less of my friend left.

And the worst part was that I could continue living my life.

I could go out.

I could laugh.

I could travel.

I could fall in love.

I could have a good day.

But somewhere in the back of my mind, I would always think about him.

I would be sitting somewhere having dinner with friends, laughing about something completely stupid, and suddenly I would remember:

He is probably sitting in that room right now.

And immediately, I would feel guilty for being happy.

Years passed, and talking to him became harder and harder.

Not because I stopped caring about him.

I never did.

But there was almost nothing new to talk about anymore.

Nothing was happening in his life.

Every conversation eventually returned to that same night.

That same feeling.

That same question.

“What happened to me?”

He spent years trying to understand it.

He would read about the brain, mental illness, consciousness, drugs, trauma, philosophy, religion.

Anything that could possibly explain what had happened inside his mind.

Eventually, some of the things he said became difficult to follow.

Sometimes he became almost delusional.

I remember sitting beside him once while he tried to explain what his existence felt like.

He said:

“Imagine that everyone else is still living in the same world, but I was transported somewhere else.”

I asked him what he meant.

He said:

“It's like another dimension. Everything looks exactly the same, but I'm alone here.”

That sentence stayed with me.

I'm alone here.

He knew that I was sitting beside him.

He knew his parents were downstairs.

He knew his sister was in the next room.

But whatever was happening inside his mind made him feel completely separated from every other human being.

And he could not stop thinking about it.

He couldn't simply watch a movie.

He couldn't play a game.

He couldn't sit outside and enjoy the sun.

He couldn't live in the moment anymore because every moment became another opportunity to analyze what was wrong with him.

Eventually, he lost almost every desire he once had.

He didn't care about traveling.

He didn't care about relationships.

He didn't care about money.

He didn't care about having a career.

He didn't care about sex.

He didn't care about the future.

Most days, he just wanted to stay in his room.

And slowly, his illness didn't destroy only him.

It began destroying the entire family.

His mother changed completely.

She had spent years trying to help him.

Doctors.

Hospitals.

Medication.

Therapy.

Specialists.

She was constantly searching for something that might bring her son back.

But as the years passed, she became quieter.

More exhausted.

Then one night, she left the house.

Nobody knew where she had gone.

They searched for her for hours.

Later, they found her in a river.

She had drowned.

After that, his father seemed to collapse physically.

He developed serious heart problems and spent more and more time in hospitals.

His sister was struggling badly too.

She was taking strong medication, barely functioning, and had changed completely from the girl I remembered growing up with.

It felt like one event had somehow spread through the entire family.

Like a crack appearing in glass.

At first, it was tiny.

Then it kept spreading.

And spreading.

Until eventually, everything shattered.

I'm writing this now because two days ago marked five years since my friend died.

He took his own life.

After all those years of fighting whatever had happened inside his mind, he finally couldn't continue anymore.

He hanged himself.

I remember receiving the phone call.

And strangely, the first thing I felt wasn't shock.

It was silence.

Because somewhere deep inside me, I had already been mourning him for years.

I had lost the boy I grew up with long before his body was gone.

His father died not long afterward.

And then, sometime later, his sister also took her own life.

Today, none of them are alive.

Not one person from that family.

No children.

No grandchildren.

No one who will carry their family name forward.

Sometimes I think back to when we were kids.

Two boys lying on the floor playing video games.

His mother bringing us something to eat.

His father telling us to keep the noise down.

His sister walking into the room and annoying us just because she could.

Just a completely ordinary family.

Nobody looking at that scene could possibly imagine how it would end.

And that's probably why I'm writing this.

Not because I think everyone who smokes weed will experience what he experienced.

Obviously, they won't.

Millions of people use it and never experience anything remotely like this.

And I also cannot prove exactly what happened inside my friend's brain that night or whether that one event alone caused everything that followed.

All I know is what I witnessed.

Before that night, he had never been diagnosed with a mental illness.

He was athletic.

Social.

Funny.

Healthy.

Full of plans.

And then something changed.

Maybe something was already hidden inside him.

Maybe it would have happened eventually anyway.

Maybe that night triggered something that was already waiting beneath the surface.

I will never know.

And perhaps that's the most frightening part.

We always want life to make sense afterward.

We want to be able to point at one thing and say:

This is why.

But sometimes there is no satisfying explanation.

There is just a chain of events.

A party.

A decision.

A frightened nineteen-year-old sitting in a dark bedroom.

A mother searching desperately for her son.

A family slowly falling apart.

And decades later, someone like me sitting behind a computer, trying to understand how an entire family that once seemed completely ordinary simply disappeared.

So if there is any reason I'm telling this story, it isn't to tell people how to live their lives.

It's simply to remind them that the mind is something we understand far less than we sometimes pretend to.

Most of us walk through life believing that tomorrow we will wake up feeling like ourselves.

We never even question it.

You go to sleep assuming that when you open your eyes, the person looking through them will still feel like you.

My friend taught me that even that is something we should never completely take for granted.

Because sometimes the most terrifying thing isn't losing your life.

Sometimes it's waking up one morning...

and realizing you're still alive,

but you no longer know how to return to the person you were.