When Weed Turned the Volume Down

The first time I smoked weed wasn’t about rebellion. It was about grief. It happened with my brother — my mom’s son — the one I only saw every few years after she died. After she was gone, we didn’t grow up together. We didn’t process the loss side by side. Life scattered us, and grief became something we carried separately.

That moment was the first time since my mom died that we were coping with the loss together. The one year anniversary of her death. We didn’t sit down and talk about her. We didn’t know how. We didn’t have the language.

But for the first time, the weight wasn’t mine alone. We were both hurting in different ways. Both carrying grief that had nowhere to land. Both trying to survive a family fracture that never really healed. In that moment, weed didn’t feel like an escape — it felt like a pause.

The noise softened. My thoughts slowed.

My body relaxed in a way it hadn’t in a long time. That’s what stayed with me. Not the act itself — but the relief. The quiet. The feeling of finally exhaling. The sense that my nervous system could stand down, even briefly.

And the connection mattered just as much as the relief. Because that was my brother. Because we were grieving the same person. Because for a moment, I wasn’t alone in missing her.

After that, weed showed up again — not constantly at first, not obsessively. It wasn’t something I had regular access to. But whenever it appeared, my body remembered what that moment felt like, and it also gave me a sense of closeness to my brother. Simply knowing we were doing one thing the same, even if it wasn’t together.

It remembered the quiet. It remembered the softening. It remembered what it felt like not to brace. It remembered the connection in that moment.

By then, I already had a pattern. I had been using boys and intimacy to regulate pain. I had used self-harm to release it. Now I had found something that made my mind quieter without needing another person to stay. Weed didn’t feel dangerous to me. It felt familiar. It didn’t fix my life. It didn’t heal my trauma. But it gave me temporary relief in a body that had never learned how to rest.

And when you grow up in survival mode, anything that gives your nervous system a break feels like medicine. No one was teaching me how to process grief safely. No one was helping me regulate emotions or make sense of what I had lived through. So my body filed weed away as another solution — another way to cope.

Not a warning sign. Not a problem. Just another tool. At the time, it felt manageable. Something I could pick up and put down. What I didn’t understand yet was that relief without support slowly becomes dependence.

Weed didn’t start my addiction. It simply fit into a system that was already forming — a system built around escaping pain instead of healing it, quieting fear instead of facing it, surviving instead of being supported.

This wasn’t rock bottom.

It was the moment relief started to feel necessary. By the time ninth grade began, the quiet I had tasted wasn’t enough anymore.

Weed had shown my body what relief felt like — but it hadn’t changed my life.

The bullying was still there. The grief was still unresolved. The abuse at home had escalated. And the shame I carried felt heavier by the day.

I had learned that silence was possible. Now I needed it to last.

What started as shared grief and occasional relief turned into something else entirely. Something private. Something daily. Something I needed just to make it through school without falling apart. That was the moment my addiction stopped being situational and became necessary. That was the moment I realized I couldn’t live inside my head anymore.

CLOSNG PRAYER

God,

Thank You for moments when I wasn’t alone in my grief.

For the rare times connection softened pain when words couldn’t.

Hold the memory of my mother gently —

and the ways her absence shaped how I learned to cope. Heal the places where relief replaced care.

Teach my body now how to rest without numbing, to grieve without running, and to feel without fear. Thank You for staying near — even when I didn’t know how to stay.

Amen.

XOXO, The Healing Wildflower