I was orphaned at 18, which is a weird age because a lot of people expect you to be an adult, but of course you're still a kid. My parents weren't the nurturing kind, more the force-you-to-work-ten-hour-shifts-at-my-restaurant-and don't-get-paid-for-it-while-I-smoke-cigarettes-until-I-die kind. They were abusive people, but that didn't stop the sheer loneliness that came from being 18 with no parents, one sibling living with her friends, and another sibling lost to heroin.
For a while I was fucking miserable. I felt like there was nothing and no one in the world. Every day felt hollow, every thing was pain. It was scary to wake up because I didn't remember what I did during the day, and falling asleep every night just meant fighting nightmares until I got so exhausted I'd slip into sleep. That is, every day was like that until I started smoking weed.
Legitimately marijuana changed me. It saved me. For a lot of my friends it's a drug, something you do with your buddies to get wacky, or use to pregame a movie, stuff like that. I love that about it, I love that my friends can use it to add laughter into their lives, but to me it was always more serious. What marijuana did for me was when I first started smoking it looped the sentence "I don't want to die right now" through my mind, saving me from my suicidal moods, and finally after going from 250lbs to 150lbs as a 6'2 male, it returned my appetite.
What surprised me about it was that marijuana helped inspire me to get back into reading. I'm a writer, and I have been since before pot, but with all the drama that happened a few years ago, I had no motivation. Books felt like million ton weights to me. Weed reminded me that no, that's not how they're meant to be. Books are supposed to feel like friends, and so last year I read more than 20,000 pages.
So many people bitch about how marijuana kills motivation, and I can see where they're coming from, but I disagree with the statement. I think marijuana can be one of the most useful aids in getting your motivation back, or even just maintaining a certain level of enthusiasm.
The excuses with pot come from people wanting to shift away responsibility for their life from themselves. They want to have not finished an album or a song they were working on because they were high, not being they were being lazy. It's a scapegoat, and not a bad one considering you can't hurt the feelings of a plant, but, the thing about scapegoats is that we should be aware of them because we should call out our own bullshit.
Excuses allow us to not do the best we can. They make us feel totally cool with underachieving. Don't let yourself fall into that trap, because that's not what life is about. This isn't high school anymore, you won't want to slide by. This is your real, one and only, life. Do your best, high or sober, for your own sake, and for the sake of contributing the most beauty that you can to the world. Love you guys, see you later.
