Sharing my experience (~1 month in)
I’ve been (unsuccessfully) using weed to try and help me cope with depression and anxiety for a while now, honestly not sure how long, I have terrible sense of time. Probably at least a year, if not two. For a while I could tell I was just doing it because it was what I did, and my body didn’t like when I wasn’t doing it. I could tell it was starting to make me paranoid, but I justified it to myself that I could control it, or that I would cut back, which I never did. Finally, I had a couple experiences where I decided to take a good bit more (25mg edible instead of 5-10mg) and got so high that I lost my touch with reality a bit, and got incredibly anxious. It felt like I was living in a movie, and not seeing through my own eyes. That’s not to say I was “tripping”, but it was definitely a weird and scary experience. It made me realize how bad I was doing in regards to my usage, my mental health, and other aspects of my life. I decided to quit, and have since been working to improve other parts of my life as well. I’ve found a decent bit more motivation to get things done since quitting, but everything else has been very uncomfortable. I’ve had incredibly horrible health anxiety and fear of death. I’ve been terrified that some random thing is going to go wrong inside my body and kill me and I’ve been really struggling with the idea of death and not being here anymore. I’ve also been struggling with depersonalization/derealization (whichever one it is), and feeling like I’m not really *here*. It’s like I’m watching the world from behind my own eyes, and oftentimes feels like what I’m seeing has some sort of disconnect from my mind, even though I know it’s real. Almost like playing a first person video game. That’s been the symptom that’s messed with me the most, it feels horrible, it terrifies me, and it’s often times hard for me to convince myself it’ll ever go back to “normal”, even though I have periods throughout the day that are normal, and I’ve seen other people here share that they dealt with the same thing for a while. Other than that, I’ve dealt with tension headaches, constipation/diarrhea, bloating, being very fidgety especially in my legs (although I already kind of dealt with that), and some other random pains mainly in my chest and legs. Sorry that this is long, but most people kinda think I’m being a baby or something when I share this with them, so I kinda felt I needed to get it out there somewhere. Thanks if you read this, and I’d love to hear if you guys dealt with anything similar, what you did to help it, and how long it lasted for you. My health anxiety has started to tone down in the last few days, as has the physical effects, but the depersonalization is still kicking my ass, and I’m very tired of it. It doesn’t make me want to smoke again though, it makes me never want to do it again, honestly.