The Addiction No One Talks About (Weed, Stagnation & Potential)

In this episode, I talk about a side of addiction that doesn’t get enough attention—the kind that doesn’t destroy your life overnight, but slowly keeps you stuck.

After watching Anonymous People and reflecting on my own journey, I started to see addiction differently. Not just as something that causes chaos, but something that can quietly hold you back from becoming who you’re meant to be.

This episode is about weed, comfort, avoidance, and what happens when you finally start facing yourself again.

If you’ve ever wondered whether something in your life is helping you grow or keeping you comfortable… this one’s for you.

Anonymous People Documentary: 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2571226/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, my name is Derek and welcome to Coming Back Online, where we have honest talks about mental clarity, long-term weed use, and coming back to yourself. I've been getting a lot of messages from people lately, and I really appreciate all the support and people feeling open enough to tell me their stories. It's uh pretty remarkable how we're all more connected than we think we are. And anytime we feel alone, there's somebody going through very similar struggles. And you know, this page is kind of picking up a little bit, so I'm getting a lot of messages all at once, and you know, I um I'm very grateful that my voice resonates with you. And I just wanted to say, like, if I don't um write back right away, you know, it's it's not anything um personal. I'm kind of going through my own thing too and carrying a lot of pressure with my own sobriety journey and going back to school after 20 years and working. I mean, you you guys know how life gets. It's not always easy to uh juggle all these different responsibilities, and um, but I just wanted to really say that you know it really like it's the reason why I started this page is to get these messages from people saying that you know they love the podcast and that I've made some kind of difference in their life and that they're getting on the sober journey too, and that they had a realization. This is not uh an easy journey to go through. It's definitely not easy to get sober um off of anything, but just know that I'm rooting for you guys and that I'll keep fighting this good fight and keep trying to share my wisdom and um hopefully people can share theirs too because I really don't have all the answers. I may make mistakes along the way, I may say something the wrong way. I've never really been one to speak in front of a camera and kind of be vulnerable like this. So I just want to let you guys know that I'm learning along the way too, and it is it's we can grow together, you know. This journey has been um really eye-opening for me, and I think the more that I learn about my own sobriety, and of course completing my um um, I don't know if I if I told you guys, but I'm doing like a drug and alcohol counseling program. Um so I'll be getting my certificate probably I have to go through all the different courses, but I think it takes about a year and a half, two years, and then you know, I'll be working in like treatment centers and um and then doing an internship and all that stuff. So I'm sure I'm going to see I'm going to have a lot of frontline experience, and you know, I'm gonna keep learning and keep growing and try to share that knowledge, but I I really appreciate all the kind comments and the words of uh encouragement, and it um really means a lot. So I really want to thank you guys for that. So, anyways, let's uh get into the episode today. Um You know, I really want to talk about the ways we've been looking at addiction and speaking about it, and I think sometimes you know it's easy to find it's hard to find the right way to talk about it, and sometimes it's very easy to find the wrong way, you know, because when people hear the word addiction, they usually think rock bottom, right? We create this image in our head where everything is falling apart and you compare it to seeing people in really bad places in their life, or um you know, we we compare it to just seeing rock bottom. But what if your addiction doesn't always destroy you like that? What if it just kind of slowly dims that light within you and your full potential? And what if it just makes you feel okay by being less than what you really are? And this is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, especially especially after watching this um documentary for our school, and I really recommend it. It's called Anonymous People. Um a lot of it's about alcohol addiction, but it's also I mean, I think addiction is addiction, we can correlate it with anything. And um, you know, I've also just really reflected on my own life and my own experiences because I've had a lot of addiction around me in my whole life. Um I've talked about losing my stepdad to alcoholism, which was really, really painful for me. Um because, you know, like I had to go into the hospital and watch him under dialysis, and the last words he said to me was, I'm dying, son. And that you know, that really hits hard when I think about how I could have been there more for him in those last moments, but it was hard for me to to take that and to see somebody who was such a strong man in my life and um and a family and someone who I loved very deeply to suffer like that, and it was hard for me to stay in the room and to watch that, and I I don't know, I might hold that guilt um for the rest of my life, but you know it's just I've had a lot of people in my life who have had addiction, and um I've seen the negative consequences from the addiction and um I've seen what it can do at its worst. That's why I kind of want to make my path look a little different, and I haven't had heavy addictions like alcohol or heroin or methamphetamine, but I do have a very addictive personality and I have my vices. Um weed was one of them, but also gambling, and uh I have you know a slight I think I I definitely had a slight pill addiction at one point to Vicadin and Xanax. And if I were to let myself fully go down that path, I could easily get addicted to those stronger medications. Um I recognize that in myself, and I understand the power of that. So although I didn't go down that those routes of the heavier drugs, I chose something that felt safer, and for me it was weed, and after a long time I just told myself that it was helping me, it was helping my anxiety, it was helping my creativity, it was helping me relax. And maybe at first it did, and it did it was something that was definitely helping me um be creative in my endeavors. Like I I like to play music, you know, I was a singer-songwriter. I guess I still can kind of consider myself that. But I wrote a lot of songs while I was smoking. You know, I would sit in my room and I would smoke and I would pick up my guitar and I would, you know, make this piece of music, this piece of art, and I felt very proud of that. But I noticed that I wasn't getting the response from other people that I felt about my music, that it didn't the music business is tough, you know, it's a difficult industry to break into, but I don't know, I just feel like there wasn't I wasn't connecting properly with people with my music, although I found a lot of beauty in expressing my art through it. But over time, um I started doing something else, you know, smoking weed every day. It it didn't d destroy my life per se, you know, but it made me okay with not growing. And it made me comfortable just being um average, you know, living a mediocre life. Not I'm not saying mediocre in a sense of that I wasn't appreciative of all the things that I w that uh all the opportunities and all the value that I did have in my life, but I wasn't living to the potential that made me content and satisfied in my own heart and my own spirit. And that's the most important thing, you know, is ha how you process everything at the end of the day and how you sleep at night. Um you know, it just numbed things just enough where I didn't have to face myself. And that's something that we don't really talk about enough when we're talking about smoking weed every day. And so for this class I was talking about that documentary that I saw Anonymous People, which I definitely recommend for anybody to watch. And one of the biggest thing that one of the biggest um things that the documentary talked about was the stigma around addiction and how we only focus on these extreme cases, um throughout our media culture, throughout life, or our own experiences. But what about the people who are just stuck, you know? What about the people who are not falling apart, who can function in society and just kind of just move along, but they're not moving forward in spiritual wise and in their own clarity and feeling content, you know, every day is kind of just the same rut that they feel like they're in. I mean, that's where I think I was, and I think that's where a lot of people are from what I've learned. And I started realizing something is that addiction isn't always about destruction. A lot of the times it's about avoidance. Avoiding discomfort, avoiding our growth, avoiding the parts of ourselves that we don't want to face. And when you keep numbing that, you don't just numb the pain, but you numb your potential. And you see, this is where it kind of gets it it kind of gets interesting because all that energy I was putting into weed, all that energy I was using to think about it and getting it into using it and to coming down off of it and r and recovering from it, that energy doesn't just disappear. You know, it's it it it wants to be redirected. And when I stopped that energy came back flowing. Not always in a good way, a lot of things I had to process and deal deal with and go through um you know, therapy and cognitive therapy and uh some really tough times, tough nights, a lot of sadness, a lot of grief, a lot of anger. All those things are normal, and I had to fight back against it. I had to realize that I I can't just play this victim part, that I have to actually start fighting against those feelings. And that's what brought me into therapy, that's what brought me into starting this page, that's what brought me into taking tango lessons, and I'm still in that fight. I'm still looking for things to expand my horizons, expand my mind and my spirit, and I still have to take that leap of faith for things that I've haven't done that I've always wanted to do, you know, and and hold myself accountable that I'm in control, you know. And now instead of numbing, I'm I'm trying to do that building, I'm trying to build disciplined, um, not only with staying sober, but with my diet and working out, and I'm trying to keep my clarity and I'm trying to build a purpose. And all that energy that used to go somewhere else, like smoking weed, is now redirected into different things that I find more value in and that give me a higher sense of purpose. So I'm not saying that weed is horrible for everyone, I'm not saying it's evil, I think it can have a lot of medicinal purposes purposes for a lot of people, and I think it's how it's used and why it's used, and if it's used to help you for other symptoms or other issues, and it works in your life, then that's good because you found something that has made you feel like you have a better quality of life from that. But for a lot of people, it doesn't do that, it it kind of does the opposite, and there is a s a full spectrum of different experiences with different people from different substances, and we also we all need to understand that and take that into account that everything in life is different. You know, we are similar, but we are different. We experience foods differently, we speak different languages, we live in we have different families, we have we different cultures, um, different ways of thinking, different interests. I mean, everything in life is different, not just at a human level, but even as in a um even in a biological level, even in a even in the ecosystem, everything is different, and no tree necessarily grows the same in the same um fashion in the same um direction uh or lives exact same lifespan. There's a huge amount of diversity in every factor of life. I'm here to be honest with myself, and I'm here to f help anyone else who needs to be honest with themselves. We have to be honest with ourselves, and we know the answer deep down. We know our spirit tells us the answer. It's whether we want to listen to that or we want to reject it and live in denial. And I think everybody has that inner voice within them that knows if they're on the correct path or not. Is it helping you grow? Is it keeping you comfortable? Because those are two very different things. And I really believe this, you know, some of the people who struggle the most with addiction are the same people with the most potential. Because they finally turn that energy around and they don't just get better, they become powerful and they become focused and present and real. So if any of this resonates with you, I just want you to sit with it. You don't have to change everything overnight, but maybe you can start asking yourself the question, you know, who would I be if I stopped numbing? Anyways, I wanted to thank you guys for listening to another podcast. Um I'm gonna continue to try to get better with these podcasts and make them longer, maybe start doing interviews with people in the profession of treatments, treatment centers, and rehabs, and addiction studies, and doctors and therapists, and people's own experiences as well. I am really grateful we can all build this community and stick together and hold each other accountable, and maybe this can actually grow into meetup groups down the line and into things where we can support each other because I think that's what it's all about. I think the way to hold yourself accountable is by helping other people. So thank you guys for listening, and I'll keep up the content. Talk to you on the next podcast. I appreciate all the support. Alright, bye.