Smoking Weed, Reading-Induced Anxiety, and My Worst Week of Quarantine Thus Far

Maybe I’m being dramatic, but this week has by far been the worst week for my productivity. And if it weren’t for conditioning myself to always be overly hard on myself, maybe it would have been one of the best weeks. 

My week started off in a slump due to what I like to blame on smoking weed over the weekend. You see, I have an on-and-off relationship with pot and I have never been more conflicted with whether to commit to it or to leave it again. In high school, my mom always told me that she would rather me be a pothead than an alcoholic. Alcohol was harder to get anyway, so my best friends and I would Jamaican hotbox my Ralph Lauren orange bathroom in one of the apartments I grew up in, and call it The Rainforest. It was no surprise when I chose CU Boulder for college. I had a beautiful bong and my best friend Niki and I would make dispensary runs more than once a week, take drives up Chatauqua blasting music we could belt at the top of our lungs, and then return to our many homes throughout the four years to make food (usually her cooking and me reaping the benefits of her cooking skills).

I always felt bad for the people who said that smoking pot gave them anxiety because it did quite the opposite for me. In fact, I often say that I never truly experienced anxiety in its purest form until post-college when I was coincidentally no longer smoking. But when I turned down jobs to travel and spend three months in Bali “figuring my life out”, I had no option other than to quit. It wasn’t hard for me - maybe a few nights of having trouble sleeping, and replacing weed with Bintang beers that gave me debilitating stomach aches, but overall a seamless process, which I was always grateful for.

When I returned to New York, I never fell back into smoking weed, because when I did take a hit here or there, I found that I would have to isolate myself in my bedroom and put on a minimum of three guided meditations, turn my phone off, and read a book to relieve me of the anxiety that ensued. 

But 2020 has been different.

Up until this global pandemic, my anxiety was at an all-time low. My career felt like it was progressing in the right direction, I was putting the work into my personal brand that I had talked about for a long time, and my relationship with my friends and family were stronger than ever. My life felt balanced, and as a strong libra, that means a lot. So, I figured, if my general anxiety is reduced, why not be able to take a hit here or a hit there and be able to laugh my ass off with Christian and our quarantine crew? So anyway now that I’ve covered my relationship with weed over the past 10 years (HOLY S*%^ HIGH SCHOOL WAS THAT LONG AGO??), I want to end with this. I can now socially smoke and have the time of my life that I once had, but the price I pay is the burnover the next day. I no longer wake up at 6am on a normal day - it’s usually closer to 8 or 9. But when I smoke, a fog hangs over my head until around 1pm sometimes for two days straight, which gives me anxiety in and of itself. 

All that to say, I hit the bowl on Sunday night and when I woke up feeling unmotivated on Monday, I was ok with it. I am working on putting less pressure on myself in general, so sometimes that means waking up on a Monday and accepting that it won’t be my most productive day, and to honor all of those feelings and not force myself into being productive. But when I woke up on Tuesday and couldn’t check off more than half of my to-do list, I started spiraling. What have I even done the last four weeks other than complete a handful of tasks that might mean nothing? Why am I treating this like a vacation? Will I be changed at the end of this, or just a worse version of myself? What is working out for 90 minutes a day doing for me other than distracting me from the things I need to get done? I mean, what do  I even need to get done? And also, why do I feel the need to take an hour-long bath every time I feel cold?

And on top of that, Christian and I were heading back to Brooklyn from our six week quarantine in Connecticut on Wednesday, so I had to pack up all of my clothes, my packages I’d received out there, my books, and my memories of life as we knew it in quarantine in nature. NYC has been my homebase for the majority of my life, so when I’m away from the city for too long, I start to lose my routines, my inspiration starts to plummet, and I begin craving the dirty streets and my 1000 square foot apartment. But it’s different - unsettling, rather - returning to the city in the middle of a global crisis. I felt like maybe once I was back in my own space, I wouldn’t treat this time like a vacation any longer, wouldn’t feel the need to reward myself for menial tasks, would be able to focus and be more productive -- whatever that means when you just lost your job.

But it didn’t quite happen like that.

First, I had a panic attack after eating too much chocolate that I had no self control before realizing that I am possibly (again) spiraling with my need for control over everything, including my body. Then a panic attack that we had no food and would have to go to one of the most dreaded places in the epicenter of this virus - the grocery store - and spend hours between waiting in line to get in, to making sure we got everything that we need so we don’t have to return anytime soon, ultimately taking time away from things I needed to get done. Then eventually fell asleep at the drop of a hat at 10pm from exhausting myself from panic attacks for the previous 2 hours - or should I say three days?

So often when my anxiety builds up, I go into strategy mode. What can I get done with the last two days of this week that will make up for the slump of the previous three? How can I block my calendar to reach my peak productivity? What are tasks that are hanging over my head causing this anxiety that I need to just suck up and tackle? Surely enough, I rise on Thursday later than I want to (not because of indulging in pot, but just because now I am used to getting up and having nowhere to go other than another room of the house), open up my planner, and start crossing things off of my to-do list. Until that is, Christian has the one break of his day when we can go to the aforementioned dreaded grocery store. So we go - tackle yet another thing on my to-do list, until we get home and he gets back on calls and I am unloading $300 worth of organic groceries that I’m not sure I can even afford?? And then decide that instead of trying to get back into my to-do list for the day, I will reorganize all of our kitchen cabinets because it is something that has bothered me for so long, and what better time than in the middle of the day to start tackling this?

Of course, as time works, it’s already 6pm, I have a Zoom happy hour with friends, then have to call my mother back, and then it’s 8:30 and I have only eaten carrots and hummus for dinner and decide to put almond butter and jelly on a rice cake and call it a night. So I close my computer, move from my dining table workstation to my sofa not even 6 feet away, and peel open my book “Signs: The Secret Language of the Universe”, which in theory should be right up my alley, and has been on my To Read list for months. Between then and 10pm when I move to bed to continue reading, I also get annoyed with Christian for drinking another beer because WHY do we need to drink every night? And by we, I really mean that no one pressures the other, but when I decide that I don’t need a second or third drink, it is my belief that Christian should also make the same wise decision and opt for self-control.

So I return to my book in bed in my pajamas, reading about the stories of death and reconnecting with people lost on the Other Side (AKA afterlife, which I firmly believe in). But I realize 100 pages in that even though this book is objectively interesting, it pushes my anxiety because after all, I am most scared of death and losing people I love. I mean on an average week, the thought of losing my best friends and family and even not-so-best-friends who I interact with frequently, and the idea of us taking for granted the physical and emotional connection we have with each other everyday, freaks me out. Sometimes when Christian takes Beau out for his bedtime walk and isn’t back within five minutes, the thought crosses my mind that something happened. I mean, for the most part I’m pretty chill, but death is something that I haven’t come to terms with yet, and thus, reading this book is maybe a step too far for me at this point in my journey with dealing with things that inevitably happen that I can’t seem to face.

Eventually I put the book down and ask Christian to put something light-hearted on, because, although Laura Lynne Jackson, speaks about these experiences of loss in a positive light - we can connect with those we’ve lost for forever - reading story after story about a mother losing her seven year old child or a husband losing his 30-something year old wife isn’t, as they say, easily digestible. And this got me thinking about my reading habits - yet another thing I should reconsider. Since the stay-at-home order, I pick up books and zoom through them quickly, earmarking pages I want to come back to or save forever, and starting and finishing new books each week, making me feel productive. But then last night when I forced myself to put my book down because it was taking an emotional toll on myself, I realized that I need to slow the fuck down. 

So we watched Too Hot To Handle on Netflix, which is so dumb but also so brilliant, and I thought I had forgotten about my book that I was worried would give me nightmares about losing people I love. But then I woke up at 3am after dreaming that I received a sign that I will cross to the Other Side at 36 years old. And I couldn’t breathe and I laid awake in bed then contemplating whether this was a real sign from the universe, and if so, how I should spend the next 10 years of my life before it ends, and what my world will look like at that point, and also wondering if I ever envisioned my life as older than my 30s, and if that was also a sign - yet another spiral. And then I calmed my thoughts an hour later after convincing myself that this is a product of what I am consuming and I won’t die in 10 years, and I will live to see my future children go to college and graduate and have children of their own, and I fell asleep thinking about how I’ve basically mastered my anxiety at this point, but can’t seem to pull myself out of mental spirals when they wake me up throughout the night.

And then I woke up again at 5:30 panicking again with these thoughts and not being able to sleep again, which made me realize how fucked up my sleeping patterns have been not just since starting this book, but in general the past 2 months, and I was relieved at that thought. When Christian and I both woke up this morning, I told him about everything that happened throughout the night since he had fallen asleep and he held me and comforted me as he always does, and then I meandered my way onto ManRepeller and The Cut to read a few articles before starting my day to take my mind off of the things it had been consumed by for the previous 12 hours, give or take. And in these, I found comfort in reading about how Harling Ross and Madeleine Aggeler are also dealing with these unprecedented times and weird sleep schedules, not in the sense that I wish for others to suffer with me, but more so that, we are all in this together, and even I who feels like I deal pretty well with anxiety now, am facing new challenges and types of anxiety that I never have experienced before.

So now it’s Friday at noon and I feel comfort in the fact that I wrote this piece since waking up, had a good cry while reading it aloud to Christian, and that the weather outside matches how I’m feeling on the inside - because, you know, I’ll take any sign to validate my feelings. I can’t help the anxiety that I will feel through the end of the day (week/months) about not being productive, and I most likely won’t check much more off of my to-do list any differently than I have the past four days, but I have done what I know best to do with these feelings - put them out into the universe and hope for a sunnier tomorrow. And after all, what is the point of productivity at all times if we never really face how we feel, and feel all of those emotions honestly?