This is my life story thus far and the unpredictable paths that I've chosen to walk.
I was a strange kid growing up. I spent most of my days observing stars, reading anything I could get a hold of, daydreaming about how it would be like to be a butterfly, and wanting desperately to be abducted by aliens and to be accepted into a foreign planet. I wanted to be the only one of my species and to live in a more technologically and spiritually advanced society so I can experience what the entire universe had to offer. I always had so many questions and there was never enough answers to satiate my hunger for knowledge. I also suffered many traumatic experiences as a young child, from being beaten by my alcoholic father, to the death of my grandfather on Christmas Eve and the death of my father on Valentines day, both of which happened in the same year. I suffered chronic asthma and was diagnosed with trichotillomania, an obsessive compulsive disorder that caused me to pull out my hair. Kids would make fun of the bald patches on my head and my absence of eyelashes.
My thirst for knowledge distracted me from the uglier side of life. My mother was my first source for answers about life, but all she would teach me were the lessons of the bible. I was constantly challenging her teachings.
I would ask her questions like,
"If cleanliness was next to godliness, does that mean I get to be a god if I am clean enough?"
"Does praying before meal time make the food taste better?"
and
"How can I honor papa if all he does is drink and hit me?"
The only lesson that caught my interest was when she said that God molded us from clay. So I believed for years that humans were literally made of clay. I would sporadically loose touch with reality and hallucinate that people were walking blocks of hardened mud. I was scared to death of walking in the rain, for the fear of melting into the dirt where I thought I came from. What saved me from this insane belief was the library, specifically the astronomy section. I wanted to know the truth of where everything came from, where the stars and planets and moons originated, where and how life was created.
In elementary school, instead of playing jump rope with friends or hanging on the monkey bars and sliding on the hot, plastic tubes on the playground, I would hang out in the library and soaked in as much information as I could.
My intellectual pursuits could have gotten me into Harvard, Yale, or MIT. I had the grades for it. I would obsess about my schoolwork and had a perfect 4.0. My goal went from learning for the sake and fun of learning to the arduous task of constantly being the best, which eventually lead to a deep depression in my teen years. One night, I was doing homework for my advanced physics class at four o'clock in the morning and got stuck on one problem for an hour. I got so frustrated with myself about not having the capacity to solve that problem, that I started thinking about how much of a failure I was going to be. Instead of going to MIT and being hired by NASA to study extraterrestrial life, I imagined myself as a homeless person who would yell obscenities at the stars for my failure to solve that stupid problem.
I couldn't handle the stress. I grabbed a paperclip, unfolded the curves, and dug the tip into my skin. I slashed into my arms obsessively, but failed to draw blood. I wanted desperately to see myself bleed, to prove to myself that I was not made of clay. But the failure to see the results that I wanted frustrated me even more. I upgraded to a knife and started with one slash. I watched as the blood trickled down to my thigh. One slash turned to two, which turned to 15, which lead to 120 neatly lined slashes that spread from my thumb to my elbow.
This went on for years until I sought treatment. I was prescribed a series of antidepressants that I took for two weeks. I hated the way it made me feel so I tossed them. My mother sent me to a psychotherapist, but I hated the way that she made me feel and how my family would join in on our sessions. What started out as a way to help treat me turned into an invitation for my family to tell me everything that was wrong with me. It was a hellish month of them crying over how I was a horrible daughter and sister. After that, I refused to go anymore sessions and barely made it out of high school alive.
The year I graduated and turned 18 was the beginning of my new life. I moved out, went to college for journalism and philosophy, and learned to love myself again. But after I made that step forward, I made another two steps back.
I developed a social life, which developed into a very unhealthy streak of parties and experimentation. I worked full time to support myself, went to school full time, and still managed to get obscenely drunk almost every night. My drug of choice was alcohol, which evolved into cocaine and alcohol. At the time, I needed the cocaine to be able to catch up with my crazy lifestyle. I went from obsessively trying to please myself with my perfect GPA and urge to be the best at everything I did, to wanting to please everyone else. I never said "no" to parties, never said "no" to drugs, and never said "no" to casual sex.
After two years of doing fairly well in college (I was the Editor In Chief of our newspaper and was a leader in the student senate), I dropped out and focused solely on survival. I worked two jobs. Even on the days where I would work for 16 hours straight, I still forced myself to go out to bars to play pool or to parties to get crazy and drink my worries away. I eventually got bored of my surroundings and convinced my mother to help me move to New York. I told her that my intention of moving there was to transfer to NYU and to finish school, but all I really wanted to do was party and live wildly.
Less than two months before I was set to fly to New York was when fate interfered. I was browsing through the personals section of Craigslist to amuse myself when I came across a post from someone I knew. Let's call him Mr. X. He had been a frequent customer at a coffee shop that I used to work in. I sent him an e-mail just to say hi. To be honest, I felt kind of bad for him. He seemed so innocently pathetic with his headline of, "Desperate and willing to settle for less". His ad was so self-deprecating that I wanted to shoot him an e-mail to make him feel noticed. That friendly e-mail evolved into heavy flirtation, which lead to my first date with Mr. X the following night. I agreed to go on a date with him if he promised to make me laugh, to which he replied, "I'm sorry, but I refuse to make you laugh." Which ironically, made me laugh.
He was an hour late and showed up wearing a stinky Supernatural Hydroponics t-shirt. Curiosity was what made me stay in a smoky bar for an hour for this guy. When he finally arrived, there wasn't a single moment when I wasn't laughing. We played pool and he beat me every single time. I'm not a professional, but pool was one of my mini-obsessions. I played pool almost every night for two years and had a hard time finding guys who could beat me.
Love snuck up on me and Mr. X and I found ourselves saying "I love you" after just a couple of weeks of seeing each other every day. I moved into his house in the forest where he introduced me to the world of growing marijuana. I had smoked pot a few times at parties, but never really appreciated it until I met him. My life went from a chaotic cycle of self-destruction to the laid-back lifestyle of a stoner in love.
I spent a month living in New York and couldn't stand the pressure of parties and the depressing winter weather. Mr. X paid for me to fly back to California and to live with him in Los Angeles.
From there, I learned how to grow hydroponic marijuana from Mr. X, who had been growing for 15 years. After a year straight of learning about the medicinal uses of marijuana and getting to know a few of the 1,000 dispensaries in Los Angeles, I realize my calling. I've become completely enamored with the beauty of this miracle plant, its healing properties and its many uses, and even moreso the growing aspect of my new "career". I love watching the clones that I cut grow from 3 inches to 6 feet long. I love walking into our flowering room and observing the buds crystallize and develop the strong THC that Mr X's plants are famous for.
I no longer have to worry about following a strict path of majoring in something at college and being a hundred thousand dollars in debt to get a degree that's worth wiping my ass with. My hobbies as a child hasn't changed. I'm still a sponge for information and my educational pursuit has gone from learning for the sake of getting a good grade, to learning for the sake of learning. I've also thrown away my old party girl life for something healthier and laid back. I get to choose what hours I work, and I've learned how to grow and nourish a plant that nourishes me. It pulls me up when I get down, it banishes the nausea I get from my natural nervous tendencies, and it makes sex a hundred times better. If marijuana isn't a "miracle drug", then I don't know what is. It's not at all harmful or addictive, and it helps people who have problems that are exponentially worse that anything I've ever had--people with cancer, AIDS, multiple sclerosis, etc--and the fact that it is still illegal under the eyes of our federal government baffles me.
I created this blog to honor the plant that saved my life. I have no idea what the future holds, but isn't not knowing half the fun? All I want to do is experience life, and the choice to grow marijuana--despite the lies that the government feeds us--has been the healthiest lifestyle choice I've ever made. Mr. X and I are growing as legal as possible, we have a good relationship with the legitimate dispensaries in our area, and we aren't hurting anyone. If anything, we're helping people with chronic diseases who use marijuana as a tool to a less painful life.
The dangers of growing, however, has nothing to do with growing or the plant itself. It's the stigma that our government forces on it and the perpetuation of those false assumptions about marijuana from the puritanical sheep in our society who believe what the government or what their conservative religious leaders tell them.
Hmmm.......
I just realized how long my first post is. I'll continue this another time. :)
"Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could."
-William F. Buckley, Jr.
Smoke out with your heart out,
Ceres <3
