No Place To Turn… My story is not much different from other marijuana addicts, but it is a little bit different than alcoholics or abusers of other substances. I began and ended my using career with marijuana. I was raised in the ‘70s atmosphere where it wasn’t uncommon for parents and all their friends to smoke around the kids. I always loved everything about weed, so I started trying to get high at the ripe ol' age of 8. I finally figured it out when I was 11. Besides that I wasn’t too happy with my upbringing. We were fairly poor and my parents didn’t exactly have a happy marriage. I always thought of myself as different from the rest of the world. From my very first high I experienced what is referred to in the Twelve Questions as creating my own little reality. From then on the only way I ever dealt with anything in my life was through escape. What I found was that avoiding reality would only work for so long. Eventually real life caught up to me. That took a while, though. By the time I was in my teens my parents were divorced and I was given all the freedom that a teen could possibly want, since my mom had her own issues to deal with. I did all the drugs and partying that there was to do by the time I was 17 and found most of them weren’t to my liking. After a couple bouts with cocaine, meth, and assorted pills I decided I did not want to be a druggie and decided to just stick with weed. Afterall, weed was harmless. I also decided I’d had my fun and it was time for me to buckle down and pursue my future. It was during this time that I really began to personify the “self will run riot." I had tons of common sense. For example, it made sense that I should only smoke on weekends or that I shouldn’t go to job interviews high. It made sense that I shouldn’t stay up till the wee hours if I expected to make it to work the next day. It made sense that I only needed to think myself into the kind of life I believed I should be leading. That’s the thing about addiction…it supercedes all common sense. Talk about living a “fantasy of functionality." Looking back now it’s as if I was living against a current until I just couldn’t keep it up anymore. What finally did it was becoming a mother at age 22 while I was in college full time. The stress of managing an addiction along with managing a family became too much for me. I became very clinically depressed which, of course, led me to non stop 24/7 smoking. That led me to becoming very isolated and unable to leave my house on most days. When I was finally able to admit to myself that I had a problem, I then had to face an all new problem. Where could I turn? Here I was a young mom without insurance for myself and a habit that, according to what I knew, wasn’t really an addiction. I couldn’t go to rehab and I wasn’t an alcoholic. So I decided to seek out the other fellowship for addicts. After mustering up a ton of courage I called. To my dismay I was told that they couldn’t help me since my drug of choice was weed (that’s not true but the person on the phone obviously didn’t know any better). I remember being very hopeless one night and asking God for some help, what a novel idea right. Shortly after I arranged to get a computer built by a friend, one of the first things I did when I got online was look up Marijuana Anonymous. I’m convinced that’s where God stepped in because I never heard of Marijuana Anonymous and I would have never thought to look for it on my own, since I was convinced there was no help out there for me. I went to the online meetings for about 3 months and just soaked it all in. I never uttered a single word or attempted to talk to anyone. Basically I was scared to death but felt safe with knowing no one saw me as anything more than a screen name. I can’t tell you the relief that came from knowing that there were people out there who were addicted to marijuana. I kept coming back and kept coming back till eventually, with God’s help and the help of others being there online for me, I was able to make it through my first day clean…Then my second, and third, and fourth. Wow! Four days, I hadn’t done that in over 10 yrs! Then I relapsed on a Friday night. For the first time in my life I saw things differently…a change had occurred. I saw weed as something that had complete power over me. It was something that was taking away from the person I was and was meant to become. That night was a real epiphany and I thank God for it. I decided that the things I heard said in meetings were the way to go. I was able to admit that my way had failed miserably and I just wasn’t going to be able to do it on my own will power. Once I was able to be open to the idea of taking the suggestions offered to me by people who had gone before me I was on my way to recovery. Part of those suggestions was to get myself to a LIVE meeting and get a sponsor who was in my town. It took me a couple weeks to get the courage to do that, and even then I had to have my oldest friend come with me, but I believed it was important for me to face my fears. Since then I’ve done my best to take the suggestions that other people have given me. Particularly the ones whom I admire. I wonder sometimes how I’ve managed to make it this far. How I’ve managed to continue to go to meetings and work the steps when I’ve never really stuck to anything in my life. I can only say that it’s because of the way the 12 Step recovery program was designed, and most of all because of God. I still get afraid sometimes that I won’t be able to keep it up. Then I remember that I don’t have to do it on my own and that I just need to stop to ask for help. Thanks so much for reading my story.