I Looked Back at a Year and Couldn’t Name One Thing I’d Done

At some point around Christmas of my second year at university, I tried to remember what I’d done since September. Not highlight reel stuff, just anything. A conversation that had gone somewhere interesting. A project I was proud of. A night that was worth telling someone about. I sat with that question for longer than it should have taken and came up with almost nothing. The year had been fine. It had also essentially not happened.

I’d been smoking heavily since about six months in to first year. It started the way these things tend to start, socially, then as a habit, then as a constant backdrop. By second year it was most evenings and some afternoons and occasionally mornings on the weekends. I wasn’t failing my courses. I wasn’t missing things in any obvious, measurable sense. I was present. I was just, I understand now, not quite there.

The strange thing about cannabis at that level of use is that it doesn’t feel like it’s doing much. You’re not wasted. You’re not impaired in any crude, visible way. You’re just slightly removed from everything, slightly muted, functioning at a register slightly below full. And because there’s no dramatic signal, no obvious cost, it’s easy to tell yourself the whole time that it’s fine. Fine is a low bar. I was meeting it and mistaking that for enough.

The Christmas accounting bothered me more than I let on at the time. I’d started the year with things I’d wanted to do. Not ambitions exactly, but intentions. I was going to get serious about writing. I’d been saying for two years that I wanted to learn to record music properly, I had the equipment sitting there. I’d wanted to finally read some of the books I’d been collecting. Almost none of it had happened. Not because I’d been too busy. I hadn’t been particularly busy. It had just all quietly slid away into evenings that blurred into each other and didn’t produce anything I could point to.

What I keep coming back to is how smooth it felt. There was no misery in it. That’s what makes it hard to describe and possibly harder to recognize in yourself. I wasn’t unhappy. I was comfortable in a way that required nothing from me and produced nothing in return. The year passed easily and left almost no mark. When I think about how daily cannabis use affects the brain, especially motivation and memory consolidation, it explains the mechanism. But the experience of it was just smoothness and forgetting.

I stopped in January. Not with a big declaration, I just decided the accounting had been too uncomfortable to ignore and that I wanted to see what a year looked like without the constant muting. The first month was harder than I expected. Sleep was bad, I was irritable and restless in a way that made me understand for the first time that my evenings hadn’t actually been calm, they’d been sedated. There’s a difference. Calm is a state you can access without assistance. What I’d been doing was closer to maintenance.

The restlessness eventually settled. Somewhere around month two things started to feel more distinct. A conversation I had in the library one afternoon stuck with me. I finished a short story I’d been avoiding for six months. I started running, mostly because I needed something to do with the energy that had nowhere to go. These are small things. They’re also more than I’d managed in the previous twelve months combined.

The year I’m in now has texture. Some of it’s uncomfortable texture, anxiety I’d been smoothing over, questions about what I’m doing and where it’s going that are harder to sit with when I can actually think clearly. But they’re real questions, and I can work with them. The benefits of quitting aren’t always immediately obvious from the inside, but at about eight months out, looking back at the previous eight months, I could actually name things. That’s the whole thing, really. The year became something that had happened to me rather than something that had dissolved around me.

I don’t think I ruined a year. I just made it disappear. And I think about what I’d have given, sitting in December trying to account for September, to have a single clear thing I could point to and say: that was mine, I made that, I was there for it. That’s the thing about numbness. You only understand what it cost when it’s over.