My Relapse After 6 Weeks — and What It Actually Taught Me

I’m 21, in my second year at university. I’d been smoking since I was 17, daily for the last two years. I quit because I noticed I couldn’t get through a lecture without thinking about it. That felt like a problem.

The six weeks were hard but manageable. I slept badly the first week and a half. I was irritable in a way that surprised people who knew me. By week three I was starting to feel more like myself. By week five I was genuinely proud. I thought the hard part was over.

Then exams started.

The pressure came in fast and I didn’t have a plan for it. I’d always had weed for that. Not to celebrate, not to socialize, specifically to turn off the exam stress. That was its job. I knew that abstractly during the six weeks when things were calm. I didn’t feel it until I was sitting in my flat at midnight with a paper due in eleven hours and the walls felt close.

Someone had some. I said yes before I finished thinking about it.

The first thing I noticed was that it didn’t work as well as I remembered. Or maybe it worked too well in a different way. The stress went away but so did everything else. I sat there for two hours basically unable to start the paper. I handed in something halfway done and I knew it while I was writing it.

The next morning I felt bad in multiple directions at once. I was disappointed in myself for caving. I was embarrassed because six weeks felt wasted. But mostly I was confused, because I expected to feel relieved and instead I felt worse than I had the whole time I was clean.

That’s when I started actually thinking about it.

The thing I understood after the relapse that I didn’t understand before: I wasn’t using weed to feel good. I was using it to not feel anxious. Those are different things. For two years I had used it to make the pressure of studying and exams and being away from home feel manageable. The six clean weeks were calm weeks. The real test was always going to be a high-pressure moment. I just hadn’t had one until then.

I went back to not smoking after that. Not immediately, I smoked for two more days, which felt like giving up, which I guess it briefly was. Then I stopped again. This time I knew what I was actually dealing with.

The anxiety was still there. It had always been there. Weed didn’t fix it, it just covered it long enough for me to function, or what I thought was functioning. Without it the anxiety was louder but I could at least see it. I could name it. This is the feeling I’ve been running from.

That’s what the relapse gave me. Not proof that I was weak, though it felt like that for a few days. Proof that I’d been using weed for a specific reason I’d never been honest about. Once I saw that, I could actually do something about it. I started talking to a counselor at the university. I told her what I’d figured out. She said it was a good place to start.

Six weeks of being clean was useful. The relapse was more useful. That sounds backwards but I mean it. You learn what you’re dealing with when the coping mechanism isn’t available and the thing it was coping with shows up anyway.

I’m past it now. Not dramatically past it, just past it. The exams are over. The anxiety is still around, smaller maybe. I have slightly better ways to deal with it. That’s the actual progress. Not the days counted, not the streak. What I understand now that I didn’t before.

If you have relapsed or are scared of relapsing, this piece on what long-term quitting really involves is the most honest thing I read during that period.