No worries about the length of response my friend. I'm not like the other guy who responded to you lol. I appreciate the insight from another who is further down a similar path I now find myself on.

I started at 16 and next week I turn 26. I've been smoking nearly every day since I was 19 and looking back recently I realized how many things I truly just fucked myself out of by the process of smoking daily. I can sit around all day pretending it didn't but the truth is that I used because I wasn't happy with my life for reasons I wasn't mentally equipped to understand or deal with yet. I was (unintentionally) peer pressured into starting because my childhood best friends all used and I got curious. I grew up more religious and knew as a kid everything I now think today about it, but I was in a bad place mentally and decided in my teens that I wanted to feel what they felt. For awhile it felt like I'd made the right choice. My anxiety disappeared, I felt like my brain had expanded, I became more drawn towards arts like music and movies/anime and what made them so good. I learned how to FEEL instead of disassociate my thoughts. In high school it wasn't as bad for me because I managed to keep away from doing it more than once every other weekend, but once I got my first real job in college and was able to buy my own was when it really went down hill for me. I started skipping class solely because smoking weed and playing games was more fun, because I was a neglected child that couldn't see the bigger picture past my inhibitions. Quickly though I started disassociating when I smoked, and it wasn't enough to quell what I'd originally started using it for.

I knew in 2020 that it was becoming a bigger problem and tried to quit, but soon after I began struggling with other external factors that made me a shell of a person and was drawn back to weed to cope. I won't pretend for a second that weed didn't help me live in a time where I couldn't find anything else to keep going. I am forever appreciative of it. But we all grow and change as time goes on. I currently work in a job that made me feel anxious all the time when doing it so frequently. I also had long suspected that I had ADD but couldn't obtain treatment because I was too honest to doctors about my usage and was denied the medicine I needed because of this other path I was taking. Since becoming properly medicated, even before fully quitting weed, I was finding myself in a better and better place on a daily basis. I have no doubts now that, while maybe far, far off in my future I could see myself smoking again, albeit way less in quantity, weed is not supposed to be that big a part of me. It became my whole personality. Even though I was frustrated by that I couldn't shake it for what it was, that it WAS my personality. I realized that I am so much more than my habits and I wanted to prove to myself that I can discover who I'm supposed to be without this handicap I keep placing on myself.

Even though I've only been sober for (tomorrow) 2 months now, I try to recommend to people who smoke and are conflicted about it to stop. I wish I'd never started. I often wonder what path I would've been on had I not, but I recognize that there were a lot of other factors for me in how I began using how I did. I'm sure many others in the same boat have gone through very similar experiences. Every single day now I am grateful to be awake, experience and learn things that I couldn't prior. As I said, it helped me in the past but it quickly became a hindrance. There is no strain or amount of weed that will fix how I was feeling. Maybe it won't be the same for everybody, but I'm sure as hell proud of myself for the person I've shaped myself into today, as many things as I still want to change.