I started smoking weed when I was 14.

In college I was a huge stoner, smoked all the time. Then I went into the army, and it started giving me anxiety, so I stopped. Then I started again. I traveled the world, ended up in Thailand, got deep into meditation, and for the first time, I started actually paying attention to what was going on inside me.

That's when things got interesting.

I loved cannabis. Genuinely loved it. It made me relaxed, present, social. I felt more comfortable in my own skin. So when thoughts about quitting started creeping in, I pushed them away.

But meditation has this annoying way of making you honest with yourself, and making you see things...

The more I practiced, the more I started noticing a pattern - in the days after I smoked, my mind was always louder, messier, and more chaotic. Getting back to that feeling of inner calm was much harder. I never would have even noticed it if it weren't for my consistent meditation practices.

I started to realize the thing I thought was helping me relax in the short term was actually making it harder to actually be at peace in the long term.

Around that time, a woman I knew in Thailand mentioned that if you've smoked a lot, it takes about 6 months for weed to fully leave your system.

I had been smoking since I was 14 and I had never gone 6 months without it.

So I basically realized I had no idea who I was without cannabis inside of my system.

That landed differently than I expected.

Not long after, something happened while I was high where my boundaries got crossed. The fact that I was high made everything feel fuzzy and hard to read.

That was the moment I decided to take a break.

About three months in, something unexpected happened.

All of this teenage angst started surfacing. I didn’t know how to explain it. I literally felt like 15 year old Danielle, experiencing the anger and angst I never processed back then, because I had started numbing it at 14 without even knowing that's what I was doing.

It lasted a few weeks. It wasn't fun. But it moved through, the way things do when you actually let them.

And after that, I felt clear. Really clear.


After that, meditation practice eventually started filling in what I used to get from weed - the calm, the ease, the ability to walk into a room full of people and feel genuinely comfortable in myself without needing anything to take the edge off.

That feeling I had chased for years? I could access it on my own.

I eventually came back to weed, slowly, living in Peru - but with a completely different relationship to it.

That's a whole other story.

The thing I want to leave you with is this: I didn't know what I was numbing until I stopped numbing it. And what was on the other side was that I felt sharp, clear, relaxed and confident in a way that was actually mine. No substance needed.

I didn't know I could feel that way on my own.

I just never gave myself the chance to find out.