My first halloween after starting medical marijuana – week something or other

I started documenting my medical marijuana journey with a neat plan – I’d title each post with the week number and write a post every other week. That’d not be asking too much of myself, would it? Well, my life got to be really busy and I haven’t been able to keep up with writing for this blog. So instead of a highly organised approach, I’ll be posting whatever I feel up to posting, whenever I feel up to posting. Today, that’s a pic dump with blurbs. Long-ass blurbs. Sooorrry Boot That. I didn’t get dressed up for halloween so you’ll just have to make do with me pulling faces.

So here are some pictures with lengthy captions to try to describe my busy life as a medical marijuana user:

I had an encounter with a young rheumatologist. She didn’t greet me, introduce herself nor stand from her desk when I entered her office in the hospital. But Optimistic I am not daunted by rudeness, so I went ahead and happily lyricised about all the wondrous properties of medical marijuana, explaining that it helped me sleep, helped me be not just calm but cheerful too, and that my fibromyalgia pains – the reason why I was having a check-up at the hospital with a rheumatologist – were all but gone. She cut me off and gave me a stern lecture about the dangers of “street drugs” and scolded me for my apparent stupidity, claiming that I would undoubtedly get addicted. She made it sound like by year’s end I’d be a crack addict selling my body for my next fix. Shame.
On the whiteboard behind her she’d written, “A smile brightens everyone’s day”, and I imagined that under her face mask she must have been wearing a really ugly smile to match her ugly attitude.
I couldn’t get that image out of my head, of an ugly smile hiding under her mask, until I took an Ugly Smile Selfie of my own. Now I’m over her bullshit and obsessed with finding all of my own Ugly Smiles with their attendant bullshit.
This is because I discover ugly thoughts when I practice my ugly smiles and then I’m better able to acknowledge and work with those parts of myself. I’m not afraid of my own ugliness any longer. Thank you, young rheumatologist, for inspiring such a fun game.
This kind of creative healing was beyond my reach before starting with prescription cannabis, but now I come up with these therapeutic practices like Robin Williams (RIP dear one) came up with funnies on the spot.
My Ugly Smiles Selfies are cathartic for me – other people don’t have to like my cannabis use, and I don’t have to like those people.
It is all actually just fine.
When I look at the Ugly Smiles Selfies I can’t help but laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. We’re all just fools in the end, why not have a bit of fun with ourselves instead of judging and discriminating against others?
I took this photo about an hour before getting my eyes laser-fixed, my birthday present from my wonderful husband. In the past I’d been freaked out by the idea of lasers in my eyes. But Catherine the Medical Marijuana Patient is aware now of her bullshit and is better able to Talk Some Sense Into Herself.
It also helps that HusbandBear is the King of Logical Thinking and he helps steer me down less dramatic and more realistic paths of thought. I did however feel super nauseous when the smell of burning eyeball filled the room and I had to ask the surgeon to stop so I could take a deep breath and think of my beloved HR Giger, who reminds me always to find the beauty of the horror and relish it. Then I said we could continue and we got the job done. My gratitude and respect to everyone at the St James Eye Clinic.
I had a copper coil UID installed so that I can get my whoopies without getting knocked up. Sadly, the gynaecologist who did the job is a creepy bastard with religious views who basically tortured me before and during the procedure so I won’t be taking my precious lady parts back to him when my uterine bling needs replacing.
If he doesn’t want to do these procedures, why agree to do them at all? I feel like maybe he should smoke some weed, feel some feels for his fellow man (and the women he’s torturing!) and chill out some.
But that’s not going to happen, so I will go to a doctor with actual morals and a gentle touch in the future. Hopefully I can find someone who doesn’t hate women.
So anyway, this picture above is a picture of me thinking about him with *disdain*, and now I can let it go, enjoy my stress-free sex and move on joyously with my life.
I started painting High Painting Number Five, and it’s the biggest canvas I’ve had a go at so far. It’s a challenging painting because it’s all about who I am, and I am confronting a lot of parts of me that I didn’t want to own in the past. But painting while high is so therapeutic that I’m able to meet these parts of myself and accept them without too much trouble. Then I can work on changing those parts of myself if I really want to.
In amongst it all, I’ve been wrestling with a tummy virus that includes headaches and dizziness on top of all the gut complaints. Because of this, I have at times chosen not to vape my medical marijuana because it just made my head feel worse. But because I was experiencing anxiety as a side effect of ending my antidepressant use; I needed some help. I turned to Deanxit, which was prescribed to me years ago by a psychiatrist when I was weaning on to antidepressants, and I knew from that experience that it would help me wean myself off of the antidepressants.
I made very, very sure that I didn’t vape for at least 8 hours after taking the Deanxit. Why? Because my psychiatry appointments are 15 minutes long, once a year, and that’s not enough time for me to think up questions like, “Hey, when we go to Amsterdam next month, am I going to take a Deanxit, eat an edible and then spend the next 8 hours enduring a mini psychotic break in a strange bed beside a draughty window in a Northern European winter?”
Nope, that was a lesson that I learned the hard way. I can laugh about it now, but I sure wish they’d have warned me… Do not mix antipsychotics with psychedelics. Still, I have a great story to tell now so it’s not all bad, and I’ve been taking out my frustration on building this beanie from scratch. Currently it has ridiculous frills added to it but I think I’ll unravel those and make something nicer. I have the patience for this. I am practising learning from my mistakes.

I try not to have regrets. I’ve done some painfully stupid, and at times, really fucked up shit in my life, but I insist on finding the joy and the beauty that resides in everything. I do this because I have the power to choose to be either regretful about or grateful for those experiences. I enjoy feeling gratitude and I don’t enjoy feeling regret. Instead of avoiding living, like I used to do (I didn’t leave our apartment in Berlin for 8 months) in case I do something I regret, I’d rather get on with living and be grateful for every moment that I get to enjoy being on this planet, in this era, with you all. And if I do some stupid shit along the way, like falling in love with a handsome psychopath who just wants me to bolster his ego before discarding me and shaming me, well, what a marvellously hateful character he will become in my stories…

Every trauma I experience can become a part of an abstract artwork – a gorgeous secret that only I know is there. Arguments can become exquisite twists and pretty weaves in my knitting and crochet. Mistakes, ugliness and shame can become the organic foundations, the fertiliser, of entire forests of accomplishment and achievement, because my failures teach me how to succeed.

Some night recently, around halloween, I got up to pee and climbed back into bed with the thought, “Who am I?” The answer came back to me; “I AM.”

I slept well then, because I choose to be gratefully, gloriously, *fabulously* ME.

No regrets.

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