I am happy I had weed-induced panic attacks and depersonalization

I overcame the most terrifying, disconcerting, anxiety-creating, weed-induced psychological turmoil of my life, and I am hoping to shed light on my experience. By writing what I would’ve liked nothing more than to read, hopefully I can ease some worries someone may have.

I have only smoked weed three times: the first time, I didn't feel a high; the second time, it scared me, but left me after a week; the third time, it hit me extremely hard, twisted my mind, sent me into panic, and brought me debilitating effects for many weeks, before eventually departing.

I was sixteen or seventeen the third time; now I am nearly nineteen. After one hit of the bong (wow, I really sound like a dirtbag), I didn't feel high, so I had another. Around ten minutes later, I was sitting quietly among some peers, feeling inwardly nervous, when, all at once, it hit me. Panning about the room at my not-so-close friends—on whom the weed seemed to have the opposite effect—all of a sudden I was indescribably petrified.

My heart started racing. I began to tremble.

'Oh, no. No, no, no,' I recall saying, standing up from my seat like Niki from Obsession—except I was certainly not smiling!

I am drawn to describing the terror that suddenly befell me as follows. It was as if some deep-seated assumption of mine—one I depended on for comfort within the world—was abruptly ripped from beneath my feet, throwing me into inconsolable existential terror and consternation.

So, after a few foggy, tortured hours sitting on a chair, intermittently comforted by one friend or another, I went to bed.

Most clearly, I recall this one thought I had during my high. The knowledge of my terror was vivid beyond words, completely undeniable, and I knew that it would be impossible to forget. I could not leave this feeling overnight; I intimately knew that I was doomed to feel it for weeks to come, if not longer.

And, sure enough, though the morning after was blurry and uneventful, when I rode back home and stretched out on my bed, my room didn't look normal—or was it my mind that didn’t?—and, falling into a fresh panic, my belief from the night before—that any normalcy from my past life had left me—was apparently confirmed. I had turned over a stone and uncovered something that could not be unseen.

I fretted that I had ruined my mind. I did not know if I’d ever regain psychological wellbeing. Was I going insane? Was time real? Am I in a time loop? What is time? What am I? Wow, I might actually be losing it!

In the following months, I had a few distinct panic attacks. On those occasions, I feared leaving bed to see the world, lest I should trigger that indescribable fear again. I suffered quietly, telling nobody; I silently hoped it would go away.

I felt dissociated, mentally separated, every good feeling overwhelmingly smothered in anxious confusion.

I read that the best thing to do was to resume your normal life, pretend nothing happened, and wait for it to wane. But I couldn’t, for each time I tried, I was overcome with fear; it was too debilitating and, without any consolation, I felt it would eat me alive.

Ultimately, the excruciating despair of silence outweighed my reluctance to tell an adult. I broke down and told my mother. As I knew she would, she booked me in to see a psychologist. I went to two or three appointments and, to my disbelief and delicious relief, I actually began to accept how I felt.

The psychologist helped greatly, not that she shone light on the unfathomable state of my mind, but that she gave me tips for my disturbance and panic attacks, and gave me a sense of being connected to another person—not merely a family member, or one of my naive, oblivious friends (caring as they may be), but someone with expert knowledge and compassion who showed me I could conquer my predicament.

One tip she—my psychologist—gave me was to avoid diving into each terrifying sensation I had. Do not try to interrogate each scary feeling that arises, but instead treat each terribly-unnerving, existentially-torturous sensation as something to be merely observed for a moment, then plainly released.

It’s like swimming into the waves, rather than with them. Or clamouring to stop a set of falling dominoes, rather than letting them be.

However completely terrified I was by my state of mind, I found myself morbidly drawn towards it. Sometimes, I would stare at objects or focus on some idea in my head with the intention of resurfacing that existential dread—perhaps for understanding’s sake, I don’t know.

Anyway, it was my going to that psychologist that turned the tide of my perception. From then on, my hope resparked and my anxiety diminished within a few months. I began being more present, feeling more normal, free from that incessant existential rumination.

I am great now, thank you for asking, and am actually grateful for this whole ordeal. Without it, I may never have committed myself during senior high, which I did in consequence of wanting to understand reality—because it so befuddled me! Actually, I got into university off the back of that year and am studying cool things that I doubt I would have studied had I not become so immensely, despairingly, paralysingly disturbed during that time of my life.

I do still wonder, though, about how weed does this to some people, and not others. Would I have been undisturbed had I smoked with closer friends in a more familiar place? I am much less laid-back than they were, and more introspective, so was that partly the reason for my incomparable reaction?

I do suspect that the root of my reaction was intellectual: that, if I were a more relaxed person, I mightn’t’ve been so affected. Smoking brought on a state of mind that enabled certain realisations about the world that I hadn’t quite pinned down yet, and which subsequently lingered in my awareness, and which I was thus forced to consider.

Overall, 0/10 experience; definitely not pleasurable. Enlightening, on the other hand—maybe! While I might come off as giddy, trust me, I was not during this time! Not until I saw my lovely psychologist could I begin to move on and make light of it.