In March 2020, I went to the LCBO to stock up, because I understood a lockdown was coming. I remember standing in line (two meters apart back when that was a new thing) looking down at my soon-to-be-purchases, and thinking that I was in trouble, if I was to be locked up at home with alcohol in a high-stress situation for weeks at a time.
Up until then, I had a balance with alcohol that was calibrated around how dang busy I was keeping myself all the time; I was never at home, always at work, university, one of the several clubs I managed, one of the roleplaying groups I was a part of, or attending a class on any one of the several things I did in my “free” time, including archery, tai chi, and edged weapons. I basically only drank when I was at home, but that wasn’t very often. When I was at home though, I drank way too much. Alcohol was the way I pumped the brakes and rested for the night.
Standing in line that day, I could see that if I was at home 24/7, I was going to end up drinking a lot. And that was true at first. But over the following few months, I found myself drawn also to cannabis oils that I also happened to have in my cupboard.
Sometime last summer, under the weight of covid, I began taking regular doses of CBD oils in order to help me get through my days at home. I felt shame about this, because I mostly considered cannabis to be a drug, and so the way I understood what I was doing as a kind of abuse.
Something strange happened though. Over time, as I continued with microdosing, I slowed drinking. It just didn’t hold the same appeal to me?
Then one day last summer, I realized one day I hadn’t had a drink in a few days. Then it was a week. A month. Two. Three.
Which is weird, right? That isn’t how alcoholism is supposed to work. So what happened there?
The tl;dr version is that I think that I was trying to use alcohol to do something that cannabis always would have been better suited to do all along, on a deeply biological level.
Bonus Material:
