How I Grew Out of Weed

By the end of September, everyone had left. They had all been accepted into college. I had not. Fine, I thought. I’ll take a gap year. But I made no plans to teach English in Africa or to become a ski instructor. Instead, I stayed home with the other burnouts, and we did drugs.

I started smoking weed when I was a junior in high school, right after I got my driver’s license. Before long, I was smoking every week. At the beginning of my senior year, a friend introduced me to Xanax, which I began taking occasionally. After catching me in multiple lies about where I was and what I’d been doing and finding several prescription pills in my jacket pocket, my parents gave me a series of stern talks, telling me to shape up. My dad had said that if he caught me doing drugs, he would send me to boarding school. But with little more than a year before high school graduation, he thought it unwise to disrupt my education.

I thought I was off the hook, so I didn’t stop. I was getting high almost every day. But in June, after graduation, I received an email from my parents telling me it was time to move out. They said they were available to talk about finding somewhere to live, and they were open to helping me financially. But the deadline was not negotiable: two months.

I didn’t respond. I was upset to be kicked out of my childhood home, but I wrote in my diary at the time, “There is so much drama that I figure it would be stupid to fight to live there.” Deep down, I knew I’d been unpleasant to live with.

So I left. My parents and I hugged goodbye on the way out. I knew my fate was mild compared to one particularly drug-addled friend of mine. He was one of a handful of kids at my high school whose parents hired private security to kidnap their children in the middle of the night and take them to “wilderness camp,” a militaristic rehabilitation program in Utah. He came back months later with a buzz cut and the phone number of a new dealer.

This was back in 2017, in California, which had voted on Election Day the