But I must say, I disagree.

I had a weird experience with a 10:1 THC:CBD Tincture back in 2016. I admit I was not very schooled in dosages, nor was I really paying attention or holding back, if you know what I mean. I am not even sure the 10:1 is the exact ratio I was taking, but let’s go with it for the sake of this post. It seems to be the strongest offered by the brand I bought. (Care By Design) I want to finally share what happened, and what I have been saying happened, because they are two different things.

At first – over the course of about six days in January of 2016 when I was microdosing, I really felt euphoric and blissful, just like the labeled claimed. The tiny eye-dropper style delivery method was fun to add to my morning tea. Who knew how much was in an eye-dropper, and how concentrated it was? I felt great.

My reasoning for trying this tincture: deep seated and long-standing – I was going full “replacement” strategy. I had known for some time, (even back then) that I needed to quit smoking so much weed, for the sake of my lungs and respiratory wellness. (*update – even in the midst of COVID, a respiratory and highly contagious disease, I still smoke so much weed.) As any good drug counselor will tell you, replacement strategy is only a short term fix: since “all addictive behaviors offer the similar neurological and psychological processes, creating the rewarding feelings and sensations, replacement addictive behaviors are common among those trying to overcome an addiction.” (From VeryWellMind, a mentalhealth blog/resource maintained by dotDash publishing co.) I had personal first-hand experience with the shortcut of replacement strategy when I quit cigarettes twenty years ago: replaced with food and with weed, semi-successfully. Honestly, I give myself a B+ on that effort, some days I really do still want to have a cigarette, but I don’t. I mostly keep my weight within a 10-12 pound range, and my weed spending on close watch, monthly. These are my crutches, and how I process and cope with emotions.

So with my new medical card in hand, I went into exploration and discovery mode at several dispensaries in San Francisco. To say I was like a kid in a candy store is to describe it pretty accurately, except that a kid usually has a parent present at the candy store with them, offering and enforcing some limits. I was carefree and without regard to what was going to be safe and effective, but rather – what will make me feel relaxed and happy, like I do when I smoke a bowl, or a joint?

Being in experimental mode, I did take some analog notes, but they turned out to be too cryptic. Years later, as I try to recall and recreate, I can only guess at what I was tryna tell myself. It reminds me of my broken arm incident, back in 2004, when, after outpatient surgery, doctors shot me up with morphine, and sent me home with some augmentation pain killers to last for several weeks. I kept a little tally sheet, with a timestamp to track how many painkillers I was allowed in a day, because my soupy brain really liked the high, and there was no way I could trust myself to remember proper dosages. The Care By Design tinctures were one of many new form factors I was trying, Pax vaping pens being another. And add in a chocolate or a gummy here or there. But yea, I “quit smoking so much” weed.

So in these six days that led to my “overdose”…I’ll give you the run down. At first, blissful and euphoric, like I mentioned. Then, a phase where the fantastic of my imagination blended too easily with the reality in front of me, but all in good fun. An example: On Caltrain, the bicycle car is at the very last car, if you’re headed southbound. Northbound, it’s the first car, and all cyclists know where we’re allowed to board. This is also where the conductor usually does his door and radio check, to keep an eye on the cycle count. (Max: 46 – check the record)

On day one of riding the train, (likely day three of the six day dosing party) I meet the female, young conductor, and it’s her first day on the job. How cute. Day two, I hope to see her again, and I do! Both ways! We chit chat quite a bit. I envy her for starting a career job with longevity and benefits, when I am just contracting for a very high dollar rate, but for a very short time, and given no consideration for long term employment. She’ll be train conductor for twenty years, and retire with CALPERS money, which is rumored to be fat. Or maybe she’s in a union, I don’t know. But I imagine. And then my imagination runs wild.

The last day I took the train on this commute journey, I didn’t see my female conductor friend. I saw the older mentor conductor instead, a skinny bearded, older white dude. And in the bicycle train car, were plenty of non-cyclists. A new type of carriage train car, where fewer bikes fit, (24) but they fit very elegantly. Passengers filling the seats were all talking with each other, as if they were together.

I imagine the whole train car to be a movie set. The one guy not participating in any conversation is wearing a pair of glasses that look like Google Glasses or some modified fashion eye-glass that is also giving him a camera view or a data overlay, perhaps. He is probably the director of the film I imagine we’re all in right now. Maybe he is even live streaming to some viewers, this train experience.

And so my days (and nights) go on like this. Everything I see, I begin to imagine elaborate stories that go to explain or distract or justify an observation, a judgement, a behavior.

In the four and a half years since this incident, I’ve been in talk therapy, exploring the way my mind works. (with a helpful, licensed therapist, and without drugs other than the normal “so much” weed I smoke). And creating stories, or distractions, is one of the many skills I learned, being dragged around the globe as a spoiled military brat. Daughter of a Marine Corps Officer, our lives were characterized by a whole lot of moving, and a whole lot of hurry up and wait. Yes Sir. As a kid, you develop very good self-soothing and self-entertaining skills.

So there was my wild imagination, yes. But there was also an acceleration, a speeding up of my body, my mind, my awareness. I began to feel like I didn’t need sleep, and that food was just really slowing me down. My senses, acutely aware. I could clearly hear things from another person’s headphones blasting, or chit-chat talking sounds floating down from Phyllis’s upstairs kitchen, in my downstairs in-law apartment.

Eventually, by Sunday night of that week – I hadn’t really gotten a full night’s worth, maybe a full hour’s worth of sleep since Wednesday. That weekend I was trying to meet only my most immediate needs: get groceries, get some exercise, get sleep, but I couldn’t relax for the life of me. It was an NFL playoff weekend, and the SuperBowl was scheduled to be “in SF.” (Which really meant Santa Clara – 35 miles away, but the city was crowded, and I mean littered with football and sports marketing types.)

Having lost track of how much liquid I was dropping into my morning tea, and how long a vaping pen “should” last, I was definitely beyond measure, as they say. But I felt like myself. I didn’t feel scared or paranoid, just hyper-aware. And I was never really clear in the first place as to how concentrated, with what compounds – and how this was going to affect me, before I began mixing and matching. I guess I’d have to compare it to my early drinking days: I’ve definitely learned what works for me, and what causes me to get wretched. And how much of each, some of this, none of that…but, like therapy, that too took some practice to get right.

What I’ve learned since this incident is that I most definitely lost good judgement. I discounted how high I actually was, causing alarm among even my dope smoking, partying friends. If it weren’t for my cryptic Facebook postings, and a network of people who love me, reaching out to each other to check on my wellbeing, it’s hard to say what might have happened.

What did happen was that I checked myself into Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital, with the help of my dad, who flew out from Florida on a moment’s notice to help me do so. In San Francisco, I must say, this is truly a badge of honor, a secret club to admit yourself into, and I am grateful for the experience. But it cost me, and my family, a lot.

What I used to say happened, was that I was tricked into checking myself into the hospital, or that I was going in as an undercover spy to write about and expose how screwed up our medical system is, from a mental health perspective. (Charlie’s Fourth Angel, my wild imagination always at work!) Or that I just needed help getting a good night’s sleep and that now would be a time to go see a doctor about that, on a holiday, at this in-patient facility. But that is hiding behind the truth of the matter, which was that my family and friends convinced me, much like the difficult task of talking a 2 year old child into taking a nap, that it would be good for me. I ultimately agreed that seeing a doctor would be helpful, but I never told the doctor – or my family – that I was on any “drugs” – until several months later. Imagine their fear throughout all of this.

In the epilogue of this EPIC blog post, I must say that the care they gave me at Langley Porter was just what I needed, but maybe they kept me in about three days too long. I was 5150’d for five days and ultimately diagnosed with bipolar, but they were uncertain about this and offered also ‘brief psychotic episode, manic in nature’ as a possible diagnosis. I was sent on my way with a list of shrinks to call and a few months worth of antipsychotics. But I knew in my heart I had duped myself into seeing what it was like inside a mental hospital. Some part of me had hoped to put myself on light-duty rest, with no penalty – like tagging the “safe spot” in a game of capture the flag, thinking I’d be able to jump back in as soon as I said the game-on-again-word. Ha. Winning, Charlie Sheen style.

With the thanks of my shrink, my brother, the close knit group of people in real life and on Facebook who reached out and dropped by to check on me…and of course, my parents, my Aunt Janie and my former landlord Phyllis, I was quickly set back upright, holding my all my shattered pieces in bits, like a Humpty Dumpty perched up on her wall. In the nearly five years since this overdose, I’ve gained the ability to trust myself again through the futile attempts at putting all the bits back together just as they were. Talk therapy, journaling and listening to my whispering heart while shutting up my frantically chattering brain are what has helped me get my important bits back in order. Humpty’s new shape isn’t Dumpty at all, and her wall has a much nicer view.