On Holly Whitaker Smoking Weed (and why it’s none of my business)

I vividly remember reading

Holly Whitaker

’s then-blog Hip Sobriety in the depths of a blind hangover. I was so sad. And when I read her words, I just thought: this is my story.

This was in Spokane, probably 2015, several years before the phenomenon that became Quit Like a Woman, before Chrissy Teagan posted her reading this on her instagram.

Her story wasn’t the old white men AA nonsense that I really couldn’t handle at that time.

I’m sure I was drinking coffee, filled with anxiety, having woken up from a blackout, perhaps having stayed up late with my stepkid, playing Monopoly, talking about who the fuck knows what, that gnawing what-did-I-say feeling, that surely-they-would-say-something-if-it-bad.

My central nervous system was surely fried. Sometimes I made what we called elaborate breakfast, in the kitchen, passing the time with bacon and homemade biscuits and sausage gravy and pancakes and chocolate chip waffles. Perhaps I was doing that, trying to give myself a focus.

All this, 7 years before I would take my last drink.

What I remember from her blog was this: she was writing about the pleasure of being young and sober — the liberation of giving up alcohol — that her life was better, this wasn’t a punishment, something I truly couldn’t fathom; and every word about her experience drinking and wanting to not drink or control her drinking resonated with me, in my bones.

I took a walk that afternoon. I thought to myself, my God. I have got to get this. I just have to.

I thought of myself going to bed without a drink. I took a lot of deep breaths.

But it was a Sunday afternoon. And I was bored. We probably took my stepkid back to their moms. Or maybe they lived with us by then.

But as I recall it, then I went to the Super One down the road and bought some champagne. The bubbles fizzed. I sat on my back porch and looked at the grass. The champagne was so light. It tasted so good that I went back to the store and bought some craft IPA.

Maybe some wine, too? Did I ask my ex-husband what he would like to drink?

I can’t remember.

---

As of late, Holly Whitaker has come out and shared — quite gently, I might add — that her sobriety has evolved to include recreational use of weed (or cannabis, as people always like to say, because I suppose it has the most positive connotation).

I can imagine the challenge of being a public figure with a cult following in sobriety. A lot of people seem to have opinions about whether or not she is smoking weed.

Some people are furious with her. As far as I can tell, she has done this “I don’t need this kind of negativity in my life” for people who dispute this new take on sobriety.

Others say this is California sober, what’s the problem. As far as I can tell, too, there is kind of a kiss-ass cult mindset surrounding her, this she-can’t-do-wrong sense. She is very popular, might be another way to say this. People want her to like them, to validate them.

The spectrum of people in recovery (and quite a few out of recovery, too) with opinions on what constitutes a relapse is vast, to be sure.

Purists (or fundamentalists? Extremists?) in AA think a near-beer is a relapse, which seems quite extreme to me.

But, the truth is, despite myself, I do have opinions about Holly Whitaker smoking weed, too.

Or feelings, at least. It’s hard to name the feelings. Jealousy, maybe? Awe? Fear? Anger?

I don’t even take benzo anxiety medication anymore, I think to myself. Prescription medication! Medication that I got at the pharmacy where I pick up my sons’ amoxicillin, for fuck’s sake. Not something I scored on the street.

Or am I fearful for her, perhaps? I mean, really, weed. We are so far beyond this being a “gateway drug,” aren’t we?

But to use something recreationally. Just for the fun of it. Just to get fucked up.

How would I know, for instance, that the use is recreational, and not problematic? How would I know it’s just for fun, and not a desperate attempt to escape, to avoid a feeling, to just fucking not be so present?

These questions, in regards to a substance, would exhaust me.

---

I have such a long list of things I can binge on that are detrimental to my health — perhaps the data would even show more so. The things that I tend to binge when in times of despair: Cigarettes, sugar, soda, stress, obsessive thinking.

I have given up cigarettes, for the most part, but it is the first thing I want to reach for when something sends me through the roof.

Holly Whitaker wrote that she is experimenting with weed. Experimenting.

What we are comfortable with can evolve in sobriety, I know.

The irony of when I am effectively “working my program" or “walking in my integrity,” or “staying in my own lane” — whatever we should call it — is that I shouldn’t particularly have an opinion about what other people do.

It’s none of my business, really, what Holly Whitaker — person I have never met and almost certainly will never meet — does “recreationally.”

Or how she defines medicinal or recreational or whatever else for herself.

It’s that simple. It’s none of my goddamn business.

I need to assess, just for myself, how my central nervous system responds to certain things.

And perhaps that is what she is getting at, with the vagueness with which she addresses this “smoking weed recreationally” thing. It seems fine now, she says.

People in recovery circles walk a fine line with fear. There is nothing wrong, by my assessment, with having a little bit of healthy fear.

Maybe a good memory, really, that I tend to like things like that a little too much.

My husband, who loves lobster, recently developed an allergy to shellfish. It was a lobster bisque that triggered the hives, the scratchiness in his throat. He now has an epi-pen. The doctor suggested he may not be allergic to shrimp as he is allergic to lobster.

We have yet to test this theory. But it is unlikely that lobster would kill him, and even less likely that he would even have a reaction to shrimp. In my somewhat tenuous metaphor, the lobster is like liquor, and the shrimp is like weed - something akin to lobster, in the same family, something that would produce a similar, delicious, dizzying result.

But at what risk? And who am I to say where the line is, what one’s risk tolerance ought to be? If he should try shrimp, or if it matters if Holly Whitaker hits a bong?

In the end, I suppose, we are all only mortal.

Me staying in my lane / Photo by Pranay Pareek on Unsplash