The Road Part II: Meaning

May 15, 2017May 15, 2017 / Russell James / Leave a comment

Even when it looks like there’s a storm up ahead, the road is the right place for me to be.

My mental health disables me from doing many things. I’ve left a dozen or so jobs due to the ongoing struggle. There are times when it prevents me from taking care of myself: I have a hard time exercising and eating right, I can have a tendency to neglect my hygiene and the state of my house. It can prevent me from doing chores and other work that needs to be done for my music business. It can hold me in a cage, causing me to cancel plans at the last minute, and even cancel gigs in a similar fashion (this isn’t a rare occurrence). Travel has been hard for the past 5 years, and international travel has been completely out of the question. There is so much life that my mental health gets in the way of, so when I’m looking at coping skills I am searching for things that open the doors PTSD and depression have closed on me.

While I’m planning an entire post on the coping skills I have developed, one coping skill, in particular, has developed into a lifestyle over the past 24 years. Music. While I played one musical instrument or another since I was a young child, I didn’t fall in love with it until I started playing guitar. I never felt that playing guitar was a tangible coping skill: It didn’t alleviate my deep-seated feelings of sadness or anger, and I don’t feel that it does as an adult, either.

All smiles at a show in Lancaster, PA, May 2016.

For me, music doesn’t work like a typical coping skill. There are a lot of layers to this, and I’ll try and explain. For me, music has always been a constant positive presence in a life that has been plagued with negativity. I’m talking about the trauma I’ve been through as well as the trauma of life-long depression. It acts as an anchor, through the most turbulent storms. It has been constant and consistent, unlike most other things in my life. I can depend on it to be there, no matter what. I realize that this could all change in a moment: I could lose my sense of hearing; I could lose the ability to play music somehow. But I am confident that I will always have music in my head, even if I can’t express it. It’s always there, and I love it so much. I wake up in the morning with songs in my head and I go to bed struggling to filter them out. My love for my wife is the only thing that trumps my love for the feel of a guitar beneath my fingers. It’s this love that has the most profound effect on my life and forced my hand.

Two years ago I left my job as a psychotherapist amidst immense, depressive turmoil. It was hard, I’d left so many jobs for the same reason. I’d begin these jobs by working my ass off and being good at what I do. Six months to a year later and I’m a depressed wreck: burnt out, suicidal and calling in on a regular basis because I feel like I can’t move. This has been a pattern my whole life and it has nothing to do with laziness: I know this because I work hard and (I hope) all my former co-workers and supervisors would attest to this. I stop working hard when my mental health begins to decompensate. Then I stop working altogether, and I mean this in an encompassing manner. My whole life stops working: I can’t do anything around the house, any coping skills go out the window because I’m stuck to the couch, or my bed, or that chair I always sit in at the kitchen table. Hiking and music are gone, and at times I just stare at the wall for hours on end. My brain stops working correctly. Distorted thoughts perpetuate the depression, while my depleted cortisol levels leave me open to severe anxiety, which also digs the episode’s heels in deeper. After this happened yet again with my final job as a therapist, my wife and I decided it wasn’t important for me to make as much money as it was for me to make meaning. I’ve played music for what seems my entire life, part-time professionally for the past decade. It was time to use those talents and skills to try and start a career doing the only thing that had ever really made sense to me.

I’m driving a straight line across the southern California desert, where the Colorado meets the Mojave in Joshua Tree. It’s dusk, I’m listening to Tycho churn out mellow electronic beats alongside ambient, dreamy, analog synthesizers and guitars. A slight crescent of moon has already risen behind me, and ahead the horizon is a stratum of colors: The Dr. Seuss landscape is divided from the sky by a fading band of pink and orange, changing the colors of the rocks from a deep pumpkin to dark violet. The colors continue above the fading sun: a fading sky blue turns navy as it reaches into space. My windows are open and the cool air licks my face. The smell of night in the desert is special: the dry, dusty cough of the day seems to allotrope into relief. The chill in the air makes it feel damp and the smell of the creosote bushes is a natural aromatherapy, lulling me to wind down. I drink this in greedily as I pull into my campsite and begin preparing for sleep.

Barker Dam, Joshua Tree National Park, April 2017.

This is a scene from the beginning of a month-long tour I recently completed, but it’s one that I could write from several different, exotic locales. Over the past year-and-a-half, I have completed six tours ranging from five days to a month. I’ll be leaving in three weeks for a month-and-a-half. I live out of my Honda Element most nights, staying in national parks and forests, BLM lands, and even a Safeway parking lot or two. I spend my days hiking and fishing, and most nights are filled with gigs in exotic cities and some of the most amazing small towns this country has to offer. I’ve hiked the rocky outcrops of the Pacific Ocean, fished the rivers and streams of the Rocky Mountains, and I’ve walked the New York City streets in the dead of winter. I lived in one of the most remote national parks in the country for a month, writing music and gazing at a night sky the likes of which I’d never seen. I’ve met countless amazing people and been able to reconnect with old friends. None of these things would have been possible without music.

On stage at Big Bend National Park, Texas, November 2016.

Soon after leaving the traditional career path I began realizing new and deeper love for writing and performing music. I realized that I loved the feel of a guitar in my hands just as much as I did when I was 13. It was invigorating; I couldn’t stop playing and writing. I began booking solo shows in earnest (I was still playing with a band at the time) to bring in some money, and I began looking at booking my first tour: Tucson to Silver City, NM, not six months after leaving my job. This first tour was a disaster. I left the house depressed and it grew as I went down the road. I ended up having to come home early, and my wife and a friend had to meet me in Truth or Consequences, NM to help me finish the journey as I was unable to drive. As I rode in the passenger seat for two hours back to Albuquerque I figured my time as a touring musician was over as soon as it started. It was just too scary to be on the road by myself.

Hitting the road alone can be dangerous for someone with such severe mental health concerns, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do it. Quite the opposite, in fact. In my time in academia, I did a lot of studying on trauma. Not only was it close to my heart, but I found the concept of trauma to be absolutely fascinating, and I began seeing childhood trauma as a pervasive social problem. In my studies, I came across the concept of posttraumatic growth. It’s a term to describe the tendency for people who have gone through trauma and healed themselves to exhibit a perception of personal growth as a result of the process. This growth gives meaning to the trauma, creating space for further healing to take root. For this reason, posttraumatic growth has become a focus in my life: to further understand the optimal situations that produce it, and then apply them to my own life. One of the first things I realized about growing beyond my trauma was that I had to allow for situations where I needed to rescue myself, over and over again, to allow new emotional memories to become tied to my anxiety and depression. Memories where I triumphed.

In Peter Levine’s book Waking the Tiger, he discusses an incident where a group of school students was kidnapped and buried underground in their school bus. They escaped, some with more injurious trauma than others. A study was done on the children and the varying affects the traumatic experience had on them in the years following the event. Loosely explained, the study showed that the children who actively worked towards ensuring survival (in this case tunneling their way out of the bus and to the surface) showed graduated returns in growth and healing beyond the experience of being kidnapped. Older children who conceived of the plan and encouraged younger ones to help dig were shown to be the best off in the years following the event and the younger children who began to dig and help were doing well. The story lies in the children who were frozen by their fear and relied on others to rescue them. They were affected in a debilitating way by the traumatic event, even years after it occurred. What was the difference? In short: those who experienced the most posttraumatic growth kept moving. They refused to give up and they fought for survival.

Fight or keep moving.

There are a lot of childhood traumas where fighting is not possible, as was the case with mine. Just because I couldn’t effect the situation at the time doesn’t mean I’ve lost my chance at posttraumatic growth, but it does mean I have to work harder at it. Going on tour and putting myself through anxious situations and coming out on top aids posttraumatic growth. Each time I drive through major city traffic without panic I’m one step closer to it never happening again. Each time I don’t throw in the towel when I’m driving in some faraway state while depressed and on the verge of tears I pound another nail into my trauma’s coffin. If I didn’t have music I wouldn’t be able to do any of this

I’ve been playing music since I was very young, and I’ve been writing it since I was 15. I feel in resonance when I’m creating music. Chasing this resonance has pushed me out of my comfort zone and that is something I have sorely needed. Chasing the resonance has brought a level of meaning to my life that I could never have imagined. It has been the true impetus of healing in my life, and when the going is hard that is how I choose to understand what I’m doing. I don’t have any delusions that I would become some famous singer-songwriter, I know that I’m just another white guy with a guitar. I also know that meaning is rarely found in something outside of ourselves, like money or notoriety. Meaning comes from within. Cultivating this meaning is one of the most important tasks we must accomplish in our lives. Music gives me the road. The road gives me meaning.

Feeling good on the southern California Coast, April 2017.

The Cape

April 18, 2017April 19, 2017 / Russell James / 2 Comments

I’m sitting in a dingy hotel room in Clallam Bay, across the strait from Canada. I can see the southern coast of Vancouver Island beyond the docks where men anchor boats after a long day in search of Halibut and other big commercial fish. My day started unassuming enough, with a drive up 101 (an amazing road worthy of its own post) towards the northwestern coast of the Olympic Peninsula. I was planning on taking the day off, as it was pouring and I was in serious need of a shower and a warm, dry bed. After securing my room in Sekiu, I decided that seeing the tribal lands of the Makah would be important, and perhaps I could see the coast from the west as well.

I started at the Makah Tribal museum, and I read about the plight of the Makah, which read like the narrative of every North American tribe: White people came, natives died, white people took land, natives died, often horribly. White people forced treaty, tried their best to wipe out culture by forced assimilation of native peoples, who kind of went along, but eventually gave them a well-deserved middle finger. I saw the bones of whale and saw how the people of this land were similar to the people of my land: different fish, different water, same people. Warriors, fighters, survivors.

The woman at the counter and I began talking and she told me that the small tribal community that resides on Neah Bay had lost one of it’s youngest and brightest stars. A kid, only 19, who died while diving for shellfish for food, just a week ago. The community was already reeling from the suicide of a tourist a few weeks back, and then this happens. This community, which consists of a gas station, a minuscule marina, the museum, and a handful of sea-battered houses. So much pain on the shoulders of such a small population.

The boy was a leader at the age of 19. “He had such a voice,” she said, and she played me his singing at a recent tribal dance. She was right, he emitted a power in his voice that seemed to come from the might of the sea itself. He was deeply rooted in his culture and spoke at other tribal councils about the need to preserve hunting and fishing traditions. He was attending university and studying biology, and was known to walk into his classes still smelling of whatever dead, beached sea creature he had just been dissecting. “The professors told him he had to stop doing that,” she smiled.

She said he died out at Cape Flattery, at Hole in the Wall, a dangerous cove at the westernmost point of the contiguous United States. A wave came in and swept him out to sea. There was a trail that led there, she told me, and it was important that I go there. “It’s a spiritual place, you will feel it, I know you will feel it.”

She directed me out of the village, which now looked tired with grief, soaked to the bone, and looking for simple rest. It was raining steadily as I took the sharp curve that put me on the Cape road. I first climbed, then descended the winding two-lane that follows the Sekiu River. Great, white trees tunneled the road, and jade-green clubmoss clung to bare, skeletal branches that still awaited a Spring awakening. Further back I saw the ever-present Douglas Fir trees towering in the temperate, rain-drenched hills. The road began to climb again towards the trailhead, the rain continued to fall.

At the trailhead, I saw few cars, which wasn’t a surprise on a Monday like this at the end of the country. This really was the end of the road, I thought to myself, as I struggled to pull my rain pants on while sitting in the driver’s seat. Snug in my rain gear I began the descent, which was steep, wet, and shimmering a glorious green. I could feel something stirring in this place. The trail was muddy, and soon my shoes were covered and I was thankful for choosing the waterproof sneakers for this trip. The rain beat staccato against my raincoat and I walked with the syncopation. Every ten hits or so I would get bombed by a fat drop falling from one of the trees rather than the sky. It was fun to anticipate them when I walked under the canopy.

After about half a mile, the trail leveled off and a boardwalk came into view. As I approached I saw that it sat about three to four feet above the ground cover, which was a litter of giant ferns, tangled roots, and various flotsam that has collected over years of heavy storms. As I walked on these boardwalks, I saw huge, yellow lilies bursting from the forest floor. Everything was covered in clubmoss and the earth smelled rich with life. Mixed in was the oily aroma of the railroad ties that constructed the board walk. Eventually, I heard the roar of waves crashing against the rocky Washington coast mingling with the tap-tap-tap of rain on my hood. I approached a clearing in the rocks, the haze parted and I saw it. Cape Flattery.

“I didn’t know,” I whispered to the sky, the rain, the trees, anything around me. I didn’t know something could look this beautiful. This powerful, yet fragile. I walked to the clearing and the carved coast came closer into view.The turbulent northern Pacific waters raged on to the west, smashing against two green islands about 1/8 mile off the coast. The water flowed into a deep gouge in the coastline, the Hole in the Wall. The blue-green waves moved in and out of the cove, like deep breaths, in-out, in-out. The water towards the center of the inlet was a deep navy, sighing up and down like the belly of the Earth softly sleeping. It could wake up in a rage with no notice, filling the hole and carving further into the rocks. This is where it happened, where the sea took him, I thought. I listened.

Hole in the Wall: A dangerous place even for those who have grown up diving rthese waters their entire lives.

I walked further toward land’s end. My steps felt light on the spongy earth, it gave the vague sensation that I was hovering rather than walking. I saw the trail lead first down, then up towards the final lookout. The trees towered above me, the rain continued to pour down, and the wind pounding the Strait of Juan de Fuca began picking up. My heart felt like it was floating on those last steps. I felt the spirit of the cape flowing from the ocean, the rocks, the ground, the trees. The echo of its voice reverberated in the sea caves that littered the northern side of the cape. I went to the very end, Tatoosh Island floated about a mile off into the sea, a green stalwart against the pounding surf, with a small, white lighthouse adorning the highest point. I looked again towards the Hole. I thought of the young man whose spirit departed him when the wave took him while he was diving there. It was a violent looking place, only a very brave person would be able to navigate those waters, and he and his people have been doing it for millennia. They fought back the Spanish who raped tribal women and tried to steal their lands. They fought for the right to hunt and fish as they have done for centuries when the US forced them to sign treaties. They retained their culture even when Americanization did it’s best to take it from them. Their spirit lingers here in this place. I sat in the rain and let it pass through me. I let the water clean my heart and mind. I could smell the salt in the air, mixed with the deep, rich loam.

The end of the country. Tatoosh Island off in the distance.

I spent the previous weekend camping with my friend at Kalaloch Beaches to the south. We had a perfect spot: trees shading us from the bleating sun, the roar of the waves to the west, and a grand view of the ocean just beyond the bluff that dropped off to the beach. We spent Sunday morning hiking Ruby Beach and intellectualizing about this and that. We went to college together, studied religion, and both came out on the other end more than jaded with the faith of our upbringing. My friend was now trying to reconcile his core ethics, which remained the same as they were when he espoused his former faith. He wanted to know what made him tick, and why. It was an illuminating conversation for me, to hear someone going through a crisis of faith in such an intellectual way.

As I hiked around the Cape, going down this dangerously slick path to the next one, mere feet from falling to my death (and happy to be doing so), I applied my friend’s question to my own life. What made me tick? Why do I do what I do? What matters most to me? The answer came easily: I don’t want people to suffer. Almost everything I do runs through this filter and has since I was young. I’m not perfect, and I cause suffering, too, but trust me when I say the resulting shame has been crippling. Why don’t I want people to suffer? Because I know how much life can hurt, how that hurt can change a person, can damage a person. I know and I don’t want other people to feel that. It’s why I studied religion and philosophy, it’s why I became a therapist, and it’s a driving force behind why I play music. It also directs a central passion, or locus of control of mine: environmental awareness.

Trying to think like my friend, I questioned why in the world I care about the environment. I mean, I don’t think the most drastic and cataclysmic damage will be seen on Earth until after I’m dead when It won’t really bother me ( because I’ll be dead). I don’t have children, I don’t plan on having children, and even if I did, again, I’d be dead and wouldn’t really care either way. So what’s the point? I’m going to get to enjoy this planet, then I’m going to die and anything else is pretty much immaterial to me.

It comes back to what makes me tick: I don’t want people to suffer. I have suffered a great deal in my life and I don’t want anyone else to feel that way. I have also found there are things that help me get through this painful life. Connecting with this Earth is one of the main ones. I want to show people that they can heal themselves with this connection. We can become better because of this connection: better physically, emotionally, and yes, spiritually. There is so much respite and life to be found in the natural world; I want to save it because I know that it can help people get through the suffering. Its song is so sweet, and I firmly believe that everyone who truly hears it will be changed. This is why I want conservation. This is why I do everything I do. I feel it deep within my soul. My heart explodes with its truth.

After a long time perching myself on various dangerous ledges, I began making my way back up through the forest on the steep trail. My body felt hot under my rubbery rain gear, and the trail climbed ever steep. My feet slipped on the muddy slopes, slick as ice. While each step took effort, I still retained that euphoric feeling, like I was gliding up the hill. My heart felt peace, even as it beat ever harder within my chest. When I finally reached my car I stripped down to my tank in the pouring rain and let it wash the sweat off. I breathed in the spirit of that place, something so old yet so fresh. I got in my car and drove towards the village. The Strait of Juan de Fuca, a memorial to the Spanish that tried and failed to take this land from the Makah, loomed gray on the horizon.

As I navigated the streets I saw that the faces of those I passed wore the badge of grief that the woman at the museum did. May you feel peace, I chanted as I made my way past the totem poles that marked the entrance to Neah Bay. This place gave me something more valuable that I could have imagined. It gave me more than just an amazing picture, even more than an amazing feeling. It gave me reason, meaning, and purpose. I am grateful for the story of the young man that compelled me to see his sacred place. And I am forever grateful for this, the most important hike of my life.

Sekiu, 4.17.17

October Rain

October 13, 2016October 13, 2016 / Russell James / Leave a comment

October is arguably the best month of the year in New Mexico. The heat of the summer has tapered off into the pleasant and dry 70s during the day, and a comfortably chilly mid-40s at night. It’s not quite time to put away the short sleeves, but cool enough in the mornings to wear a cozy sweater. Like the rest of the country, our leaves begin changing rapidly around the 3^rd week. I live near the Bosque, which describes the east and west banks of the Rio Grande. Sudden bursts of yellow explode within the green cottonwood trees that fill the strand, creating an amalgam of emerald and gold. The air smells crisp in the morning and dry with heat in the afternoons before settling into a refreshing bite as the stars emerge above the city of Albuquerque.

It’s the perfect time of year for hiking, camping, fishing, walking the dogs, eating breakfast on the patio, and potlucks with friends in the park. The intoxicating smell of roasting green chile is on the air, the balloon fiesta happens (hundreds of hot air balloons filling the sky every morning is an amazing site), and the outdoor patios at all our fine breweries gather fine folks like moths to a flame. To my wife and I, October also means Annibirthary week. This is when we celebrate my birthday, our anniversary, and her birthday on consecutive days by going on some type of outdoors adventure together.

October brings together some of what I consider the best things in life. But the advent of autumn also carries a hard and heavy weight for me. For the past 25 years I’ve spent my favorite time of year covered in a months-long blanket of depression. I can hear it breathing behind me as August turns, and by the end of September I’m in the fog. At my birthday I’m glued in, enveloped in gray that stands in stark contrast with the season of gold.

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The result is that I live a sort of half-life: I’m experiencing the brilliance of the season through a shroud. This October I took a trip across the country, stopping at such awe-inspiring locales as the Ozarks and Great Smoky Mountains. I met my wife on the coast and we attended the wedding of a dear and old friend. For this year’s Annibirthary we were to stay in a trailer on the land my wife bought in West Virginia, and experience I was looking forward to. We were then to travel to Cuyahoga National Park, stay with friends, before driving back to Albuquerque. The first half of the week went fine. Once the wedding was over the meltdown started. My depression snapped at my face like a rabid dog, and the breathing I’d heard early in August had turned to fire on the back of my neck. Daily panic attacks meant plans had to change. The pain I felt in my heart was only equaled by the pain I forced upon myself thinking that I was ruining my wife’s vacation, and it was all my fault (one of depression’s most effective lies). We salvaged what we could, and we have some happy memories of the week, but mostly its polluted by hour long stops on the side of the highway to calm me down, and unstoppable tears.

Every autumn my hope for the best trumps my expectation of the worst, yet the worst always seems to happen no matter what I do. This year has been particularly hard: constant suicidal thoughts, self-injurious panic attacks, and I just don’t know how a body can hold that many tears. It’s also been particularly productive in spite of its hardships. My creative life is unbottling, sometimes at an obsessive rate. I don’t sleep, but more often its because my creative mind won’t shut down, rather than ruminating over what I would write in my suicide note. I count this as a valuable treasure, a ray of light cutting through the rain.

I’m heading off to Big Bend National Park in a couple weeks as I begin my month-long artist residency. I’ll be in one of the most remote areas of the contiguous United States, hours from the nearest professional psychiatric help, and an entire day’s drive from home. But I’ll be minutes from the Chisos Mountains, towering seven thousand feet in the Texas desert. I’ll be a short walk from the red canyons of the Rio Grande. The only expectation that I have been given is to be inspired and create. My hope is that the depression will clear by the time I get there and I can make the most out of this experience. Something tells me that it won’t make a difference if my dark tourist is accompanying me for the ride.

Let’s Talk Cannabis

August 5, 2016August 6, 2016 / Russell James / Leave a comment

Sandbridge Beach in Virginia is a favorite place for my wife and me. Each year we are privileged enough to spend a week with her family amongst the dunes and waves, laughing and bouncing up and down in the water, getting minor sun burns, and avoiding the tiny, translucent fiddler crabs poking out of their dens in the sand and running across the playa. It’s a joyous reunion: dozens of family members converge upon several different beach houses and spend the week recharging their batteries in unison. I love this week and look forward to it every year. Walking the beach at sunrise and sunset, letting the sun slowly brown my typically pasty skin, watching the kids play in the sand and water. These things are surely energizing and life-giving. There’s only one problem with this week: I’m not allowed to take the only medicine that is effective for my mental health.

Throughout my life I have been on over a dozen medications to treat my intractable depression and posttraumatic stress disorder: Lithium, Lamictal, Prozac, Abilify, Celexa, Lexapro, Paxil, Cymbalta, Effexor, Serzone, Tofranil, Remeron, Seroquel, Zyprexa, BuSpar, Wellbutrin, Trazadone, Topamax, Prazosin, Brintellix, and most recently Zoloft… not to mention the following benzodiazepines to combat anxiety: Xanax, Klonopin, Ativan, and even Halcyon. None of them has done anything to alleviate my depression or symptoms related to my PTSD. Here’s what they have done:

Caused me to gain 60 pounds in 3 months (Abilify)
Caused my digestive system to be in constant upheaval
Time loss (when all of a sudden its an hour later and you don’t know how that happened, different from forgetting, more like blacking out)
Suicidal thoughts have been exaggerated (they’re always there, but they come harder on some meds)
Severe withdrawal symptoms
Thousands of dollars

These are all just off the top of my head. If I thought harder and read my old journals, I could easily list more detrimental effects. These are the most salient, the ones that have impacted my daily life for over twenty years. I’ve continually put myself through further hell and pain by following the advice of several doctors because, well, they’re doctors. All of them, save two, had no understanding of the Endocannabinoid System, or ECS.

So what is the ECS? It is the “essential regulator in bodily function…” (Russo, 2004). Its basic functions are “relax, eat, sleep, forget, and protect” (DiMarzo, 1998). It’s a very nuanced system that mediates a physiological homeostasis when in balance. When it is out of balance we start experience some serious, and often mysterious, health concerns. According to Phytecs, its discovery was only a generation ago and therefore many in the medical community have a knowledge deficiency when it comes to this crucial component in healthy bodies. In fact, there may be medical practitioners who have no knowledge of it whatsoever. This is truly an oversight in our medical community.

Recent research has shown that an ECS that is out of balance can result in many adverse medical conditions, some that are heretofore mysteries to the medical community (e.g. fibromyalgia). A hyperactive ECS is linked to morbid obesity, diabetes, and hepatic liver fibrosis. Similarly, we see a deficiency in endocannabinoids in persons experiencing fibromyalgia, migraines, and idiopathic bowel syndrome (IBS). Further research is beginning to show links between deficient levels of endocannabinoids and retractable depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and various neuropathic pain conditions.

This is pretty revolutionary stuff. But here’s the big kicker: persons with cancer have been observed to possess increased levels of the two main endocannabinoids. What does this actually mean? It means that when the body encounters cancer it fights it using the natural method it has: the ECS. The problem is that our bodies do not have enough endocannabinoids to fully do the job and both stop the growth of cancer cells as well as kill them off. In research coming out of Europe, the addition of extreme ECS therapy in cancer cases is showing incredibly positive results. Qualitative reports have been popping up in the media quite a bit over the past 2 years, most famously President Jimmy Carter’s miraculous recover from cancer by using 1000s of mg of THC and CBD, the main chemical responders in cannabis.

Endocannabinoid sounds an awful lot like “cannabis,” right? There’s no coincidence there. Cannabis, more derisively known as marijuana, weed, and pot, is the key to balancing an out-of-whack ECS. This is the science behind medical marijuana, this is why it works. Simply put: using cannabis in conjunction with other supplements is going to straighten out a lot of medical problems. With someone like myself who experiences posttraumatic stress, the experience of adverse memories is lessened, not because I’m stoned- that’s more of a necessary side-effect, but because of what the endocannabinoids are doing to my brain’s chemistry. They’re assisting me in experiencing the awful memories of my trauma in a different way. This manifests itself in decreased levels of hyper-vigilance and anxiety, decreased experiences of depression, and decreased adverse dream-states (no more nightmares), to name a few. The result of these decreased negative experiences is that I can function in my day-to-day life. I can get up, do my work, take care of my hygiene, clean the house, and cuddle happily with my wife and dogs. It’s an amazing reaction that I’ve never gotten from any of the multitude of pharmaceuticals I’ve been prescribed. Better yet: it doesn’t give me any negative side effects.

Those of my friends who know me are aware of my long-standing love affair with cannabis. I first started using it when I was 13 and have rarely looked back since. Cannabis was an exclusively recreational plant for me until four years ago. As I began to understand how medicinal it can be my entire paradigm around its use shifted. That’s not to say I don’t recommend it for recreation, because I most certainly do. For a lot of people, it can be a lot of fun, and regardless of what the media has always tried to portray, it has far fewer detrimental effects than other recreational substances (I’m looking at you, booze). Yes, it needs to be used mindfully. So does everything else in this world.

I now see my own personal use as a mixture of medical and recreational, with a strong emphasis on the former. There’s a misnomer in our society that says that one cannot enjoy taking their medicine. For a lot of situations this has a lot of truth and utility: someone who enjoys taking their pain medication too much is bound for a lot of trouble down the road. It can’t be a hard and fast understanding. Cannabis makes me feel good on a medical level, and it makes me feel good on a recreational level. Why is that so wrong?

Here are the facts:

Cannabis has not been linked to deteriorating lung functioning or lung cancer
Cannabis has not been proven to be addictive
Cannabis has not been proven to have accompanying withdrawal symptoms
You cannot overdose on cannabis (but you can take too much and feel miserable if you’re not careful)
Cannabis leads to eating excessive amounts of Hot Cheetoh’s and pizza, so you must take care when using it.

When Nixon put out the Schafer Commission Report (which has since been debunked as an attempt to corral the African-American and left wing communities and omitting the final conclusions that cannabis should be folded into the medical community) policies were set in motion and propaganda machines went full press to demonize cannabis. We are now in a day and age where we can see through these transparent attempts to keep the public in the dark, if we open our eyes (they don’t want you to do that).

I’m typing this lengthy post in the living room of my in-law’s rental. It’s sunny with clear blue skies. If I poke my head out of the window I can hear the lull of waves crashing on the beach and children playing. I’m in Virginia, a state that has not approved medical cannabis. I have nowhere to get it and if I had it in my possession I’m at risk for prosecution by a state with archaic drug laws taken directly from Nixon’s little report. Therefore, I’ve been struggling with my depression and anxiety all week. It’s not that I haven’t enjoyed myself, I certainly have. But then I start feeling the ball in my chest grow and I have to leave where I am and sit alone until the tears stop. Sometimes this lasts all afternoon when the sky is clear and the air smells of salt and sunscreen. And I’m inside typing a blog about how I can’t use the only medication that works for me. I sincerely hope that those who read this with an antagonist opinion have done so with an open mind. As always, I would love to help anyone understand this pretty complicated issue via personal communication.

Works Cited

Di Marzo, V. 1998. “‘Endocannabinoids’ and other fatty acid derivatives with cannabimimetic properties: biochemistry and possible physiopathological relevance.” Biochim Biophys Acta 1392 (2-3):153- 75.

Russo, E.B. 2004. “Clinical endocannabinoid deficiency (CECD): Can this concept explain therapeutic benefits of cannabis in migraine, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome and other treatment resistant conditions?” Neuroendocrinol Lett 25 (1-2):31-39.

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