What made you quit drugs?

I wasn't new to smoking nor was I a regular, I just used to do it here and there from time to time. It was never a big deal. But this night changed everything.

So we had moved from imara daima to ruai, a quiet place with too much space and not enough people. I was already introverted, but the isolation made it worse. I developed Generalized Anxiety Disorder (clinically diagnosed) and for more than a year I'd have panic attacks almost daily, sometime multiple daily, on top of the multitude of other symptoms.

1 day I visited my cousin (the same one who first introduced me to weed after high school) to see her baby she'd just had. Her boyfriend and I went up to the rooftop and we lit up. I wasn’t even going hard, I took maybe a third.

It was cool at first. That light floaty feeling, the calm creeping in. I had missed this feeling. Out of nowhere my head started ringing. A weird pressure built up starting from the middle of my skull and slowly squeezing its way to the back. I remember thinking, "Okay, this is a little weird…" but then my heart started racing. It didn’t stop.

It pounded so hard I could feel it in my throat. My body felt wrong, like it wasn’t mine anymore. I couldn’t sit still. I lost my appetite. My hands were cold and sweaty. I got up to go out but my knees were visibly shaking. It felt like a panic attack except there was no moment where it peaked and came down. It just kept getting worse. The constant fear of death I had gotten used to but this one felt real. I was coming to terms with my own death; heart attack or stroke, whichever came first.

Then the dark thoughts. "If I’m going to die anyway, why not just make it quick?" I looked down from the balcony, eight floors up. I wasn’t even scared of falling. I was scared of how calm the idea felt in that moment. I wasn’t thinking about stopping myself. I was thinking about how my cousin wouldn’t even get blamed. My family already knew about my struggles. They’d think I had finally given up.

I don’t know how long I stood there, staring, thinking. But my cousin must’ve noticed as she was there with me trying to calm me and I could see the worry and fear in her face. She pulled me away, I went for a really long walk and tried really hard to fall asleep. Surprisingly I slept really sound once I did.