Radical Freedom: Why I'm Quitting the "Sacred Plant" Forever

The true story of how I let a so-called "sacred" plant steer me off course... and the bumpy road I took to create a life of wild, radical freedom

I’m breaking up with weed — and all substances — for good.

Up until I was 30 (I’m 37 now), I had never touched the stuff.

Then, on a mini vacation in Seattle in the fall of 2017, my then-husband and I bought some vape cartridges.

I didn’t feel much when I first tried it… so I still barely touched the stuff.

But eventually, it “hit me,” and I experienced the fabled effects of this so-called sacred plant medicine…

It pushed me out of my shell.

It helped me see myself from a wider perspective.

It helped me see life differently.

And as deeply steeped in ignorance as I was then, I didn’t believe I could have accomplished any of those things without it.

It’s a tricky plant that has served a purpose in my life.

But I’m not ashamed to admit that it isn’t serving a purpose any longer.

Similar to how I’ve realized the marketing that exists behind the mental health industry pushing us all to run to our local drug dealer psychiatrist for the latest and greatest pill that will magically solve our deep-seated emotional and spiritual issues (and the physical ones that result), I’ve also realized that the purpose marijuana can serve…

…is short-lived.

Because it’s a shortcut.

Marijuana showed me places I could go that are possible to go without it.

It pushed me out of my shell → I can live outside of my shell.

It helped me see myself from a wider perspective → I can see myself that way all the time.

It helped me see life differently → I can choose to see it differently on my own, too.

Not everything even the wisest “spiritual” people say about marijuana is true.

Marijuana is physically, mentally, and emotionally addictive.

Just because it’s not as immediately life-ruiningly horribly addictive as drugs like meth, cocaine, or heroin, doesn’t mean it’s not addictive.

And it may not ruin your life (it’s much, much easier to quit and the withdrawal symptoms are not life-threatening), marijuana can certainly slow your life down.

Which may be what you need — for a time.

But in the long haul, it’ll have the opposite effect you originally intended.

Marijuana causes adrenaline and other feel-good chemicals like dopamine and serotonin to flood the body and the brain… that’s how it gives the illusion that it helps us.

It’s similar to how drug companies lace their pharmaceuticals with caffeine to create the illusion that they make us feel better.

Anthony William, the Medical Medium, says in his book Brain Saver that cannabis causes a “crisis” state in our brains.

Fight or flight.

It creates stress in the body.

Isn’t that what we need less of when we first reach for a substance like weed?

What we feel when we feel “chill” isn’t the marijuana, it’s the adrenaline racing to cool off our brain and save it from the crisis of the toxin inside of it.

(Incidentally, that’s also why cold plunges feel “good” but only after you get out of the icy water. Adrenaline. NOT because cold “therapy” is good for you.)

Hear me loud and clear: It’s not the THC (or whatever’s in those pills) that makes us feel good. It’s what the THC causes our bodies to produce in response that feels good.

There are other ways for us to produce those things other than by consuming marijuana… ways that don’t cause us to binge eat and procrastinate on the things that matter most to us:

• Long, leisurely walks in the woods

• Meditating

• Writing something meaningful (journal, poetry, Substack articles, etc.)

• Really good chats with besties

Now I’m going to share the good, the bad, and the ugly about my personal journey with cannabis.

It started in Seattle…

… but it really started when I picked it up back home in Orlando.

I was still married at the time, and around the same time Seattle happened, my husband said he wanted to explore an open relationship… which was code for “You’re not sleeping with me enough, and I’m not happy about it… but I’m too chicken to ask for a divorce, so let’s see if you’ll fall for this instead…”

And I fell for it.

I totally fell for it.

It took me three weeks in “identity crisis” mode to say “yes” to the idea. All kinds of scary thoughts raged through my mind…

Who am I if I do this? Who am I if I don’t? My husband was a virgin when we got married; isn’t it cruel to keep him under lock and key for the rest of his life if I can’t give him what he needs?

And eventually, I thought…

This is better than getting divorced. We don’t have to tell anyone. What a relief to not have to be everything for him anymore. More love in my life sounds great. I trust him. I want him to be happy and free. Don’t they say “If you love someone, set them free?”

This was the time in my life when it became the most obvious (only in retrospect of course) that I had no idea how to deal with my emotions.

Heck, I didn’t even know I had emotions.

Back then I’d describe myself as “not very emotional,” when the truth was that I’d spent many years suppressing my emotions — not saying how I really felt or asking for what I really wanted — so I could keep the other people in my life (like my parents + my husband and his parents) comfortable.

Because if the people close to me were happy with me, then I could be happy with myself… right?

Codependency at its finest.

Marijuana changed all that.

It brought a lot of emotion to the surface. Eventually, I stopped caring about what people thought of me. It felt like I’d come alive again, and I’d credited this magical plant for that.

I eventually told my husband the truth: that I wasn’t attracted to him, and that I didn’t want to keep forcing myself to sleep with him.

Of course, I didn’t know I wasn’t attracted to him when we got married. I remember thinking it was kind of “odd but cool” that I was marrying a guy who looked and sounded and acted like him… who seemed so unlike everyone else I’d ever been attracted to.

But I just went with it.

Plus, my mom and dad liked him — so how could it possibly be an unwise decision to marry the guy?

Such was my decision-making process at the time… if nobody was telling me it was a bad idea, then it must be the right idea.

Two years after our wedding, I stopped taking the birth control pill… the one I’d been on for a couple of months before I suddenly realized I had a “strange sort of crush” on my then-just-a-good-friend.

I had no idea how taking synthetic hormones every day could fuck you up in ways you’d never expect — and they never tell you about — but that’s exactly what happened.

(Birth control pills are going to become the “cigarettes” and “sunbathing in Crisco” of our generation… just wait.)

I blamed myself for everything that happened next:

My libido crashed and burned.

And I felt so guilty and ashamed.

I did everything I could to revive myself, but none of it worked, so I resorted to drinking to loosen me up (literally)… and essentially forced myself into sleeping with a man who did nothing for me in that department.

But I couldn’t let myself see that. Not yet.

What would it mean to admit to myself that I’d married somebody I wasn’t even attracted to because I’d taken factory-made synthetic hormones that had altered my consciousness (and pheromones)?

It was too painful.

It was less painful to just believe I was broken and needed fixing.

I tried to fix myself for five years.

I took ashwagandha, chasteberry, and dozens of other hormone-balancing herbs that did make me feel better mood-wise. What got me to quit the Pill in the first place was noticing how abysmal I felt in the week where my body literally bled not because it was shedding its uterine lining but because it was in withdrawal from the drug I’d been taking.

To some extent, my husband inviting me to explore an open relationship was terrifying, but to another extent… I was relieved.

And when I got on the dating apps (for the first time ever) and saw how many good-looking men were interested in me even though I was married, I realized how not hot I felt when I was around my husband.

He certainly didn’t act excited to be married to me most of the time. He often just seemed distant and disinterested… but when he wanted a romp, I was supposed to just…. be into it? Nah, boo.

But I digress.

My use of marijuana started innocently enough. At first, it was just CBD, which seemed to help me so much with anxiety — especially the anxiety I felt when trying to quit drinking.

That’s how I stopped drinking initially: by vaping CBD, which eventually turned into THC.

Not only did it help with my anxiety, but it also seemed to increase my confidence. It seemed to melt the wall between me and my words. Suddenly I could just speak without thinking about what I wanted to say first.

There was less hesitation.

Less pause and more poise.

It felt like I could finally be who I truly was. Unapologetically vibrant.

And my husband didn’t like that much.

By August of 2018, he’d been seeing someone else for four months and had “the best sex of his life” (who comes home and tells their wife that?).

Since I’d had a flare-up of HPV according to my recent PAP smear, my husband told me that we could no longer have sex without a condom so he could protect his new girlfriend Karli.

He had HPV, too, and he’d had it for the entirety of our marriage because I’d first tested positive for it in 2011.

Even though I wasn’t into sex with him anymore, I remember feeling incredibly insulted by his ignorance of how viruses work.

He already had HPV, but instead of telling her that, he’d told her about my results, and that scared her. Since he wanted to have unprotected sex with her — which would undoubtedly transmit HPV to her at some point anyway — he’d promised her that he’d just use a condom with me from that point forward.

Absurd, right?

When he told me his “plan” to protect her, I laughed — and I was also furious at what I perceived as absolute ignorance.

I’d long started to lose respect for my husband, having watched him quit project after project that “didn’t pan out” while I worked myself into the ground to support the new lifestyle he’d been party to convincing me was the next logical step for us in “our” success.

In addition to forcing myself to have sex with my husband, I’d also been forcing myself to give him way more credit than he deserved for my starting my blog, Proofread Anywhere, back in 2014.

Even though he had no ability or skill to create any of it himself and I’d done 90% of the initial work — including building the website, the course itself, writing ALL of the emails, hiring/managing team members when it became more than I could manage on my own — I forced myself, especially in front of his parents, to ooze with feigned gratitude that I wouldn’t have been able to do it without him.

And I believed that for so long. I genuinely believed that I never would’ve become successful without him.

Does an acorn require a sunflower seed to grow into what it’s innately meant to become?

No.

We all have an innate pattern — maybe you’ve heard it called “destiny” — that drives us to unfurl into the best versions of ourselves.

My husband was most certainly a catalyst for this process to begin, but he wasn’t the cause.

But I craved (and so did he) his parents' approval above all else. It was ingrained in our way of life. If you don’t know what to do, ask your parents.

They didn’t approve of everything we did, though, especially when it seemed to be my idea. I remember our decision to take a year-long travel adventure down to South America — his mother cried, and his dad was pissed but told us if we wanted to “waste” a year of our lives down there, to go right ahead.

And we did. I’m glad about that.

It certainly wasn’t a waste of time: In that time, I grew Proofread Anywhere to its first million in revenue, and I helped two other entrepreneurs in similar niches relaunch their tired brands. I made a profit doing all of it.

But I was so stressed. My husband was doing his own projects and using the money my brand had earned to finance all of them. His projects didn’t go anywhere. He’d switch flavors so fast. I tried so hard to maintain belief in what he was doing, but slowly, the longer it went on, the more I began resenting him.

Proofread Anywhere was generating $80,000 a month by that time, and he wanted to start a pay-per-click ad consultancy or sell yet-to-be-built Software as a Service (SaaS) to the owners of martial arts studios.

It wasn’t that he wanted his own thing that bothered me. It was that he wanted his own thing without learning the skills. He’d been sold by multiple coaching programs that he could just hire other people to do the things he’d sell to these unsuspecting business owners. He wouldn’t be managing ads or writing copy or building workflows himself; no — he’d pay someone else to do all of it for him, as the middle man, and make a huge profit on the front end.

I’d long wanted him to invest in what was right in front of him, to stop being on the payroll without working on the actual business doing actual work. My dream was that he’d step up and learn how to write killer copy or build landing pages or create course content — or at least find and hire someone who could — so I didn’t have to do it all myself.

(By early 2018, to his credit, he’d finally started taking the business “we” had seriously and had stepped into a management position, but it was too little too late at that point and it came at a cost of a $4,000-per-month “coach” who got the idea from me.)

My husband was so blind to the stress I was under, sitting right there as I downed up to an entire bottle of wine in the evenings while we watched Downton Abbey on the floor of our shitty apartment in Buenos Aires.

I can see now how he didn’t know me at all. He frequently admonished me for moving too fast: “Slow down! Not everyone moves as fast as you do” — making me feel like I was the problem but ignoring his own contribution to that problem.

Everyone else needed to be happy — him, his parents, the team I’d built, the students I served — but who was there to make sure I was happy?

I thought I would be happy if everyone else was, which led to a lot of wasted time clarifying and explaining and justifying my decisions to ensure I got their approval.

Even though I lost significant parts of myself while I was married, I’m so grateful for the parts of myself I kept alive.

I wasn’t focusing on myself, though. I wasn’t looking inward.

It wasn’t until I started using marijuana that I started to look inward.

Inward was a scary place. Yet I was relieved when my husband said he wanted a divorce in the middle of our trip to Cancún.

I’d been vaping some pretty wild stuff I’d picked up from our recent trip to Colorado, but I wouldn’t find out until years later that vape cartridges at that time (2017-2020) were being laced with other drugs.

Hallucinogens.

That’s how I ended up committed into mental hospitals four times in two years. Each time was preceded by heavy use of vape cartridges I’d purchased from recreational dispensaries in Boulder, CO and Los Angeles, CA.

It’s likely the dispensaries had no idea they were selling laced vapes — that was part of the issue, it had become a pervasive problem that only the manufacturers were in on.

The vapes looked and tasted just like real marijuana, except there were other drugs inside in amounts small enough to “enhance” the experience — but the effects of these other drugs are cumulative.

Hallucinogens can build up in your system and cause extreme psychosis — even if you haven’t hit the vape in a couple of months.

According to Medical Medium, cannabis itself can cause psychosis. My hunch is that vapes contain such a high concentration of THC and if you’re puffing away like a smokestack like I was — not moderating your consumption in any way — it’s bound to have negative effects eventually.

THC has cumulative effects, too. Over time it can muddle your memory, and because it’s a toxin, your body stores it in your fat cells. That means all the munchies-induced binge eating you do is putting your liver in overdrive: not only is it working hard to cleanse your body from the toxin that is THC; it’s working hard to process the insane amounts of crappy food sliding down your gullet.

I gained 30 lbs between 2021 - 2024 — and I’ve linked it directly to my use of substances.

That’s why I’m quitting.

I quit because I no longer want what substances offer.

I quit because I know that I’m being called to step into the “elite,” next-level version of myself — and that version is substance-free.

Substances are just a shortcut to the myriad of natural highs available when I’m living a life that feels amazing to me.

So what does that amazing life look like?

• It’s substance-free (alcohol, weed, caffeine — even the occasional leftover tiny dose of Xanax on nights I’m an insomniac)

• It’s focused on loving me first — not in a “selfish” way, but in a way that nurtures the source of the creativity, generosity, and love I can freely share with other people when I’m also giving it to myself — instead of endlessly abusing and draining myself to please them.

• It’s adventurous. I’m writing this from a cozy (and free!) campsite in Michigan. I’m not just camping but experiencing life long-term in an 84-square-foot Sprinter cargo van that’s been converted into the tiniest and most beautiful house.

Substances were robbing me of the immense joy and freedom that I can cultivate in this chapter of my life.

It took me years to recover from the crash-and-burn of the hospitalizations.

I did stupid things, like sign my company over to a parasitic manipulator who did nothing but siphon my creativity for his own gain.

I believed what my doctors told me, that I had an incurable mental illness.

Desperately looking for answers, I believed what I read from others online about mental illness and how they were dealing with it.

I rejected the pharmaceutical synthetic substances for the most part — Xanax became a crutch for about 18 months.

Substances are substances. Nobody’s deficient in alcohol, THC, benzos, SSRIs, or antipsychotics.

So I’m committed to being medication-free, too. The Brain Saver book (and my podcast) will help you if you want to commit to this too.

Understanding the root causes of our behaviors and our emotions is critical. Experiencing mental illness symptoms doesn’t mean there’s something irreparably wrong with you.

It’s an invitation.

An invitation to look within. To understand your body, your mind, and your soul more than you’ve been doing.

The answer will never be “I’m just fucked up in the head.”

That’s a lie that was literally sold to you by an industry — an industry that has billions of dollars allocated for marketing alone — that is invested in convincing you to blame your genes for your symptoms. To remove yourself from the equation. To make you forget you ever had any power.

It’s all lies.

And just the way we’ve been lied to about pharmaceuticals, we’ve been lied to about cannabis. It’s not that pharmaceuticals and cannabis don’t have any benefits, but the benefits are all short-term.

Using any substance for the long term will lead to problems.

Disharmony.

Unrest.

Illness.

Understand that the “benefits” of any drug — sacred or not — are illusionary. The call I’m answering to permanently abstain from any and all substances in my life is to break free from all illusions and create a new level of freedom in my life.

It’s the call to grow.

I’m no longer imprisoned by fear, self-abandonment, or a belief that I need a substance to grow into my best self.

Despite what messages we’re fed by medical propaganda disguised as medical advice, we don’t need a substance to heal.

Substances will never heal anything.

To really heal ourselves, we need to let the substances go.

We need sunlight, water, nontoxic food, sleep, deep rest, and love — especially love for ourselves.

There’s nothing wrong — and everything right — with learning to deeply appreciate ourselves. Our choices have gotten us this far, even if we’re a little (or a lot) beat up.

And if that’s true, then it means our choices will get us to where we actually want to go, too.

Our choices will get us to who we want to be, too.

Where do you want to go? Who do you want to be?

What a beautiful thing to realize: It’s your choice.

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