Just found this website. Seems like a great discussion forum. I’m super grateful to have found it as it seems like a lot of you people know a lot about PAWS. I’ve done so much reading today on this website & got familiar with a lot of stories. Today I would like to share mine & would love insight & support. If you read this, I am appreciative of your time & help.
I am 20 years old. Started smoking weed in my junior year of high school. Started off occasionally like many others. This, of course, led to daily use. After high school, I moved states to go to university. I now live away from family & needed to make new friends & had zero access to weed. About a month into school, I found someone else who smoked weed & we started smoking together daily. Sometimes multiple times a day. By the way, when I involuntarily quit for the first month of college, I had ZERO withdrawal symptoms.
Fast forward to the end of my sophomore year of college. I have been smoking in my house everyday multiple times a day for a year. Dabbing concentrated mostly in the last 2-3 months of my smoking career. I had a very bad experience with cocaine where I became incredibly anxious(probably only my fifth time doing coke). This pushed me to drop everything & head back to my home state. I have been stone cold sober ever since. Dropped caffeine. The only addiction that continues is a nicotine addiction to Juul (psychiatrist thinks I should hold off on quitting this until I feel more baseline).
I am now 80 days into my sobriety & don’t feel like I have felt “normal” since 80 days ago. Something happened on that day that I can’t explain. I feel like i’m dealing with PAWS. I have this terrible anxiety that I f***ed myself for life. Like I messed up my brain permanently or have developed some mental disorder that makes me anxious.
This is accompanied by the absolute weirdest sensation in my head. It feels pressurized in my forehead. Like somebody smacked me with a hammer lol. It’s persisted & its constant. Never feel better. Sometimes it doesn’t hurt perse by most of the time it does ache.
Can somebody please relate to me? Is this normal? Is this PAWS? I hope it is just PAWS, but then again, I don’t like either option lol. Either I have a two year journey ahead of me, or I have something wrong & need to take pills. I don’t wanna do either, but here I am. Anyways, i’m not unhappy, mostly just anxious & wanting everything to go back to normal.