The Year I Woke Up: How THC Sparked a Trauma-Informed Awakening at 55

Content note: This essay discusses my personal experience with cannabis as part of my healing journey. It’s not medical advice or a recommendation... just one person’s story of what helped me see clearly. This piece traces my own 'THC trauma-informed awakening,' and the way clarity arrived exactly when my nervous system was finally able to use it.

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I didn’t try cannabis until I was fifty-five.

People always assume I’m setting up a punchline. I’m not. I’m telling you about the year I came back to life.

Because if I’d touched THC any earlier in my life, it would’ve numbed me.

It would’ve blended into the wine, the pharmaceuticals, the forced smiles, the “I’m fine” scripts, and the small ways I taught myself to disappear.

Earlier in life, THC would’ve helped me tolerate the abuse.

At fifty-five, it helped me finally see it.

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For most of my life, I thought my suffering came from a personal flaw. I thought I was anxious. Oversensitive. Broken in that spiritual, silent way women get taught to fear. I thought my mind was the problem, my emotions were the problem, my inability to “just get over it” was the problem.

So I did what women are trained to do in systems that require their silence:

I tried to fix myself instead of the conditions hurting me.

Pharmaceuticals that flattened everything. Therapies that taught me to cope with harm instead of name it. Wine that knocked me out just long enough to pretend I’d rested. A lifetime of performing competence on top of collapse, working harder than my body could sustain, smiling as my life depended on it, because it did.

All of it in service of being palatable, pleasant, easy to live with.

And none of it worked for long, because the problem wasn’t an internal malfunction.

It was relational harm.

I wasn’t anxious.

I was threatened.

I wasn’t broken.

I was adapting to an environment that rewarded my self-erasure.

Then the pandemic hit, and in crisis, everything false falls apart.

My husband was diagnosed with cancer, and cannabis entered our home as medicine, not recreation. I didn’t take it to relax. I didn’t take it to get “high.” I took it because the world was cracking open and I needed something, anything, that might help.

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And then something unexpected happened:

THC didn’t numb me.

It unmuted me.

It sharpened my perception instead of dulling it.

I started noticing things I had trained myself not to see:

the subtle manipulations

the dismissiveness

the gaslighting that had become so normal, I mistook it for conversation

the way I disappeared myself to keep the peace

the exhaustion of holding everything together while getting nothing back

THC didn’t create paranoia.

It created clarity.

It didn’t give me new emotions.

It gave me access to ones I’d buried decades earlier just to endure.

And then I saw a sign online, one of those simple, almost flippant things:

"Are you depressed?

Remove the assholes from your life."

Most people laugh.

But I read it like prophecy.

Not because the line was profound, but because my nervous system recognized a truth my mind had never been allowed to articulate.

My depression wasn’t a chemical defect.

It was a relational chokehold.

It was the wrong people for too long.

It was the loneliness of being surrounded by people who didn’t see me.

It was the insult of being expected to perform wellness inside a system causing the harm.

THC didn’t save me because it’s some miracle substance.

THC saved me because of timing.

At fifty-five:

My children were grown.

My tolerance for mistreatment had worn thin.

My fawn response was cracking.

My freeze response was melting.

My intuition, buried for decades, could finally speak again.

If cannabis had entered my life at twenty-five, I would’ve used it to survive the abuse.

At fifty-five, it showed me the abuse.

It didn’t lull me into softness.

It snapped me awake.

And once I saw the truth, I couldn’t unsee it. Which meant I also couldn’t stay. And leaving, even when it’s right, still breaks something open.

That was the pivot, the moment my real life began.

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What Waking Up Actually Looked Like

There’s a stereotype about cannabis that it makes you float away from life.

For me, it did the exact opposite.

Once I stopped abandoning myself, I started moving. And I mean that literally. I could feel my body again. The tightness in my chest loosened. My jaw unclenched. I could breathe all the way down.

Since that first year of awakening, I have:

left relationships that had been shrinking me

relocated across the country

rebuilt my sense of home and safety

earned a trauma recovery coaching certification

built a practice

created a Learning Library

developed a writing practice that matters

learned how to parent myself

learned how to parent my older teen with presence instead of fear

learned how boundaries actually feel in my body

discovered community

discovered my voice

discovered myself

This isn’t the life of someone numbed.

This is the life of someone who finally remembered who she was.

People imagine cannabis makes you drift.

For me, it returned me to my body, the one I had abandoned to survive.

And once I had a body again, I had direction.

And once I had direction, I had a life.

I became a woman who could finally hear herself.

That’s what healing actually is.

Not perfection.

Not positivity.

Not performance.

Just the capacity to feel, to choose, to move.

Cannabis didn’t fix me.

It returned me.

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Thank you for reading. If this stirred something in you and you’d like to spend more time with this work, you can explore The Humble Pie 12 Steps and learn more about how I support people as a trauma recovery coach.