#the executives are dysfunctional and the emotional regulators are on strike | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

survivorsforcannabis-blog · 6 years

Text

Sheena: Medicating in an Unregulated Market Plus Bringing People of Color into the "Cannabis" Space

Sheena is a 33-year-old New Yorker, survivor and cannabis advocate. Having been a cannabis consumer for most of her life, she began approaching it from a wellness angle in recent years. Today, she advocates within her own communities and volunteers with Women Grow. Here, Sheena shares her story of trauma, what it’s like to live in an unregulated market as a person of color, and what motivates her to advocate as a bridge between the cannabis space and communities of color. In her own words:

When did you begin using cannabis?

As a teen, I used cannabis to escape thoughts of unworthiness and sadness. I started smoking a little after my first rape at 14. I was impregnated, that was my first miscarriage. And I suffered my first sexual assault at 11. I was abused by another child, forcibly. That took a long time to process and I still have to see this person, because of family ties.

Looking back, I can say that some strains helped calm my racing thoughts, while other heavy sativas exacerbated the racing thoughts, gave me horrible flashbacks and paranoia. That’s one of the dangers of an unregulated market – especially in New York City, where you have great variety but there’s no way to control what’s coming in. I was exposed to really strong strains at a young age. It was sporadic, whatever you could get on the streets.

But I started out on alcohol. Alcohol is actually the gateway drug, not marijuana. For me and other teens around me, it was far easier to get our hands on alcohol and prescription drugs like Xanax and Prozac. You just hoped that whatever you had would numb you out while entertain you.

I also experienced a level of neglect – parental abandonment at first and then later on, they invited someone into the home that made it very hostile. There’s also generational trauma that my parents perpetuated on me, and then there’s all the cultural trauma of being people of color.

It’s a lot, and when you don’t have the tools to process, you’re gonna escape. You can use any number of things as a crutch, so that’s what cannabis was for me then. I would consume outside of the house and then when I got home I could deal with being there. Sober reality was too much to take.

Once I was a bit older and got involved with a heavy smoker, I started having regular access to high-grade cannabis and it started stabilizing, without these crazy episodes of paranoia. So through my 20s, I was a pothead. I liked it better than alcohol, it didn’t give me hangovers and I could still function, even on an indica.

In my late 20s, I ended that almost decade-long relationship with this person I had built myself around, so I had to rebuild my identity. And cannabis was there.

I actually had an intervention, three people told me that I had anger management issues, and that got me into therapy. Before that, I was very anti-therapy. But I had only seen therapy that doesn’t work. Therapy is what you make of it, like anything in life.

Many people also don’t realize that there are many different types of therapy for different experiences. Thanks to all the identities I hold, it was hard to find someone that could assist me in my healing – being Latina, being bisexual, being kinky – it felt like I already had a few strikes against me. I first saw one therapist who was great for childhood issues, but she absolutely fucking sucked for trauma. My current therapist is trauma-based and culturally competent, she’s also Latina. It’s Dialectical behavior therapy, I was extremely blessed to find her.

Has being in therapy affected the way you medicate?

It was in therapy that I started exploring those feelings that I had used cannabis to avoid, and also noticed how it relieved all of my anxiety symptoms at once. Cannabis shifted from something I could sub in for alcohol, to the medicine that it was originally intended to be. This shift also came in conjunction with when vape pens started getting popular here.

For the record, I have five disorders – general anxiety disorder, social anxiety, dissociative disorder on top of my PTSD. But now that I was becoming aware of these things, I could realize that my reactions to stressful situations were really my disorders, and I could use marijuana responsibly whereas before, with uneducated use, I used to binge. Now, I can notice that I’m anxious, notice the physical manifestations in my body, take a couple pulls from a vape pen and be okay. I can go on with my day.

I was just becoming armed with this knowledge when I was raped again. It was domestic violence, it occurred within a relationship. This is where my life splits into two parts – my life leading up to that and my life after that. It was like an extinction, of my soul and my spirit.

Cannabis is what’s kept me alive this long, it helped me control my thoughts and be present in my body. There were so many times that I felt dissociative, like I’m floating away, like am I here, am I not? And when I smoked, I just felt like myself. Because when I was sober and had to cope with the rational knowledge that somebody I loved violated me in this way, in my own house… There were some points when I could literally feel my psyche splitting from the inside out. And cannabis helped keep me together. Vape pens saved my life.

What does your consumption look like now?

Cannabis is now an essential part of my self-care. And I don’t need a lot – there’s this beautiful concept, microdosing. I just take enough for me to be okay. Unless I’m using it recreationally, but now I make those distinctions. That’s a distinction that needs to be taught as we move towards legalization, and that’s a distinction we have to make as consumers.

I feel like smoking flower is the most optimal way to use cannabis because it’s the quickest, but when I cannot do that – because I work a very corporate job and cannot be coming back from smoke breaks stinking of anything – a vape pen is the best thing. It helps me handle anxiety and the pressure of my job.

For depression, I like to smoke high THC, high CBD strains. In Denver, I found this strain called Monica’s Miracle – the budtender called it Adderall in weed form. I do feel like I have ADHD, or Executive dysfunction – an inability to do the most basic adult things. I feel like [the reason it’s so common] is that nobody emotionally raises us or teaches us emotional coping skills. I have theories that this has to do with un-dealt with generational and cultural trauma as people of color. We’re taught how to survive, no one teaches us how to thrive. How can you teach someone how to thrive past that when you’ve never thrived past that? I feel like we’ve reached a point now where we’re starting to ask that question.

How has being a woman of color affected your experience of cannabis?

I was arrested when I was 17, for smoking and for two roaches in my pocket. This was the Giuliani era, when he was really cracking down. It was a very traumatic experience. They were two Puerto Rican cops who didn’t really want to take me, they just wanted to take the two guys I was with, but the white sergeant said I had to go, said they had to teach me a lesson.

I got arrested at 5:30 in the afternoon, was driven around Harlem in the van for hours and couldn’t call my mother until 3 o’clock in the morning. I didn’t go in front of a judge to be arraigned until 6:30 the following night. So I was a 17-year-old girl with no prior convictions, was never even suspended from school, and I spent 24 hours in police custody. I can look back now and make humor of it, but it was terrifying, and it was so excessive.

I didn’t smoke for almost a year after that because I just didn’t want to deal with it. I was like, fuck this – this is not worth it. But things were stressful at home and I distinctly remember the night when I started smoking again – I almost got into a fistfight with somebody so it was like, something needs to give. But I didn’t consume in public, was constantly watching my back. It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve ventured to smoke publicly but it’s always in the back of my head, that maybe I’ll go through that again.

The biggest thing that we have to keep in mind as we move towards legalization is access for people of color. It’s very important to pass the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act in New York, to ensure equity, to ensure that we do have access to sit at the table – if we choose to sit at it. But from what I’ve seen, we still have a long way to go in terms of education on what’s possible.

I recently attended the Women of Color in Solidarity Conference, so I was taking smoke breaks with other women in community organizing activist spaces, but very few of them were making the connection that they’re doing it for self-care. This comes with education. And overall, women of color are not aware of what their sisters are doing within the space.

I find that when I have conversations with my neighbors, with my friends outside the space, people just don’t know what’s going on and I feel like we’re in a bubble. That’s a big gap and for me it’s important because, especially as women of color, we bear the brunt of almost every ‘ism’ you can think of, to varying degrees, based on what privileges we carry. We’re just not centered on anything. So that is something I’m actively working towards bridging.

Did you always call it “cannabis”?

I didn’t consciously start calling it cannabis until I “crossed over” to the cannabis space. As a Latina, Colombian to be specific – it was always weed, marijuana, hierba – slang. If you were around white people you’d say pot or reefer, whatever the fuck they’d say. I only now call it “cannabis” and started talking about the space, and noticed a shift in my own behavior, but I’m trying to keep in mind that this shift occurred because I had access to resources.

One of the things I try to be conscious of is that while I am a woman of color, I do carry certain privileges, such as being light-skinned. So I also think we need to be conscious of access to language.

Sometimes when I do say ‘marijuana,’ people tell me it’s not politically correct. I’ve had people tell me that it’s against me as a Latina, but I really never knew that ‘marijuana’ was racist. Who are you to impose that on me when that was not my experience? I would respect if that was someone else’s experience, but coming to correct people says more about you than it does about the plant.

Recently, I was at a kid’s birthday party in the projects, around my hood friends. They still smoke dutches and I’m telling them about the volcano, vaping and edibles, and they just don’t give a fuck about any of that. I kept calling it cannabis to the point that they told me to call it weed, and what am I supposed to do, keep being snotty and calling it cannabis? That’s their language and that’s what I come from.

If we want to reach people, we need to use language that they understand. What use is it for me to speak in terms that people don’t understand? Meet people where they’re at and sometimes they’ll gravitate to that. Shifts in consciousness don’t happen overnight. It’s a process.

What motivates you to advocate for the plant?

A dear friend of mine was diagnosed with breast cancer and passed away last December. She was already a consumer when she was diagnosed at stage 4 and shit got real very quickly. We went to Denver last August, to see what was out there. Vape cartridges really helped her so we came back and put up a GoFundMe to get her some. She met her $2,000 goal within 2 days of posting, then GoFundMe shut down her campaign and refunded everyone their money, because she stated on the page that she was going to use it for cannabis. It’s real bullshit.

I helped supply her with vape cartridges and sometimes it worked, other times it was not potent. That’s another problem with the unregulated market, it was an absolute mess to get any consistency in the medicine she needed.

She spent the last month of her life in the hospital, pumped up with opioids. It’s almost like the painkillers were worse than the cancer. They gave her fentanyl, which was far too powerful. It was horrific to know that cannabis could help her but we couldn’t give her that. So there’s always going to be this question, as long as I live: what would her quality of life have been if she lived in a regulated market?

Another thing is, all my experiences led me to be trained in Mental Health

First Aid, through a class offered by the NYC Department of Health. I feel it’s crucial, everyone should take it. My mom took the class, and that was one of the most affirming moments I’ve had with her, for her to validate me even if she can’t quite understand what I’m going through. The fact that she was willing to see me as I am and not just pray it away or deny it, as people of color often deny these conditions, that helped a lot.

And I hope that as I open up, I can help others feel affirmed and feel that maybe they can open up. As I opened up to my family about my journey in the cannabis space, I’ve gotten more support and acceptance than I could have ever imagined.

When I went to Denver, I bought back an insane amount of edibles, lotions, tinctures – to approach my family from the wellness angle. I brought lotion for my uncle’s psoriasis and arthritis, and gave tea to my grandmother for her gastrointestinal problems. You have to tailor your approach, but the beautiful thing about cannabis is that there are so many products out there.

They were extremely interested and very grateful. They admitted they wanted to try but didn’t know where to look. So that empowers me to continue exploring what’s possible in the space, because I can see what this is doing for my family.

0 notes