The first time I got high was in my freshman year of college. It was probably late September or October. I had two suitemates that I hung out with regularly, let’s call them A and B. One night B comes up to us and was like, “guess what I just bought,” and he holds up a little baggie. A is like, “do you have papers or something?” B says, “nah, I met someone who has a piece.”

So we go out to the quad later that night, and we meet up with a bunch of people. I don’t know what to expect, but am told that usually the first time you smoke you might not feel high or know that you are. I had no idea what I was in for. I was also extremely paranoid, after all, I had never done anything like this before. Yes, I had friends in high school who were potheads. But I never hung out with them outside of class, let alone after school. Some of them would go out to the woods to smoke during chemistry class, but I never went with them. They would come back to class blazed as fuck, and I could tell. But seeing someone that’s high doesn’t give you an accurate representation of how it feels to be high. As someone who’s never smoked, you see them saying or doing dumb shit, but you just pass that off as them being a dope.

After you’ve smoked a few times, you can start seeing where your dopey friend was coming from. But me back then? I had no framework for what to look for. At that point in my life, I had only gotten drunk once, but I didn’t even drink like that. It was a funny and stupid story. Back in 8th grade, my parents had this thing that they called cell group. Every two or three Saturdays there was a gathering of their church small group at a host family’s house. When I was younger, I was a showoff. I was eccentric, a contrarian, I did things to get people’s attention. But only at church; at school I was quiet and reserved. I think this was a defensive mechanism that I put in place to hide my insecurities and anxieties. I was comfortable around people at church, I wasn’t comfortable around people at school. That’s besides the point though.

Well anyway, it was a summer day, and someone had set up two coolers full of drinks. One of them had sodas & juices — kid’s drinks. The other had Mike’s Hard Lemonade or something along those lines. I decided I would try one since I was curious. It tasted just like juice to me, I couldn’t taste the alcohol in it. I thought this was interesting so I had another one of my friends try it. We shared three between the two of us. This was our first time drinking, so again, no idea what to expect. My skin started feeling hot, so we both went down to the basement to play some video games. We had sat down for maybe 20 minutes, but I started feeling dizzy, and my friend started feeling hot. So we went outside, and we started fanning ourselves. One thing led to another and we started running around in circles in the front yard. Neither of us had any idea why we were doing what we were doing, it was like it just happened all of a sudden. We were very confused, but I now know that we were acting crazy cause we were drunk.

So this was the only experience I had with any sort of substance usage up until this point, so I was very clueless. I was told to puff puff pass. And that it’s easy, just put your finger on this hole, light the bowl, lift your finger, inhale deep, then inhale again. It didn’t make sense to me, so suitemate A helped me with it. We passed the bowl around a few times, until we were all out. A bunch of people got up and left, but a small group of us stayed and sat there for a little bit. I noticed that the streetlight that I had been looking at seemed hazy now, but I didn’t think anything of it. Someone suggested that we go to H-Quad to get food, so that was now the plan. All of a sudden, people started running (I never found out if they were strangers or part of our original group), so my friends and I joined in. I asked someone why we were running, and he told me, “I have no idea, just run.” So I did. We ran all the way to H-Quad, on the other side of campus. At first I wasn’t going to get anything to eat, but I changed my mind after my mouth started watering looking at my friends’ sandwiches. I ordered one, and I vaguely remember it seeming to take way too long to make, and I also remember really enjoying that sandwich. This was my first experience with the munchies.

But after that experience, I didn’t smoke again until midway through Junior year. I was too caught up in other things. The story I told for a while was one that went like this: I smoked once, but I didn’t get high. But that was just me being naive. I know better now. I smoked once, and I got really high. I just didn’t know it at the time.