Lazy Was Never an Option — Until I Made It One
The guilt doesn't produce output. It just steals the rest and gives nothing back.
Programming
Looks Like
Let's start here: I never thought weed made you lazy. That was never my story with it, even though it's everybody else's. Cartoons, D.A.R.E., the whole "you're gonna end up on the couch eating chips" script — that's what I was handed before I ever touched it myself. So when I finally did smoke for the first time, I was waiting for the sleepy part. The slow part. The part where I supposedly stop functioning. It never came. What came instead was happy. Laughing. Giggly. In college I'd get a body high and I was never tired — I was alive in my skin. Somebody could touch my arm and it felt like a thousand tiny sparks going off, tingles and electricity moving through me like my whole body had been plugged back in. That was my first real relationship with this plant, and it had nothing to do with laziness. It had everything to do with feeling. So when people act like rest and cannabis are the same lazy sin, I already know that's a lie, because I lived the opposite of it.
I didn't grow up with rest as a concept, though. I grew up with Saturday at 7am and a house that needed cleaning — every week, no exceptions — and once a month, a deep clean on top of that. Grades worked the same way. There was no room to not be good. No room for failure. No room to just be average and call it a day. So somewhere in me, rest got filed under "the thing you do when you've already earned it" — and the bar for earning it kept moving.
These days, taking rest back looks like a nap. Quiet, with nobody calling my name from the other room. It looks like working out — which sounds like the opposite of rest, but for me it's where my body actually resets. It looks like sitting in a chair getting my nails done, or getting my hair done, and not being needed by a single person for that stretch of time. None of that is laziness. That's maintenance. That's a woman making sure there's something left in the tank to give.
The guilt doesn't even produce output. It just steals the rest and gives nothing back.
I won't pretend the guilt doesn't show up, because it does. I'll be resting and think, I could be doing more — and then I don't even know what "more" is. I just know I should be doing it. And then I'm not resting anymore, I'm sitting there spiraling about what I'm supposed to be doing instead of actually doing anything.
This is usually where the plant is supposed to step in and quiet all of that down — and to be fair, it still does, just not the way it used to. Since moving to Vegas, I haven't found weed that does what the weed in Georgia used to do for me. What I had access to there — that was the good-good. It made me laugh. It gave me that tingle all over. It let me chill all the way out, get creative, and actually sit still long enough to hear myself — my real thoughts, my higher self, whatever you want to call it. Vegas hasn't given me that yet, and I'll be honest about that instead of pretending every session is a spiritual experience. But even on the average stuff, the lesson is the same: the plant slows me down enough to hear the parts of myself that hustle culture trained me to talk over. It's not the weed doing the resting for me. It's the weed getting me quiet enough to let the rest actually land.
We're still living in a world where religion gets treated like the only measuring stick for morality, and cannabis carries a stigma that comes straight out of that — the idea that if you smoke, you're somehow less than, less moral, less put-together. I think it matters for people to see actual normal people getting actual normal life done while this plant is part of that life. Not a stereotype. Not a cautionary tale. Just a mom, a founder, a regular person, living a regular day — same as everyone else.
I get up, I take care of my kids, I run a business, I rest when I need to — and cannabis has been woven into that whole picture the entire time.
And here's the line I won't cross back over: the idea that weed is bad, that I'm a bad mom for smoking it, that there's something immoral about me because of it. I've heard that message my whole life in one form or another, and I believed a version of it for a long time. Not anymore. That's not a confession. That's just my life.
The plant taught me that rest is not laziness. And I am not taking it back.
