Herb Ritts, Metamorphosis of the Body, British Vogue, October 1988

What No One Told Me About Edibles

Disguised by an enticing chocolate brownie, there it was, my bad trip. I had no intention of getting high. In fact, I don’t even know why I ate it. I think I was probably hungry and there was nothing else to eat. Having dinner at some friends house, someone handed me the appealing brownie which everyone kept eating hour after hour. They were still the same, so I thought… I didn’t think, I just ate it.

Don’t eat it all!” said someone. “Eat it, it’s fine!” said someone else. And so I did.

After a cool half hour, I started eating dinner and poured myself a glass of white wine. It’s one of the few alcoholic drinks I actually enjoy drinking, even though I was already feeling a bit weird, hungry as if I hadn’t eaten that brownie. It didn’t take long for it to kick in, in me and everyone else. Two folks began laughing as I’d never seen them laugh. It was ok at first but then thoughts kept passing through my mind as quickly as they’d go. Were they laughing at me? Something I said? I asked “Do I have something in my forehead?” I didn’t. They were laughing because that was their high. Mine was a lot different.

Edibles Can Make You Paranoid

That was the beginning of my marijuana paranoia. It felt as everyone was either ignoring me or against me. I was afraid to speak and say something really inadequate. People seemed different, I didn’t know them anymore. Those who wouldn’t normally speak were especially more assertive and I was truly battling with unsettling thoughts. Oh my God, I’m going crazy. I eventually shut up and spent the whole five hours of that dinner (which were, in reality, two) quiet, struggling, barely hanging in there.

I stopped drinking the wine and tried to pour myself water from a big bottle. It was hard but not as hard as to ask someone to pour it for me. I typed “paranoid when I’m high” on Google and barely managed to read it. The info fell into oblivion.

Edibles Can Sedate You

At one point, I felt the weirdest feeling ever. I’d feel something and although I knew it was pain, I didn’t exactly feel it. As if pain was recognized but not accepted by my brain. I felt disassociated, heavy, with terribly dry eyes. All this while sitting at a dinner table trying to cope with appearing normal and worrying about how fucked up my brain was.

Edibles High Can Last 12 hours or More

Torture eventually faded a bit. I moved on to a couch nearby, laid in there for a few more minutes, or hours… Edibles can alter your time perception. That dinner was one of the longest, most unbearable moments of my life. And from there we went back home. I began feeling a little better, but not quite myself yet. I fell asleep in no time.

The next morning I woke up, had breakfast and headed toward the coast for a walk on the beach. It was a lovely sunny Sunday but I still couldn’t build a ten-word logical sentence, which eventually got me way more scared and way more paranoid, on the brink of tears. “How long does this last?” “Am I never gonna recover?!” I asked to my boyfriend, “I don’t think my head is well yet.

And that’s what no one told me about the damn edibles: it could possibly go wrong. It could make me question my sanity and wonder whether it would take a step back in healing the anxiety I already struggled with.

It can work well and from what I’ve read, it can feel great, depending on your circumstances and on how much you eat. The craziest detail of my bad trip story was how unplanned and how unintentional it was, as if it had to happen or something.