There are a few things about being me that have changed in the year and half since I moved to NYC. I wear makeup now. My former ambivalence about oysters has transformed into an obsessive quest to discover every buck-a-shuck happy hour in town. I can’t get enough of those slimy little fuckers. Anchovies, once among my small pantheon of untouchable foodstuffs, are now among my favorite ingredients in anything involving tomato sauce and/or garlic. I wear skirts sometimes now. And after an entire adulthood of mostly eschewing drugs of every kind, I’ve become an enthusiastic stoner.

I began and ended my brief and unexciting relationship with drugs when I tried ecstasy at a rave when I was 17. Whether it was the techno music, the blacklights, the grindy, anxious high or the living-1992-cliche combination of all of those things, I did not enjoy myself—to put it mildly—and swore off drugs of every kind and instead cultivated an enthusiastic relationship with whiskey and cigarettes, which kept me intoxicated all the way through my 20s. I dabbled in some other mind-altering options a couple of times. Literally, two other times. Once when I smoked hash in Amsterdam, then fell down a flight of stairs and puked on myself. Then once more when I dropped acid, one tiny quarter tab at a time late one night after closing down the bar. We stayed up past dawn giggling in the living room. It was fun, but I had heard enough about acid to know that it wasn’t necessarily always fun, so I never touched it again, not wanting to push my luck. I was (still am) terrified of cocaine and will never try it. Mushrooms seem like they might be fun, but the opportunity to try them has never presented itself.

Meanwhile, marijuana was always available and every now and then, when I was feeling particularly loose and convivial, I’d take a hit off the pipe, the bong, the joint that someone was passing around. People would occasionally gift me weed or a spliff that would usually crumble to dust, forgotten in a drawer. As I grew older and my tolerance for alcohol waned, I started bumming hits more frequently from my pot-friendly friends. I would have a wee hit or two when it was available, and didn’t think about it when it wasn’t. I did sometimes consider getting a medical marijuana card, knowing the right kind of pot would help with my insomnia. But I never got around to it.

But now I’m all in. I have guy who comes to my house with an armored briefcase full of baggies boasting bodacious buds of indica and sativa and hybrids thereof, edibles, oils, and pre-rolled joints, all done up in professionally branded packaging complete with, in my informed opinion, excellent copywriting. My favorite birthday present this year was a combination snuff box and one-hitter from my friend Cam, facilitating portability. And while I have been known, of course, to enjoy the effects of pot recreationally in the comfort of my home or a friend’s, and occasionally whilst walking about the city—more than anything, my newfound pot habit has been a boon for my sleep. One or two puffs right before bed, a pleasant drift through a mental candyland of hilarity, and I’m out like a baby in a coma. After a lifetime of intermittent bouts of insomnia that have me tossing and turning and running on 2-3 hours of sleep a night for weeks at a time, consecutive nights of deep, dreamy uninterrupted sleep feels like a fucking miracle.

However, I’ve recently been reminded of a downside that I should have seen coming but I didn’t. There is an obvious, symbiotic relationship between the nature of the buzzy feels marijuana offers and my mood. Having been, by and large, in a good headspace for most of the summer, I’d nearly forgotten how easily I can tip over into a sticky black depression with the smallest nudge. My bedtime pot ritual usually results in me giggling myself to sleep with my head full of bad jokes for the standup routine I do in the parallel universe where I’m unbelievably hilarious. When my mood is mostly positive, pot bolsters the good feelings, creating a delightful closed circuit of happy fun thoughts and feelings. But my moods are on a hair-trigger and one errant little idea will burrow into my psyche like a parasite and lay eggs that hatch into dark terrible imaginings that toss me into a depression that makes me want to lay in bed for days, periodically leaking baseless tears. Being a marginal adult, however, I know I can’t do that. So I get out of bed, I go to work, I make plans, I pretend everything is fine until everything actually is. Sometimes it takes a few days. Sometimes it takes a couple of months.

I read someplace that pot is good for depression. I’d like to contest that assertion. What I learned recently was that what pot does for my depression is the same thing it does for my delusions about how funny I am—that is it turns the volume way, way up on it. It sharpens the sad, sending a barrage of terrible thoughts slicing out of my imagination like razors, making a bloody hash of whatever tenuous hold I had on normalcy. So instead of composing (seemingly) uproarious standup routines in my head and giggling myself to sleep, I drift on a sludgy river of emotionally masochistic fantasies, where I imagine, in brutal detail, the absolute worst things all the people I love could say or do to me. All my amazing friends and family turning into these cold fiends who tell me what a useless, abhorrent, obnoxious human I am. THC enhances my facile imagination, making these terrible little scenes in my head all the more detailed and real.

So that’s fun.

This particular bout of depression proved to be mercifully and uncharacteristically brief, and I like to think that the ability to sleep helped it pass. Anyone who deals with depression knows that exhaustion and sleep-deprivation only makes it worse. I did think twice about about hitting up my stash for a few nights. But in the end, I decided to run the gauntlet of the dark, sad thoughts to get to the comforting oblivion of sleep and the actual rest that comes with it.

As for the waking hours, I’m starting to warm to recreational uses of marijuana more frequently. Now that I have some stuff that doesn’t take my proverbial legs off at the knees after one hit, I can take a walk, meet a friend for a drink, go to a movie, mix the sweet, bubbling brain-feel with the rest of the world and see what else gets unlocked in my mind. Maybe in the end, I’ll find more light than dark and the bad moods will keep their distance.

Well, it’s a nice thought anyway.