I had a medical marijuana card for nearly two years before I worked up the nerve to buy legal weed. Living in laid-back Vermont, I had access to a friend’s homegrown herb, which my husband used to make me cannabis-infused coconut butter in the family Crock-Pot.

Applying the butter topically soothed my chronic pelvic pain and relieved symptoms of the debilitating bladder syndrome that had plagued me for a decade and warranted the card. Occasionally, I ingested a tiny lick of butter during a flare-up — an imprecise home remedy. I savored the full-body relaxation that followed but loathed the disorienting mental side effects.

I’d been a cannabis skeptic from the start: I never much liked getting high for fun, tending to feel nervous and paranoid rather than happy and chill. I also carried childhood shame about catching my mom smoking a little pipe in secret — the strange pungent smell, her altered state, her mortified reaction when I walked in on her. And I worried that using more cannabis would alter me in turn, distance me from my children and prevent good parenting.

– Read the entire article at Washington Post.