When I was first transitioning from the corporate world to the freelancing world, I found a book titled, “Start With Why” by Simon Sinek. I’m pretty sure that I didn’t leave my apartment for an entire weekend and just read the whole thing in like 48 hours.
The reason why you got started is going to help you on the really shitty hard and frustrating days. I feel that it was time that I shared my cannabis why.
Imagine for a moment, a lazy, humid August night and an oak kitchen table in a small three bedroom home in middle America. The scene is a 12-year-old girl sitting at that antique oak table flipping through Delia’s catalog picking out back to school clothes while her grandmother finishes cooking dinner and her grandfather washes the already used dishes.
Her grandmother is telling her a million different ways to say no to drugs. That since she is entering junior high, she needs to stay away from that “Mary-Juana.” That her grandma knows it in the school because she is the executive secretary to the superintendent of the school district.
The girl rolls her eyes and says, “yes grandma I’ll stay away from the “Mary-Juana.””
Imagine now 20 some odd years later a Thanksgiving dinner at that same antique oak table in middle America and the 30 something woman taking a deep breath and telling her grandma the real reason she moved to the west coast was to pursue a career in helping change the stigmas surrounding “Mary-Juana.”
A few months after that and the woman is helping her grandparents incorporate CBD into their morning regimen because of all of the terrible side effects from their prescription drugs are killing them faster. Imagine that woman walking hand in hand with her grandfather into a dispensary when he came to visit her in Oregon, and together with a sweet budtender, they get him a CBD cream that will allow him the relief from his challenging to pronounce aches and pains that a prescription drug can’t fix.
Imagine that woman is me and seeing what prescription drugs have done to people that I love is part of the reason why I work in “Mary-Juana.”