Why I Can't Smoke Weed Anymore, and Why You Might Not Want to Either

I started smoking weed regularly in high school, but I'd tried it when I was about thirteen. By high school weed was one of my "harmless" loves because it made me feel great almost immediately, but had no shitty side effects that could get me into trouble. It didn't incapacitate to me to the point of not being able to drive. I could still go to school. I could take tests. I could show up to work with no real suspicions. Everything was fine and dandy when I was high, or so I thought.

So let's rewind again back to when I first started smoking weed, in middle school. Odd things would happen when I got high, but I just assumed this was a result of first time weed experiences, and having a low tolerance". I didn't think it would kind of continue for the rest of my smoking, on and off, and possibly change my brain chemistry. I just thought that was "the way weed is".
In general when I was in middle school smoking weed, I'd get reallyyy reallyyyyy high. The kind of high where I thought that "nothing was real". I remember my body would feel like plastic: my lips, my fingers, my legs, etc. I'd just continually touch my body because it no longer felt like mine. I don't know if anybody else has similar weed experiences to that, but this would happen pretty often. Of course, I ignored it.
I also would start hallucinating on weed. I'd see full-blown shit happening, not a butterfly fly out of vision or something, but like non-existent headlights that would suddenly turn into a car driving towards me, when in reality I was staring at a fucking wooden gate. Really trippy shit. And I know that marijuana is obviously a depressant as well as a mild hallucinogen, but I just don't know many other people who trip on it often like I used to.
So in short, my first two years of smoking were a bit weird and offbeat. But what took the cake was an experience I had when I was sixteen or seventeen, after hitting the blunt for the first time. Mind you, by this point I was smoking copious amounts of weed everyday, so the hallucinating and weird body shit had for the most part, completely went away. Now when I smoked, what I normally felt was just a normal high. What happened when I hit the blunt though was the beginning of five other similar terrifying instances that would continue to happen over the next four years.

So I hit the blunt, and my friend and I are sitting in the grass outside my apartment complex having a great time. I feel fine. She feels fine. Everything is "fine", until we decide to get up and head back to my house. Then, the strangest thing happens. When I stand up and we begin to walk, I literally lose my sight? It sounds crazy and impossible, I know, but she remembers it to this day so it's not like I could make this shit up. It's basically all tunnel vision, and before I know it, I'm still standing but I can't visibly see anything. Everything is dark, but not as if I'm blind, because it's literally all just black. Complete darkness. Once I tell her, she is kind of freaking out. I lay back down in the grass and close my eyes, panicking, and within 15 minutes I open my eyes up and am luckily able to see again. But it was terrifying. I never really thought much of it.
Around the same time as this, I was diagnosed with possible Bipolar 2 disorder that had the possibility of emerging into Bipolar 1. That bit is kind of important, because Bipolar 2 is just mostly depression, and some hypomania (which is mania but without the hallucinations, delusions, and rarely any hospitalizations, etc.) VS Bipolar 1 would include a lot of mania (hallucinations, delusions, likely hospitalizations, etc.) with very little depression, generally.

Fast forward to when I'm eighteen in college. It's a couple of months after I've tried shrooms for the first time (which may have been related to the upcoming experiences I'm about to mention, but I really don't know). I've continued to smoke copious amounts of weed and have my medical recommendation for insomnia, anxiety, and depression.
The night before, I did a small amount of coke for the first time, and drank a shit ton of alcohol, and stayed up really really late. I know, not the best idea for someone with Bipolar 2, but I was young, unmedicated, naive, and no longer had a therapist. Sue me.
So I wake up at 7 am because, guess who has class the next day? I'm so out of it, but I do my regular routine of not eating breakfast, and smoking a shit ton of weed, hoping it will help me get through the 4 hours of class. When I leave my place, I feel fine. When I'm taking notes on the syllabus, I feel fine. But suddenly I get this creeping feeling, about thirty minutes into the class. The paper starts looking very, very white, and the words I'm writing look as if their in double. I feel suddenly extremely sweaty, like a panic attack. Like I'm literally beginning to be doused in sweat. And suddenly, this half moon/glitch art/vibrating form thing emerges in the corner of the room that just won't go away. Whenever I turn, the half moon thing turns with me, as if it's a part of my eye. So I'm not sure exactly what it is, but it's not going away, or moving from the line of vision that it is in. Mind you, I'm still high as fuck. This continues for about 30 minutes to an hour, one of the most terrifying intervals of time in my life. I thought I was going crazy.

I stayed away from coke and 3 hours of sleep after that for a time, but I also kind of noticed that maybe if I hadn't smoked so much weed, it maybe wouldn't have happened?
When I called my old therapist to talk to her about it, she urged me to quit smoking, drinking, etc. because my BP2 might have been switching to BP1. I just didn't believe her, because I was literally doing much less than everybody else in my friend group, and they all seemed fine. Why would I be the outlier?

Fast forward to a couple months after that. Again, everything is "fine." Did Molly maybe like 3 weeks ago. Haven't done anything since except smoke weed. I'm having a good day. I just finished getting high as fuck and am getting ready to start one of my favorite movies. When, oh my god, it happens AGAIN. I feel the hot feeling, the racing heart, the weird vision, and then it slowly begins: the half moon glitch vibrating thingy. Luckily this time, I'm able to nip it in the bud. I lay back on my boyfriend's bed at the time, and he gives me a xanax to calm my nerves. I just keep my eyes closed for like 15 minutes, and when I open them, everything's fine.
After this I start to actually get a bit worried about "getting too high" because I start to see the pattern and wonder if weed could actually be that bad for me? I still smoke on a regular basis though, but usually not too much.

Fast forward to the a few months later. My friends and I get really high before going into an amusement park to enhance the experience. In line, I experience basically the same shit as the other times, minus the moon. My entire vision feels whited out and incredibly surreal at the same time, and I'm sweaty, my hearts racing, and I'm terrified. I feel like I'm going to completely pass out. It goes away after I sit down. But again, the outlier is me being really high.

These less severe versions continue to happen over the course of the next year and a half. It happens again when I'm on a bus. Again when I'm on a train. Again when playing tennis with a friend. By this point, I'm barely even doing any other drugs anymore, ever. I just happen to be really high on weed.

The last time it happened was when I decided to completely give up smoking weed regularly, and stopped buying weed. I had already cut down a lot because it continued to give me normal anxiety (which ruined the whole point because weed was supposed to suppress my anxiety, help me sleep, etc not make everything worse), so at this point I was smoking literally like maybe a bowl or less a day, VS my old self that would smoke at least 7 bowls of weed a day.
I had a tiny, TINY bowl packed the size of maybe an ant (like that's literally how much weed I put in), hit it, and then continued with my day. I was meeting a friend at the park and I was walking in the heat, excited to meet up with them. The sun was shining. It was a great day. Blah blah blah. I was a bit anxious about being on time. But like overall, good day.
We meet and I still feel fine. We stop at a Starbucks really fast. We're chit-chatting. Still fine. I'm pretty high for some reason, even though I barely smoked anything. And then it happens: the whited-out/surreal thing, where it feels like everything is going to continue to white out to the point that I pass out, or can't see anything anymore. My heart started racing. I started getting really hot. Etc etc. I had to go outside and sit down with my eyes closed to get back to normal again.
And it finally occurred to me than that if I couldn't even smoke an ant-sized bowl of indica without this happening, maybe there was something wrong: with the weed, and with me. That's when I did my research and found out some sketchy possible facts that made me not want to smoke weed like I did in the past again:

So there's still a lot of questions about weed, but one thing is certain: There are numerous associations with marijuana use worsening the symptoms of those with mental health disorders, specifically people with Bipolar Disorder developing schizophrenia-like symptoms after smoking copious amounts of weeds, as well as those with a predisposition to schizophrenia either having their symptoms worsen or they end up developing full blown schizophrenia. The more you smoke and have these factors, the more likely you are to develop these symptoms, as well as the younger you started smoking, the more likely these things are to happen.
Reading those articles and studies really scared me, because one after the other said the exact same thing. Considering I started smoking at thirteen, smoked a LOT of weed, had Bipolar 2 disorder (I was pretty sure of it by this point), and I had an idea that psychosis might run in my family, the cons started to outweigh the pros. I can't afford to be stuck in a psych hospital seeing shit, doped up on meds, etc. I had to sacrifice my love for my sanity, even though technically, none of that might happen.
Now I don't buy weed anymore, and I rarely smoke with other people. Science isn't completely sure, but there's strong possibilities it could cause life-altering damages to brain chemistry for people like me, and I just don't want to take my chances. I don't want to go crazy before I'm able to get better.
So if you have Bipolar disorder, or a predisposition to schizophrenia, you might want to watch out too. I've linked some articles at the bottom if you'd like to read more.

I'd love to hear any stories or opinions from smokers who have mental health problems too below! This is just my own story, but I kind of think it's important to share because very few people seem to know the risks.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2811144/
http://www.livescience.com/24873-marijuana-psychosis-pot-side-effects.html
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/03/06/390143641/pot-can-trigger-psychotic-symptoms-for-some-but-do-the-effects-last
https://www.mentalhelp.net/blogs/marijuana-makes-it-worse-severe-mental-illnesses/