I held the capsule in my palm at the kitchen sink and thought: this is it? It was the size of a fish oil pill. Smaller, maybe. It did not look like something that could fix three years of not sleeping. It did not look like much of anything. I had driven an hour to Brookings to buy it, worn sunglasses indoors like a woman in a spy movie, and now I was standing at my own sink holding something that looked like it belonged in the vitamin drawer.
Two and a half milligrams of THC. Five milligrams of CBD. I did not know what those numbers meant. Lisa had explained it on the phone — THC helps with sleep and pain, CBD helps with inflammation, the ratio matters — and I had written it on a notepad the way I write down anything a medical professional tells me, in neat block letters, underlined twice. But standing at the sink, the numbers were just numbers. What mattered was the question underneath them: would this be enough, and would it be too much?
I took it at eight o'clock, after the dishes, the way I do everything — on schedule. By nine, the ache in my hands had changed. I don't mean it disappeared. I mean it got quieter, the way the furnace gets quieter when you stop listening for it. The tightness in my wrists, which by evening usually feels like wearing gloves two sizes too small, loosened enough that I turned the pages of my book without thinking about it. I turned off the lamp. I slept seven hours.
The next morning Lisa called. I told her. She said, “Don't change a thing.”
Four years later, I have not changed a thing. Same capsule. Same dose. Same time, same sink, same glass of water. I have never increased to 5 milligrams. I have never tried a different product. I have never felt the need to, which is the part that surprises people when I tell them, though it does not surprise me. When something works, I see no reason to fix it. I take the same approach to pie crust — I found a recipe in 1986 and I have made it the same way ever since, because it works. Gerald has never complained about the pie crust. Gerald has never complained about the capsules either, though he has less to say about those.
What I want to tell you, if you are just starting, is that enough is a real place and you can stay there. You do not have to keep going up. You do not have to try something stronger. The fear I had — the fear a lot of people have, especially women my age — is that you will feel out of control, that you will be foggy or strange or not yourself. At 2.5 milligrams, I have never felt any of those things. I feel like myself. I feel like myself after a good night's sleep, which is a version of myself I had forgotten existed.
I know the temptation to try more. We are raised on the idea that if a little helps, a lot will help more. We do it with Tylenol, with coffee, with fertilizer. But cannabis does not work that way. I have talked to women at church who started higher — 10 milligrams, in one case — and felt dizzy or anxious or heavy in a way that scared them. When they backed down to 2.5, they slept.
Here is the practical thing: you can always take more, but you cannot take less.
If a small dose tonight is not enough, try again tomorrow. Your body is patient. The bottle is patient. There is no prize for getting to the right number faster, and a bad first experience can make you put the bottle in a drawer and never open it again, which would be a shame.
I need to be clearheaded at five-thirty in the morning. I do the farm books. I drive my grandson to hockey practice on Saturday mornings in the dark, on county roads where the deer come out of the ditches without warning. I cannot afford to be foggy, and I am not. My hands work. My sleep is solid. The day starts clean.
What enough feels like, for me, is the volume turning down on the pain just enough that I stop noticing it. It is the book getting heavy in my hands because I am genuinely tired, not because I gave up on being awake. It is waking up and reaching for my glasses on the nightstand without wincing.
That is all I needed. It might be all you need too. And if it is, that is not settling. That is finding the dose that lets you be yourself again.
What does enough look like for you?