I Use Cannabis to Inspire Creativity in My Work. So What?

Kim Myles is an HGTV host, interior and product designer, and hairstylist. For PS's Radical Honesty issue, she discusses using cannabis while working. Read more radically honest stories here.

I met cannabis when I was 20. Had never done any drugs, was not a drinker. But I had my first experience with cannabis, and it was an instantaneous love affair. Love, love, love. And why I loved it was that I was instantly aware that I had been living 20 years with the low hum of constant anxiety. And when I consumed cannabis, that hum disappeared, and the quiet was deafening. I didn't know that my nervous system could feel like that. Also, I was very much an insomniac and really struggled with insomnia. It didn't matter what, but at 2:13 a.m., I was up. It's horrifying. But guess what helps that? Cannabis.

For me, cannabis truly was life-changing. It changed who I was in the world, how I moved through the world. And the bonus track has been how exponentially it enhances my creative process. I would never give cannabis credit for my creative process, but it is a brilliant amplifier for me. I find that when I'm ideating — because I am a creative, I create things. In my interior design work, my home is my lab where I'm creating and living amongst my creations. For example, I have a set of patterns I created 15 years ago, and I've brought them out again. Just graphic patterns that could be wallpaper, could be anything else. If I have a little cannabis and then I'm ideating around that and walking around my home, which is my studio, and making connections — I call it cross-pollinating. I'm like a little bee and I just flit around and let things hit my eye and my brain.

I'm a sativa strain girl. I like uplifting, light, bright, creative, chatty. That's what I want people to know: you can customize your dosage and your experience. It's not all about being on the couch. I say that as someone who lives and works in the tri-state area. I am with a lot of high-achieving, high-functioning individuals. Millions of them. And most of them are consuming cannabis, either recreationally or medicinally. Maybe they're like, "I'm playing tennis and my knees hurt so I'm doing Mary's Medicinals. I don't feel high, but I need that anti-inflammatory and pain relief."

A huge reason I was so excited to join Cannabis Media Council and be actively, physically, publicly engaged in the work of cannabis advocacy is because I am a short, round, Black woman in America. So you can't scare me. Your judgments do not matter to me. I am Teflon. I am uniquely positioned, I believe, to live my best life — and that includes cannabis. It's not my entire life; I'm not a grower, I'm not a cannabis businessperson. But guess what? It's a $455 billion industry. It's an industry that's rife with men, as they all are, but it has a real path for women. But what about the medicinal piece, the farming piece, the sustainability piece, and the mass incarceration? It touches everything. I was born into and have built my business during late-stage capitalism, so for me, inequality is a feature and not a bug. Cannabis is the one industry where I've discovered a multitude of financial opportunities, as well as a deeply engaged and diverse community.

We have to step outside of shame. It is informative, but it is a useless tool as far as a forward motivator. Notice it, interrogate it, and then move on. But I do believe in my heart of hearts that as humans, we are all more alike than we are different from each other. And the more I speak my truth, even though it seems so unique to me and I can get wrapped up in my narrative and the intimacy and shame and how much to reveal — guess what? Everyone feels the exact same way I do. We live in an information age where everything is on display. So if I'm going to be on display, I'm going to use it.

We as human beings on this rock at this time deserve to create the best lives that we can for ourselves and for our communities, for each other. And I know through lived experience that cannabis is a connector. It connects your brain, it connects emotions, it connects communities. I'm really privileged to work in the industry in this way, because when you talk to any of us who are in it, it's shocking to me that there's still a 1950s attitude about it. It has so many touchpoints that can be so positive. I know that cannabis is one of the ways forward in a time, in a world, that feels like it's on fire.

Jump back to the Radically Honest issue.

Lena Felton is the senior director of features and special content at POPSUGAR, where she oversees feature stories, special projects, and our identity content. Previously, she was an editor at The Washington Post, where she led a team covering issues of gender and identity.