*This Conversation is featured in Gossamer Volume Eight: the Space issue, which is on [newsstands](https://www.gossamer.co/stockists) and [available to order now](https://shop.gossamer.co/products/volume-eight-space).*

In August 2021, I opened [Gorilla Rx](https://www.gorillarxwellness.com/), our dispensary on Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles. The store aesthetic came from my years working in the natural food industry. I wanted our store to be different from traditional dispensaries, and I loved being in the vitamin section at the Whole Foods and GNCs of the world. I wanted it to be a place in the community where elderly folks would feel like they were going into a vitamin store. And I wanted our place to break down the stigma of the experience of visiting a dispensary.

That meant having a home goods and lifestyle section, collaborating with community businesses, and showcasing real cooperative economics. [Reparations Club](https://rep.club/), for example, had their books and albums in our store. If you come in, you will see and feel a community in action. We stock a large selection of Black-owned, woman-owned brands. Your individual action of purchasing that product will help that person feed their family and enable them to create more and do more for others. To me, that’s what the spirit of cannabis has always been, long before it was regulated. No matter what color or race or gender you are, we want you to be a part of this.

[[1]]

I am a serial entrepreneur. Gorilla Rx is my fourth business. I never thought I wanted to open a dispensary. My family has always believed in alternative medicines that grow from the earth. Chlorophyll is the compound that’s closest to human hemoglobin, so if you’re iron-deficient, it’s a blood-builder. It goes directly to your liver and it detoxifies. So I launched Gorilla Life, a chlorophyll beverage line. In 2007, I launched a cannabis-infused version called Chronic Tonic.

When I learned about California legalizing in 2017, I planned to expand my cannabis-infused beverage line. I moved quickly, because I thought I’d have nine months to get our manufacturing license. In that process, I learned about the Social Equity Program. I went into retail cannabis with the specific goal of creating a model of cooperative economics, to show people that they do not have to take predatory and sharecropper agreements.

I come from an entrepreneurial family. In the early 1900s, my grandfather had the first Black-owned bar and hotel in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He kept the first dollar bill he earned on his nightstand. After migrating to Leimert Park, Los Angeles in the early ’70s, my grandfather had a gardening business. I would watch him at the dining room table doing his books and ledgers, which always intrigued me.

[[2]]

My parents focused on community development and started programs for those coming out of prison, and for women who had suffered domestic violence. My mother even had a birthing center. Sometimes during the late hours of the night, someone needing help would knock on our door and my dad would answer. We didn’t have much food in our refrigerator, but I would watch my dad give his last dollars to a community member who was in more need than we were.

I got the best of the capitalism side and the socialism side. Our community-first model at the dispensary comes from that. For three years before we opened, our space operated as the headquarters for our education, training, outreach, and organizing efforts.

> Our core values are based on our family values.

Gorilla Rx is a family business. My 29-year-old daughter Kika Howze is my marketing director. She was my only child for 12 years, and then I had her two younger sisters. In eighth grade, she joined Usher’s nonprofit program as an ambassador, and then moved to New York to work with his management company at 17. After five years there, she worked for Team Epiphany, which is a Black creative advertising agency. But COVID brought her back to Los Angeles.

Obviously, we share the same values. She’s been able to develop our brand. My nephew Aaron is the store manager. My niece Amina is an assistant manager. My other niece is my inventory manager. My godsister works in the store. That was how we built our foundation. Our core values are based on our family values. That’s how we hired. I was able to just post on social media. People who came to work for us were people from the community who wanted to be there.

[[3]]

For me, a typical day starts at about 4:30 AM. I’ve got to wake up my children for school by 5:15 AM, so those 45 minutes are probably the only time I have to myself. I ground myself and get my prayers going. Then I drive my kids to school for an hour and a half on two different sides of Los
Angeles.

We have offices above the dispensary, and that’s where I spend most of my time. About 40% of my day is focused on government relations, but that’s down from 70%. When I opened the dispensary, I didn’t realize how deeply I would need to be involved in politics, and I’ve never had a business where that was a prerequisite to succeed.

I’m on the board of the Minority Cannabis Business Association (MCBA) and on the legislative committee for the California Cannabis Industry Association. I’m also the president of the Social Equity Owners and Workers Association. All of that means I’m engaged very directly on a leadership level in local politics regarding equity and social justice.

[[4]]

As a child, my family moved every two years. My dad was pursuing multiple degrees, and we would move from state to state as he attended different colleges. We always lived in the inner city, no matter where we were. Struggle was at the heart of our environment, but we always found joy. As an adult, that ability to be flexible and spontaneous and thrive amidst struggle has proven to be a benefit in the cannabis industry.

It’s been over five years since Proposition 64. As community members, we have yet to see the benefits of the Social Equity Program. In the six months after opening my doors at Gorilla Rx, I had $650,000 collected in taxes. I’m taxed at 37% from the city and the state. I’m representative of cannabis businesses across the board, but there is a very stark difference between Social Equity operators and the rest of the industry. Aside from the barriers to entry in this business, once we get into the cannabis industry, we’re not well-resourced. We don’t have banking, we don’t have these huge accounts that would allow us to scale to the point of profitability three years in. We have to pay taxes to the city every month, and taxes to the state every quarter.

> I never thought I’d have to sue the city of L.A. and organize a movement.

And so we’ve been fighting at the State Senate level and also at the city level to eliminate the excise tax specifically for Social Equity operators.
A year and a half ago, I helped organize a coalition of equity organizations across the State of California, and we formed the California Cannabis Equity Alliance (CCEA). We’ve hired a lobbyist, we pooled our money together, and we’ve been lobbying at the assembly and at the State Senate level. Give us an advantage, allow us to reinvest back into our communities. I have more than 30 employees. That $650,000 I paid in taxes could have gone to medical care, to hiring more employees, to raises.

I got caught up in this retail route because I didn’t realize the fight for licensing would take four years. I did not realize I would have to become a political activist in order to win. I never thought I’d have to sue the city of L.A. and organize a movement.

![Jennelle Fong x Gossamer Kika Keith High Res MGL2565](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/3vQ8k4SOuUeKg4qNd96ctO/29e1c3318c4d5e32a5104599fcecb4af/Jennelle_Fong_x_Gossamer_Kika_Keith_High_Res_MGL2565.jpg)

In my life, cannabis has always had a very spiritual connection. Growing up, my family lived by Rastafarian principles. We used cannabis in ceremony, and smoking was always a moment in my household that created peace and grounding. My mother would call it “holy” instead of calling it “weed” or “cannabis” or “marijuana.” Since my parents moved in Black Panther circles in the 1960s, there was a need in our household to take moments to be still and ground ourselves as a family. During COVID, there’s been more anxiety and depression than ever, and more of a need to find balance and peace and remove stress. That’s what I saw my parents use cannabis for. And I think that’s incredibly crucial, especially in these times.

We have 3,000 SKUs in our store, so we invite the brands to bring in their specialists and do budtender training. We also spend a lot of time with the farmers now. I’m about to take a course on endocannabinoids and dig in deeper to understand the plant. There is so much information, and so many new products that come out every single day. It is such an exploratory time in this industry.

Before legalization, I didn’t like the way dispensaries felt. I didn’t like the fact that I didn’t know what I was going in for, and that there weren’t people who could give me any information. I felt bad that I didn’t know what I was asking for. So we’re all learning as we move. We’ve hired cannabis wellness advisors that work with us and train the team. Every month we do team trainings on new products and new science.

[[5]]

The Mayor of London visited my dispensary for a tour. He’s looking at ways to decriminalize cannabis in London and we were the dispensary the City of Los Angeles selected as an example of a model “for us and by us” dispensary. I’m okay with big business and multi-state operators, but there has to be room for a cottage industry just like there has been for the craft breweries. So far, there have not been models of how that could work.

We sued the City of Los Angeles, so to be selected by that very same city to say, “This is the one model that is exemplary of L.A. cannabis at its best,” that’s what the hard work is for. And that gives great credence for us to be able to replicate this model in inner cities across the United States.

> Very rarely do you hear the David and Goliath story in a real way, and especially not a David and Goliath story starring a Black woman.

It’s a great victory. And though I love to give myself a pat on the back, it has taken the whole community. Very rarely do you hear the David and Goliath story in a real way, and especially not a David and Goliath story starring a Black woman. My whole team here has been fighting for this moment, and to be recognized for that was incredible.

The cannabis industry must be diversified. Too much blood has been spilled on our streets, too many people who are still incarcerated, too many children left without their mothers and fathers to this day. Either willingly or under pressure, people in the cannabis industry need to talk about the effects of the War on Drugs and create opportunities for those who have been affected. No matter what statistic you look at, Black people have always been disproportionately harmed. My hope is that we are actually able to have race-based and race-conscious legislation that gives equity and justice to communities that were most harmed across this country.

![Jennelle Fong x Gossamer Kika Keith High Res MGL2736](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/5ojd1s2d2P6Tk0yZlJAed2/12009b93d5fcc30591de92c10bdc78cb/Jennelle_Fong_x_Gossamer_Kika_Keith_High_Res_MGL2736.jpg)

I believe we can set a precedent, and then we’ll see the same in healthcare, in food justice, in homelessness. Once we start showing that there is a way to create equity where everyone wins and there are success stories, we can then transfer that across the board and really start healing our inner city communities, especially.

Right now, we are in the process of securing the property next door to open up a training center for equity applicants and operators along with those who were incarcerated and face barriers to entry. We’ll teach them the retail side of the cannabis industry, and give them the skills that they need. To me that’s the future.

[[6]]

*This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. [Kika Keith](https://www.instagram.com/bigkika/?hl=en) photographed by [Jennelle Fong](https://www.instagram.com/jennellefong/?hl=en) at [Gorilla RX](https://www.gorillarxwellness.com/) in Los Angeles. If you like this Conversation, please feel free to share it with friends or enemies. Subscribe to our newsletter [here](https://www.gossamer.co/subscribe).*

The Gorilla Rx owner on cannabis politics, the Mayor of London, and running a community-first business.

Jennelle Fong x Gossamer Kika Keith High Res MGL2603

> The spirit of cannabis has always been no matter what color or race or gender you are, we want you to be a part of this.

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Kika Keith

I grew up in Texas, just outside of the beautiful and wonderful city of Austin. I grew up in the suburbs with a very standard white Southern family upbringing. Just middle class suburban living. 

And then, when I was 11, I got diabetes. Sometimes diabetes is genetic, but sometimes it can just happen, which is what happened to me. For six months, you’re super sick and nobody really knows why. You’re losing all this weight. You’re having all these horrible symptoms, like nausea, all the time.

[[1]]

What’s happening is that your immune system is slowly destroying the cells in your pancreas that make insulin. They’re called beta cells. You need beta cells to live. You need insulin to live. You don’t really realize you’re sick until almost all of them are destroyed. And once they’re gone, they’re gone. They don’t grow back.

That’s very different from type 2 diabetes. I think it’s important to make this distinction. With type 2 diabetes, you still have beta cells. You’re still making insulin. You just have what’s called insulin resistance. Usually your body’s in rougher shape, and your cells are less receptive to absorbing insulin, but it’s a very different disease that just has the same name. Without insulin, when you eat carbs or sugar, carbs get broken down into sugar which just stays in your blood and builds up to really toxic and corrosive levels. Insulin takes the sugar out of your blood and delivers it to your cells. So when you don’t make any insulin, you have to inject it manually. But synthetic insulin isn’t as good as the real stuff.

[[2]]

When you get the diagnosis, it’s sudden. I was in the hospital for five days, and then they gave me a crash course. Like, “Okay. For the rest of your life, you’re going to have to maintain these complicated calculations all the time, and pay for this expensive drug, and always be prepared.” Imagine going on a seven-day backpacking trip and you have to keep your insulin cold. What if you get lost? There’s just all these factors. My parents, especially my mom, dove into the research. Reading all these books, trying to basically learn how to become an expert manager of type 1 diabetes, because I was a kid. You’re usually a kid when you get this.

For the first couple of years, she really took care of things, calculating everything. If you take too much insulin, that’s really dangerous. You can overdose really easily. And when you do, you have to eat carbs to counter it. Eat sugar, drink juice. But if that happens at night, for example, you can die.

> For me, living with type 1 diabetes means that every five minutes, you’re reminded that you’re going to die. 

My parents would wake up every couple of hours and test my blood in the middle of the night. It’s tough, but I think, like anything, you just learn how to do it. It’s not like that anymore. It’s been 17 years. The technology’s getting better and more expensive. Now it can alert you when you’re given too much. But as an 11 year old, who mostly had a very privileged and easy, beige life, this was the first speed bump. It was a big one, but it was really beneficial in the end.

For me, living with type 1 diabetes means that every five minutes, you’re reminded that you’re going to die. Or that if you don’t pay attention to it and manage it, it can kill you really soon. I really feel like diabetes is what led me to pursue a life making art. I think the experience of becoming aware of my mortality at an early age encouraged me to ask myself important questions like, what do I want to do with my time? I don’t want to do a job that isn’t exciting. I don’t want to ever go to work and feel like I just have to get through it to live my life. I really wanted to see if I could find a way to make my occupation something exciting and engaging and enriching for me.

[[3]]

No one in my family practices art, though I would consider my mom a very creative person. I don’t think she thinks so, but she is. In high school, I was interested in science. Maybe because with diabetes, you have this understanding of what’s happening in your body—the cause and effect between “I eat this” and “I feel this way and my blood sugar is this.” I was really interested in the way things worked. Especially weather and forecasting. 

In Texas, there are these enormous storms that happen in the spring, where the drops of rain feel heavy and there’s hail and tornadoes and lightning. Just witnessing that force got me really interested in meteorology. But there aren’t meteorology or forecasting classes you can take in high school. Instead, I took advanced chemistry classes, and art classes to fill my time. My high school had a ceramics class that I took. I would just mess around. It really wasn’t a passion. The first time I touched clay, I was like, “I don’t like how this stuff dries out my hands. It’s hard to understand.” I did a lot of photography, which I really loved, and was maybe a bit easier to learn than ceramics. But I went to college thinking I would be a meteorologist. 

I was lucky. I had two great professors who introduced me to ceramics, and completely changed my entire view of what ceramics is and what it could be. I really fell in love with the combination of chemistry and tactility that ceramics orbits. It was the most scientific art that I’d ever experienced. I didn’t look back.

[[4]]

I went back to Austin after a year of college and continued my education in ceramics there. I got a job with a potter, [Lisa Orr](https://www.instagram.com/lisaorrpotter/?hl=en). She was amazing. She had all these wild glazes. She told me about the interaction between sodium and copper that made this special turquoise blue—just instructing me on the chemical reactions that can happen within a glaze. We had all these conversations about the handmade pot. I learned from her that pottery was a language you could learn and communicate with. Like, how heavy is this cup? How wide is the lip? How tall is the foot? These things were like stanzas in a poem that you could bend and shape.

You can make the lip unusually wide and fat. Then, when someone puts their own mouth on it, it’s this surprising moment, like, “Whoa.” It’s invasive. Or you can make a handle that’s intentionally uncomfortable. When someone picks it up, they pay attention to it because of the inconvenience. Most people don’t think about cups. It’s a tool, everyone has one. You get them at restaurants, but really there’s a lot of room for trickery and cheekiness in messing with the archetype of the cup. You could really mess with people.

[[5]]

For me, the paintings and the sculptures I’ve had in my life, they’re so cool when I first get them. I hang them up and look at them, and it’s like, *Wow*. Then, very quickly, they just become a part of the wall. I’m not trying to trash painting or sculpture, but it’s the objects I interact with daily that over time really make you think, *What is this thing?*

Or when a cup breaks and you’ve had it for 10 years. You’ve imbued it with these memories. Like, “I had this cup of coffee with this person who’s dead now.” Or, “I was holding this, drinking out of it when I got this good news.” Or, “I got this when I lived here. And this person, my friend, made it.” These objects can hold so much memory and emotion. It becomes so enlightened and there’s so much substance available when you interact with something. I fell in love with that. That’s when I started making inconvenient cups more intentionally.

> I went into grad school loving the cup, and loving how it could exert friction on someone’s daily life.

![000020160007](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/2t1ttNve7PQgpGCHdH8GHV/82517f2c220353e993690463145e3ee7/000020160007.jpg)

I went to Alfred University in New York for my master’s degree. Alfred is a well-known ceramic school. It has hundreds of people working in clay, and all these hard-hitting professors who specialize in different areas. They have a department of ceramic engineering, which focuses on the science side and where they do really technical things. That school and the people I met there really honed the hunger I had for ceramics. 

I went into grad school loving the cup, and loving how it could exert friction on someone’s daily life. I had this cup that had an egg on the side of it. And when you take a drink from it, the egg pokes you in the face. I really loved that. Loved it. It made you pay attention to the moment, to what is this typically mundane experience. I wake up, I have coffee every morning. Because of its frequency, I lost how important those mornings were. I think this is the crux that goes back to diabetes. Every moment is precious. You have to take advantage of them because this will end, you will lose this. I was trying to make these cups that I would give away or sell to my friends. They’re not easy. They’re sort of like this weird object that you can’t help but grab. You’re attracted to it like a bug is to a flower. Like, “What is that thing? I want to pick it up.” This is a cup. And then you use it. You can’t help but pay attention to that experience.

> I really am seeking to ... inject whimsy and playfulness and hopefully lightheartedness and joy into moments that can lose their potency.

![000020160002](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/gAqgP7WaMBdMcpd6hbruJ/9713b4d8f061718be37272f7aa2a3873/000020160002.jpg)

Those mundane moments—that’s what comprises so much of life. It’s so important to me to pay attention to them, to have awareness, and to appreciate them, because 95% of your life is going to be these routines you do every day. During my time getting a masters, this philosophy expanded into furniture because it was the same thing. A chair has an archetype. It has these parts. A seat that’s this high, arms, and a back. Just like a cup has a body, and a foot, and a rim, and a volume. Furniture is the same thing. 

Every day you sit in chairs. You don’t really think about them. I wanted to make chairs that were like creatures, that looked like they were swallowing you, or had eyeballs that rolled around so that you couldn’t help but play with them. That was a breakthrough. Like, *Oh, I can make ceramic furniture and cups and basically continue on this path of my feeble attempt to enrich people’s lives through functional objects.*

[I’ve made some pipes before](https://www.artsy.net/artwork/nick-weddell-gorglaxs-pipe), but I wouldn’t say it’s a core branch of my practice. But just like a cup or a chair, a pipe is a tool that you interact with in an intimate way. You hold it and you put your mouth on it, and it’s a device used in an experience or a ritual that may or may not be daily. Just like any other daily ritual, I really am seeking to enhance those moments, to inject whimsy and playfulness and hopefully lightheartedness and joy into moments that can lose their potency.

![000020160031](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/4A8tj2wVzojtyJrnLQmGev/c7624a96af2f9e52a6b770ee1f0117d3/000020160031.jpg)

I grew up in Texas when it was a very not cannabis-friendly place. My parents are very against any kind of drug use, even though I don’t really consider cannabis in that category. They don’t know that I’ve ever smoked. I think they’d probably be extremely disappointed to know that I have. They might read this and find out that way, and that’ll be interesting.

I never smoked or drank in high school. That was not a thing I was allowed to do at all, and not a thing I felt like I wanted to do. My friends would and I would say, “Great,  do your thing, but I’m just not interested in that.” Part of it was also fear. With diabetes, you have to constantly be aware of what’s happening. So to do anything that changes the experience of how you’re feeling can be dangerous, or so I thought. What if you get super low and don’t feel it? You could die. 

> I looked up and the stars were shifting and swirling. It was terrifying.

When I was 19, I went on a big road trip with one of my good friends at the time. We started in Texas and made a ring of national parks. We befriended this pair of old couples in Arches National Park in Utah. They were from Colorado. One of them, Lenny, grew weed in his front yard. He had this gruff voice and gave us a nug of it in a little bag. He was like, “I want you boys to be careful.” 

I was like, *Well, we better try this because we’re on this trip. We’re about to go into the desert in New Mexico and camp out. I’m with my trusted friend. I’m far away from anyone else. I have food in case something goes wrong.* That’s when I smoked for the first time. 

It was a horrible, terrifying experience. Everything my parents had told me was right. Puked everywhere. In the sand in White Sands National Park, crawling on my hands and knees away from our tent. Puking for 10 minutes. And then I sat up and it felt like gravity had shifted. I was terrified to look behind me because I “knew” I was going to fall backwards along the surface of the earth and get shot into space. I looked up and the stars were shifting and swirling. It was terrifying. 

I didn’t smoke again for two years. But slowly, towards the end of college, I started again in a more careful way. I think the weed we got from Lenny was way too strong. I had roommates who were big smokers and eventually I just tried in a much more controlled way. I smoked the littlest bit. It was so wonderful.

I was never an all day smoker, but in grad school I would work late into the night. Occasionally I would smoke at 10 PM, and then work until 4 AM. I really enjoyed the focus and creativity it gave me. It dulled enough noise to where I could really sink into what my hands were doing with the work. Explore things. But after grad school, I slowed down, and now I would say I’m not a smoker. I think it was great for me for several years. It really helped with stress and my creativity and productivity, but maybe two years ago, I stopped. It just changed. It didn’t make me focused or able to work for eight hours in a really productive, beautiful way. Instead, it made me nervous and really anxious and paranoid. Before it was this guide, and now it’s this foe.

[[7]]

*This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. [Nick Weddell](https://www.instagram.com/nicks_ceramics/?hl=en) photographed by [Jessica Levin](https://www.instagram.com/jessicawlevin/?hl=en) in Chicago. If you like this Conversation, please feel free to share it with friends or enemies. Subscribe to our newsletter [here](https://www.gossamer.co/subscribe).*

The sculptor on growing up with diabetes, using ceramics to highlight the mundane, and why he didn't smoke for two years after trying weed.

000020230005

> For six months, you’re super sick and nobody really knows why.

![000020230009](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/71kwtOmm58lXwFWlHBwodB/154efdb0de729bf970bfbc56901ed3f5/000020230009.jpg)

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> There’s a lot of room for trickery and cheekiness in messing with the archetype of the cup.

![000020160011](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/5ZNOvsxazXaIsY0T3MUhFU/8a882f4221f024814d3be61a29facfc4/000020160011.jpg)

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Nick Weddell

My mom and dad met in college in the Upper Peninsula, at Northern Michigan University. My dad is Black and my mom is white, and my grandparents on my mom’s side were not receptive to my father. My father was a victim of the crack epidemic, so he wasn’t very present in my life. There are a lot of stereotypes surrounding Black fatherhood and my mother’s family held onto those.

Because I was raised by a white mother, one of the first ways that I learned about race was at my grandparents’ cabin. Like they did with all their grandchildren, they put a life vest on me and threw me into the river. I was able to swim, so I *couldn’t* be Black. That was the way my grandfather accepted me. That was my upbringing. I had to practice erasure of my cultural background. I had to perform in a way that was not stereotypically “Black.”

[[1]]

> I was constantly trying to find somewhere I fit, until I realized that I didn’t really fit anywhere. So instead I tried to make my own space.

I was raised in Detroit, which is the Blackest city in America, but we spent a lot of time in the suburbs. I was always the only Black kid in my youth group, in the churches we belonged to, in the restaurants we ate at. But when I was at home in Detroit, I wanted to be a part of the community that was reflective of me.

My grandmother, my father’s mother, was stable, nurturing, and a devout Christian. She would take me to church every weekend. She would buy all of my school clothes. But she is a devout Apostolic Pentecostal woman, and I am queer. On the one hand, she was the most developmentally important person in my life because her love was nurturing, solid, and secure. But also she had her own beliefs that made me feel unloved. I was constantly trying to find somewhere I fit, until I realized that I didn’t really fit anywhere. So instead I tried to make my own space. That really informs the work that I do now, because I just want to make space for everyone to feel like they can be their best and most authentic selves.

I found a lot of joy in school, because I was good at it. I loved math. My dad was brilliant—I was always competing with his school records. Because he was so sick—he was in rehab most of my life—I wanted my grandma to be able to see her lineage and her legacy in me. To show her what he was able to create.

![IMGL8223](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/11ghSceFNdtd7hx0vHfxQk/80d95a271e7fa55e6f87f7869c110144/IMGL8223.JPG)

I was always trying to prove myself on both sides. Trying to heal my grandmother while trying to prove to my white family that I was good enough. They are conservative, Republican, military people. I’m a queer, free-spirited progressive who works in cannabis. I spent a lot of time trying to win people over, but I wanted to be able to be myself—to not have to conform to anybody else’s standard.

I identify as a Black, biracial, queer woman who is also a fat woman—a woman of size. I’m pretty fluid in my gender identity and my perspective around gender. I like to lead with social identity markers because they illustrate my experience navigating the world. I am incredibly liberal and progressive when it comes to my politics, and I am an educator, a coach, a mentor, a developer, and a nurturer. I’m a quintessential big sis.

> I was looking for an industry that would allow me to use my passion ... to build pathways to generational wealth for my own legacy.

I started my career in educational access work. I worked as a college advisor in Battle Creek, Michigan. From there, I went to Teach for America. I taught for two years in St. Louis. I was still advocating for educational access and sending kids to college, but I started wondering: *What happens when they get there? Are they finishing college? Are they just landing in a lot of debt? How is the institution treating them?*

So I moved into student affairs, and worked as an administrator at the University of Delaware. I oversaw a strategic plan for supporting underrepresented students, which focused on building welcoming and inclusive learning environments as well as training our staff to be able to support them. 

While I was at the University of Delaware, I got my MBA. I then moved into diversity, equity, and inclusion training at the corporate level. I developed a curriculum for cultivating racial equity in the workplace that has now set the standard for the learning and development industry. But I wanted to be an entrepreneur. That’s how I landed in cannabis. I was looking for an industry that allowed me to use my passion for justice, equity, inclusion, and community, to build pathways to generational wealth for my own legacy.

[[2]]

That’s when I met [Common Citizen](https://www.commoncitizen.com/). Being able to transition into a regulated operator and see what this industry can do at scale has been one of the most rewarding learning experiences of my life. I report directly to our CEO, Michael Elias. He has a heart of gold. Mike acts with integrity, and with his values and belief in doing what’s right by patients and by his team. He cares more about the people who work for us than anything.

We have Citizen Culture Groups, which are employee resource groups based around identity. Our Honoring Women CCG, which launched during Women’s History Month, opened a pantry at our headquarters so we can come together to provide canned goods, shoes, and clothing to employees in need. Each month we prioritize different items. Mike wants to make sure if you don’t have a car, we’ll figure out a way to get you a car. If you don’t have a place to live and need to move, he’ll try to figure out how to get affordable housing. He cares about his people. And he inspires me.

But he’s also a businessman. As a leader in capitalism—because that’s the system in which we operate—he does a good job of including other perspectives while also thinking about long-term strategy and short-term wins to support his team. I really respect his leadership and—he told me to stop saying this—I aspire to be a leader like him.

[[3]]

I’ve integrated myself into every value stream, from citizen resources and our recruitment and retention strategies, to how we’re measuring diversity indicators around leadership, to what it looks like to prioritize and offer contracts to diverse suppliers in order to increase the representation of women-, queer-, and minority-owned businesses throughout our supply chain. This also extends to our operations side, which includes our [Principle product line](https://www.commoncitizen.com/principle), where 100% of our wholesale profit goes into the community. 

Common Citizen is the largest vertically integrated wholesale distributor of cannabis flower in the state. We have a huge hybrid greenhouse with over 70 acres of cultivation. We are a grower, we’re expanding our processing footprint, and we have eight retail locations across the state. I’ve been able to integrate throughout the entire organization and be an evangelist for social equity. 

With the profits from Principle, I’ve developed three micro-grant programs that distribute funds throughout the state in different communities. The first, For the Culture, focuses on increasing accessibility to the arts. The second, the Principle Community Impact Award, is targeted towards nonprofits that build community-led infrastructure development, political empowerment and expungement, home ownership, and workforce development—the four markers identified by the McKinsey Racial Wealth Gap as key drivers for advancing racial equity around wealth. 

> Failed startups led by white men raise, on average, $1.3 million. But startups led by Black women receive, on average, about $36,000.

The third, the Common Principle Startup Accelerator, is a prototyping, milestone-based grant. We invite startup-stage entrepreneurs to pitch their ideas for the opportunity to receive business model training and executive coaching. Once they build that model, they’ll be able to implement their prototype using the $5,000 micro grant. And at the end of the year, we’re inviting all of our accelerators to pitch their business model for $50,000.

Failed startups led by white men raise, on average, $1.3 million. But startups led by Black women receive, on average, [about $36,000](https://www.wired.com/2016/02/its-embarrassing-how-few-black-female-founders-get-funded/). Our vision at Common Citizen is to reinvest $1.3 million into the community by 2023, and draw attention to those gaps.

We just did a community engagement activation back in Battle Creek, where I was a college advisor, and five of my former students came to learn about our micro grants. I found out that at least one of my former students works in our cultivation. That was a full circle moment for me.

[[4]]

I’m a Pell Grant, full-ride scholarship kid from the University of Michigan who also inherited a shit-ton of debt. I didn’t have a safety net. I was scared of wanting kids, scared that I would mess them up. We’re all going to mess them up in our own ways, but I didn’t want to be violent and abusive. That’s something that comes with the cycle of poverty—rage in the household.

I’m finally at a place where I can say I want some kids. I had a lot of trauma loops and reactions I had to heal. I also now know I’m not going to be raising my children in poverty. I know where I’m headed. I’m going to be able to leave my kids with a legacy. I’m going to be able to provide for them so they don’t end up in the same place I came from. Coming to that realization has been transformative.

Where I’m at right now is building sustainable healing habits so that when the kids come, my partner and I will be able to teach them the same. For me, that means a lot of movement practice, getting my body in shape to be on the ground, playing with my children, being present.

[[5]]

I’m embracing that God blessed me with this big body because I’m meant to take up space. Clothes and adornments play into those things. I’m six feet tall. I never wore heels. Then when I was in California at [The Smoker’s Club Festival](https://www.thesmokersclubfestival.com/) in L.A., I went to a swap meet and bought two pairs of kitten heels. And I was like, *Okay, I’m going to learn to wear these shoes*. Because I’d been telling myself I couldn’t wear them because I’m already tall. But now I’m walking in whatever. Just playing and trying to learn to walk in them, playing with how I dress, learning my style.

My [Curvy Cannabis Series](https://goodfatlife.sounder.fm/episode/24-curvy-cannabis-crusader)—a campaign to increase the representation of fat women in cannabis marketing, which also provides a space for healing and connection—was one way I learned to be able to see myself, look at myself, and love myself. We did boudoir photo shoots that centered cannabis products, but a lot of the facilitative dialogue that happened were women sharing stories of trauma.

> A lot of my healing has been around the idea that I’m here to take up space, and I don’t have to be invisible.

I never wore lingerie before I did Curvy. The most impactful moment for me was when I was looking at myself in the lingerie, and I was like, “Look at how my armpit fat hangs over. I hate it.” I asked my friend, “Do you have this?” And she was like, “I don’t have that, but I have this.” She had the wings. There are all these things that we’ve been taught to hate about ourselves, and we all have our thing, but here we are looking stunning, there to celebrate each other. It has taught me to embrace my body.

Curvy is actually kind of how Common Citizen found me, because we were featured in their documentary [*Somewhere Higher*](https://www.nowness.com/series/nowness-shorts/somewhere-higher-cannabis). I was able to pay 10 plus-size models through that. Even though over 60% of women are size 14 or up, we’re only included in about 2% of marketing. We’re less likely to get gigs. We’re less likely to be included. We are literally taught to be invisible. 

![IMGL8163](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/UP9zUVedX46JpIN1sq8bt/6672fdf4c6005d75a447098d02fa87a1/IMGL8163.JPG)

A lot of my healing has been around the idea that I’m here to take up space, and I don’t have to be invisible. It’s about embracing yourself in all of your fullness. I had to teach myself to love myself. I don’t care how you view me anymore. It’s about how I view myself. 

I think that in order to be courageous you need to be authentic and true to who you are. You have to be very clear on what your values are, what you want to accomplish, who you are, and behave with integrity in staying true to those things. To me, courage is acting with integrity around who you are in every space.

> I think the core of how I take care of myself is knowing how valuable I am.

My idol in this industry is [Mary Pryor](https://www.instagram.com/iammarypryor/?hl=en). I think that she has the most courageous, strong, and clear voice. She’s not going to tolerate BS. She’s going to be very direct about what’s right and wrong. She’s cultivating pathways for so many people who are unseen and unnoticed within this industry. I really value her intention, thought, and care for our community. She reaches back. She’s not in Detroit—she’s in New York—but she reaches back and makes her presence known. We have a Black Women in Cannabis Facebook chat, and she engages there to let folks know she’s an available resource. I really value what she stands for and how she does her work. How freely she gives herself to ensure her mission of increasing inclusion in the industry. And how she moves. She moves fast.

My community is my support system. Oftentimes people say that as you elevate, you lose relationships—and I’ve gone through a lot of transitions in mine—but there are consistent people who pour into me, love on me, and celebrate me, and it’s reciprocated. Having those relationships helps me stay balanced and recognize that sometimes it’s about the people around you and not necessarily always about the work that you need to get done.

I think the core of how I take care of myself is knowing how valuable I am. When I was young in my career, I overworked myself and didn’t know how to communicate my boundaries. I had imposter syndrome. I always needed to be performing. I needed folks to see how valuable I was to them, because I didn’t see the value that I had already in me. I had to learn that I need to fill myself first.

[[6]]

That means getting my mind and my spirit right so that I can be grounded. I’ve started to prioritize better eating and nutrition to make sure that I’m giving myself energy so that I’m not exhausted. I move right, making sure that I’m increasing my flexibility, stamina, and strength in my body.

Another big part of that balance for me is maintaining therapy. I microdose psilocybin. I was doing it every three days, but started doing it daily to make sure that my mind is just ready and wired and intact. If all of those things aren’t integrated, you’re not going to experience joy in your journey. It’s going to feel like work and labor. 

Everything I do is what I was brought to this world to do, and an opportunity to make an impact at the scale I’ve always wanted to. I get to have a lot of fun in what I do, and I’m kind of like a celebrity at work. They treat me with respect. They value my perspective—and I work to win them over—but we’re a team, and I love it. I’m living the dream, honestly. I wake up happy.

[[7]]

*This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. [Jess Jackson](https://www.instagram.com/iamjesshuman/?hl=en) photographed by [Bre'Ann White](https://www.instagram.com/breannwhite/?hl=en) in Detroit. If you like this Conversation, please feel free to share it with friends or enemies. Subscribe to our newsletter [here](https://www.gossamer.co/subscribe).*

Common Citizen's Director of Social Equity and External Affairs on learning to love her size, increasing equity in cannabis, and creating generational wealth.

IMGL8318

![IMGL8090](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/6fl6oCJwlUIhTfJZshcsZn/f416c921c773a826924720d12a1da7da/IMGL8090.JPG)

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> I’ve been able to integrate throughout [Common Citizen's] entire organization and be an evangelist for social equity.

![IMGL8015](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/OS3ZE02FBG3fKvPZa6AQi/7d564f68273314cea02fe412f6c83fa4/IMGL8015.JPG)

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![IMGL8345](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/5RkHvngCKHgY0gm8yqCtlO/559f5006a46aeeb27e13e72c6ea40406/IMGL8345.JPG)

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> Another big part of that balance for me is ... I microdose psilocybin.

![IMGL8354](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/2HX0JZ1I23zGc4kBjoxF8p/48354fd87927a079b3ffe9c5e3db8dfb/IMGL8354.JPG)

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Jess Jackson

[[1]]__3. Start Rolling__

Pick up your paper with both thumbs and both index fingers, careful not to spill. Slowly roll your flowerand paper back and forth between your fingers until it starts to feel like a firm cylinder, almost like a cigarette. You’ll know you’re done when the mixture is packed together enough that it keeps its round shape on its own. This step takes practice, but you'll quickly get the hang of it.

![How To Roll a Joint - Roll](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/45AFT5yhgdnz8QrfTH109D/75d36f5410e1cc76af24347868c31532/How_To_Roll_A_Joint_-_Roll.jpg)
__4. Tuck and Seal__

With your tight (but not too tight) cylinder of flower sitting in the bottom crease, tuck the bottom of the paper over the flower and into itself. Your flower should be completely surrounded by paper. After you’ve rolled the flower almost to the top of the paper, lick the edge along the gum line. Carefully finish rolling as the now-sticky end forms a nice seal for your just-about-finished joint. Most people naturally turn their joints into more of a cone shape, but don’t feel pressured to. Do whatever feels right to you.

![How To Roll A Joint - Licking](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/6FoSFH4bKo94kK1TsRl0Kj/5b5f90eb0cde29bb834ed8520f37aeea/How_To_Roll_A_Joint-Licking.jpg)

[[2]]

![How To Roll a Joint - Smoking](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/1HigSdPcN3zR7vAWgsMoos/8b468ed2885da36a17f7bdc32dbf15e9/How_To_Roll_a_Joint_-_Smoking.jpg)

*Like this guide? Get [a full set here](https://shop.gossamer.co/products/pamphlets-sensible-guide-series), for all your stoner education needs. (They also make a great gift.)*

Step-by-step instructions to rolling a joint.

How To Roll A Joint Hero

How To Roll A Joint - Mobile

How To Roll A Joint - Smoking Preview

__1. Break It Up__

Using a grinder, sharp scissors, or your fingers, break up about half a gram of weed (a couple of small buds, basically) into a neat pile. There’s really no such thing as too fine, but you definitely don’t want your weed to be too big. Aim for about the size of minced garlic.

__2. Fold And Pour__

Place your rolling paper on a flat surface, gum-side up across the top. Now fold the lower half in half again, so you have two creases: one in the middle and one a quarter of the way from the bottom. (This extra crease is not required, but it helps.) Pour your nicely ground bud evenly along the lower of the two creases. It’s okay if it’s thicker in the middle; like batter, it’ll roll out.

How To Roll A Joint - Fill

__5. Shake, Shake, Shake__

Pinch one end of your joint (the wider end if you rolled a cone) and using a flick of your wrist, shake it back and forth to pack it even tighter. It should look like you’re rudely signaling for the bill at a restaurant. (Alternatively, you can use any long, thin object to push the flower down.) Once it feels nice and firm, give the end a little twist or feel free to carefully tear off the excess paper.

You now have a nice, personally rolled joint to smoke with friends, family, or, of course, alone.

How To Roll a Joint - Shake (Right)

There are many ways to roll a joint. We have found this way to be the easiest to teach and to pick up. Don't worry, we’re sure your way is also great!

How To Roll A Sensible Joint

I came into writing in my mid-twenties. I wasn’t specifically pursuing it, but it’s one of those life shifts that makes a lot more sense in hindsight. Being a thinker, or very ruminative, is pretty core to who I am. Sometimes in a bad way. It’s how I process the world, and what I’ve always done to soothe and understand myself.

I think of it more as codified thinking. Less about prose, or even finding the most beautiful set of words. To me, that is what I find satisfying about writing. I turned to journaling when I was young. I enjoyed—or I relied on—being able to put things into words. Basically, to be able to talk back to myself.

My mom always talks about how I was kind of a precocious kid, but not in a child-genius way. I wanted to be older and settled and have the questions of my life answered. I used to beg her to take us to a fortune teller. I was too young to have cynicism about that. I was like, *There’s somebody out there who can tell me what’s going to happen?* Through my mom’s retelling, I used to say that she was so lucky because she already had a family and knew what she was doing with her life—everything was settled. She thought that was a strange thing to want at such a young age.

[[1]]

I didn’t pursue writing or creative fields because I was a big athlete growing up, and then I studied business because I didn’t know what else to do. I was pretty lost. I kept picking the safe path, and in my mid-twenties I had a classic realization that I’d made all the safe decisions, but I didn't really know who I actually was. I was working in HR in San Francisco. I was in a long-term relationship. I was living a very particular type of life and everything was in that “good but not quite right” holding pattern. So I decided to change everything up.

After a couple years of trying a bunch of different things, I got a job as a junior editor at [Man Repeller](https://repeller.com/). I moved to New York on the fly. This was March 2016, so I had six months in New York before Trump won. Working in media at the time was interesting because there was this really palpable shift over my first year. I worked my way up, and ended up staying for four years. Every year was such a huge cultural shift. 

I gave them six weeks notice in January 2020, and had my last day just by chance on March 11th—which was the day the stock market crashed, the NBA was canceled, Tom Hanks got COVID and everybody started taking it “seriously.” Freelance budgets were slashed, and this was supposed to be my big freelance leap. So I decided to launch a newsletter called [Maybe Baby](https://haleynahman.substack.com/) instead.

[[2]]

I publish an essay every Sunday, and send out a weekly podcast and recommendations list as well. It ended up being a great alternative path, and I’m fully supporting myself with it now. I’m coming up on two years, and it’s definitely gotten more polished as I’ve worked on it. Originally, my idea was to literally jot down some spare thoughts and share my work. This was in the early pandemic, so nobody was writing anything for anywhere, and nobody was talking about anything except the pandemic.

It was an interesting time to write. I know a lot of people had a different experience creating in that time, and I’m not saying what I made was truly visionary, but I found it really inspiring, for lack of a better word. To walk through an empty Manhattan was just so strange. I mean, that’s the kind of shit you see in movies, and it’s interesting just because it’s so unusual. Writing has always been about finding order in the disorder, so it was just a natural outlet for me during that time.

What I try to do is put words to something I find to be complicated or inscrutable, or maybe existing in the gray space between how we perform and who we really are. The dark in between, the shadowing in between. I think that applies not just to personal identity but also how we exist online as our digital selves, how we exist in our friend groups, and in our relationships with people. I think a lot about biases. I’m really interested in how we dilute ourselves or what we take for obvious that maybe isn’t, or explaining why something we take for obvious is true, and unpacking it, and what that might tell us more broadly. So maybe this is pretty vague, but generally the project of my newsletter is writing about modern life. Oftentimes at the intersection of culture and identity.

[[3]]

Another inspiration for the direction of Maybe Baby is what I wasn’t able to write in my previous job. I got my start in women’s media at a particular type of website with a particular tone. I couldn’t get too political. I couldn’t get too in the weeds with weird sources and anything that felt too serious wasn’t really the tone. I'm still struggling to shrug off that tone and assume a different type of audience.

Another big hump I had to get over was letting go of a particular type of professional career as a writer. In New York, and especially in media and literary circles, there are these kind of big names that are always thrown around. I mean that in terms of publications, but also people. There’s this sense that to be respected, you need to be known in a certain circle or way, and published in certain places. It took me a while to understand that approval from a certain set of people wasn’t actually going to give me what I thought it would give me, and that I had to get more honest about what I wanted out of writing in general.

> It took me a while to understand that approval from a certain set of people wasn’t actually going to give me what I thought it would.

An important process I went through with the newsletter was readjusting my priorities and reshaping my ambition to things that feel a little more grounded and relevant to my life, and less influenced by external forces or check marks on a path. Not that I don’t still feel that tug sometimes, but it is nice to be guided by a more subjective, soft idea of what brings meaning to my life versus validation from the powers that be.

I spent the last year really figuring out how to sand away the friction from my writing process—and also my wellbeing. Telling myself, *You don’t actually have to write a book. You don’t need to read comments from every single person. You don’t owe an email reply to every single person, every lovely person or critical person.* I tried to turn a lot of my pressure valves off and rearrange my life and work in a way that was optimized for my mental wellbeing. That was really, really huge. But the natural caveat is that friction is interesting, and it can be sexy—and I mean that in a somewhat platonic way. To have your work be a little more fast and loose sometimes.

[[4]]

Contentment and complacency are very easy to mistake for each other. I think a lot of life is being willing to sway back and forth. Like periods of being more ambitious and active and pursuing, and then coming back to your comfort zone and relaxing and just being done. I think they’re both really important parts of life.

Now I’m trying to figure out what comes after feeling like I’ve oversimplified. Maybe it’s getting out there and finally writing that book proposal, doing all the press that I’ve been avoiding, and freelance writing. But it could be something else. I don’t want to take other people’s scripts for what it means to succeed or have a full life when I haven’t fully kicked the tires on whether they match me.

Part of that’s also connected to why I’ve been generally less visible online. I don’t post that much anymore. I’m giving so much of myself that I feel this desire to keep something. I’m trying to figure out how to be ambitious in a non-professional context. I don’t just mean hobbies, but I mean what does it mean to build a community with my friends? How do I deepen my relationships in my life and deepen my relationship with my house or my neighborhood or with New York? My work doesn’t just get my ideas, but it gets all of my recommendations, like movies, shows, and recipes. It already gets so much of me that I feel this draw to have things that are really important to me outside of it.

[[5]]

Last year I turned off comments on my newsletter. I definitely had an issue in 2020 where I would spiral anytime somebody left me a mean comment. That was part of the inspiration—to shut off the valve to this immediate public feedback to everything I put out, which meant sacrificing the positive comments as well. It was just sort of like, *I actually don’t think I need this constant barrage of feedback from strangers.*

I became less focused on how I was being perceived, which is such a time and energy suck. Not being on Instagram as much, there’s this part of you that feels less perceived in a bad way. Everybody likes to be perceived sometimes. I laugh all the time about those TikToks that are like, “The people in this coffee shop are the only people I’m going to see today. Everybody better look at my outfit, because I only put it on to get a coffee.” 

I think it’s normal to want to coexist with the people you’re writing for or speaking to in a tangible way. Sometimes I’m doing cultural criticism or making claims that people disagree with, and I think that’s totally fine. I definitely toy with wanting to have a healthy discourse and not feel like I’m speaking into an empty room, which is part of the reason that I’ve been seeking out more of it in my actual life, like talking to other writers and getting an editor and bringing in that outside perspective from people who are known and trusted to me. I also have a feedback form. So if people really have a burning bit of feedback to give me, they can give it to me, but my writing is not like an Amazon product with five or one star reviews under it.

I wrote about this a long time ago when I first shut them off, but it made me rethink how we talk about the term “community” on the internet. A lot of times, it was just shorthand for a vibrant comment section, and I don’t think that necessarily always represents a community. Or, those people might be in community with each other, but they’re not necessarily in community with the person who’s providing the comment section. There are not equal stakes at hand. It made me think about what community meant and how to actually get it in a way that felt more meaningful to me.

[[6]]

I’ve definitely written about drug use here and there, but not how much or how often. I smoked weed in college and drank heavily, but I didn’t really try anything else until after school. I was pretty scared of anything else. Maybe I did do mushrooms once, or a few times. But I remember feeling really nervous about anything else.

It wasn’t until I had this opportunity to go to the Electric Daisy Carnival. The first time I did molly was at EDC, which is so funny. I remember being so scared and googling things like, “What is molly? What are the risks? What are the dosages? What’s happening in your brain?” I remember somebody saying, and it’s so funny that I blindly trusted her, “Your brain is already storing up serotonin and dopamine. Basically, you’re just high on what makes you happy.” I was like, “Oh, okay.”

That was my foray. I was still really nervous about everything, but I loved molly and feeling less control. To give a drug too much credit, I think it kind of changed the trajectory of my life. I just remember feeling like I accessed a side of myself that was a little more adventurous and open to new experiences that were maybe dangerous. Which was never how I thought of myself as a person.

> To give a drug too much credit, I think it kind of changed the trajectory of my life.

![MG 6004](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/5veXiDTCnyig8RftjuP2Kf/27e4464694089cf2bad435251f4a2f94/_MG_6004.jpg)

In hindsight, I’m glad that I didn’t experiment with anything much until I was in my twenties. I feel like I was more equipped to handle it. Not in every way, though. I made a lot of dumb mistakes at that time, like getting too confident about what I could or couldn’t take. But I did really appreciate this new side to myself. I think there came a point really clearly where I started feeling too old for that scene, and I started to see the façade. At these types of music events, there’s this feeling that everybody loves each other and there’s benevolence. But you also notice that when you get there early nobody is like, “Hi!” That’s not there. If you start to think too much about the façade, that need to be high to get along, it starts to feel a little gross.

So I sort of tapered back. At the time I was especially focused on changing my career and I was not partying as much anymore. I’d say if that was my molly era, I’m more in a mushroom era now. I love mushrooms. They’re definitely my favorite high. For me, if I had a choice between being a little bit high on weed or a little bit high on mushrooms, I’m definitely picking mushrooms.

As someone who really favors her sense of self in any given moment, I really like taking small amounts of them. I find that taking a little bit of mushrooms and going on a walk, or even just taking a little bit on a Saturday, a lot of times I forget that I took them. That’s the amount I want to take.

[[7]]

In my earlier life with drugs, I never wanted to take something and have to force myself to feel it. I feel the opposite now, which is that I want it to be so subtle I could forget it’s there—or make use of it. Which is like, are you going to sit on the couch and scroll on your phone, or are you going to put a record on and light a candle and knit, or draw? My boyfriend Avi and I both have little creative hobbies, and we’ll have nights where we try to cultivate an environment where we’re both working on things. I guess that’s kind of a metaphor in general for cultivating a head space for yourself.

If I don’t feel like doing that, I can just chill or exist. I think that’s why I’m not a huge stoner. I wouldn’t describe myself as smoking every day, that’s not me. I probably smoke once a week. But I do feel like I’m starting to smoke more, and I’ve realized that I really prefer indica to sativa. I kind of prefer the chilled out body high to the think-y high. I used to prefer sativa because what I wanted to do was cry laughing.

> In my kind of party era ... I did acid on a nude beach in San Luis Obispo.

In my mid-twenties—this was sort of in my kind of party era—I did acid on a nude beach in San Luis Obispo. I’ve only done it once. I was not nude, but there was only one guy there, so it wasn’t rude of me to not be nude. It’s just funny that it happened to be a nude beach, because I was the highest I’ve ever been in my life. There was an old naked man walking around in the waves, and I was just like, what’s going on?

It was a pretty fun experience while coming up but then things got kind of dark for a while. I think this is really my fear with all drugs: being lost somewhere in my mind and feeling like I’m losing contact with reality. This experience forever scared me because I was so trapped in this other space. Every once in a while I would come to and be like, “Oh my god, I’m on a beach. I’m myself. I’m with my friends.” And then I would go back under. Time was just elastic. I felt like I was gone for years.

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I think sometimes when I get high, I can still access that bad trip, and that’s kind of what scares me. Maybe that’s part of why I am such a fan of the lighter doses. I can definitely be kind of a mother hen, like, “Just start low. Don’t take too much.” Sometimes I feel like people think it’s fun to be like, “Oops, I took too much,” kind of in the way where you’re like, “Oops, maybe we should get one more drink at dinner!” But it’s not the same.

But a lot of people don’t mind going off the deep end, so I probably just need to be less of a control freak. I ended up coming to from the acid experience and having a nice time the rest of the night. We went to a music show. I later [wrote an essay about that experience](https://repeller.com/bad-acid-trip-taught-me-everything/), and specifically the idea that because I got over it and was fine, I should therefore be able to talk myself down from a high in the future. This is a really common refrain from drug users in general: when you’re high, just accept that you’re high.

I think it’s a little bit antithetical to what a high is, which is that you’ve lost access or some amount of access to who you were sober. Therefore, you cannot rely on carrying one particular lesson over the bridge. The metaphor of the essay was basically that a lot of emotions are like this. For example, when you’re not angry, you think, “The next time I’m angry, I’ll just say this,” but that’s just not how anger works, or depression, or anxiety. When you’re in those places, the point is that you’re high on that emotion. You can try to talk yourself out of it, but then ultimately, you’re just denying yourself a feeling that you need to process.

[[8]]

I was grateful for the lesson from that high. I guess I maybe don’t regret it. It was very applicable to something I struggle with all the time: trying to intellectualize my feelings. Which kind of brings us back to the beginning of why I write, and the risks of it. How do you make sure that you accept and embrace your feelings?

Since I wrote that essay, it’s the top hit for anybody who googles “bad acid trip.” It’s funny, at least once a month, a really random person who doesn’t follow me or know who I am, who’s just a little bit high, sends me a long DM saying they found my essay and telling me about what’s going on with them, or maybe thanking me or whatever. I call [them acid DMs](https://haleynahman.substack.com/p/80-the-acid-dms). It’s a funny touchpoint I have with people who live otherwise completely different lives from me and probably don’t give a shit about anything I’ve written.

There have been times where I wonder if they don’t even want me to reply, like maybe they’d be embarrassed the next day to see what they’d written me. Sometimes they’re really long. But it’s a really nice little peek into humanity, people in this vulnerable place where their walls are down and they’re maybe feeling a little out of control. It’s sweet to be let into that moment.

![MG 6028](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/2mSbSikHAKjWWaVNh2QXw5/b64b45ca7a4a95f76800d86c3ce31855/_MG_6028.jpg)

*This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. [Haley Nahman](https://www.instagram.com/halemur/?hl=en) photographed by [Nik Antonio](https://www.instagram.com/nik80s/?hl=en) in Brooklyn. If you like this Conversation, please feel free to share it with friends or enemies. Subscribe to our newsletter [here](https://www.gossamer.co/subscribe).*

The Maybe Baby writer on the downside of feedback, getting lost on a nude beach, and becoming an unintentional resource for acid users.

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> Writing has always been about finding order in the disorder.

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> My writing is not like an Amazon product with five or one star reviews under it.

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The Maybe Baby writer on the downside of feedback, getting lost on a nude beach, and becoming an unintentional resource for acid users.


Haley Nahman

Gossamer looks at the world—travel, design, art, culture, and food—through a green lens.

*This article is featured in [Gossamer Volume Seven: Touch](https://shop.gossamer.co/products/volume-seven-touch). Subscribe [here](https://shop.gossamer.co/products/annual-magazine-subscription).*

It’s a little known fact that a male octopus’s eighth leg is actually its penis. The very name—derived from the Greek word *októpus*, meaning “eight foot”—has led us down the garden path. I’ve lived my whole life believing an octagon has eight sides, my 83-year-old nanna is an octogenarian, and *an octopus has eight goddamn legs*—it’s basic linguistics.

But now, at the auspicious age of 33, I have to accept that I’ve been suckered. There’s nothing “octo” about the male octopus. They have seven tentacles and a specialized limb for transferring sperm. In other words, the eighth leg is a penis.

To put that in context, the name “octopus” is the species equivalent of referring to a human male as a triped. I simply refuse.

This deceptive appendage, called a hectocotylus, was first recorded by Aristotle around the year 347 BC in one of the earliest surviving scientific studies. The ancient Greek philosopher left Plato’s Academy following his mentor’s death, swapping the city of Athens for the island of Lesbos where he spent two years observing the marine life of a lagoon at the island’s center.

It was here that Aristotle, father of Western logic and apparent octopus voyeur, first surmised the use of the octopus’s eighth leg in the mysterious act of cephalopod sex. He was, of course, widely disbelieved. It wasn’t until 1827, some 2000-odd years later, that Aristotle was proven correct.

It’s not hard to see why it took so long for biologists to catch up. The hectocotylus looks and acts like a leg on a regular day. It can bend, it can stretch, it can exert suction. But at the sight of a slinky lady octopus, the hectocotylus can, in some species, stretch to twice its
regular size. If we’re talking ratio to body length, it’s a crime against octopus everywhere that we hold the donkey as the gold standard of gonopodia.

But alas, we must collect our minds from the gutter. As one of the most antisocial creatures on earth, size for the octopus is about survival. While sex for humans certainly has its own set of challenges, sex for the octopus comes with a very real threat of cannibalization.

The fear of being consumed—literally, not metaphorically—by the object of its affection is so great that some species of cephalopod have evolved a mating ritual so stealthy that they can avoid touching their partner at all.

The male argonaut octopus, for example, is so averse to physical intimacy that he instead tears off his penis-leg, sperm clenched tightly in his tentacled fist, and gives it to the object of his affection like some kind of macabre Valentine’s gift. In other words, an argonaut octopus would rather wrench off its own penis than touch another living creature. Is that not the saddest thing you’ve ever heard?

The more I think about it, the more I wonder—are these octopuses desperately lonely? Studies have long proven they have extraordinary minds, but it appears that evolution has dealt them a cruel hand: intelligence and vulnerability in equal measure.

Have their exposed, fleshy bodies made them so terrified of the world around them that they can’t, even for a fleeting second, indulge in the tender touch of their own kind? Do their suckered limbs and bulbous bodies long to be wrapped in the tentacles of another?

Unfortunately, we may never know the answer. More than two millennia after Aristotle’s observations in the lagoons of Lesbos, we still have so much to learn about this wildly intelligent, yet fiercely private creature.

For now, I choose an alternative narrative. One where octopuses are the ultimate romantics, sacrificing life, limb, and loneliness in the quest for love and lineage. In my 33 years of dating, I’ve yet to receive a Valentine’s gift as memorable.

[[1]]

V7 High Minded: Tentacles 2

High Minded: Tentacles

*This article originally appeared in [Volume Four: the Inside issue](https://shop.gossamer.co/products/volume-four-inside). Subscribe [here](https://shop.gossamer.co/products/annual-magazine-subscription).*

Symmetrical stacks of shimmering, rectangular boxes. Holographic labels promising total, complete, maximum, sparkling, advanced, and optic whitening and cavity protection. This is the toothpaste aisle at the supermarket, a candy store of personal hygiene.

Scanning the rows upon rows of boxes puts me into a trance. It’s as satisfying as biting into a frosty ice cream bar. Maybe I’m just a sucker for good marketing. I think my favorite is Crest Complete Whitening Plus Scope, a double helix of mint mouthwash splitting the blue and green box down the middle.

When I was a kid, my mom bought Aquafresh, red and blue stripes of gel sandwiching one of white paste emblazoned across the front like a patriotic banner. That’s the box that probably began my obsession: the supernova graphic behind the friendly Aquafresh label promised to make the monotony of tooth brushing “EXTREME,” while clouds of soft, foaming bubbles scrubbing away at my teeth would burst into “ACTION.” Toothpaste is among life’s most banal necessities, and yet the packaging is pure magic: stare at the boxes for long enough and the goopy paste inside the soft, fat tube becomes a faded memory. Now it’s glamorous, now it’s bursting with freshness.

The packaging didn’t always look this way. In the early 1900s, it was called “dental powder” and came in squat metal tins decorated with ornate labels that pledged to “cleanse” your teeth, to make them “beautiful.” But even then, the labels conveyed a sense of urgency, reminding us to be hypervigilant over the health of the bones protruding from our faces, like tiny tombstones. In the 1950s, “dental powder” turned to “dental cream,” accompanied by “Colgate” printed in *TRON*-like letters on a solid red background. But the product itself remained in flat, one-dimensional boxes well into the eighties: Crest packages were dull, metallic grey, and the futuristic Colgate font of the fifties had been replaced by a more rounded, friendly mark—hardly the slanted, aggressive lettering we see now.

Today, the graphics glitter, and though the same primary colors are deployed across almost every brand (red, blue, white, and sometimes green), they are now more vivid, more blindingly cheerful, like a grin pulled too tight across an anxious mouth. Toothpaste advertising is both scary and reassuring, leaping off the shelf to scream—CLEANS! GUARDS!—at you while declaring that under its care you will be disease-free, you will achieve purity. Every brand—the Sensodynes, Aims, and Arm & Hammers, too—evoke feelings of cleanliness, vowing to repair (rejuvenate, strengthen, restore) what we didn’t even realize had been damaged. Almost every box across every brand features the word “fresh” or a graphic that resembles an exploding firework.

Sometimes there’s an extra flourish to make the toothpaste look professional. Take the Colgate Total box, another favorite: a white pinstripe background breaks up the red block reserved for the logo, and to the right, a shimmery multicolored oval surrounds “Total,” a little gold clock floating behind it. This one protects not just your teeth, but your cheeks and gums too, a police officer for your whole mouth.

Assurances of a clean mouth are one thing, but there’s more at work here: toothpaste packaging creates a deeply satisfying pattern of order. It’s symmetry. It’s organization. There is a simple geometry to the boxes—sharp rectangles, fluid ovals, and neat text bordered by a string of bubbles or a gold stripe. Maybe I have no control over the trajectory of my life. It’s possible that only fate or angels can decide what path I take. But toothpaste offers the illusion of agency. Here is my stubborn message to the universe: I will bring structure and order into my home with this juicy tube of toothpaste. I will scrub my teeth until they sparkle.

This is the strange spell cast by the toothpaste box. Toothpaste packaging isn’t selling toothpaste. It’s selling one of the most appealing and delusional ideas in the world: that what we buy can bring our troubled human brains any kind of peace. That perhaps we are all just one toothpaste tube away from joy.

[[1]]

gossamer philotheus nisch inside toothpaste 2019 copy

High Minded: White Lies

*This article is featured in Gossamer Volume Seven—the Touch issue— subscribe [here](https://shop.gossamer.co/products/annual-magazine-subscription).*

“Wink” belongs to that particular category of words destined to lose their meaning once repeated. Say it twice and it’s no longer a verb but an absurd salad of hard consonants—the sort of syntax drummed up for the sake of a children’s book. It reads like a sound: onomatopoeia for the gesture itself. The actual practice is no less bizarre. Consider your use cases: it’s a mode of ocular flirting; a non-verbal alternative to “I’m kidding” or “I’m lying;” a disconcertingly tender, silent greeting. It can be romantic, sinister, snide, or playful—and a worthy accompaniment to “U up?”

The beloved half-blink is also an undeniable cousin to the twitch. When executed poorly, it appears less like a mode of silent communication and more like a brain malfunction. But miraculously enough, the wink maintains its cultural allure.

Speaking frankly, I am a subpar winker. Shutting one eye seems to require nearly all of my facial muscles—a spasm that appears more cartoonish than sly. Moreover, it would seem that I am left-eyed, in as much as my right winks translate more accurately as sour flinches of pain.

The type of winker I am most pointedly taken with, though, is the wily, subtle kind. The sort of person who folds a wink softly into grooves of dialogue, who makes you wonder if it actually happened in the first place. There’s a certain romance to subtext of all forms: bits of informational embroidery, scrap phrasing. And in New York, where exhibitionism reigns supreme and confrontation masquerades as commonplace rapport, that sort of small, conversational footnote—the wink—often feels all the more precious.

While there’s no definitive biological consensus on the fundamental appeal of the wink, there are some relevant findings. In the 1960s, a biopsychologist named Eckhard Hess discovered that our pupils dilate when we zero in on something to which we feel sexually attracted. Several years later, nonverbal studies researcher Dr. David Givens determined that rapid blinking (or Hugh Grant’s signature eye flutter) operates as a sign of arousal. More recently, in 2015, Match.com polled over 5,600 single people across the United States about their texting habits and a whopping 53 percent said they used the “winky face” reliably when flirting. This is, of course, not the same as the *actual* practice of winking, but illustrated or otherwise, the gesture has its salacious undertones.

The wink isn’t merely amorous in nature. It can be conspiratorial, too. According to body language expert Patti Woods, a wink often indicates shared knowledge. “It says, ‘You and I have a secret we both understand; others do not,’” she explains. And by that token, the gesture is an admission of a mutual, private history.

It’s that thing that happens at parties, in rooms humming with other people, all of them bobbing and weaving and telling secrets. That thing where you meet someone’s gaze—maybe your person, maybe not—from across a chasm of other upright bodies. There’s no particular sentiment being communicated here, no transmission of information. It’s just a quiet acknowledgment that someone else is keeping tabs. You’re seen, therefore you are.

On the subject of across-the-room eye contact, the titular character in Noah Baumbach’s *Frances Ha* puts it best: “It’s this secret world that exists right there in public, unnoticed. It’s sort of like how they say that other dimensions exist all around us, but we don’t have the ability to perceive them.” That’s what’s in a wink.

Broadly speaking, as a writer by trade, nonverbal cues aren’t exactly my forte. But this past year, I meandered my way into a form of writer’s block so persistent it felt structurally sound—like I could live inside of it, shades down. I had everything and nothing to say, and for the first time, words seemed dull and flimsy held up against the harder-earned edge of real life. And therein lies the magic of the wink: language can be a game of diminishing returns. We need not have words for everything.

The wink has a special economy. It’s the giddy affirmation of communion, but without the untidy business of language mixed in. It’s romance devoid of clichés; friendship sans qualifiers; a joke that’s all punchline. Or perhaps it’s just a muscular tick.

*Reading this feature would be even better with the actual magazine. Order your copy [here](https://shop.gossamer.co/products/volume-seven-touch).*

[[1]]

Stoned thoughts on winking, and saying everything in the blink of an eye.

V7 High Minded: Winking 2

Saying everything in the blink of an eye.

High Minded: Winking

Volume Eight Space Man

Deep Green Slides 

Dusk by Lauren Coleman

Dusk Geray Mena

Gossamer Dusk 

boxstack2s

Gossamer Dusk CBD and CBN tincture is a unique formulation of cannabinoids and terpenes engineered to help you rest. 

Features

Kika Keith

Nick Weddell

Jess Jackson

How To Roll A Sensible Joint

Haley Nahman

High Minded

High Minded: Tentacles

High Minded: White Lies

High Minded: Winking

High Praise

Street Appeal

Go With The Stream

Dressed To Drill

For people who also smoke weed.