A 5 mg edible that was still too much for me

Setting & intention — An evening at home, nothing planned afterward. I'm a very occasional user and wanted a mild, relaxed night; 5 mg is often described as a modest dose, and I treated it that way.

Preparation — Ate it after dinner, kept the rest of the package put away, and had no plans to go anywhere — no driving under any circumstances.

Timeline — Nothing for over an hour, which is exactly when redosing feels tempting; I didn't, and that turned out to be the most important decision of the night. When it arrived around ninety minutes it kept building for another hour past what I wanted — racing heart, a strong sense that something was wrong, and a stretch of real paranoia about ordinary sounds in the building. Lying down in a dim room with water and a podcast made it survivable rather than pleasant. It faded over several hours.

Afterward — Groggy the next morning. No lasting effects, but no interest in repeating it at that dose.

What I'd note — 'Modest' is relative to the person, not the label; for my tolerance, half would have been the right experiment. Oral onset is slow enough to trick you — the dose you add at hour one arrives on top of everything at hour two. Having nowhere to be was the safety margin that mattered.