preface: this kinda turned into a rant where I just complain about my ex girlfriend but you might be able to learn something by reading it. Or not, who knows. Anyways, onto what I wrote.
Hello, friend.
On this forum I go by Charlatan. You might be wondering, "why would you choose a name which insinuates that you're a fraud?", to which I'd answer simply: I am a fraud. No matter how much I'd like to pride myself in knowing something, no matter how much knowledge I think I have about a topic, there will always be somebody who knows more than me. But I'm not going to let that hinder my quest for knowledge, nor am I going to let it define my usefulness, in this community or in general. Everyone has experiences specific to them, and I strongly believe that everyone else has the opportunity to learn something from those experiences. So I'm here to share mine.
Just a little background on me, I live in a culturally Southern county in a culturally Northern state in the geographical South. I'm relatively young, too; somewhere in the double digits. I became intensely interested in entheogens about a year ago, spending hours and hours pouring over forum posts, wikipedia articles, and study abstracts. Since then I have done mushrooms three times, LSD once, LSA thrice, I've attempted to brew ayahuasca twice, and attempted an A/B extraction once. Sadly, this has equated to 8 threshold experiences, one moderate experience on LSA, and one full experience on mushrooms. Although I'm incredibly interested in it, I've yet to breakthrough either drinking or vaporizing DMT.
Anyways, when I was initially going through my "drug research phase", I had a girlfriend at the time who, being raised in an incredibly conservative household, was terrified of anything that wasn't cannabis (which I had to introduce to her over the course of months). This severely complicated my introduction to psychedelics, and this is what the rest of this introduction is going to be about. As much as I hate to admit it, she played an integral part in my first experiences with psychedelic substances, and as much as I'd like to change that, I can't, so instead I'm forced to learn from my mistakes.
My first shroom trip was a single fresh cap, most likely Psilocybe cubensis. It's hard to tell due to the variety in my area and the fact that my eyes are rather inexperienced. I spent the night arguing with my GF and watching my keyboard breathe. She later testified that she didn't know I was tripping, although I explicitly stated that I was. She spent most of the time talking down to me and calling me irresponsible because I inadvertently blew her off to go shrooming with my dad. I consider this experience to be a "bad trip", because although I didn't experience any scary or profound visual effects, I was experiencing the self-deprecating magic mushroom mindfuck that I'd grow to love. Couple the introspection that mushrooms bring with a narcissistic and potently negative significant other and you get a four hour lecture from both her and your subconscious, haha. Although I'd like to note that even though it was overall a negative experience, I learned something about myself and my partner that night, so I see it as a victory.
My second overall psychedelic experience was with a tab of acid. I dropped with my dad coming home from a long day of work. As soon as my SO found out, she sent me a text saying "I'll talk to you when I don't feel like dumping your ass". That's not paraphrased; those were her actual words to me. This of course filled me with intense anxiety, so I went and laid down in my bed and tried to sleep, which in hindsight is impossible. I spent the better half of 8 hours in my bed, alone, terrified and in pain from crazy muscle tension in my legs. Sometime in the middle of it all she called me in hysterics, which gave me even more anxiety. After sobbing incoherently for five minutes, she hung up on me and stopped answering calls and texts. I spent the next hour completely sure that she killed herself because of me. When I found out she was alive and well, I began to think that she did it all on purpose. That she deliberately gave me a bad trip so as to prevent me from trying it again. Of course that was most likely a paranoid delusion, but I can't say for sure either way. What I do know is that, yet again, even though I had a very negative experience, I still consider it to be one of the more profound experiences of my life, and I've tried to use what I "learned" to my advantage.
My third overall trip, and the last one I'm going to outline here in this "introduction", was a "heroic" dose. 60 grams of freshly picked mushrooms, diced up and spooned into my mouth little by little with Pepsi to chase each round. Shortly before I tripped, my SO told me that "we need to talk when [my] trip is over". This gave me a fair amount of anxiety as I knew exactly what she was going to say, but as I sat there on the couch watching things get weirder and weirder, and watching my thoughts and perspective change and morph, I grew to love the anxiety. I let the intense feeling in my stomach spread and consume my entire body. I forgave her, and I accepted that whatever is supposed to happen will happen. When I accepted this, the anxiety dissipated completely and I was free to enjoy my experience for exactly what it was.
So, I guess the moral of my story is you can't have a girlfriend who hates drugs and drugs that hate your girlfriend. In the end I think it's pretty safe to assume that the way I acted brought about the experiences I had, and by that I mean I should've anticipated the way my SO would react and completely avoided doing drugs altogether. At least while I was with her. I don't blame her for the irrational ways she acted, I blame myself for putting her in the situation where she felt that acting irrationally was the best option.
But she's nothing to me but a memory anymore, which opens me up to experiment with whatever substances I like. Hence signing up for an account here. I hope to use any knowledge I gain here, and any knowledge I've already gained from a year of casually browsing, to better myself if at all possible. Or at the very least, to better my extraction procedures.
tl;dr: don't do things your SO hates if you actually value their opinion