Hi, everyone!
I’ve been lurking the Nexus since February. I’m finding it very educational and entertaining. It’s quickly becoming the place I spend the most time in on the Internet.
I’m a 45-year-old American man having a psychedelic renaissance (like everyone else, it seems). This has had a profound, powerful, and remarkably positive effect on my life.
In high school, I experimented with LSD, mushrooms, and cannabis as well as benzos, and sedatives. Back then I rarely drank but I used cannabis near daily. That is, until 1991 when everyone around me decided I was having way too much fun. At 17-years-old, ceding to pressure from my family and following friends of mine who’d been sent to rehab, I joined Narcotics Anonymous. I would spend the next 14 years sober, making that fellowship the center of my life.
In 2005, I decided that I didn’t want to be in a religious cult anymore and I disassociated with Narcotics Anonymous. In 2007, I decided to start drinking again. In 2008 I stopped smoking cigarettes but started smoking weed again. For the next 10 years I would sustain a pretty much constant, miserable binge-drinking lifestyle. I became a bartender and lived almost exclusively in the night time world, staggering home when the sun rose. I quickly found myself suffering with dreadful depression and got on SSRI medication that I’d stay on for 8.5 years. I watched my relationships with my family, friends, lovers, and employers gradually deteriorate or violently rupture. Things got really dark.
I 2015 or 2016, in the wake of a bad breakup, I ended up meeting a source for mushrooms. At first I looked at them as my new favorite party drug, taking 2 or 3 gram doses once or twice a month. Once I started taking doses of 5 grams and up, things started getting interesting. I started having caring thoughts about myself and others. I started having entheogenic experiences where kind voices posited ideas to me about how I might live a more peaceful, joyful life. I knew I was on to something and I felt invigorated to seek more experience. I’ve taken LSD a few times in the last year and was instantly reminded why it was my favorite thing in high school. I did my first PF Tek and grew a bunch of mushrooms over the winter. Last month I did my first DMT extraction from MHRB (using Nexian Q21Q21’s Vinegar/Lime Tek). I’ve now smoalked DMT nine times and I’m blown away at the totally alien otherness of the experience. The shocking beauty this molecule has shown me in my mind’s interior has brought me to tears on more than one occasion.
My rediscovery of psychedelics has brought with it a renewed interest in my own life. I haven’t had a drink in three months and I’m not the least bit interested in having one. I tapered off and detoxed from taking SSRI medication in favor of an occasional mushroom microdosing regimen and actually feel less depressed than I have since I was 10 years old. I’ve started a daily meditation practice that I’ve maintained for over 4 months. I’ve stopped working an excessive schedule and started devoting serious time to art, music and writing projects. I’ve joined a psychedelic society in my city and regularly attend their meetings. My house is in order. My roommate doesn’t find me passed out in the bathroom. My cat doesn’t hate me anymore. Life is getting pretty good!
It’s amazing what happens when you realize that surviving your own life is a losing proposition so you just start living it instead. I’ve spent half my life in psychotherapy and/or self-help groups and neither brought this realization to me in any concrete or palpable way. Psychedelics did, and along with it they gave me entirely new, bizarre, beautiful worlds to explore. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so optimistic or enthusiastic in my whole life.
Anyway, I just wanted to thank you all for being here. I’ll probably just go back to lurking now.
