Hello,
I wrote this a while ago for a different community, but I have edited it fairly liberally to be a bit more useful to this community. As a disclaimer, this is a fairly self-indulgent and long diatribe about how I feel my teenage use of LSD affected me. I do not claim to be the next Hunter Thompson, and my writing may feel amateurish in places. None the less, LSD deeply, deeply affected me, and among other things left me with a lifelong interest in the psycedelic state. In a very real way, it affected the way I think and feel.
I am posting this here in the hope that it might entertain, and perhaps even provide some food for thought to people who have not had the chance (or the courage, or the foolishness) to tempt fate with an ego-shattering dose of LSD.
This is a long winded and self-indulgent rant about the time I spent at the end of my high school years, eating way too much LSD. My guess is that I tripped between 25 and 40 times in an 18 month period, with most of that focused in a 12 month span. My hope here is to communicate something about my personal experience with a community that might understand what I'm getting at. A secondary goal is that some of you might actually be entertained by my narcissism - we'll see. I did my best to keep this as short and coherent as possible, but given the utterly long and incoherent nature of the time in my life that I'm trying to convey, I may not have done that good a job.
I have come to believe that perhaps some of the most significant single moments can only be understood after years of hard-earned perspective. Certainly, if you had told me on the day that I turned 17 that my actions over the next several months were going to raze the fertile grounds of the future with a scorching heat, leaving them twisted, confusing and above all different - I would not have believed it. It was a dangerous age for me. Body of a man; mind of a child; curiosity of a very stupid child.
Certainly, the blotter itself cannot be blamed or praised for any of what was to come. Nor can the misguided suggestions of those more experienced and yet less introspective than I; those who told me "this isn't anything that dramatic, this isn't anything you won't like. This is just acid. This is like being stoned, for 12 hours straight." And when there was acid, it flowed. It flowed like blood through the Nile, it flowed as red wine from Dionysus' cup. It was 1998, and the Acid Train was running at full tilt 24/7 across our pine-filled northeastern landscape. The people who were picking up in real bulk were paying less for a tab than I pay for my daily newspaper. If you had the money for a Sunday edition, you could probably find half a strip. But blotter is just a carrier, a delivery mechanism. What was delivered was the most massive, irresponsible trip my shitty little town had ever seen. That trip spent two full summers making its way, over and over, through our minds. We became the carriers. We became the trip, and suddenly some of us didn't really know who we were anymore.
I will stop speaking in the plural now, because the rest of those faces are lost to me. People I knew who used the same drug to go through something similar at the same time, and nothing more. Some moved on to better places, some to worse - the one that haunts me is the face of my friend Matt, always a good person to be around when Uncle Sid was taking your brain for an 8 hour cruise through Wonderland. Matt's face is burned into my mind as I sat in my 12th grade Government class, watching him mime at me ludicrously. Matt's face is burned into my mind as the memory of a terrible phone call that I would get years later: "Matt is gone. He killed himself in Texas." And so it goes. A face that doesn't haunt me is Cory, who also rode around the bend twenty times too many with our Uncle Sid, but has since gone on to be a successful engineering major at a private technical school. And so it goes.
The single watermark that can be seen in all my mental photographs, is the word "Irresponsibility". I've seen well-adjusted, basically reasonable adults temporarily driven to the bottom of an ocean of insanity by a single trip. Reasonable adults understand that you can't just hang out down in the coral with the fishes, though. Reasonable adults come up for air. I was an African Warrior Monk, a superhero, a pantheon of Gods - anything but an adult. I was a child in a candy store, eating through my own twisted mask of rapture until I was chewing on my serotonin receptors, and I had no clue.
My first time out was nothing special, two hours of slight patterns and stimulation: it was just enough to get my lips wet, just enough to irrationally throw away all of my logical reservations about a chemical so powerful. My next time out came two days later, when I put 5 white tabs down the hatch at 7:30AM on a school day, secure in my knowledge that there was no way what I was doing was not the correct thing to be doing, because there was no way that something that felt so amazingly right could have any problems associated with it. I didn't think I felt any "different" than I should, and, lo, as I tumbled down the road of something that wasn't exactly an addiction but can scarcely be called anything else, I very quickly forgot how different the world looked to me. I could no longer see "what was different", because I had lost all track of "what is the same". I lost track of words. I lost track of objects. Every doorstop was an eye winking at me; every set of traffic lights began to take on the aspect of the eyes of a giant serpent-beast that stalked me at every intersection I drove through.
That first time out I ended up back home, at my parents house, at about 3pm, with the simultaneous impressions that I'd done something terribly wrong, and that what I was doing was terribly right. An image of a wood-grain pattern (colorized and mated with a woven rug) kept flashing in my mind, and I understood that it was a God. I had been more or less atheistic to this point in my life, but suddenly I wasn't just wondering at the existence of gods - I was letting them speak to me, speak through me. The woodgrain-carpet God had only one message for me. "It's the old...." and then silence. "It's the old". "It" in this sense describing the state that I was in. "The old" in the sense of eldrich, ancient. This message pounded through my consciousness on a loop for what seemed like hours (and may have been). "It's the old...". Always trailing off, just teasing me, telling me I had connected to something that was both real and much vaster than anything I had experienced, but not saying EXACTLY what it was. Only that it was old.
As I spiraled down and ultimately crashed hard on my bed, I had the fleeting sensation that I was a terrible, worthless human being who deserved to pay an awful price for what he had done. This theme would become a consistent factor in my post-peak moments. To a smart person, a reasonable adult, that would have been an indication of trouble - but I was a child, and a stupid one at that. I was only sure that I had found an awfully special secret, and that I needed to spend as much time with that secret as I could, even at the expense of everything else in my life. Despite my parents' best intentions, I was a spoiled child, totally unaware of the awesome opportunities in life I had been afforded, and so I shut doors and strapped C4 to my personal bridges at an alarming rate. Alarming, anyway, to those around me. I was still in holy awe of the Moment, trying to hold on to that peak state forever, because I really believed it was both possible and necessary.
That was where my logic eroded. The little homunculus telling me what to do became a malnourished and schizophrenic being, deluded into thinking it could see itself with complete perspective. Also, utterly unaware how deep the hole it was clamoring down ran. I wasn't running from anything, or to anything - I was just in love with The Moment in a way I had never been before. I felt as though everything else I had ever had in my life was a shallow, two-dimensional cut-out, and that I had finally stumbled on to The Big Secret. The secret I couldn't see was that the longer I spent in Wonderland, the more it began to resemble the shallow, cut-out world I thought I'd been living in before. Acid doesn't change the world, only the way you relate to it, but I did not have the necessary perspective to understand this difference. And so by necessity, every trip had to be longer and harder than the one before. I had little interest in gawking at the roadside attractions I'd already seen when I knew there must be bigger, more sweeping vistas even further on - and so I pushed myself as hard as my wallet would allow, and harder. I became deceitful and a thief, but I did not realize it in those terms. So convinced was in in the Godly righteousness of my actions, I could not see the demon that I had become.
At this point, maybe six months in, I'd been wandering in the shadow lands to the East of Perceptual Reality for so long, so frequently, that it really didn't matter if the drug, the dose, was in me, or not. The dose was always in me. I was nothing but dose given human form. Words began to become very, very strange little things to me. "Ocelot" was a word I read in a "Calvin and Hobbes" strip that I became fixated on. Suddenly Ocelot was everywhere. When I was on dose, I would use Ocelot to mean love or hate, fear or compassion: a noun, a verb, a representation of "the old....". A representation of the unknowable. At times I would let language fall apart completely and resort to a sort of primal babble, with lots of gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair. My already well established tendency towards self-harm took on bizarre new psychedelic forms, and I let myself shred and burn my flesh into flayed bits as I rode towards peak states. Afterwards, I always felt a little guilty and a little ashamed, but also safe in the knowledge that I wasn't doing this alone, exactly, there was something greater than myself expressing itself through me, and so it was all jolly good. Many evenings were spent looking at slowly shrinking pupils in the mirror with the thought "you've tripped the day away, child, and soon it will be night. You've tripped the day away, child, and soon it will be night."
One day, It happened. It would happen to me a total of three or four times during my 18 months of excess, all towards the end: in fact, it seems to me that once It happened, I couldn't accept a trip where It didn't happen. It became the means and the ends, and I didn't know what It was. With 8 years of perspective, I can say that It was the point where everything about me ceased to exist. It was the Peak Experience, the blinding white light and twisted darkness that consumes everything, the absolute absence of Ego. At 27 these things make sense to me, and I can understand from an intellectual point of view that when you obliterate that ego boundary time and time again through harsh chemical means, you can get burned. Not the hot fire of a brand, which makes you painfully aware of the burn at the time it's delivered. This was much more akin to carrying a large icicle in my hand for an hour, only realizing when I'd returned home that the curious slight stinging I had been feeling was nerve death and damage. The curious stinging, in this case, was inside my mind. It lived with me in the same space that I lived, in the same space that the thing that "I" use to tell me what "I" am lived. I had invited a cosmic monster into the home of my deepest secrets, and so they were being leveraged against me. I grew to hate myself more than I knew possible. I did not empathize, identify or communicate properly with any of the other humans in my world. I had become selfish as a spoiled child, and anxious as a rat in an oven.
There was a process at work through all this, and I was approaching the end. I was approaching a breaking point, but I did not know it. Somewhere along the line, I'd gained a girlfriend who thought any chemical alteration was a bad thing, and so this kept me from losing it completely. My desire to feel the light of the Acid Gods never quieted, but the frequency of those doses dropped through the floor. I learned from that relationship that giving up something you want solely because another person believes it to be in your best interest is a short-term strategy, and it did ultimately shatter that relationship. Perhaps it was far better to have that stress falling on to the structure of a relationship than to have it become manifest in my own introverted insanity and doses, it's hard to know. I suppose the relationship did me good by artificially tying my hands during a period of time when I was incapable of tying them myself, but this also allowed me to get off the hook I'd put myself on without really learning a lesson.
And so I was, broken and defeated, left to twist pointlessly in a perceptual darkness of my own creation. My mind grew to the point where it feared the dose exactly as much as it desired the dose, and I became confused, agitated, spiritually depressed in a way I'd never known. Later, I was put through any number of SSRIs, SNRIs, atypical antipsychotics, benzos, and others - when what was really needed was a fucking spiritual reboot. I needed an erasure of the misconceptions I had allowed myself to form while wandering in the wasteland, the scorched world that anyone who lingers too long in Wonderland will eventually find themselves in. I didn't need a doctor, I needed a priest or shaman. I didn't need a pill bottle, I needed belief in myself as a good and honest individual. I had sacrificed all of this and more in my blind hunger for the knowledge that I thought could only come from the peak of the plateau. In the process, I had damaged myself to the point where I could no longer use that knowledge in a way that was useful to me. I had seen nearly everything, but I had done nothing.
The sad little adult's world I found myself in when I finally did wander out of the rabbit hole was far, far different from the richly colored world of childhood I had entered the hole from. I didn't believe in myself, and so I didn't believe in anything. I began to question basic assumptions such as "I am a human on planet earth". At this point, it had been a year since my last real dose, but suddenly my vision became stained with afterimages, static and recognition of faces where there were none. I obsessed on these perceptual differences until I quite literally made them worse by focusing on them. I started reading a message board for people with HPPD, and this made my own HPPD seem dramatically worse because I was thinking about it all the time. I read on such a forum that people who suffer from HPPD often have tinnitus, as well, and I became worried that that would happen to me. Lo and behold! My hearing took on the tinnitus-fueled pitch and whine of a wind tunnel, and the more I listened for problems, the more problems I heard.
It was at this point that 9/11 changed the face of the world I was just barely beginning to understand again, and so I let myself fall completely inside myself. Anxiety states became my home. Finding the world intolerable, I allowed myself to be put back on drugs, to be put on Klonopin and Celexa. I dropped the Celexa in 2002, but kept taking the Klonopin until late 2005 when I crossed over to Valium and then tapered off to nothing. Only after doing that was I able to accept myself and my life for what they are, and to begin to recognize the awesome and overpowering Love than I am capable of feeling.
I took LSD, something regarded by many people I respect greatly as a great teacher, and abused it. I wanted to know everything, and so I learned nothing. With 10 years perspective, I have begun to understand some things. I know that in many ways I am still the stupid child who was dumb enough to stare at the sun until I was blind, dumb enough to drink bleach until my guts had been rotted and shredded. Conversely, I have gained an appreciation of how my perceptions define my sense of reality, how at the end of the day I am nothing but a perceptual being, how skewing the nature of those perceptions can inherently skew everything else about myself. I have learned how to be a Good Person, how to be supportive of my friends and loving of my family and friends. I have re-learned how to be honest and productive. Everything that I lost to doses, I have reclaimed, except for the innocence of childhood. At the same time, I cannot blame childhood's end on my long trip; childhood ends, period. The death of the child is the birth of the adult. And I have absolutely no fucking clue if I am "better" or "worse", "happier" or "less happy" than I would have been in a world without doses. I only know that I am "different". I stared at the sun, I saw myself reflected and ripped apart and born again a million times in one split second on several occasions, and all I can really say is: dosing didn't change any one thing; it changed everything. The moment that I felt It and broke through to what must be Jim Morrison's 'other side' for the very first time, absolutely everything changed.
In those ten years, I have moved forward. I managed to grab a Bachelor's degree in a technical field. I made friends. I met the woman of my dreams. I'm employed, productive, and even reasonable. I've become a person I never knew I could be when I was a stupid child. I've been extremely hard on myself, and still am, often to a fault. I didn't trip for 7 of those 10 years out of blind fear that it would give me nothing but more anxiety and perceptual problems, but I finally relented out of curiosity in the summer of 2006, and discovered that LSD no longer holds the attraction it once did. I "get it", and a museum dose will give me a hilarious insight into myself and into the dose itself - but I have no interest in taking myself to the other side, at least, not with LSD. There is nothing there for me to learn that I can't learn through other means.
So, I suppose I have learned many, many things, about myself and perhaps about other people - but only because I had to. I let my sense of self get so absolutely warped and twisted, that the only possible way for me to move forward in my life was to reconnect the dots. By that, I mean that I feel that dosing is fundamentally an 'associative' experience - turning up the volume on all perceptions, letting me see the connections between them and how those perceptions relate at a very basic level to the thing that I regard as "I". I turned up the volume until I couldn't hear the music any more, only the pulsing drone of my eardrums rupturing, and I was left in a shitty and desolate world that seemed devoid of meaning or life. If I had been left alone at the height of this depression, I might have come to a bad end - but fortunately I have always been graced with good, supporting and loving people in my life - and I have used this to my advantage. I let myself care about other people because I'd forgotten how to care about myself. In caring about other people, I saw that they genuinely cared about me, and I learned to assimilate that affection towards myself as my own. I let myself learn how to care about myself by mimicking how others cared about me. For better or worse, this has allowed me to move forward. I'm not 17 anymore. I might not really be 27, in the mental sense, but I'm probably not that far off. I've learned to wrap my HPPD up in more comfortable perceptions, and keep it in a little box where it can't bother me (most of the time).
I spent a long time feeling grateful for the things I'd been allowed to see by dose, and longer still regretting every one and wishing to hell that I had never discovered the shit. I no longer feel gratitude towards the dose itself, nor regret of the dose. I feel gratitude for the appreciation of the unique perspective of each and every organism on the planet that I picked up somewhere along the way, and there are certainly things I did that hurt other people that I would go back and undo if I could - but I cannot. And so I must move on. I've more or less made my peace with the Acid universe, and no longer desire to spend much in the way of time there.
For someone who has tasted this particular medicine many more times than necessary, I really have no opinion on its merit, or its place in the world. I do not believe that it is a good thing, and I do not believe that it is a bad thing. I know that it is a powerful, mysterious thing. I know that it broke down and reinvented everything about myself. I know that it changed everything. That my experiences were fucked up and unhappy is not surprising when you consider that I was a fucked up and unhappy person when I went into them. That I now feel myself to be a basically reasonable and usually happy person is cause for a bit more surprise, I suppose.
It took me 8 years to begin to assimilate my peak states properly, and now that I have, and I have some understanding of what happened to me and what it might mean - all I can say is to reiterate that everything is different.
I love you all, and I love life. I only pray that others who may wander into Wonderland may likewise emerge intact, happy and empathic. My friend Matt paid the ultimate price for his views on life, and that pains me immensely even now.