(Sorry this is really long. if you want to skip the intro, I've put this symbol next to where the important stuff starts
) My boyfriend and I had some cyans left over from a while back. Both of us had off last Saturday. I love tripping at night and I take every opportunity I can to do it - pretty much every time I don't have something to do before noon, I trip. That day was no different - we had about 6 grams left of our stash and we decided to split it. Both of us figured it would be an easy going, earthy trip because we were going to be taking a relatively small dose.
I have had an ever-fading tolerance for the cat pee taste of mushies since the first time I ate them, and I decided I was not going to just chew them up and swallow them this time. I couldn't bring myself to face the nasty flavor. We didn't want to make tea because his whole family was awake. They wouldn't care if they found out we were tripping, but it would just be a little bit different to be in the kitchen hanging out with his mom while brewing some shroom tea. So I decided to try the lemon tek this time. My boyfriend wouldn't do it because he said it sounded way nastier than just eating the shrooms, so I started soaking my shrooms while he ate his with a handful of peanut butter m and ms. After my shrooms soaked for 20 minutes, I plugged my nose and chugged the whole concoction in one fell swoop, and after I unplugged it I was pleasantly surprised to find only the after taste of lemon juice. Not one iota of cat pee flavor! We put on some music, turned off the lights, got in to bed and waited.
Around 5 minutes later, I could already feel some tingling in my limbs and a light, fluttery sensation in my palms and the bottoms of my feet. My boyfriend and I timed our consumption pretty well - he started tripping at pretty much the exact same time that I did. I started to feel an incredibly intense feeling of well-being and satisfaction with life. I remember imagining every good moment I could think of that had ever happened to me in my life, and with each new memory came the most incredible wash of bodily euphoria. It was like orgasms in every part of my body, and the feeling was renewed with every second. I laid back and closed my eyes. For a few minutes, I saw nothing but blackness. Then, the trip hit me like a train.
I was seeing visuals that defied logic - colors that I had never seen before, objects simultaneously turning in both directions, shapes that didn't look like people, but they felt like faces when I saw them, and they melted in to one another, retaining their own characteristics but flowing so seamlessly together that I couldn't tell where one started and the other began. Thoughts felt like they were flying in to my brain from an outside force - they slammed in to my head at a million miles per hour, repeatedly, and every time a new thought came, I would feel a jolt in my upper body and my line of vision would turn black for a split second. As if I had literally been physically hit in the head. The music started to sound like it was coming from inside my head. I was surrounded by 360 degree visuals - when I closed my eyes it was like another world behind my eyelids where nothing made sense and time didn't exist and nothing happens the way it happens in our world.
I was so overwhelmed I didn't know what to do with myself. I started to have a little bit of anxiety - not like the soul-crushing existential anxiety that comes with a truly bad trip, but I just started to feel like 4 hours of this might be a little bit too much for me. I was shocked - I really did not expect 3 grams of shrooms to come on this strong. When I opened my eyes, I could see the outlines of shapes from the light of my boyfriends computer screen. Everything looked all bubbly and colorful like it was created by a 70's graphic designer. I looked at my boyfriend, who seemed to just be peacefully reclined and enjoying the trip. I hoped some of his calmness would rub off on me and I scooted closer to him for some comfort. He sluggishly put his arm around me and it felt like dead weight. I started to get uncomfortable with the clammy sensation of skin on skin and I moved away. He asked me if I was okay and I mumbled back a yes. I was telling the truth - I was okay, but I was only okay.
After that, it's all kind of a blur until this one vision I had. I vividly remember this scene: it happened behind my closed eyelids. it was a black space. It was blackness all around me, except for a rectangle of color against the blackness. Almost like a movie theater - entirely dark except for the screen. And the especially weird part about it was that I could see myself sitting on the floor in front of the screen, watching it, and I was outside of my body looking at the back of my head. I could recognize that it was me, and I knew that that body is where my mind usually is. But looking at it, it felt like another person. In the moment, it felt like I was a mind disconnected from the person watching the video. On the screen was a video of myself from when I was very small on a family vacation. I don't really remember this vacation but I know where it was because of photographs. I don't know if what I was seeing was an actual memory or something my mind made up from piecing together stories and photographs. I watched as different memories from my whole life played across the screen. Most of them were simply neutral memories - things like conversations I had had with friends, me studying for tests, etc. and it was like the person I was watching was a stranger. Even though I knew it was myself, I had no emotional connection to that person.
Then, there were some scenes that played on the screen from my mother's death. She had had cancer since I was twelve, and I was eighteen when she died. It was only a few years ago, and I was present at her death. The memories of her death are not exactly traumatic, they don't launch me in to emotional fits thinking about them, but they're obviously not good memories. I remember thinking to myself "sh!t, I really don't want this trip to go down that rabbit hole". However, I knew that trying to ignore the painful memories playing in front of me or escape from them would only make everything worse. So I decided to watch them and confront my feelings about it. I expected to feel incredible sadness and pain. To my surprise, as I watched and relived some pretty terrible moments from my life, I didn't really feel much. I realized that in my daily life, I don't really feel much that seems to be related to these events, although on paper they should be some of the hardest things that have ever happened to me. It hit me that I can't feel what I'm supposed to feel about those things. I didn't know how to feel about them. It didn't feel like I thought it was supposed to. I always thought that the death of someone you love is supposed to feel like an open wound, that would feel extremely painful and profound and raw and tender for some time but eventually seal shut and stop hurting. I thought that the memories of your loved one were supposed to feel like stabbing pangs of longing and desperation. I thought that grief was supposed to feel like tides of anguish that cover you and pull your head under water and you can't breathe or see or think about anything but swimming to the top and gasping for air. I thought it was supposed to feel like hopeless bargaining and pleading for one more moment with the deceased. I didn't know that loss could also feel like emptiness. I didn't know that death could be like emotional Novocain. I didn't know it could feel like nothing. And I especially didn't know it could still feel so dead and empty and callous two years after it happened.
I have always considered myself lucky for not feeling the way others have felt about the deaths of their loved ones. I felt lucky that my mother's death didn't take away my life. After her death, I sat around for days and days waiting for the numbness to subside and for the incredible aching feelings to begin. But they never did. The apathy followed me through my life until this trip. And it wasn't until a few days after the trip that all of it started to make sense to me.
Coming out of the trip, I just felt really confused and agitated. But over the next couple days, I realized that these negative experiences had been eating away at me underneath the guise of anxiety. They crept up on me in times when I didn't expect them, but it didn't look like the hurt and sadness that I thought I was supposed to feel from the complete destruction of my life as I knew it. It looked like fear and irritability and pushing away the people close to me. I guess I had always known that my anxiety was related to my mother's long illness and death. I didn't, however, really understand it until this trip. The anxiety had been my mind's way of allowing me to consume the emotions in the way I could handle them. Instead of dropping the bomb on me all at once, my psyche dropped it on me little by little in the form of fear and agitation that never stopped, that were at first small enough to ignore. That, and the fact that fear just hurts less than sadness. But the bombs got bigger and bigger over time and before I knew it, they were violent explosions of terror and dread that consumed everything around me. They were not just panic attacks, they came with sudden, blinding feelings of worthlessness and of the voidness of life and feelings that I would never be able to do anything right and that I was a terrible sister and daughter and girlfriend and friend. They would swallow me whole for days, weeks, months even until they were so unbearable they would push me near suicide. It came for my relationships, for my performance at work and school, for my self image, for my optimistic outlook on the world. I always felt lucky that the death of my mother didn't destroy my life, but it did. It just did it slowly and little by little, so I could just wake up one morning and realize my entire self as I knew it was gone. I just didn't have to deal with noticing it while it was happening. And when I would go through times where I wasn't experiencing intense anxiety, where I felt something related to normalcy, I would think I was cured, or at least doing well at the moment, and go back to tripping, and little did I know that brewing underneath the surface was the pain I had been expecting to feel the whole time. But I was never okay, even when I really thought I was.
Over the past week and a half I've been feeling this absolutely incredible feeling of sadness and hurt. I know it's just what it takes to heal. I know the mushrooms uncovered something in me that I needed to come to terms with. I'm beyond grateful for that. I'm just really having a hard time dealing with it. I'm trying to just remind myself that after all this, after I purge myself emotionally and really experience all I need to experience, I will be able to feel all the good things again that the ever-present cloud of misery made me forget I could feel. I guess I'm just looking for some insight and support. I sort of told my boyfriend about the experience, and he was incredibly loving and sympathetic, but he's just never dealt with a loss like that. For the entirety of my teenage life, nothing was normal for me. It was fear of bad news every single day. I'm just finding normalcy again at the beginning of my 20s. I'm feeling a lot of loss over the young years that were chewed up by negative emotions that I sometimes didn't even realize I was feeling. I feel like the emotional callousness stole so many incredible experiences from me. I guess I just want to share it with someone who might understand.
Thanks for reading, even if you don't have a response for me. I'm grateful to anyone who takes the time out of their day to hear my little story.
peace and love
