Shroomaversary

Today is my shroomaversary.

Today marks the anniversary of when I took psilocybin for the first time. It was September 2020. We’d been in a pandemic for 6 months. No vaccines in sight yet. I was living with my husband Keith at our home. At the time, I had been hanging out with ne’er do-wells, like Caleb who’d done “more” than “just” cannabis. He and I would talk a lot about our religious trauma. He gently encouraged me whenever I asked him about shrooms, specifically. He did not recommend cocaine for me. I am trying to remember what emotion motivated me to try shrooms. Like… honestly. Why? Was I desperate? I don’t recall being a total mess at the time. However, just September 2019 I quit my full-time job because I was bored as hell, depressed, and having existential dread at the idea of repeating this every day (or something similar) for the rest of my life. I was also working hand-in-hand with Dave Warnock and his speaking tour about dying as an atheist. But it wasn’t enough. So I left my job and pursue my entrepreneurial interests like being a virtual executive assistant, a photography, and a life coach. But, boom, a few short months later, COVID hits. So September 2020 was one year out from my abandonment of the 9-5 full-time cube life but the hopes and dreams I had for “what could be” were pretty curtailed by the pandemic. I wasn’t really getting much business or income. Coaching remained fulfilling but I didn’t get much income from there either. Ain’t nobody hiring photographers in the pandemic, much less, one who is trying to build up their reputation. I suppose all these factors led to some kind of desperation. But that still doesn’t sound right. I felt like it led to an open-mindedness. People I loved and trusted were telling me that shrooms can really change your view on the world and on yourself. Being someone who had been singularly dealing with complex post-traumatic trauma without knowing, I really needed more recovery to feel like life was worth living. So I read some books, watched some documentaries. Got as informed as I could handle. Very few people in my circle at the time had fucked with psychedelics. But I had a few people who knew and were encouraging me, like Kyle B and Ben F. I managed to get a hold of 2G of shrooms and made a plan. I was sick to my stomach, anxious as fuck. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was feeling really challenged, like I was having to stretch out my muscles to consider this as an option. After my religious/spiritual trauma, I have been understandably highly guarded around things that fuck with your mind and concept of self. I didn’t take to marijuana right away when I tried it, for example. And I have been very resistant to a lot of psychological modalities due to their spiritual nature. But… I was approaching my 40s and my mental life quality was really not improving much despite my external circumstances improving quite a lot. I asked my husband at the time to “sit” for me. I didn’t really trust anyone else to do it. I had no idea what to expect. Would I lose myself? Would I lose my mind? What would I see? What would I become aware of? What about my world would change? Or would it only be temporary? Would I find out that I was wrong about a lot of things? Well, I ate my 2G with a slide of bread and PB because I was so anxious about tasting the earthy shrooms. I was incredibly anxious about the nausea they tell you that you experience. Once they were in my stomach, I was so frightened… what was going to happen? Was it happening yet? But I remember that about after an hour, it was pretty clear that “this” is what it feels like to be on psychedelics (if you know, you know; hard to describe). What stuck out to me is that I didn’t really feel like “not me”. I thought hallucinating meant that you kind of lose your sense of self or it mutates into something weird. But my sense of self, which I had never really been able to conceptualize before, was still there. In fact, it was more clearly there than it had ever been. I hadn’t really noticed what my mental activity had been like before this point. I had a lot of psychological defenses installed that kept me from being aware of how much mental pain I was experiencing. When I was on shrooms, all of that mental activity just went down to a hush. And all that was left was me. Me here. Me breathing this air. Me standing up. Me, this body. Me on this ground. My sense of the earth changed. I hadn’t realized how my brain had framed me as a 3 dimensional human walking on a two dimensional plane. Suddenly I could send that I was standing on top of a spinning, living planet. That I was a tenant. That I was a child of this earth. When I laid on the grass, my brain told me that I am hugging my mother. Words don’t do justice here, they really don’t. When I asked myself, okay shrooms, I am scared of death… what do you have to say about that? I imagined myself curled up in a hole, surrounded by warm, dark earth, resting, needing nothing, not in pain, just resting in the earth. Didn’t sound so bad. I had many other experiences while on this trip. But the next part I’ll share today is the coming down. As I came down from my trip, I went from delight to terror. Terror because all the mental activity came back. All the ruminating thinking, the anxiety. But I didn’t know what those things were at the time. It was just something I was aware of mildly, like a shadow. Never really could consciously name it. I slipped into a weird depression, feeling like I had been triggered by having a “spiritual” experience and then losing the experience just like that snap, a reminder how much I struggled to “stay connected” to the experience of Jesus while I was in Christianity. A couple months later, I went on a date with Adam. I was a few months out from the shrooms trip and starting to come apart. I was definitely feeling humbled. Like I had experienced something I didn’t think was a thing and I was desperately trying to make sense of it. Adam is someone that I now know is fairly self-aware and fairly integrated with himself. Plus, he can articulate pretty well what his internal experience is. I was drawn to him because of his self-awareness, integration, humor, and uniqueness (he’s not just another dudebro). I began to open up to him about the weird thoughts I was beginning to notice, thoughts I hadn’t allowed myself to see before, but shrooms had cracked open the awareness door. I remember the first one. I told him that I noticed something in my head say that if I wear a gray top and a gray bottom, that he won’t find me attractive. Small. But it was the first thing I named. Shortly thereafter, I met Graham, my other partner, with whom I really dug in deep and discussed all of this in more detail (and we still continue to!). And how to summarize three years? My god. Impossible. Especially those particular three years. There was SO much awareness building up inside me, all while handling a lot of life changes. Those life changes: dealing with the pandemic, being under-self-employed, realizing my marriage wasn’t serving me anymore, moving into my own room in the house, my boyfriend moving in with us, Caleb moving away, getting back into administrative support but this time remote and with a chill dude, Adam divorcing, Adam dating another person and my jealousy, having a kid in my life, divorcing, selling our house, moving in with Adam to downtown St. Paul, getting a job as a Director, no longer having any space for myself, becoming aware that I am profoundly dissociated and depersonalized, realizing I have complex post traumatic stress disorder, my parents reaching out to me after doing some of their own psychological work and holding space for me to process the trauma they were a part of, Adam moving in with Lacey, me moving out to live with Jake, my car was stolen, having full control of my finances for the first time since 2003, living alone for the first time since 2003, … I’m sure there is more. But that’s just the external circumstances. Internally, every day I process and become aware of more and more of my mental activity and somatic messages. I am processing my religious trauma… finally. It’s overwhelming. And I see all of these developments (for the most part) as directly coming from doing 2G of shrooms once upon a time in my backyard and then feeling super confused. Do I recommend it? I dunno, I don’t know you. This is just my story. I am grateful that shrooms are a thing. I don’t really understand how they work, but they really helped me. And they’re right. They don’t give you what you want, but they give you what you need. I didn’t want most of what happened these last 3 years, but I needed it. I am now so much more honest about how I feel, about my fears, about my needs. I am repaired with my parents. I am living alone where I am able to get to know myself better… finally. But my god, the last 3 years have SUCKED. I don’t know what’s next for me, but I am still absolutely in love with my life coaching work, my photography, speaking with the public about basic awareness and embodied living. I really don’t know what’s next. I had gotten so used to the cycles. The repetitive cycles, where nothing changes and you don’t change and you can’t change. But I am finally changing. I am finally feeling some freedom. Time is slowing down a bit. I am beginning to be able to talk myself through things with more ease. I am beginning to notice the pieces of me I left behind in my mind to keep me safe that are actually filling me with shame. It’s exciting some days. It’s confusing some days. It’s depressing some days. But … like I promised myself in 2013, I won’t kill myself. Because if I do that, I can’t find out if something better is coming. That said, I have been more than understanding with myself over the last three years when being dead sounded so much better than being alive at many, many points. Honestly, promising myself to not kill myself was probably the best strategy out of all of them. People use the word “survival” a lot that I almost feel like it’s lost its meaning, but it’s true. Choosing to not kill myself every day was really the bare minimum I was able to do every day and it was HARD. But it kept me going as different parts of me were brought into awareness, integrated, shared with others, grieved, and settled into chairs in my head. I sense that there’s still a lot more to do before I can envision myself saying “omg, I feel like… mySELF”… and I have no idea how I’m going to get there.