I gave everything I had in that relationship, the shrooms allowed me to see. I was not unkind or abusive. I was stressed out and anxious and consumed with work. But I am twenty-three years old and I basically run an NPR show. If I have yet to figure out how to balance my life perfectly, that’s to be expected from a twenty-three-year-old girl.
This spiritual Christmas trip was the first time I had ever experienced unconditional love. And I was receiving it from myself. This forgiveness was transformative. It released me from the blame I heaped on myself all day for the collapse of my relationship. That evening, I took care of myself like I would someone I loved. I took a bath. And I ate my first real meal in three months: half of an apple pie and cheap Chinese takeout. In the weeks after, I hid my hip bones with a healthy layer of fat. I started dating someone else. And my spiritual beliefs shifted. After my parents’ divorce, I’d eschewed my idea of a cruel, transactional God. Now I believed in a force greater than myself. Not a deistic being, per se…more like the idea that the universe might be organized around something like love.
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There is a ton of information now—including TED Talks and Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind—about psilocybin and MDMA being highly effective medications for PTSD. Anecdotal stories abound of suffering veterans emerging from one meaningful trip completely cured, with a new vigor for life. Shrooms in particular have proved to be a great salve for people with terminal illnesses. The oncoming specter of death can be terrifying, but after these suffering patients emerge from their hallucinogenic experiences, many are at peace with their lives and deaths, content to be absorbed back into the fabric of the universe. Shrooms have also been shown to suppress your DMN and dissolve your ego, allowing you to look at your life with a childlike, brand-new perspective. They can draw connections between disparate parts of the brain, building creative solutions to our life’s struggles and strengthening areas we don’t use frequently enough.
But for me, the effects of shrooms, although powerful, were always temporary. That feeling of freedom from self-doubt, of confident self-love, only lingered for a few days or weeks. Eventually, the dread always returned.
I’d try to chase it away with shroom trips every three to six months throughout much of my twenties, in botanical gardens from Berkeley to Brooklyn. While sitting under a grand spruce, I’d commune with the wise shrooms, which always guided me back to a place of perspective and peace. These trips were not confetti-strewn party extravaganzas. Instead, they often involved lots of crying and digging through hard truths, coming out on the other side with a clearer lens through which to witness this sublime world.
But there was the problem of access—shrooms are a Class A drug, after all. After I moved to New York, I wasn’t able to find a dealer, and my supply ran out. Fear scribbled black marks all over my vision once again, until I couldn’t see the world’s beauty—just my own ugliness. By the time I was diagnosed, I hadn’t tripped in a couple of years.
If I ever needed a new perspective on life, it was now, so I went back to my favorite medicine. I interrogated my friends on the encrypted messaging service Signal for a few months until I found a very pricey eighth. I ate it at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden on a sweaty summer afternoon, excited to see myself once again through prismatic, all-loving eyes.
Unfortunately, the first hour and a half wasn’t prismatic at all. Instead, I found myself power walking in circles through the Japanese Zen garden, thinking about how human beings’ superficial needs were bringing on the Anthropocene. I had so many needs, too. Needs from Joey, needs from my friends. Oh God, I thought. A woman is simply supposed to provide, not to need. The worst thing a woman can do is take up space with her hunger. With her hysteria.
All of my aggressive walking finally led me to a very large, flat rock overlooking a wildflower meadow. I remembered my initial goals and decided to sit on this rock and resolve that I was not a useless piece of shit if it was the last thing I did. I sat there slapping my forehead, muttering, “You’re awesome! You’re awesome! You’re awesome!” until a question popped into my head. Why do people believe in you?
Why? There must be something inside me that deserves that belief. Back up. Who believes in you? I scrolled through my phone. There were sweet little texts from a bevy of people. All of them were so smart. So talented. They were good judges of character, and none of them suffered fools. I looked at the last text messages some of these people had sent me. One friend said she missed me. Another said she thought I was one of the silliest people she’d ever known. An old co-worker told me just last week that she believed I was responsible for her career.
Usually when these people send me compliments affirming my existence and worth, I send back some version of: “Oh, pshaw, you’re soooo nice, but I’m actually a fetid sewer marsupial, lolol,” and then I rush to catch my train or chop garlic or respond to my next email.
The shrooms showed me that my C-PTSD was a void. When Dustin didn’t text me back for three days, when Kat snapped at me because I said something careless during a conversation, when Joey locked himself in the office to get away from me for a few hours…the black hole expanded, its maw impossible to fill, and it began to whisper dangerous things as it grew: Why aren’t you a priority? Why aren’t you loved? Surely this means they are about to leave. My fear of being abandoned forced me to need proof of love in abundance, over and over and over again, a hundred times a day. So even though my friends were constantly attempting to fill the great void of my self-hatred with generous words, assurances, and compliments…they were all simply getting sucked into that black hole, mere crumbs for my intense desire. I dismissed them. In the end, my friends’ exhortations had gone to waste.
But now, with the help of the shrooms, I allowed all of this praise to finally penetrate. To allow myself to believe I was worthy of it.