What A Long Strange Trip It’s Been
(Part 11 of the story of my psychedelic-enhanced journey to mental health)
It was about 5:00 pm before I had emerged sufficiently from the influence of the psilocybin to look at the clock. I had eaten the mushroom around 11:00 am, so I had been on a six-hour trip, most of that time in deep hallucination.
Although I could now converse more or less normally, I could feel that I was still a little under the influence of the drug. Jimmy had warned me to expect the effects to dissipate slowly, lingering through the next day. But now I felt ravenously hungry.
Early in the morning, before David and Jimmy had arrived, my wife, Andrea, had set up a large fruit and vegetable tray along the wall for us to eat during the day. Ordinarily, I like to eat a variety of foods and would have put a little bit of everything on my plate. But for some reason, my mushroom-influenced mind wanted only the cut-up cantaloupe.
However, I didn’t want a fork. Something about the utensil stuck me as artificial and distasteful. I just wanted to grab a handful of the fruit, drop it on a plate, and eat it with my hands. So I did. I ate two large handfuls of cantaloupe and then stopped, no longer hungry. I didn’t stop at the time to think about my strange eating habits — but I did the next day.
I was no longer very hungry, but I felt exhausted. Jimmy had gone upstairs to give Andrea a status report and to warn her about my condition. He told her that I would feel as if I had just run a marathon — and he was right. I don’t know if it was due to my hallucinatory vomiting, to my death throes from asphyxiating in the ponds, or just to the effect of the mushrooms, but every muscle in my body felt tired, achy and used.
When David and Jimmy left, I hugged them both, and we exchanged warm and heartfelt promises to see each other soon Then I went upstairs to see Andrea.
As I emerged from the basement, I realized that I felt proud — intensely proud. I was proud that I had figured out how to get past my “therapy impasse,” persuading David to participate and successfully making all the arrangements for the psilocybin trip to happen. And I was proud that I had braved the trip and emerged much better for it, with real hope for having accomplished my two major goals: controlling my shame, and destroying my emotional shield.
But to really understand how profoundly proud I felt, put strong emphasis on the word “felt.” I have been proud of myself for accomplishments in the past, but this is the first time that I fully felt the sense of pride. It felt like a warm liquid suffusing throughout my body that re-energized me and made me want to talk and connect with someone. The feeling was the exact opposite of the shame that I had felt in the past, which would manifest as a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that left me wanting to avoid other people and be alone.
I found Andrea in the kitchen, setting the table with the pizza that she had ordered on Jimmy’s suggestion that I would probably want something savory and filling. It tried to tell her the story of what had happened on my trip in chronological order as best I could remember. I’m usually very good at organizing a story into its key components and explaining them clearly and sequentially, but I was still somewhat under the influence of the psilocybin, and even I could tell that my accounting of the hallucinations and revelations was disjointed, full of tangents and hard to understand.
Although all I’d had to eat all day had been the couple handfuls of cantaloupe, the pizza did not appeal to me at all. It was my favorite sausage, mushroom and onion, and I wasn’t feeling anything like full, but the pizza didn’t seem very appetizing. As I would come to realize the next day, it felt unhealthy.
Unsurprisingly, I was very tired and decided to go to bed earlier than usual. As I stripped and prepared to get into my usual nighttime ensemble of boxer shorts and a t-shirt, I realized that I didn’t want to put them on. I preferred to sleep naked — something that I almost never did. At that moment, I realized that the only reason that I routinely wore clothing to bed was body shame and that I no longer felt controlled by the shame. Since that night, at least at home, I have continued to sleep naked.
Jimmy and his company’s literature recommended that the psilocybin tripper not plan to do anything complex the following day. That is when the best “integration” occurs, when patterns and revelations emerge and when the hallucinations of the trip are put into context.
The day following my trip was bitter cold. Anticipating that, I had made a big fire that morning in my living room fireplace and stocked it with enough wood to last most of the day. My plan was to put a pillow by the fireplace and lie on it all day, just contemplating what I had experienced in my basement the day before.
But first I needed a morning beverage — and it had to be hot tea! I told Andrea, who was as surprised as I was. I never drank tea. I wasn’t a coffee drinker either and usually preferred a fruit juice or carbonated soda. But no longer. The idea of sugar or carbonation in a drink was distasteful.
I took my tea to the fireplace and sipped it as I lay in front of the fire. I just stared into the flames and let my mind drift back to the psilocybin trip, remembering the details of the various hallucinations and trying to arrange them in some sort of chronology.
The mesh curtain drawn across the fireplace that protected the carpet from flying flaming embers reminded me of my first hallucination, the one-inch mesh with Meso-American symbols over the basement carpeting. From there it seemed easy to re-live the other hallucinatory experiences. I did more than just remember them. Like my experience under ketamine, I was able to re-experience, albeit from a distance, my thoughts and hallucinations of the prior day.
That is when I realized that shame is burned into my brain and can never be eradicated. But it could be controlled and disempowered. The key is to recognize when it is trying to influence me and make a conscious decision not to let it do so. Still a little bit under the influence of the drug, my mind equated it with the popular fable of “belling the cat” — creating an automatic warning system to alert me when the shame emerges from its place of banishment in my brain to try to influence my thoughts or behavior.
While lying in front of the fireplace, I also realized what my brain had been trying to tell me when I hallucinated about urinating in my pants. Unable to entirely eradicate the shame, it tried to help me to banish it by recognizing that its origin was just a young child’s silly mistake in the first place. By showing me that I first inferred shame from something as common and meaningless as a toilet training accident, my brain made it easier for me to banish the shame as completely unwarranted and the product of a toddler’s confused understanding of the world. I never did find out whether my parents had intentionally shamed me for wetting my pants or whether I inferred that shame on my own, but it didn’t matter. Nothing from that incident justified the kind of shame-worthiness that my younger self subsequently assumed.
As the fire burned on, I also completed the integration of the two hallucinations about drowning in the ponds. Although I had had a flash of understanding and instant insight when discussing my emotional shield with Jimmy and David near the end of my trip, it took time in front of the fireplace to understand and appreciate the symbolism of those hallucinations. That is when I realized that I shouldn’t have been able to hear the tweeting birds while I was still submerged in the “pleasant pond,” but I recognized that the pleasant attributes of that scene represented positive emotions that I was feeling for the first time — as long as I accepted them and let them flow to me without struggling against the water.
And I had a revelation about a topic that I hadn’t even asked the mushrooms to address. As my mind stared into the flickering flames and wandered, I thought about the cantaloupe and pizza and tea. I considered why I had viewed the forks by the fruit tray, the pizza, and fruit juice and carbonated soda with such distaste.
As I figured out to pose that question, the answer appeared in front of me and seemed obvious: I had an unhealthy relationship with food. I binged on it or used it as a numbing device.
This wasn’t an entirely new thought, but the revelation of its truth did surprise me. It was due to the psilocybin that my history and pattern of misusing food became completely obvious to me — similar to my almost instantaneous revelation under ketamine that my childhood trauma was a pattern of disappointing my father. What had previously been just an assumption (albeit the reason that I joined Weight Watchers) now became an internal certainty, and I knew that my relationship with food needed to change.
As the influence of the psilocybin waned, I tore my gaze away from the fire and looked around the room. It was late afternoon. The dregs of tea that remained in my cup were cold. Six hours had passed since I had lain down on the pillow. I didn’t remember it, but I must have thrown more logs on the fire because the stack of logs was lower and the fire still burned brightly.
Like the fairy tale princess who awakens from a spell, I was never again, after that moment of “waking up” in front of the fireplace able to re-live the events of my psilocybin trip. I could remember them, like ordinary memories, and I hurriedly wrote them down so that I wouldn’t forget them. I even recited them on film for a documentary that was being made about Jimmy. But even though they were my experiences, from that point on they were just memories that lost their sharp edges. Part of my reason for writing this memoir is to try to prevent them from fading into eventual oblivion like any other memory. But as the next chapter describes, the lesson I learned from the mushrooms have become a permanent part of me and have changed my life and personality in dramatic ways.
