A Journey Around the Mushroom
How one experience with Psilocybin changed my life immediately and forever
What feels like ten years ago, when quarantine was just beginning, I found myself with a bag of mushrooms of the entheogenic variety. Having never experimented with psychedelics before, I was a bit nervous. That bag of mushrooms set in motion an entirely new life for me. One where I’m happier than I ever knew possible.
After easing myself into the mushroom experience by starting with small doses and working my way up, I found myself at a critical crossroads in my life. At the same time as I was preparing mentally for my first heavy dose of mushrooms, I was also preparing to be fired from — what I believed to be — my dream job.
My career to this point was boring and largely terrible but I had gotten a job with a company I actually, genuinely thought I loved, and I was blowing it. Since I was in a probationary period, I knew the exact day that I was going to get fired and every day that passed added to the ball of anxiety that sat in my stomach.
I had no idea what I was going to do when I got fired. I had come up with some half-baked plan to be a writer like my semi-estranged mother always tried to be. I had tried to become a writer before but never seemed to have the ambition for it. In other words, it was complicated in too many ways.
With the support and encouragement of my lovely and amazing companion, I decided to take mushrooms about it.
I was prepared for things to turn sour. I had a lot of pain and shame over my current circumstances and I was prepared to walk through the door that led to me facing that. I wasn’t prepared for what happened once I did, however.
On receiving gifts you feel unworthy of
The “ride up” on mushrooms is terrible, in my experience. I get clammy with a cold sweat as I shiver. I began to feel as though I was becoming a mushroom, preferring hot, damp climates. This is a common effect for me on mushrooms and I find it hilarious every single time. Once I caught myself in the mirror while wearing a hoodie and started laughing at myself for looking so much like a mushroom.
After taking a shower, I laid down on the floor and felt anxiety creep in. I began to fear my decision. Deciding to not run away from it, I began asking myself “what the hell am I going to do?” over and over. I felt the anxiety that I normally feel every day at work, a pit in my stomach. I worried that this trip was going to turn bad but I made the conscious decision to let go and let whatever happened happen.
I want to break here to say that I do not believe mushrooms are for everyone. I believe everyone needs to meditate hard on the idea of doing them before moving forward.
Bad trips DO happen and they CAN be a terrifying experience. Often, they come about when the user is faced with something and attempts to avoid confronting it. Psychedelics largely work by killing your ego. As goes your ego, so goes your subconscious.
That means, if you try to push a thought away, there’s nowhere for it to go. Alarms start to go off and it can feel like a thunderstorm in your head. The best advice I’ve ever heard about mushrooms was: if there’s a door, open it; a staircase, take it; a being, greet it.
Deciding to face up to that feeling instead of running from it allowed it to show itself to me for what it really was. I finally made the correlation that if this was (1) the feeling I had at work everyday and (2) terrible and hated by me then, maybe, I needed to reframe my thinking.
Then I began asking myself a different question: “why are you chasing something you don’t even enjoy?” I mean, hell, unemployment was paying more than I was making at the time anyways (for a couple months at least.) That could buy me time to come up with a real plan. Everything lined up for me to chase my happiness in a way I’ve never been able to with a career-assed day-job.
So why wasn’t I excited? Like, at all? Why did I dread it?
This thing happens on mushrooms (for me at least) that I like to describe as receiving fully-formed memories of events that never happened. These are downloaded directly into your brain. I’ve heard it theorized that mushrooms are nature’s way of evolving to communicate with us and share experience with us. I really want that to be true more than anything in the world.
It was in this fashion that I received the following message. It was unprompted and new for me entirely.
The “memory” was of myself, receiving an award. I understood fully that this award was the love of my girlfriend and I felt deeply that I didn’t deserve it. I began crying. I realized why I didn’t think that I should chase my dreams, I didn’t think I deserved happiness. I didn’t think I deserved love.
Time doesn’t really exist on mushrooms but I believe I must have cried for at least an hour. I was on the ground, blowing my nose into a towel so I wouldn’t have to keep getting up for tissue. I was laughing, I was happy, I was loved.
I said to myself — for the first time ever — two things that day. The first happened here when I said “you have a voice. You have something to share.” I said this out loud to myself, crying on the floor.
This was when the anxiety was lifted from within me. I felt peace for the first time in months. I felt direction for the first time in years.
I hugged myself, taking breaks to find new sections of towel to blow my nose into. I thanked the mushroom for telling me this, I thanked God for growing mushrooms, I thanked the air around me for just being in the room.
Sitting there I realized I needed to attempt to go to the park and write a story using real hallucinations and events I was experiencing on the tail-end of this journey. I said thanks out loud again to nothing in particular and took it all in for 30–40 more seconds before standing to go to the bathroom.
This was when I accidentally looked in a mirror.
For the uninitiated, this is a risky move. Let’s just say, faces, particularly ones belonging to you, don’t always look the best while you are journeying. My smile was from ear-to-ear, though. I tried to focus through all the fog to see my real face, minus the shifting wrinkles and swirling pores. I looked into my eyes, noting the PREPOSTEROUS size of my pupils.
The second thing I said out loud to myself for the first time came here, as I looked into my reflection, feeling as if my consciousness had somewhat separated from the body. In other words, I felt like I was actually able to be an outsider looking in at myself.
“I love you,” I said out loud.
Now what?
Since then, I have dedicated myself towards the things I deserve and desire: happiness and morality. Thinking you can focus on happiness with your next job or sacrifice morality for the “right job” is a tool of the oppressor. I spent years thinking my next job would be the one I could finally grow into myself with. I spent years not thinking about how the “right job” would never ask me to lose my morals.
I was doing a job for which I was not meant to be in. I was shoving a corner piece into the center of a puzzle and yelling at it when it didn’t work. Nobody is in charge of my happiness but me and I decided that I had to follow it.
That doesn’t sound that profound, right? It isn’t! Because it’s something that I already knew deep down but I never had the courage to search for. The mushroom said to me “be still, be happy, seek more.” And I have done my best to do so since.
Entheogenic drugs allow you to break out of the routine that you have set for yourself. For some, this can be the routine of addiction (a single mushroom trip ended tobacco addiction for 80% of the participants in one study.) For me, this was the routine of self-doubt and self-hate. Those emotions don’t leave but mushrooms helped me to not make so many decisions based on them.
Studies have shown that a single mushroom trip, administered to Cancer patients in terminal condition has the ability to profoundly diminish or even eliminate the anxiety and fear associated with the illness and death even after following up 6 months later.
In other words, the memory of this event keeps the impact alive. Interestingly, the converse wasn’t true for patients who had negative experiences (only around 20%.) For them, they didn’t think the event had impacted them at all 6 months later.
Since this journey, I have used that memory to help build a legitimate writing career that I’m proud of. I have gotten a day job I love and cannot wait to go into. I’ve also gotten to the point where that day job has to be part-time. My patience, understanding, compassion, and emotional wellbeing is, I believe, still benefiting from that one experience.
The controversy of psychedelics
I’m placing this section at the bottom and not, as might be more intuitive, at the top because I think it’s dumb I have to place it at all. Psilocybin is less dangerous than every, other, drug including alcohol. Up until the racially motivated war on drugs, there was very promising research on psilocybin for any number of treatments.
Like many, I fell into the trap of the propaganda. Truthfully, I didn’t even smoke cannabis much until a few years ago. When I did, I researched it compulsively, like everyone should do before taking any substance. Everything I’ve ever taken has a corresponding google search history that says something like “weed bad why.”
To be more emphatic and clear-cut on this: I do not advocate the use of any illegal substances by any person ever. Should you decide to do so on your own, however, after doing all the research you can find, there is real hope here. There is real love here. I get that it’s a drug and it’s making changes to my brain and that might be all there is to it.
But, even if that is it. Does it really even matter when it allows us to come out on the other end, SIX months later, still feeling joy radiating from that point in the past? Most drugs allow us to escape, psilocybin allows us only to journey further inward.
J Gordon Curtis is a freelance writer in the cannabis space with a passion for the decriminalization of nature. In his free time he writes fiction, often borrowing from psychedelic revelations or experiences.
