How I went from using drugs to escape the world to using psychedelics to embrace it
The first time I tried LSD, I was 27.
I waited so long to do hallucinogenics because I had lots of respect for their impact on the mind - especially since I knew that my mind can go to very weird and unusual places.
But my carefulness when it came to LSD didn't mean I was cautious about drugs in general.
Firstly, I smoked weed on a daily basis for 9 years - from the age of 18 to 27.
If you’d asked me at the time, I’d have said I did this because I suffered from sleep paralysis (night terrors) and if I smoked enough weed to completely knock me out, I could avoid it.
But this was only half the truth, since I had lived with sleep paralysis my entire life.
I did it for the same reason I took most drugs back then - I was in pain. I felt lost and lonely and I wanted to release myself from feeling something but at the same time to make myself feel things that I wouldn't on my own.
In other words, I was depressed. And as many people who've suffered from depression and smoked weed excessively know, even though it can quiet down the noise short term, in long term it does not help.
Secondly, taking all kinds of drugs as a bartender in your early twenties seemed not only widely socially accepted but almost appropriate.
When I was working, my co-workers and I took coke on an almost daily basis and MDMA quite regularly. We told ourselves that its not a big deal - just fun! And it also made working 10-12 hour shifts, 6 days a week, so much easier.
For me, the factor of reducing social anxiety was also a huge plus and this felt like an easy solution. But actually we didn't talk too much about our excessive use of drugs. We just did. It was just normal and everything was okay. We were young and "thinking about consequences" was a foreign concept to us, that didn't even cross our minds.
This time of my life was ‘fun' but often very reckless…one time, we went to a bar for a party, and someone handed me a little bag with a powdery substance in it and a name I had never heard.
Without even understanding what it was, I took a huge sniff out of it. It hit rapidly and I started to feel like the room was swallowing me whole. Overwhelmed, I went outside. This substance turned out to be 2CB. So not only have I now taken a hallucinogenic even though I wanted to be very careful with them, I also had no idea what to expect of the one I’d just taken. Under the influence of the substance, my friends faces looked like demons, but thankfully they were kind and patient enough to take care of me so my terror quickly subsided. I got lucky.
This phase of my life went on for a few years until I was 25 - partying, getting fucked up, constantly smoking weed, etc. - but that's when I just had enough. I stopped working as a bartender and started working for a tech company instead.
I still took MDMA occasionally when I went to parties and I also still smoked weed. I didn't smoke it during the day anymore but I kept the habit of having one joint before I fell asleep.
When I met Peter (my now husband) I was mostly just smoking weed. We were both extremely independent and did not mean to find someone to share our life with at the time, but we quickly realized that we definitely did not want to lose one another. If we wanted our relationship to survive, we’d have to find a way to break down the walls that were keeping us apart emotionally.
We started with the first forms of what we call now our "relationship check-in" ritual. In which we both took MDMA to talk about our feelings towards one other and how we see our relationship - since it is very difficult to do this sober when you have your guard up.
This really helped us express how we really feel about each other, even when in our day-to-day lives our defense mechanisms and bullshit made it sometimes hard to see this. I truly don't know if we would have been able to break through each others walls without these rituals. This helped me start to see the substances I had been abusing in an entirely different way.
Peter also introduced me to LSD.
Before I took LSD for the first time, I already been through a good amount of soul searching and non-medicated exploration of myself. In taking it, I really wanted to make sure to do it right and not to get lost in some dark corner of my mind. It was really important to me to do things for the right reasons this time, and not to get caught up in my old ways ever again.
After my first few LSD sessions, I was amazed how much clearer I could see my mind, if I looked in the right way. I started to see where my defense mechanisms kicked in and could see that right behind them paths were hidden - paths that lead me past my bullshit right to the true source of my hardwired beliefs and traumas.
And there, I could look at these beliefs, question them, re-evaluate them and eventually change them or throw them out all together. I realized that your mind doesn’t just get wired during your childhood, but you can rewire it for your entire life!
To see that I could adjust and alter my beliefs and ways of thinking changed everything for me. It felt like tearing the curtains open of and old abandoned house and letting the sunlight flood the rooms - rooms that have been in darkness for years.
But if I could only find these hidden places and explore my mind during a trip, that would’ve made me feel dependent on a drug again. But I saw now that, during a trip, psychedelics simply have the power to reveal new or forgotten paths to me, but after the trip, these paths don't get lost! I still had all the time in the world to keep exploring them, because I knew now where they were!
I used to take drugs entirely for the purpose of distraction and looking away - but now, we used them as tools to look inward - to help us see things and be more honest with ourselves. The early phases of us making our card guide Odyssey were just us, cleaning up the messes in our heads that we ran away from for so long, and trying to figure out how to do this as well as possible.
Over time I also stopped smoking weed on daily basis and bit by bit I learned how different your relationship to “drugs" can be.
One of my first proper solo sessions was with MDMA on the subject self love, since I had huge issues with that. For this session, Peter was my trip sitter but was mostly in the living room, checking in on me now and then. I spent hours by myself in the bedroom, exploring my mind and my relationship to myself. I had taken MDMA many times in my life but I truly never felt it the way I did during this session. It was like a completely different drug - an entirely new experience, incomparable to any other time I had taken MDMA. It ceased to be just a party drug once and for all that day and started to become a door - but a door that should be taken seriously and entered with intention and carefulness.
A later session I had was with LSD on the subject of trust - because I always had difficulties with this topic.
Before, if someone had asked me if I thought trust went both ways - something you need to both give and receive - I would have agreed.
But until this session, I didn't realize how superficially aware I was of how true this statement is. For the first time, I began to investigate every single moment in which my trust was broken from the perspective of the person who breached it.
I started to see the people who broke my trust as normal human beings who were just as scared and vulnerable as me.
But this realization didn't stop with others; I also realized that so many problems I have are rooted in a the lack of trust for myself. For the first time, I investigated why I had such problems with self-trust.
And through this, I decided to have a proper conversation with myself.
Do you know this voice inside your head that keeps yapping and seems to only have the most paranoid ideas? The one you shut down so you’re not even tempted to listen to it? This is the voice I had a conversation with. Since it became more and more exhausting to fight her, I decided for once to listen to her and hear what she really wanted. And for the first time, I realized why she was so anxious and angry all the time. If I were silenced, ignored, patronized, and locked away even though all I want is to protect the person who locks me away, I would also go nuts!
I finally understood what this side of me wants — by just simply listening. So I decided to keep doing this: listening respectfully to all of my "voices" but also knowing that I don't have to do everything I think because I am also wrong a lot of the time. But I think the very least I can do for myself — and therefore for everyone else in my life — is to really listen.
Now, my voices only start screaming when I stop listening, which is fair enough.
These days, I use psychedelics to hear their whispers that might some day become screams - whispers that aren’t urgent now, but could become if I don’t listen to them. Listening to and understanding them helps me open my heart, to seek purpose, and to make peace with the facts of my mortality.
Today, I could compare the conversation with my inner voices to a family meeting - sometimes still a bit chaotic but full of love and care. It's not perfect but a huge improvement to the crazy, wild monkey cage that it used to be. And one day I hope it’s like a wise council in long beautiful robes who make decisions in the most calm and reflective manner, taking everyone’s perspective into account...like the Trans-Dimensional Council of Ricks, but you know...actually healthy and functioning and less "sociopathic-egomanic-murdery".
I also realize that many people who have breakthroughs with the help from psychedelics might lean towards taking them very often - if one trip helped a lot, why not do it all the time? But I really don't agree with that.
I definitely believe that just one good session will not change your life but what I learned is that it's not the trip itself that changes everything. This trip is just the jump start to push yourself into a right direction. What you do after is essential. The drugs only show you the door, you need to take the time to go through and explore what’s behind it.
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