A Taste of My Experiences with Psychedelics

I needed a new life. For one, there was something wrong with my eyes. I hated to see them in the mirror. They looked deeply sad and sort of…dead. They frightened me. I was embarrassed to be out in the world with them, bringing that sort of drained energy into every room I entered.

Yuck.

Who wants to enter a party a deflated balloon? What a drag. Who wants to feel like a burden to life?

Yuck all over again.

I’d heard of people using MDMA and psilocybin for trauma, but I had thought I could work through the struggles I had with my brain and my body without any kind of medication. I wasn’t on anti-depressants. I wasn’t on anything aside from psyllium powder capsules, fish oil, Vitamin B12, and probiotics. I was proud of my Yankee spine (I write this feeling like an ass.) A friend of mine had been using both mushrooms and MDMA in the past months, and the changes in her were profound. I noticed things that would have sent her off the rails emotionally were no big deal. Her eyes and spirit were bright. She seemed more herself.

She told me there was before she’d started using this medicine and after.

She was living The After.

I wanted to live the after, too. So I went on an adventure.

A week before my MDMA session, I had some psylocibin and settled down on the couch with a friend who took the same dose I had, an eye pillow and music. I had only had mushrooms once before, in college, and it was a scary, wild trip. My friend who was experienced in psylocibin use, assured me our afternoon would not be like that afternoon I spend hugging third base on the Occidental College baseball field because I was afraid I was going to spin off the earth.  

This day, as the medicine began its work, I could feel myself enter my body. I felt safe, floaty. After some time had passed, I was aware of how much my body ached, and I could feel how exhausted the cells of my body were. It was as if each one was a tiny dried-up petal.

I lay with this feeling and decided I was like a lawnmower that had no gas in its tank and yet was parked in the middle of a field of grass that had to be cut. Somehow, every day, I was able to start the lawnmower of me with no gas in my tank. Clearly, I was borrowing energy from somewhere deep inside (hello, espresso, Diet Coke, iced tea, sugar) and, by force of will, getting done what felt necessary.  

Later that day, after my head had cleared and I could take off the eye pillow and walk around without crashing into the walls, I looked at my appointment book and found ways to cut my workload by more than half. I had deep respect for those exhausted cells of mine. What I was doing to myself was cruel and unnecessary. Why couldn’t I just let myself rest?

I was afraid of what I’d find if I was still too long.

“Afraid” doesn’t come close to covering it. What do you call the feeling of suspecting there is rot deep in the core of your house? Your teeth? Your bones? Your guts? Your soul? It’s so easy for me to use words I’m habituated to using when talking about emotions and feelings. Afraid, sad, lonely, depressed are like quarters that fit right into the slot, only, then I’ve used up my quarter and I still haven’t represented myself accurately.

Terror and dread combined seems about right.

This is when life as a vacation began to kick in. Suddenly I was no longer a workhorse. I was a person who had power over her time. This is when my eyes started to look more alive to me, more open, more at peace.

Warmed up by the mushrooms, a week later, I was in an office of a therapist who was also adopted and who was trained in this type of work. I was cocooned in a blanket on a reclining chair, saying “Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god.” I was saying, “This planet is NO FUN. I am on the WRONG PLANET.” I was saying, “I don’t know how I am going to survive this.” I was saying, “I am a second away from dying.” I was saying, “Oh my god. I’m a person.”

I had gone into my session with zero fear. I’d figured I’d walked through the fires of shock and grief as I’d gone from someone who felt relatively unaffected by relinquishment and adoption to someone who believed these things had deeply affected and harmed every cell of my body. What could be so bad when you already know part of you died when you were born? I was looking forward to seeing what would happen. I had the sense I was headed into the hallway of my future where, increasingly, I’d been having the sense of been there done that rather than any kind of illuminated entranceway into something.  

I had an experience that was similar to childbirth in that I had been utterly unprepared for the pain, only this time the MDMA had quieted my amygdala so I did not feel the rawness of terror. My heart and brain didn’t kick into panic mode, so I was able to endure the feelings and let the sensations move through my body with little to no resistance on my part, but with a LOT of disbelief. I was flabbergasted and keep saying “Oh my god” because I could not believe this much pain was in my body. It was like my whole self was crammed full of thornbushes that were on fire. I kept talking about the word “disbelief”, saying I was going to look it up when I was done because I wanted to know EXACTLY what it meant. I wanted to make sure it meant there was not one iota of belief in that word because I just COULD NOT BELIEVE what I was experiencing.

“You are feeling what it was like to be born,” my guide said. She said she had never worked with an adoptee and MDMA who had not experienced some sort of death. It was so good to have the pain I suspected was in me validated. It was real. I was real, too. I could not believe relinquishment and adoption had done this to my mind and body and that the world wasn’t better prepared to help me out of this cage of pain.

So much happened during this session, and I am working on a small book to describe it all to the best of my ability, but I wanted to give you a taste of what is possible. I feel ten thousand pounds lighter now. I feel like a human being who is in a body that feels full of normalcy and potential.

I feel like there was Before and After.

I am living The After. You know what feels great? Doing nothing! My heart! My heart is so happy it gets to rest.

I want this for you, too, if that is something you want. Knowing that this pain so many adoptees carry is potentially optional is rocket fuel for me. It feels criminal and inhumane not to make these medicines available for all. I am going to fight the good fight, and I’m going in with wild happiness and fury.