Hello Bluelight,
I know there are other threads in which this post might have worked well as a reply but they were a little unfocused and I very much want to be heard. The first paragraph below is a little preamble to provide context. It can be skipped.
Disclaimer: It is oh-so-painfully clear to me that what I did was just straight up idiotic. I had read a lot but not of the right things. I had led myself to believe that I knew what I was doing and I was very wrong.
I am a 6'4", 230lb male. I'm a Ph.D. student and only started experimenting with drugs other than nicotine/cannabis/alcohol within the past year. I started with 4g of psilocybin mushrooms with a friend and had one of the most meaningful, spiritual, indescribable experiences of my life. I saw the corridors of reality, made of sound and feeling, leading into the depths of existence or something like that... Suffice to say, I was too awed/terrified to try anything that powerful again for many months. I have struggled with depression for my entire adult life. That said, my life is objectively great... I enjoy my job (as much as I can...) and have a wonderful wife whom I love with all my heart. I have seen therapists off and on for years hoping to bring my sense of well-being in line with the pleasant reality of my life. My relationship with MDMA started as a conscious decision to help open the door to loving intimacy with my wife. I purchased 10 140mg blue ghost pills which had been tested for purity and dose. The experience was unlike anything I had ever before experienced and I gained astonishingly lucid perspective on the nature and origin of a lot of the hangups that had plagued me all my life (some of which, I wouldn't have even been able to identify). Solutions popped into my mind easily. I felt that I could mentally pace around a problem, look at it from every angle and figure it out with a glorious passivity. The conclusions I reached were real (i.e., didn't seem silly after comedown) and have had a significant positive impact on my life. Beforehand, I had read extensively on erowid and elsewhere about what to expect and do including the repeated statements that I should restrict usage to a dose every few months tops. But... I loved it and did not read, in any of those treatises what I the downside of abuse would be. Over a month and a half, I consumed the 10 tablets (the "magic" certainly dulled towards the end) and then bought 25 more of the same. These I consumed somewhat "responsibly" (read: not at all responsibly but nowhere near as irresponsibly as I eventually would) and generally enjoyed my experiences. At this point, I started experimenting with psychedelics including LSD and DOM. I had some interesting experiences but mostly stressful as I deeply feared the utter ego-death I experienced with the mushrooms and became somewhat panicky if I felt I was coming close. Long story short, I decided the psychedelics weren't a net positive and that I should get back to the thing I truly loved...
Flash forward. I purchased 1g of tested MDA crystal and 5g of pure MDMA crystal. I never particularly intended to abuse them but I assume many on this forum know what comes of a weak will and poor planning...
Thursday (3/20): 150mg of MDA in a gelcap. The experience was pleasant although markedly less lucid and cerebral than my earlier MDMA experiences.
Friday: 400mg of MDA over the course of a long evening. Similar experience as the night before at the lower dosage.
Saturday: 200mg MDA first thing in the morning. 200mg of MDMA a few hours later. Another 200mg of MDMA several hours later. At this point, I was feeling pretty great. My head was swimming, my eyes were rolling, my muscles were twitching, it was super-hard to pee. I finished the night with another 150mg of MDA about an hour and a half before bed. I felt tired but pleasant. I felt the need to urinate frequently and had to focus for maybe 2 minutes at the toilet to start the flow.
Sunday: 300mg MDMA and 50mg MDA at the start of the day. 500mg of MDMA over the course of the rest of the day. Similar but substantially less intense experience. Still feeling good. Up and about, went to the store and all, felt fine other than some trouble regulating my body temperature and urinating.
Monday: Slight headache in the morning but still 400mg of MDMA after work -- barely felt. At this point, starting to think I better lay off for a while to allow myself to recover.
So, that was all but 50mg of the MDA for a total of 950mg of MDA and 1500mg of MDMA over five days.
On Tuesday, interestingly enough, I felt fine. No trouble with work, no trouble interacting with folks normally... Just a little tired. The only sign of trouble was the most bizarre electric reverberations in my head when I smoked a bit of weed in the evening. They weren't painful but they were certainly alarming! I have since found that these are a common consequence of MDMA toxicity... Somehow, I had never read about these in all my preparatory research.
Wednesday was the real beginning. I felt a bit nauseous in the morning with a dull headache that felt similar to a weak sinus headache (i.e., that un-ignorable negative pressure) but centered in my brain rather than above my nose. The brain zaps were now happening occasionally without the weed (it was at this point I suspected they might not be a fluke and looked them up -- bluelight threads abounded...) I ate a sandwich for lunch. I was hungry and it felt good to eat it. 10 minutes later, I had to find a trashcan in a hurry and puked it up. Afterwards, I felt acute nausea that would be my constant companion for days... I had to go home from work... I puked again as soon as I got there after experiencing what would become a familiar cycle. I'd puke, feel vague relief for about 10 minutes, then start feeling brain zaps and shutters of increasing intensity (along with intensifying nausea) for a few hours then puke again. I could not keep anything down and at the end of the day was dry-heaving. It was awful. I found some relief in exercising as it took my mind off of it but the overwhelming queasiness would return as soon as I stopped. The brain zaps were now frequent, intense, and debilitating for the few moments that they lasted. It was very hard to get to sleep but I eventually did and slept until morning.
On Thursday morning, I experienced something that I had not since I had pneumonia as a kid (which I only remembered at this time): sleep paralysis. I awoke but could not move or speak. I could see my wife beside me and tried to scream but only managed a quiet hum after a minute of effort. This woke my wife which, somehow, released me. It was horrifying... I was still very tired and felt as though I had chugged a handle of bourbon the night before. I puked immediately then tried to go back to bed to shut out the awful feelings. This led to a horrible run of short, bizarre nightmares, each terminated with me "waking up" only to find I was still dreaming. This was one of the worst experiences of my life up to this point. When I finally escaped, I pulled myself out of bed, terrified of falling back to sleep. I told my wife that there was no way I could work and called in sick. I decided I would get some Dramamine and try to knock myself out (I was pretty desperate). This actually worked. I slept dreamlessly most of the day; occasionally waking up in a drugged stupor only long enough to confirm that I still felt like unholy death then drifting back off. I got out of bed in the late afternoon. It was at this point that I noticed the emotional hollowness that had overtaken me. I felt adrift and empty. I felt afraid and unaware of my situation on some deep emotional level. I was rationally aware of who I was, what was happening, and why but that didn't translate somehow. I guess it is only in its absence that one becomes aware of the existence of one's concept of state. What I mean is: Before all of this, I generally felt that I knew what was going on. I had some background confidence and awareness of my state relative to the other people in my life, the work I was doing/had to do, whether I was moving my life in a good direction or not, why I thought some directions were good and some were bad, etc. What I felt like was a child. In fact, I had frequent disquieting flash backs to my youth. I found myself thinking about movies I had seen as a child, trips to the grocery store I had taken with my mother when I was five or six, things like that. I felt an intense longing for childlike comfort and reassurance. I wanted my mom to be with me to make me chicken soup and tell me it was okay (I'm 30 years old...). I felt a complete absence of any emotional contentment. I felt like a child who is alone in a dark room. I felt at-risk. And, rationally, I knew it wasn't right for me to feel that way but I couldn't escape it. I actually yearned for a cigarette frequently despite having quit long ago and not feeling such cravings in a long time. To editorialize, I think that the whole serotonin reward system had been knocked out and my body was craving any kind of other positive feedback e.g., whatever makes a child feel comforted by its mother; dopamine release from a cigarette; etc. This actually led me to speculate that the entire abstract reasoning/goal creating must be facilitated by some neural pathway of which serotonin is an essential part and I was utterly lacking that. My god. I wish words could do this state justice. I am still suffering from this. I still feel hollow and empty. I know how I should act rationally and can even do so convincingly but I don't feel love or joy. I feel empty and it is terrifying.
I read on this forum and elsewhere that the thing to do is exercise and maintain a positive perspective. I have been avoiding all drugs (no weed, no alcohol, no nothing and I don't want it). I have been working outside. I have been trying to be as upbeat as I can (I don't want to stress my wife--she doesn't deserve it). But I continue to feel so unmistakably hollow. Each morning, I like to think I feel a little better, but by the evening, I feel empty again and realize that I have been all day. It is now almost two weeks since the binge began and I still feel vague nausea and the dull, negative pressure-type ache in my brain. But, most of all, I feel emotionally broken and terrified that I will never be myself again. I have read about the people who recover and feel utter despair when I read that it has taken some years... I can't help but wonder if they maybe never did recover but just forgot what it was like to feel whole. I have always been a deeply emotional person. I have so much love for those that are close to me, but when I think about them now I just feel hollow. I feel that my whole life has been ripped and everything that happened before the abuse is very, very distant. I have to think hard to remember why I might want to work on anything--what my motivations were... they seem ancient to me now. I just don't know what to do. I feel that the core of my being has been torn out; sucked from my marrow and I feel the ache of its absence. I have never posted anything on any forum anywhere and I feel some shame for laying bare my failures before an audience of strangers. Why have I written this? I know that there is no answer for me other than "wait it out, keep your chin up, stay healthy, it'll get better." Why have I written this? Here's why:
Other searchers like me. The reason those FAQs say keep use of MDMA to no more than once every few months is because, if you don't, it with shred you in a way that you honestly cannot comprehend and never want to. I loved MDMA and deeply, deeply value the insights it has given me. But listen! Don't abuse it, please! My heart breaks to think of someone doing what I have done without the wonderful wife and relative comfort in which I live. I feel utter despair and existential fear. Fear of never regaining the ability to love, truly. Believe me. Learn from my stupidity and be safe.
I know there are other threads in which this post might have worked well as a reply but they were a little unfocused and I very much want to be heard. The first paragraph below is a little preamble to provide context. It can be skipped.
Disclaimer: It is oh-so-painfully clear to me that what I did was just straight up idiotic. I had read a lot but not of the right things. I had led myself to believe that I knew what I was doing and I was very wrong.
I am a 6'4", 230lb male. I'm a Ph.D. student and only started experimenting with drugs other than nicotine/cannabis/alcohol within the past year. I started with 4g of psilocybin mushrooms with a friend and had one of the most meaningful, spiritual, indescribable experiences of my life. I saw the corridors of reality, made of sound and feeling, leading into the depths of existence or something like that... Suffice to say, I was too awed/terrified to try anything that powerful again for many months. I have struggled with depression for my entire adult life. That said, my life is objectively great... I enjoy my job (as much as I can...) and have a wonderful wife whom I love with all my heart. I have seen therapists off and on for years hoping to bring my sense of well-being in line with the pleasant reality of my life. My relationship with MDMA started as a conscious decision to help open the door to loving intimacy with my wife. I purchased 10 140mg blue ghost pills which had been tested for purity and dose. The experience was unlike anything I had ever before experienced and I gained astonishingly lucid perspective on the nature and origin of a lot of the hangups that had plagued me all my life (some of which, I wouldn't have even been able to identify). Solutions popped into my mind easily. I felt that I could mentally pace around a problem, look at it from every angle and figure it out with a glorious passivity. The conclusions I reached were real (i.e., didn't seem silly after comedown) and have had a significant positive impact on my life. Beforehand, I had read extensively on erowid and elsewhere about what to expect and do including the repeated statements that I should restrict usage to a dose every few months tops. But... I loved it and did not read, in any of those treatises what I the downside of abuse would be. Over a month and a half, I consumed the 10 tablets (the "magic" certainly dulled towards the end) and then bought 25 more of the same. These I consumed somewhat "responsibly" (read: not at all responsibly but nowhere near as irresponsibly as I eventually would) and generally enjoyed my experiences. At this point, I started experimenting with psychedelics including LSD and DOM. I had some interesting experiences but mostly stressful as I deeply feared the utter ego-death I experienced with the mushrooms and became somewhat panicky if I felt I was coming close. Long story short, I decided the psychedelics weren't a net positive and that I should get back to the thing I truly loved...
Flash forward. I purchased 1g of tested MDA crystal and 5g of pure MDMA crystal. I never particularly intended to abuse them but I assume many on this forum know what comes of a weak will and poor planning...
Thursday (3/20): 150mg of MDA in a gelcap. The experience was pleasant although markedly less lucid and cerebral than my earlier MDMA experiences.
Friday: 400mg of MDA over the course of a long evening. Similar experience as the night before at the lower dosage.
Saturday: 200mg MDA first thing in the morning. 200mg of MDMA a few hours later. Another 200mg of MDMA several hours later. At this point, I was feeling pretty great. My head was swimming, my eyes were rolling, my muscles were twitching, it was super-hard to pee. I finished the night with another 150mg of MDA about an hour and a half before bed. I felt tired but pleasant. I felt the need to urinate frequently and had to focus for maybe 2 minutes at the toilet to start the flow.
Sunday: 300mg MDMA and 50mg MDA at the start of the day. 500mg of MDMA over the course of the rest of the day. Similar but substantially less intense experience. Still feeling good. Up and about, went to the store and all, felt fine other than some trouble regulating my body temperature and urinating.
Monday: Slight headache in the morning but still 400mg of MDMA after work -- barely felt. At this point, starting to think I better lay off for a while to allow myself to recover.
So, that was all but 50mg of the MDA for a total of 950mg of MDA and 1500mg of MDMA over five days.
On Tuesday, interestingly enough, I felt fine. No trouble with work, no trouble interacting with folks normally... Just a little tired. The only sign of trouble was the most bizarre electric reverberations in my head when I smoked a bit of weed in the evening. They weren't painful but they were certainly alarming! I have since found that these are a common consequence of MDMA toxicity... Somehow, I had never read about these in all my preparatory research.
Wednesday was the real beginning. I felt a bit nauseous in the morning with a dull headache that felt similar to a weak sinus headache (i.e., that un-ignorable negative pressure) but centered in my brain rather than above my nose. The brain zaps were now happening occasionally without the weed (it was at this point I suspected they might not be a fluke and looked them up -- bluelight threads abounded...) I ate a sandwich for lunch. I was hungry and it felt good to eat it. 10 minutes later, I had to find a trashcan in a hurry and puked it up. Afterwards, I felt acute nausea that would be my constant companion for days... I had to go home from work... I puked again as soon as I got there after experiencing what would become a familiar cycle. I'd puke, feel vague relief for about 10 minutes, then start feeling brain zaps and shutters of increasing intensity (along with intensifying nausea) for a few hours then puke again. I could not keep anything down and at the end of the day was dry-heaving. It was awful. I found some relief in exercising as it took my mind off of it but the overwhelming queasiness would return as soon as I stopped. The brain zaps were now frequent, intense, and debilitating for the few moments that they lasted. It was very hard to get to sleep but I eventually did and slept until morning.
On Thursday morning, I experienced something that I had not since I had pneumonia as a kid (which I only remembered at this time): sleep paralysis. I awoke but could not move or speak. I could see my wife beside me and tried to scream but only managed a quiet hum after a minute of effort. This woke my wife which, somehow, released me. It was horrifying... I was still very tired and felt as though I had chugged a handle of bourbon the night before. I puked immediately then tried to go back to bed to shut out the awful feelings. This led to a horrible run of short, bizarre nightmares, each terminated with me "waking up" only to find I was still dreaming. This was one of the worst experiences of my life up to this point. When I finally escaped, I pulled myself out of bed, terrified of falling back to sleep. I told my wife that there was no way I could work and called in sick. I decided I would get some Dramamine and try to knock myself out (I was pretty desperate). This actually worked. I slept dreamlessly most of the day; occasionally waking up in a drugged stupor only long enough to confirm that I still felt like unholy death then drifting back off. I got out of bed in the late afternoon. It was at this point that I noticed the emotional hollowness that had overtaken me. I felt adrift and empty. I felt afraid and unaware of my situation on some deep emotional level. I was rationally aware of who I was, what was happening, and why but that didn't translate somehow. I guess it is only in its absence that one becomes aware of the existence of one's concept of state. What I mean is: Before all of this, I generally felt that I knew what was going on. I had some background confidence and awareness of my state relative to the other people in my life, the work I was doing/had to do, whether I was moving my life in a good direction or not, why I thought some directions were good and some were bad, etc. What I felt like was a child. In fact, I had frequent disquieting flash backs to my youth. I found myself thinking about movies I had seen as a child, trips to the grocery store I had taken with my mother when I was five or six, things like that. I felt an intense longing for childlike comfort and reassurance. I wanted my mom to be with me to make me chicken soup and tell me it was okay (I'm 30 years old...). I felt a complete absence of any emotional contentment. I felt like a child who is alone in a dark room. I felt at-risk. And, rationally, I knew it wasn't right for me to feel that way but I couldn't escape it. I actually yearned for a cigarette frequently despite having quit long ago and not feeling such cravings in a long time. To editorialize, I think that the whole serotonin reward system had been knocked out and my body was craving any kind of other positive feedback e.g., whatever makes a child feel comforted by its mother; dopamine release from a cigarette; etc. This actually led me to speculate that the entire abstract reasoning/goal creating must be facilitated by some neural pathway of which serotonin is an essential part and I was utterly lacking that. My god. I wish words could do this state justice. I am still suffering from this. I still feel hollow and empty. I know how I should act rationally and can even do so convincingly but I don't feel love or joy. I feel empty and it is terrifying.
I read on this forum and elsewhere that the thing to do is exercise and maintain a positive perspective. I have been avoiding all drugs (no weed, no alcohol, no nothing and I don't want it). I have been working outside. I have been trying to be as upbeat as I can (I don't want to stress my wife--she doesn't deserve it). But I continue to feel so unmistakably hollow. Each morning, I like to think I feel a little better, but by the evening, I feel empty again and realize that I have been all day. It is now almost two weeks since the binge began and I still feel vague nausea and the dull, negative pressure-type ache in my brain. But, most of all, I feel emotionally broken and terrified that I will never be myself again. I have read about the people who recover and feel utter despair when I read that it has taken some years... I can't help but wonder if they maybe never did recover but just forgot what it was like to feel whole. I have always been a deeply emotional person. I have so much love for those that are close to me, but when I think about them now I just feel hollow. I feel that my whole life has been ripped and everything that happened before the abuse is very, very distant. I have to think hard to remember why I might want to work on anything--what my motivations were... they seem ancient to me now. I just don't know what to do. I feel that the core of my being has been torn out; sucked from my marrow and I feel the ache of its absence. I have never posted anything on any forum anywhere and I feel some shame for laying bare my failures before an audience of strangers. Why have I written this? I know that there is no answer for me other than "wait it out, keep your chin up, stay healthy, it'll get better." Why have I written this? Here's why:
Other searchers like me. The reason those FAQs say keep use of MDMA to no more than once every few months is because, if you don't, it with shred you in a way that you honestly cannot comprehend and never want to. I loved MDMA and deeply, deeply value the insights it has given me. But listen! Don't abuse it, please! My heart breaks to think of someone doing what I have done without the wonderful wife and relative comfort in which I live. I feel utter despair and existential fear. Fear of never regaining the ability to love, truly. Believe me. Learn from my stupidity and be safe.
