PsychonautJustice
Greenlighter
- Joined
- May 16, 2023
- Messages
- 2
Hey there,
I am new to the forum as a member but have been following on and off for the past 15ish years. A little before finding this forum, I had been exploring the Vaults of Erowid to get myself familiar with the things I was going to experiment with.
What brought me back here was that I was planning to ask some questions about psilocybin micro-dosing for myself and my spouse, but I'll reserve specific questions for a recent thread I had found out about it, but it will be mentioned briefly towards the end of this vomiting of words.
This introduction for myself (a 35 year old cis-male, living in the US) will serve as a bit of a biography of who I am, what lead me to psychoactive substances in highschool, the mistakes I made, the things I learned, and where I am now. It will largely be a compilation of my "notable" (more or less) experiences, that I will also refer to in other threads when my "grain of salt" opinions/experiences call for them. I decided to not reserve these for specific experience related threads since most of these I don't recall exact amounts or the timelines of when I took them and started feeling effects. This is more like story time.
Thank you for having me.
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My experience with psychoactives started at age 16. I tried cannabis once at a party with people I didn't know, had no idea how to even inhale and obviously felt nothing. I wasn't a drinker really either, I had a couple of times. A couple friends of mine had started using cannabis more frequently and the first time I can remember getting stoned was in a car at a park where I can most notably remember asking:
"Do you guys ever.... have conversations with yourself in your head?"
".....you mean, thinking?"
"Yeah, yeah.... that."
Cannabis pretty early on gave me some amount of anxiety, not a whole lot though. I normally attributed that feeling to the paranoia of getting caught, but it wasn't enough to deter me. I was an aspiring musician learning to play metal and I could get stoned and just jam away for hours coming up with new material like it was pouring out of my brain from god himself. It wasn't until maybe 6 months to a year later that I first tried psilocybin mushrooms that I started to deal with anxiety which could not be ignored.
I'm around 17 years old, and I was offered by an acquaintance to trip with him and one other person who I was "better" friends with, but still not entirely comfortable with. I had done very little research into it (obviously by virtue of the fact that I was about to trip with 2 people I wasn't close with), but I don't remember being too concerned. We skipped school and went to the house of the guy who made the offer. His house was in the nicest part of town, where all of the doctors lived. His house was massive, maybe the biggest house I had been in up to that point, and it wasn't just big, it was old. So much history in those floors and walls. To add to it, this guy's mother was a cultural studies professor at the University, and had every room decorated from a different culture in the world. I was beyond hyped at this point. I dropped my 1.75 grams and chased it with a glass of orange juice and began playing the waiting game. About 30-45 minutes in I felt really sick, with the anxiety creeping up on me. I ran to the bathroom, threw up what I could, and was beginning to feel regretful. The dude was pissed at me for throwing up because he thought I wasn't going to trip anymore (I guess?). Far from the truth. After lifting my head from the bowl of the toilet, I looked down at the flower patterned floor and immediately knew things were starting to get wild. All I can really remember about the first part of the trip was the intense anxiety and fear that I was trying to suppress. Yeah, all of the rooms were pretty cool, and I knew in my head "this all looks really cool" but something just felt off, and not in a fun/exciting way. I was very close to calling my Mom and telling her to pick me up because of how scared I was. My Mom was pretty cool and would probably be disappointed in me skipping school to trip on shrooms but she would probably reserve her disappointment until after. The two guys I was with told me to not do it, and that we should go for a walk instead, to try and change the environment. Best idea ever. As soon as we got outside, my entire mood was lifted from dread and despair to hope and joy. We walked around downtown, laughing like actual lunatics at every person, animal, or thing we saw. We went back to the house and my mood carried over into the interior again and things were good, I understood. At least until, we smoked a bowl of cannabis. Just as I was beginning to grip the trip and felt like it was manageable, I took two or three hits of cannabis and almost immediately spiraled into a full blown panic attack. I remember bouncing on the chair that I was sitting in, the cannabis high hitting me, and something about the bounce of the chair just felt so incredibly wrong that I got up and ran inside. I sat down on the couch inside, and felt as if my entire body disappeared and I could not feel or connect my brain to my legs. I tried to understand how it was to stand up, and I couldn't because it felt like I was already standing. I panic'd for probably 5 or 10 minutes over this idea of "How can I stand up if I already feel like I am standing when I can see that I am sitting on this couch?!" My two co-trippers thought it was hilarious but at the moment I was having an actual crisis lol. Finally I just said "fuck it!" and I stood up without thinking about it. Immediately I was relieved, "okay I am not paralyzed", but that relief was only temporary because now that I am standing my entire presence sunk into the floor where I now feel like I am sitting on the floor while standing. Different side of the same damn coin. Spoiler alert, I was just tripping, and eventually I got over it. By the time the trip finally ended and I was driving home, I felt exhausted, but somewhat accomplished that I overcame the trip, despite the rollercoaster it had put me through. I felt like I learned some things about myself. However, that feeling of panic that hit me after smoking while peaking, followed me very very closely for a long time.
Time goes on and cannabis has become a habit, and the habit becomes an addiction. Now before I come off as the guy who says cannabis itself is addictive, I'll qualify it by saying that I believe anything can be addictive - and my perspective on addiction is anything that interferes with your life/work/relationships in a negative way that you refuse to stop doing: is an addiction problem. So while my opinion on cannabis isn't that it has addictive properties, I was addicted to it giving me constant escapes from responsibilities that I was not holding up to. I am starting to smoke on the way to school, cutting classes in the middle of the day to smoke, which turned into driving to my parent's church parking lot and smoking in the morning just long enough for my Mom to leave for work so I could go back to the house and smoke there all day. The girlfriend I had who was opposed to cannabis, was beginning to catch onto my addiction, and eventually broke up with me over it. The school finally called my Mom after I had missed so much school that I was forced to drop out. Throughout this whole time period as well, I would have random occurrences of panic attacks similar to the one I experienced while tripping for the first time. At the time though, I never connected the two, and I was beginning to grow concerned that there was something "physically" wrong with me. I had a history of asthma as a child that I "grew out of" at some point, and the shortness of breath I'd experience lead me to believe that I was having issues with my lungs. Despite that fear, as well as it having a negative impact on my life, I was continuing to smoke daily.
Now that I am dropped out of school, and just working an easy job as a delivery driver, it's party time. As soon as I turned 18, and lied about my graduation to my family and specifically my father (who lived on the other side of the country) by having a fake graduation party, I used the money I acquired to begin renting a place with some friends. We began experimenting with ecstasy. Around this time, I had been also dabbling with mushrooms as well, and beginning to read more about experiences others have had with these different substances (through Erowid and here) so I could better understand what I was getting myself into. Mushrooms were kind of a hit or miss in terms of "excitingly pleasant" to "excitingly concerning", but the environment I was in I learned played the largest impact on me. Most of our trips consisted of dropping our dose, and going on walks through the woods and only with good friends and these typically lead to a mildly uncomfortable coming up, into a commonly enjoyable experience. When it came to the ecstasy, the experience was about what you'd expect, amazingly joyous. I had read though a single experience someone had, where they were having the best time on ecstasy but it turned south for them after smoking cannabis while peaking. I found myself in the garage with my friends passing a bong around filled with cannabis, and I had smoked cannabis more than once while rolling on E, but this time, it hit different. After beginning to feel the effects of the cannabis while rolling, my mind went to that experience I had read, about how great their roll was until the cannabis hit them, and everything changed for the worst. Immediately upon having that thought, I became that experience. Everyone's face I had known for 5 years or more, had become faces that I recognized but as if I was seeing them for the first time. Everyone seemed off, or from some alternate perception or reality that made them unfamiliar. The panic was setting in, wave after wave of intense fear and dread, just like I was tripping on the mushrooms again. And then....it really hit me. The truth of the matter.
I made myself feel that way. I did it to myself. The mere thought of another persons negative experience, put me there. My thought, drove my physical body into a panic, where I was shaking, sweating, seeing things differently, ringing in my ears. This was literally mind over matter. Upon this revelation, I felt invincible, as if I was cured now of these crippling panic attacks, and the rest of the night went on as it should in a joyful bliss of ecstasy. It was truly a life changing connection made in my mind, at least for a while. Sometime around this event, I took myself into a diplomacy center and got my GED. Easiest test of my life. I was admittedly a fairly smart guy, and this test was made for immigrants where English was their second language, or kids who never paid attention in school, or were cutting class since they were 12. Either way, it was a piece of my life I was missing and I got it.
I continued experimenting with mushrooms in higher doses (up to 3.5/4g) still accompanied with reduced levels of anxiety during the come-up periods, but never enough to dissuade me from reaching my breakthrough. I tried salvia which I became a very big fan of while it was still obtainable in my state, and when I found it was beginning to be removed from shelves in other states, I purchased a handful of 20x vials to sit on for a few years. These salvia experiences were always uncomfortably intense but always insightful to me for some reason. Any of my friends who would try it once would swear off it ever again, but not me. I made it a ritual for a few years that every 4-6 months I would go out to my Mom's farm with a sitter in the distance, and would light up in our alfalfa field with headphones on and just lose myself for an hour. As someone who grew up being overly concerned with what people thought about me, feeling like even though I had a large group of friends who all looked up to me as their "metal-head-psychonaut-godfather" that I was still not fitting in with others, that I was just so much different for some reason. This continuous battering and shattering of my own ego I think truly helped me in some ways to think less of what others think and more about what I can do to help others, it wasn't an immediate shift in that direction, but it was one that eventually came to fruition.
Now is the moment where my friends I learned the phrase "Everyone get's one freebie in life". A friend of mine is dog-sitting for his aunt and uncle, and they tell him he's allowed to have some friends over but if anyone is drinking to make sure they stay the night. He is 21, one other guy is 22, and everyone else is 19 or 20 (legal drinking age is 21). So naturally, we throw a party at their nice house in a nice neighborhood. Yours truly brings the mushrooms and cannabis. More mushrooms than we needed given the number of us that decided to indulge ourselves. There was probably a half ounce or more unspoken for after 4 of us (one of which was my best friend) took our 3.5g dose. All the girls and the other guys are just drinking alcohol. We party for about 3-4 hours, myself and my hallucinogenic brothers decide that the peak has slightly faded and we need to kickstart the buzz with a joint we had pre-rolled during the come up. We go outside the house to one of our cars and light up. As we're passing it around, one of us notices a neighbor standing outside his door at around midnight. It's a Friday, so not totally weird someone is standing outside their house, but this guy was probably in his 50s, just staring at us, so naturally we're paranoid and sketched out. We suspiciously put the joint out after all staring back at him for a solid minute or ten, and then go back into the house we don't live at. We all got enough of that joint to be barely connected to reality again. We let the nosey neighbor leave our minds by attempting to play catch phrase while tripping.
*POUND POUND POUND* on the front door.
Definitely a cop, no one knocks on a door like that at 1 AM unless it's a cop.
My friends all turn to stare at me and freeze, wide eyed in more ways than one.
"WHY ARE YOU ALL LOOKING AT ME?"
"Are you going to answer it?"
"NO! I don't live here!" - The friend who's Aunt and Uncle owns the house - passed out drunk, along with everyone else at the party.
*POUND POUND POUND POUND*
I walk over to the door, and I can see a shiny badge piercing through the stained glass window of the door.
I open the door and am met by a woman officer who looks like she's ready to put me in cuffs.
"What are you doing here? Do you live here?"
"No, my friend who is sleeping, is dog sitting, for his aunt and uncle. They said he could have people over, we're just celebrating a friends birthday" - All of which is true - the other friend who's birthday it was just turned 20.
She continues to question me about what my name is, who the friend is that is dog sitting, how many people are here, and she shines the flashlight straight into my eyes.
"Are you on any substances?"
"What no, I mean, I had some alcohol"
"How old are you?"
"I'm sorry I am 20, I only had a few beers"
She shines the flashlight at my 3 friends who are all hiding behind a the wooden fence/railing just above the foyer.
"What are THEY on?"
"They just drank too."
Someone says something on her radio and she replies.
The glass backdoor swings open, and two cops come in through the back door, another one comes in through the front door.
The two upstairs start looking in the rooms and find a bunch of people passed out drunk.
The one from the front door goes straight into the basement, where there are more people passed out drunk, and a table full of empty bottles.
Along with my bag of mushrooms more than enough to lock me up.
The officer asks me to go upstairs and sit down in a chair along with my 3 friends with herself turned halfway away from us, enough to keep an eye on us.
The other officers are talking on the radios and I am shaking in fear and panic, this is the worst thing that could have possibly happened.
Ten minutes that feels like eternity goes by and the officer we talked to turns back towards us.
The one from the basement comes up to the foyer and yells "Everything looks good, let's get out of here"
The officer with us says "Thank you for your time, please stay inside for the rest of the night."
The front door closes.
"....wtf just happened?"
The 4 of us are just baffled that literally nothing happened. We spent about an hour just recapping to eachother what we witnessed to verify we weren't all just somehow tripping some alternate reality in perfect sequence to one another. We finally go to sleep as the sun is rising and not long after I wake up to my friend who is the official dog-sitter, coming back in from taking the dogs for a walk.
I tell him all of what happened, and he says "holy shit dude are you serious? what do you mean? how? are you sure that's what happened?"
One of the others who were with me springs up "Yeah dude, that's exactly what happened"
All he replies with is "Well damn, I guess we got lucky then didn't we?"
I was really hoping he was going to shed some light on wtf happened, like if he had some get out of jail free card he used to bribe one of the officers or something, but nope, nothing.
I tell my Mom the story (who is pretty cool when it comes to drugs if she's sure I am being safe about it), and she asks me more about my friend and his name, I tell her his last name.
"I went to school with a 'Xyz', he became a cop for the city I am pretty sure"
"A cop?"
"Yeah, where does he live? We went to their house a few years back for a graduation party."
I tell her where we were.
"Yep, that's him. I think you got caught partying in a cop's house."
And that's when I concluded, how we got off the hook. This is just a total guess, but my guess is that IF the cops had confronted us about the alcohol, and mushrooms, and we all just said "they aren't ours, they were here when we got here" then in order for them to do anything about it, would either put it on the owner of the property, or there would be a record of the occurrence tied to the owner of the property. I can't know that for sure, but there is 100% no way that a cop would ever walk into a basement with a half oz of mushrooms on a table, surrounded by empty bottles of alcohol, and underage drunken guys and girls, without saying or doing anything about it unless there being a damn good reason to ignore it.
"Everyone get's one freebie."
Fast forward to me in my early/mid 20s, and I am still smoking on the regular, still not holding a job, somehow finding a girlfriend at a University (I wasn't attending) to carry me through life and letting me live with her, while my father begrudgingly supports me financially. I was drinking somewhat infrequently, but still just smoking like a chimney. Wake up, bong, hour later, bong, rinse repeat. Still through all of this, and even living 2+ hours away from the group of friends I had established, they all still respected me. My best friend at the time, called me and said he had some lumps on his neck that his doctor suspected were tumors from lymphoma. I dropped everything I was doing and packed my things to go see him. My girlfriend at the time decided it was a good opportunity for us to split up, which I agreed. I was a loser who was becoming a jealous controlling jerk since I had nothing to offer her than worthless companionship.
I drove back to my stomping grounds, moved into a house with 5 of my friends, many of which were just that, but my best friend with lymphoma was also there. I got a job immediately at a thrift store, which was the same place everyone in this house worked at. It was the first job I managed to hold for more than a week since being a delivery driver straight out of highschool. Drinking was a common activity in this house, along with smoking cannabis. We would drink on average 4-6 nights a week, drinking to get drunk, not to just relax. My best friend with lymphoma was going through chemo and was behind the scenes becoming addicted to oxycodone. We were experimenting here and there with ecstasy, molly, cocaine, and nitrous-oxide, but mostly just drinking. I started playing in a metal band with some of the guys in the scene. I also began lying more (like everyone else in our group) to girls, eachother, and myself, about dumb things. This would come to bite me in the ass later.
I held my job at the thrift store for about 6 months, before my boss who I looked up to got let go due to a change in management. He had promised me he would do everything he could to get me out of the position I was in, into one that was more desirable. Once he got let go, my dream of doing something not at the bottom of the food chain in the store was evaporated. I went onto bigger and better things.... working at a button factory lol. I made pin-backs for elections, events, whatever. I was brought in to be trained separate from everyone else who had been working there for years because those people, were no good at the job. They did the bare minimum to just get by, and I was trained by the best, alongside one friend of mine who started at the same time as me. We got fast, REALLY fast, and quickly. 2 months of training in a separate warehouse and we were ready to go and show the rest of the factory how fast we were. We were encouraged by management to race everyone we could in the first week, to show the others that they should be able to keep up with us. It was a weird time and I didn't really "care" about winning but I did like knowing I was exceeding expectations. Work was getting boring though, and I was beginning to slip mentally on my motivation. I had reached the top and I wasn't able to get any faster than I was. Until a friend of mine introduced me to Adderall.
These were instant releases (10 or 20mg I don't recall exactly), it was her prescription which she said she rarely used, only when she needed to really put her head down and focus. She was on the graphic design side of the button factory, while I was on the production side. I started dabbling with these and immediately felt like a god at my job. I went from my 115% performance of the rest of the factory to 150%. I reached new heights, and was noticed by management as motivated and driven. Within a week of this new performance boost, I was promoted to a team-lead position with a nice raise. I started dating a new girl, who I was quite happy with. However, she had experience with meth abuse and was not a fan of my use of the Adderall. Unfortunately for me, I began upping the dosage my friend was granting me, so that by the 2nd month in of using the Adderall, I had tapped my friend out 2 weeks before her prescription was to be refilled. With no accounting for this sudden decline in amphetamines in my system, I crashed, hard. I began to feel like nobody again, and feared the addiction that I found myself approaching. Even if I could make it another 2 weeks, I worried I would just repeat the cycle again, or find something else to fix my need until her prescription was filled. I also began to feel intense shame of the lies I had been telling everyone in my life. I decided I needed to get away for a bit, for how long I didn't know, and I needed to set the record straight.
To keep a long story short (I know this whole story is already incredibly long, but I'll spare the nitty gritty of this part), I called a meeting of all my friends, and committed social suicide. I went around a circle of 30 people, one by one telling them every lie I could recall, and explained why I did it, and how sorry I was. By the time I got to the end, about 70% of them wanted nothing to do with me anymore, 10% patting me on the back saying "wow, youre a really convincing liar, good job" and laughing with forgiveness, and the other 20% appreciating the honesty and forgiving me. I then told everyone that I was moving away to live with my Dad to get clean and reset my mentality. My girlfriend at the time, was sad that I was leaving, proud that I set the example to my friends that we should all start to work towards a life of honesty, but disappointed that we might not see each other again.
My Dad flew up, packed my car with me, and helped me drive down to the other side of the country. I went and saw a psychiatrist who was convinced that I was bi-polar of some variety. I was prescribed numerous medications that I did start taking for a couple of months. They made me feel worse, way worse, like I was even less of a person than I already felt. I had my wisdom teeth pulled out and was prescribed hydrocodone as well during this. I was well rehearsed on why I shouldn't attempt to abuse it, but I just didn't care at that point. I started popping them to reach a pleasant threshold, and increasing the amount day after day, until the last day I did such an amount that I was basically passed out for 24 hours straight. I woke up feeling like my head was a balloon ready to float away, terrified that I actually poisoned myself so badly that I would never be normal again. My parents had no idea what was going on with me, they thought my sleep schedule was just so twisted up that I was still waking up at night to sit on my computer, and was trying to avoid them. After a few weeks, I began to feel "normal" again, but still missing home. I had no motivation to do anything but sit at my computer and game my life away. I finally decided after living there for 4 months, 2 months actually clean from everything (aside from the bipolar medication) to talk to my Dad about me going back home. Most of my friends might not be my friends anymore, but some are better than none, and that home is my home, and always will be.
The room I had my name on the lease for at my old party house, was being occupied by someone else, who to my surprise, was not paying rent, living on my rent I was still paying to the house. That got sorted out pretty fast, but this girl who was occupying my room, didn't want to move out. I called my ex-girlfriend, and she told me her roommate just moved out and she would love for me to stay with her. I drove back 28 hours on my own, over the course of 3 days, and found myself back home, on 4/20 at my ex-girlfriends house who in no time became my girlfriend again. We had the lease with my name on it at the house, switched into the girls name who took over my room. I stopped taking my bipolar medication pretty shortly after getting back, and started to feel somewhat normal again. Took up drinking again, not as much as I was before, and was smoking cannabis again, also not as much as before. Shortly after the lease switch, maybe 6 months or so, the house I was no longer living in, was raided, and everyone there had already "gotten their freebie".
My best friend, who by this point had beaten the cancer, had moved onto harder things from the oxycodone. He was using heroin, and dealing it from the house, with no one in the house knowing exactly what he was up to. Everyone's room was torn apart, and everyone had a piece of the charges put to their name. I dodged a bullet (sort of). He moved back in with his parents, and was awaiting a court hearing.
I started dabbling in mushrooms (much smaller amounts ever since the freebie) and LSD over the course of the next few years. LSD for me was my new preferred hallucinogen, it gave me the pleasant effects of mushrooms without the discomforting come up, and anytime my mind would drift to dark places, I could maintain enough mental control to push it back down. Molly was a here and there type of thing since I kind of feared uppers after my Adderall occurrence, but one time getting a dose that seemed way too speed like, I stopped doing it after that. Molly never had negative comedowns for me, but this time I felt like I was literally losing my mind. I was paranoid beyond belief that my cat was mind controlling me, and that it must be why the Egyptians had made so many statues of them. It triggered a reoccurring nightmare I had which cannot be described other than a feeling of "working on something for an eternity, and then minutes before finally finishing it, making a mistake that makes the entire thing collapse". This dream I found myself having once every 1 to 2 years, and was the only dream that would lead me to sleepwalking and being "trapped" in it for an hour+ after waking up.
My girlfriend and I were holding somewhat steady jobs, her more than me. I was constantly trying different prescribed medications for depression and anxiety, and had a doctor conclude that I don't have bipolar, and they aren't sure how I was ever diagnosed since I never had a period of time that could be defined as a "manic episode". Nothing was working though. I was still jumping around between different jobs, where I'd excel quickly, become recognized, get promoted, become comfortable, and then throw myself into a hole where I'd get fired. For most of the jobs I'd get, they'd require a clean drug test, so I'd have to quit smoking cannabis for a few weeks, and then once I got comfortable at my job I would start gaming and smoking again, and then some day would come along where I'd decide "I'd rather just smoke and game than work" and would call in sick for a day. Then one day would turn to two, and then two days would turn into a week, and the week, would be me not calling in and just no showing. This job cycle repeated itself on and off throughout my whole life, and the two common factors that were always present were cannabis and gaming. I had a trip on LSD around this time, I don't know the exact dose, but it was a blotter stamp and a half, and was definitely my most intense trip. We were watching the reboot of "Cosmos" which was of course incredibly mind blowing and enjoyable. At one moment I was sitting in my living room, staring at a light bulb in the kitchen, while my girlfriend was making food in the kitchen. I saw a time lapse spanning over the course of numerous years, her stomach grew in size, a baby in her arms, her wearing a white dress, a child running circles around her, another baby in her arms.
I found myself at a job that I was on the up and up about, we got our tax return and decided to go on a vacation together. I proposed to my now wife at some restaurant that I had the waiter put the ring on a desert tray covered and she of course said yes immediately upon seeing the ring I got from her mother. We planned for a 1.5 year engagement, interrupted by our first born son, which turned it into a 2.5 year engagement. I continued during the pregnancy and after the birth of my first son, to be an irresponsible adult. I was still not holding a job down for any longer than it took for me to get promoted and become the best person to ever work the job. I had become so damn good at failing, and having to climb out of a hole when the pressure hit. The climb is what I became addicted to as a byproduct of my addiction to cannabis and gaming. I knew how to learn anything, quickly, but never to learn consistency.
We got married, on our parents dollar mostly. It was a small but great wedding that I never ever want to do again, 2.5 years of something approaching that I can't run away from was terrifying lol. We ended up having a second child not too long after. My wife was now no longer able to work becuase I was not the most attentive father, and I was constantly trying to find something new to make us money. Eventually our bills caught up to us, and we were being evicted. I was bailed out by my father (again) who put a down payment on a house near my wife's mother where it is ridiculously cheap to live. The catch was that I needed to have work lined up, and an interview at a promising employer before he'd put the money down. I had work going, at home customer service - easy as pie, and didn't lock down my computer so I could game and smoke while on the job. The interview, was at a battery plant, who was always looking for more help, and paid the best in the town we were moving to. So, Dad bailed me out. The pressure was off, but I was still going to get this job since I have warehouse/production experience.
I go to the interview, and I crush it, like I always do. I am very good at selling myself as a professional. I had cut the cannabis use for about a month since 1) we had no money, and 2) the cannabis we did have went to my wife who has been a daily "one hit quit" (usually) user since she was 16. I won the interview, so I had to go and get a physical and drug screen. While at the doctors office that I was seeing for the first time ever, I had numerous forms to fill out, 2 of which I knew were related to the employment, and one was a general psych history that I thought was for the hospitals use only (not to be disclosed to the employer). I filled that form out indicating that I had been diagnosed as bipolar, but that I had stopped medication years before with no episodes, and that a separate doctor later on concluded that I probably didn't have bipolar. Anyways, I pass the drug screen and I am ready to get meh job. I get a call from the nurse at the employer, and she indicates to me that I need to start taking my bipolar medication again or they won't hire me. I tell her that it was a misdiagnosis and that I haven't taken the meds for years with nothing negative happening from it. She tells me I have to go and see someone they approve of to determine that. So I do, they conclude I don't have bipolar, and even verify with the previous doctor who told me the same, and then I call back again to the nurse at the employer. She tells me that the company has decided to rescind my offer because of my "confrontational attitude about my mental health issue" ????? Absolute BS, but whatever, I am not about to argue over the phone to work at a battery plant. I kind of wish I had, but come to find out, the year is 2020, and we all know what happened that year.
The battery plant closes its doors 2 weeks after my offer is rescinded because of Covid. My customer service from home job, takes off like a rocket, because now we have a new contract for "customer service for a test proctoring service". Easiest job of my life with unlimited hours at my disposal. It's text chat customer service, hell yeah. Cannabis and gaming galore. This job goes on for over a year, until schools start opening up. I held this job tight, I could sense my ability to look forward was becoming more clear, but still slightly foggy.
I start doing an overnight personal care assistant job once the customer service hours end, and then adding on data entry (I can type 130-150 wpm with my eyes closed). I'm not making great money, but enough to pay for our cheap mortgage, food, and support mine and my wife's cannabis needs. My best friend who had lymphoma (yes, he beat it), now lives 2 hours away from me again. I don't hear from him for a couple of days, when we were gaming together daily, and something is off. I know he was dealing with his addiction to oxycodone/heroin for a while even after the raid, but my assumption at the time based on what he had indicated to me, was that he was clean and had been through recovery for a year. A friend from that same house that was raided, sent me a message of a newspaper article. My friend was in a car accident, where he drove himself into the ditch, and his face was terrifying. I hadn't seen him in years, and it didn't even dawn on me it had been that long. He was charged with possession of heroin, cannabis, and methamphetamine. I should have seen the signs but I trusted him that he was getting clean, when in reality he was drowning. He called me a week later crying about how he lied to me, and I just told him that it's okay and that I'll do whatever I can to help him. He stayed with me for a week, we found a recovery center he could get into on short notice, and I drove him there with his parents and he checked in.
I am then propositioned by my cousin, who owns a photography company, doing destination luxury weddings. He saw some photos I took of my son on my shitty Galaxy track phone from Walmart and said I have a good eye. He wants me to start learning photography, and that he'd bring me on a gig with him sometime this year to see if I wanted to get involved. So I do it, I put all of my extra time off of gaming, into photography. I start consuming less and less cannabis, switching from smoking to micro-dosing edibles, to quitting it entirely. I learn fast, especially when I have an obtainable goal directly in front of me, and this one is a life changing career. I spend 6 months grinding this out, and then finally I get a call from my cousin with a plane ticket across the country for a 5 day wedding event. He hands me a professional camera body and lens and says "Just shoot. Don't worry about what you shoot, just shoot. Be creative." And I do. It was a blast, the weddings we do, are insane. He gave me a ton of harsh criticism, but I took it constructively, and I passed his test, the work passed mine. I want to do this, so badly. There's money in it, and it has an infinitely scaling ceiling called "art". I head back home, and he wants me to start doing editing between gigs. The editing side, I enjoyed mostly, but damn, the grind is rough. These weddings encompass 20,000-30,000 images and it's a lot to go through and get consistent coloring.
The editing continues, I drop the two other cheap jobs I had, and I have a consistent monthly salary coming in where I don't need to leave home, and that's just for the editing. The shooting side, was less consistent than I thought it would be, but more gigs will come. Time goes on, gigs weren't frequent enough, and I start to feel myself slipping. I am sensing my motivation and drive, and hyper focus is fading, quickly.
I call my general physician, and ask for a referral to a mental health specialist. I see a mental health nurse practitioner, I tell her what's happening, and then my story (going back further than this), and she concludes "it sounds like you've been dealing with ADHD your whole life, I want to prescribe you a medication that I think will help".
:Gulp: "What medication do you have in mind?"
"Adderall XR could work, if you experience many negative side-effects we can try something else"
"Okay sure."
And so I start taking Adderall XR at 10mg, to 20mg, to 30mg, to 40mg, and have been on it for about a year now. I noticed immediate positive effects a day into 30mg, that I knew I would, and more. I've been a workhorse grinding out my daily tasks, I started cutting back on sugary drinks and food, started going to the gym, and being a more attentive father. I no longer just edit, I manage the entire backend of my cousins company, while shooting once or twice a month in exotic locations around the US and world. I make more money in a year than I made for close to 5 years of my adult life. Some might say, it was a risk on my part to even consider using Adderall with the history that I had with it, but the difference now is that my mindset is different. After being able to prove to myself that I can quit cannabis and gaming (mostly, I play Fortnite with my now 5 and 7 year old kids once or twice a week for an hour or two), I have had 0 issues what-so-ever taking my Adderall as prescribed. I know it has it's long-term negative side-effects but sadly this is what I need now to stay on the path I can finally see with clarity.
My friend at this point, has now been clean for about 3 years, and is still clean to this day as far as I can tell. He's got a steady job, and just became a manager. We talk multiple times a week, and I've seen him a handful of times over the past couple of years. I think he's beaten it, finally.
So where does that leave me now, why am I here?
As mentioned, my wife wanted to consider micro-dosing psilocybin, I am of the perspective that I could probably take it or leave it, but hallucinogens were only ever "scary" to me because I had demons I was afraid to confront. I feel like my demons are mostly defeated at this point, but I also don't necessarily care to trip out, however if micro-dosing can provide me with more creative thinking that I am applauded for already, or just a new perspective on the work I do when it comes to shooting photos, I think it could be beneficial to me.
But secondly, and more importantly, why I even decided to write this whole mostly (maybe partially) drug-related story was because while I think that experiences written into words can provide a massive utility to individuals on the micro level, I think that also getting a more holistic view of the impacts that substances can have on you long term (both positive and negatives) with context related to events, might prove insightful to some. Cannabis and gaming, in conjunction with ADHD, ruined my life a dozen times over and over. I was self-medicating to a degree to mask some of the negative parts of my ADHD with cannabis, and then using gaming as another fix for my inability to plan for my future. Hallucinogens on the other hand, I think played a major role in my ability to be a good leader, the shattering of certain aspects of my ego drove me to become empathetic to those who work beneath me, to the point where I work alongside them instead. In addition to that, I truly believe they complimented my already analytical mind into one which continues to question my own presumptions about what is "efficient" or "the right way of doing things" so that I can continue to challenge a process in order to find a better solution. I will give myself credit where credit is due, and generally speaking, I am capable of approaching a problem, with numerous solutions quickly discovered with their positives and negatives all in mind, that can lead myself and my superiors into making the best possible decisions for our company. This continuous out of the box thinking didn't happen on it's own, and I genuinely believe I owe that much to my hallucinogenic experiences. And lastly, related to my problem solving skills, it lead me to "git gud" at learning how to do new things quickly (this could arguably be related to gaming as well).
Would I consider using cannabis again? Maybe. If I was in a state where I could acquire it legally, know what I am getting, to help me with my sleep, then maybe.
Do I have a problem with it, or others using it? Definitely not. My wife still uses it daily on my dollar since she's still a stay at home Mom.
Would I consider gaming again like I used to? Probably not. I am playing a new game now and it's called life which day by day I am growing more and more into.
Are drugs bad mkay? Not at all, if you're a person who can recognize a problem as/before it forms, and take the steps to acknowledge and separate yourself from it, then go crazy with responsibility.
The truth of it is, you can get addicted to anything. As I said earlier, anything which negatively affects your ability to balance your life in respect to your relationships, work, and mental well being, I consider an addiction. It's not exclusive to drugs.
This came out way longer than I anticipated and I doubt anyone will read it all the way through, but if you did, thank you.
And stay safe, not everyone actually gets a freebie.
I am new to the forum as a member but have been following on and off for the past 15ish years. A little before finding this forum, I had been exploring the Vaults of Erowid to get myself familiar with the things I was going to experiment with.
What brought me back here was that I was planning to ask some questions about psilocybin micro-dosing for myself and my spouse, but I'll reserve specific questions for a recent thread I had found out about it, but it will be mentioned briefly towards the end of this vomiting of words.
This introduction for myself (a 35 year old cis-male, living in the US) will serve as a bit of a biography of who I am, what lead me to psychoactive substances in highschool, the mistakes I made, the things I learned, and where I am now. It will largely be a compilation of my "notable" (more or less) experiences, that I will also refer to in other threads when my "grain of salt" opinions/experiences call for them. I decided to not reserve these for specific experience related threads since most of these I don't recall exact amounts or the timelines of when I took them and started feeling effects. This is more like story time.
Thank you for having me.
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My experience with psychoactives started at age 16. I tried cannabis once at a party with people I didn't know, had no idea how to even inhale and obviously felt nothing. I wasn't a drinker really either, I had a couple of times. A couple friends of mine had started using cannabis more frequently and the first time I can remember getting stoned was in a car at a park where I can most notably remember asking:
"Do you guys ever.... have conversations with yourself in your head?"
".....you mean, thinking?"
"Yeah, yeah.... that."
Cannabis pretty early on gave me some amount of anxiety, not a whole lot though. I normally attributed that feeling to the paranoia of getting caught, but it wasn't enough to deter me. I was an aspiring musician learning to play metal and I could get stoned and just jam away for hours coming up with new material like it was pouring out of my brain from god himself. It wasn't until maybe 6 months to a year later that I first tried psilocybin mushrooms that I started to deal with anxiety which could not be ignored.
I'm around 17 years old, and I was offered by an acquaintance to trip with him and one other person who I was "better" friends with, but still not entirely comfortable with. I had done very little research into it (obviously by virtue of the fact that I was about to trip with 2 people I wasn't close with), but I don't remember being too concerned. We skipped school and went to the house of the guy who made the offer. His house was in the nicest part of town, where all of the doctors lived. His house was massive, maybe the biggest house I had been in up to that point, and it wasn't just big, it was old. So much history in those floors and walls. To add to it, this guy's mother was a cultural studies professor at the University, and had every room decorated from a different culture in the world. I was beyond hyped at this point. I dropped my 1.75 grams and chased it with a glass of orange juice and began playing the waiting game. About 30-45 minutes in I felt really sick, with the anxiety creeping up on me. I ran to the bathroom, threw up what I could, and was beginning to feel regretful. The dude was pissed at me for throwing up because he thought I wasn't going to trip anymore (I guess?). Far from the truth. After lifting my head from the bowl of the toilet, I looked down at the flower patterned floor and immediately knew things were starting to get wild. All I can really remember about the first part of the trip was the intense anxiety and fear that I was trying to suppress. Yeah, all of the rooms were pretty cool, and I knew in my head "this all looks really cool" but something just felt off, and not in a fun/exciting way. I was very close to calling my Mom and telling her to pick me up because of how scared I was. My Mom was pretty cool and would probably be disappointed in me skipping school to trip on shrooms but she would probably reserve her disappointment until after. The two guys I was with told me to not do it, and that we should go for a walk instead, to try and change the environment. Best idea ever. As soon as we got outside, my entire mood was lifted from dread and despair to hope and joy. We walked around downtown, laughing like actual lunatics at every person, animal, or thing we saw. We went back to the house and my mood carried over into the interior again and things were good, I understood. At least until, we smoked a bowl of cannabis. Just as I was beginning to grip the trip and felt like it was manageable, I took two or three hits of cannabis and almost immediately spiraled into a full blown panic attack. I remember bouncing on the chair that I was sitting in, the cannabis high hitting me, and something about the bounce of the chair just felt so incredibly wrong that I got up and ran inside. I sat down on the couch inside, and felt as if my entire body disappeared and I could not feel or connect my brain to my legs. I tried to understand how it was to stand up, and I couldn't because it felt like I was already standing. I panic'd for probably 5 or 10 minutes over this idea of "How can I stand up if I already feel like I am standing when I can see that I am sitting on this couch?!" My two co-trippers thought it was hilarious but at the moment I was having an actual crisis lol. Finally I just said "fuck it!" and I stood up without thinking about it. Immediately I was relieved, "okay I am not paralyzed", but that relief was only temporary because now that I am standing my entire presence sunk into the floor where I now feel like I am sitting on the floor while standing. Different side of the same damn coin. Spoiler alert, I was just tripping, and eventually I got over it. By the time the trip finally ended and I was driving home, I felt exhausted, but somewhat accomplished that I overcame the trip, despite the rollercoaster it had put me through. I felt like I learned some things about myself. However, that feeling of panic that hit me after smoking while peaking, followed me very very closely for a long time.
Time goes on and cannabis has become a habit, and the habit becomes an addiction. Now before I come off as the guy who says cannabis itself is addictive, I'll qualify it by saying that I believe anything can be addictive - and my perspective on addiction is anything that interferes with your life/work/relationships in a negative way that you refuse to stop doing: is an addiction problem. So while my opinion on cannabis isn't that it has addictive properties, I was addicted to it giving me constant escapes from responsibilities that I was not holding up to. I am starting to smoke on the way to school, cutting classes in the middle of the day to smoke, which turned into driving to my parent's church parking lot and smoking in the morning just long enough for my Mom to leave for work so I could go back to the house and smoke there all day. The girlfriend I had who was opposed to cannabis, was beginning to catch onto my addiction, and eventually broke up with me over it. The school finally called my Mom after I had missed so much school that I was forced to drop out. Throughout this whole time period as well, I would have random occurrences of panic attacks similar to the one I experienced while tripping for the first time. At the time though, I never connected the two, and I was beginning to grow concerned that there was something "physically" wrong with me. I had a history of asthma as a child that I "grew out of" at some point, and the shortness of breath I'd experience lead me to believe that I was having issues with my lungs. Despite that fear, as well as it having a negative impact on my life, I was continuing to smoke daily.
Now that I am dropped out of school, and just working an easy job as a delivery driver, it's party time. As soon as I turned 18, and lied about my graduation to my family and specifically my father (who lived on the other side of the country) by having a fake graduation party, I used the money I acquired to begin renting a place with some friends. We began experimenting with ecstasy. Around this time, I had been also dabbling with mushrooms as well, and beginning to read more about experiences others have had with these different substances (through Erowid and here) so I could better understand what I was getting myself into. Mushrooms were kind of a hit or miss in terms of "excitingly pleasant" to "excitingly concerning", but the environment I was in I learned played the largest impact on me. Most of our trips consisted of dropping our dose, and going on walks through the woods and only with good friends and these typically lead to a mildly uncomfortable coming up, into a commonly enjoyable experience. When it came to the ecstasy, the experience was about what you'd expect, amazingly joyous. I had read though a single experience someone had, where they were having the best time on ecstasy but it turned south for them after smoking cannabis while peaking. I found myself in the garage with my friends passing a bong around filled with cannabis, and I had smoked cannabis more than once while rolling on E, but this time, it hit different. After beginning to feel the effects of the cannabis while rolling, my mind went to that experience I had read, about how great their roll was until the cannabis hit them, and everything changed for the worst. Immediately upon having that thought, I became that experience. Everyone's face I had known for 5 years or more, had become faces that I recognized but as if I was seeing them for the first time. Everyone seemed off, or from some alternate perception or reality that made them unfamiliar. The panic was setting in, wave after wave of intense fear and dread, just like I was tripping on the mushrooms again. And then....it really hit me. The truth of the matter.
I made myself feel that way. I did it to myself. The mere thought of another persons negative experience, put me there. My thought, drove my physical body into a panic, where I was shaking, sweating, seeing things differently, ringing in my ears. This was literally mind over matter. Upon this revelation, I felt invincible, as if I was cured now of these crippling panic attacks, and the rest of the night went on as it should in a joyful bliss of ecstasy. It was truly a life changing connection made in my mind, at least for a while. Sometime around this event, I took myself into a diplomacy center and got my GED. Easiest test of my life. I was admittedly a fairly smart guy, and this test was made for immigrants where English was their second language, or kids who never paid attention in school, or were cutting class since they were 12. Either way, it was a piece of my life I was missing and I got it.
I continued experimenting with mushrooms in higher doses (up to 3.5/4g) still accompanied with reduced levels of anxiety during the come-up periods, but never enough to dissuade me from reaching my breakthrough. I tried salvia which I became a very big fan of while it was still obtainable in my state, and when I found it was beginning to be removed from shelves in other states, I purchased a handful of 20x vials to sit on for a few years. These salvia experiences were always uncomfortably intense but always insightful to me for some reason. Any of my friends who would try it once would swear off it ever again, but not me. I made it a ritual for a few years that every 4-6 months I would go out to my Mom's farm with a sitter in the distance, and would light up in our alfalfa field with headphones on and just lose myself for an hour. As someone who grew up being overly concerned with what people thought about me, feeling like even though I had a large group of friends who all looked up to me as their "metal-head-psychonaut-godfather" that I was still not fitting in with others, that I was just so much different for some reason. This continuous battering and shattering of my own ego I think truly helped me in some ways to think less of what others think and more about what I can do to help others, it wasn't an immediate shift in that direction, but it was one that eventually came to fruition.
Now is the moment where my friends I learned the phrase "Everyone get's one freebie in life". A friend of mine is dog-sitting for his aunt and uncle, and they tell him he's allowed to have some friends over but if anyone is drinking to make sure they stay the night. He is 21, one other guy is 22, and everyone else is 19 or 20 (legal drinking age is 21). So naturally, we throw a party at their nice house in a nice neighborhood. Yours truly brings the mushrooms and cannabis. More mushrooms than we needed given the number of us that decided to indulge ourselves. There was probably a half ounce or more unspoken for after 4 of us (one of which was my best friend) took our 3.5g dose. All the girls and the other guys are just drinking alcohol. We party for about 3-4 hours, myself and my hallucinogenic brothers decide that the peak has slightly faded and we need to kickstart the buzz with a joint we had pre-rolled during the come up. We go outside the house to one of our cars and light up. As we're passing it around, one of us notices a neighbor standing outside his door at around midnight. It's a Friday, so not totally weird someone is standing outside their house, but this guy was probably in his 50s, just staring at us, so naturally we're paranoid and sketched out. We suspiciously put the joint out after all staring back at him for a solid minute or ten, and then go back into the house we don't live at. We all got enough of that joint to be barely connected to reality again. We let the nosey neighbor leave our minds by attempting to play catch phrase while tripping.
*POUND POUND POUND* on the front door.
Definitely a cop, no one knocks on a door like that at 1 AM unless it's a cop.
My friends all turn to stare at me and freeze, wide eyed in more ways than one.
"WHY ARE YOU ALL LOOKING AT ME?"
"Are you going to answer it?"
"NO! I don't live here!" - The friend who's Aunt and Uncle owns the house - passed out drunk, along with everyone else at the party.
*POUND POUND POUND POUND*
I walk over to the door, and I can see a shiny badge piercing through the stained glass window of the door.
I open the door and am met by a woman officer who looks like she's ready to put me in cuffs.
"What are you doing here? Do you live here?"
"No, my friend who is sleeping, is dog sitting, for his aunt and uncle. They said he could have people over, we're just celebrating a friends birthday" - All of which is true - the other friend who's birthday it was just turned 20.
She continues to question me about what my name is, who the friend is that is dog sitting, how many people are here, and she shines the flashlight straight into my eyes.
"Are you on any substances?"
"What no, I mean, I had some alcohol"
"How old are you?"
"I'm sorry I am 20, I only had a few beers"
She shines the flashlight at my 3 friends who are all hiding behind a the wooden fence/railing just above the foyer.
"What are THEY on?"
"They just drank too."
Someone says something on her radio and she replies.
The glass backdoor swings open, and two cops come in through the back door, another one comes in through the front door.
The two upstairs start looking in the rooms and find a bunch of people passed out drunk.
The one from the front door goes straight into the basement, where there are more people passed out drunk, and a table full of empty bottles.
Along with my bag of mushrooms more than enough to lock me up.
The officer asks me to go upstairs and sit down in a chair along with my 3 friends with herself turned halfway away from us, enough to keep an eye on us.
The other officers are talking on the radios and I am shaking in fear and panic, this is the worst thing that could have possibly happened.
Ten minutes that feels like eternity goes by and the officer we talked to turns back towards us.
The one from the basement comes up to the foyer and yells "Everything looks good, let's get out of here"
The officer with us says "Thank you for your time, please stay inside for the rest of the night."
The front door closes.
"....wtf just happened?"
The 4 of us are just baffled that literally nothing happened. We spent about an hour just recapping to eachother what we witnessed to verify we weren't all just somehow tripping some alternate reality in perfect sequence to one another. We finally go to sleep as the sun is rising and not long after I wake up to my friend who is the official dog-sitter, coming back in from taking the dogs for a walk.
I tell him all of what happened, and he says "holy shit dude are you serious? what do you mean? how? are you sure that's what happened?"
One of the others who were with me springs up "Yeah dude, that's exactly what happened"
All he replies with is "Well damn, I guess we got lucky then didn't we?"
I was really hoping he was going to shed some light on wtf happened, like if he had some get out of jail free card he used to bribe one of the officers or something, but nope, nothing.
I tell my Mom the story (who is pretty cool when it comes to drugs if she's sure I am being safe about it), and she asks me more about my friend and his name, I tell her his last name.
"I went to school with a 'Xyz', he became a cop for the city I am pretty sure"
"A cop?"
"Yeah, where does he live? We went to their house a few years back for a graduation party."
I tell her where we were.
"Yep, that's him. I think you got caught partying in a cop's house."
And that's when I concluded, how we got off the hook. This is just a total guess, but my guess is that IF the cops had confronted us about the alcohol, and mushrooms, and we all just said "they aren't ours, they were here when we got here" then in order for them to do anything about it, would either put it on the owner of the property, or there would be a record of the occurrence tied to the owner of the property. I can't know that for sure, but there is 100% no way that a cop would ever walk into a basement with a half oz of mushrooms on a table, surrounded by empty bottles of alcohol, and underage drunken guys and girls, without saying or doing anything about it unless there being a damn good reason to ignore it.
"Everyone get's one freebie."
Fast forward to me in my early/mid 20s, and I am still smoking on the regular, still not holding a job, somehow finding a girlfriend at a University (I wasn't attending) to carry me through life and letting me live with her, while my father begrudgingly supports me financially. I was drinking somewhat infrequently, but still just smoking like a chimney. Wake up, bong, hour later, bong, rinse repeat. Still through all of this, and even living 2+ hours away from the group of friends I had established, they all still respected me. My best friend at the time, called me and said he had some lumps on his neck that his doctor suspected were tumors from lymphoma. I dropped everything I was doing and packed my things to go see him. My girlfriend at the time decided it was a good opportunity for us to split up, which I agreed. I was a loser who was becoming a jealous controlling jerk since I had nothing to offer her than worthless companionship.
I drove back to my stomping grounds, moved into a house with 5 of my friends, many of which were just that, but my best friend with lymphoma was also there. I got a job immediately at a thrift store, which was the same place everyone in this house worked at. It was the first job I managed to hold for more than a week since being a delivery driver straight out of highschool. Drinking was a common activity in this house, along with smoking cannabis. We would drink on average 4-6 nights a week, drinking to get drunk, not to just relax. My best friend with lymphoma was going through chemo and was behind the scenes becoming addicted to oxycodone. We were experimenting here and there with ecstasy, molly, cocaine, and nitrous-oxide, but mostly just drinking. I started playing in a metal band with some of the guys in the scene. I also began lying more (like everyone else in our group) to girls, eachother, and myself, about dumb things. This would come to bite me in the ass later.
I held my job at the thrift store for about 6 months, before my boss who I looked up to got let go due to a change in management. He had promised me he would do everything he could to get me out of the position I was in, into one that was more desirable. Once he got let go, my dream of doing something not at the bottom of the food chain in the store was evaporated. I went onto bigger and better things.... working at a button factory lol. I made pin-backs for elections, events, whatever. I was brought in to be trained separate from everyone else who had been working there for years because those people, were no good at the job. They did the bare minimum to just get by, and I was trained by the best, alongside one friend of mine who started at the same time as me. We got fast, REALLY fast, and quickly. 2 months of training in a separate warehouse and we were ready to go and show the rest of the factory how fast we were. We were encouraged by management to race everyone we could in the first week, to show the others that they should be able to keep up with us. It was a weird time and I didn't really "care" about winning but I did like knowing I was exceeding expectations. Work was getting boring though, and I was beginning to slip mentally on my motivation. I had reached the top and I wasn't able to get any faster than I was. Until a friend of mine introduced me to Adderall.
These were instant releases (10 or 20mg I don't recall exactly), it was her prescription which she said she rarely used, only when she needed to really put her head down and focus. She was on the graphic design side of the button factory, while I was on the production side. I started dabbling with these and immediately felt like a god at my job. I went from my 115% performance of the rest of the factory to 150%. I reached new heights, and was noticed by management as motivated and driven. Within a week of this new performance boost, I was promoted to a team-lead position with a nice raise. I started dating a new girl, who I was quite happy with. However, she had experience with meth abuse and was not a fan of my use of the Adderall. Unfortunately for me, I began upping the dosage my friend was granting me, so that by the 2nd month in of using the Adderall, I had tapped my friend out 2 weeks before her prescription was to be refilled. With no accounting for this sudden decline in amphetamines in my system, I crashed, hard. I began to feel like nobody again, and feared the addiction that I found myself approaching. Even if I could make it another 2 weeks, I worried I would just repeat the cycle again, or find something else to fix my need until her prescription was filled. I also began to feel intense shame of the lies I had been telling everyone in my life. I decided I needed to get away for a bit, for how long I didn't know, and I needed to set the record straight.
To keep a long story short (I know this whole story is already incredibly long, but I'll spare the nitty gritty of this part), I called a meeting of all my friends, and committed social suicide. I went around a circle of 30 people, one by one telling them every lie I could recall, and explained why I did it, and how sorry I was. By the time I got to the end, about 70% of them wanted nothing to do with me anymore, 10% patting me on the back saying "wow, youre a really convincing liar, good job" and laughing with forgiveness, and the other 20% appreciating the honesty and forgiving me. I then told everyone that I was moving away to live with my Dad to get clean and reset my mentality. My girlfriend at the time, was sad that I was leaving, proud that I set the example to my friends that we should all start to work towards a life of honesty, but disappointed that we might not see each other again.
My Dad flew up, packed my car with me, and helped me drive down to the other side of the country. I went and saw a psychiatrist who was convinced that I was bi-polar of some variety. I was prescribed numerous medications that I did start taking for a couple of months. They made me feel worse, way worse, like I was even less of a person than I already felt. I had my wisdom teeth pulled out and was prescribed hydrocodone as well during this. I was well rehearsed on why I shouldn't attempt to abuse it, but I just didn't care at that point. I started popping them to reach a pleasant threshold, and increasing the amount day after day, until the last day I did such an amount that I was basically passed out for 24 hours straight. I woke up feeling like my head was a balloon ready to float away, terrified that I actually poisoned myself so badly that I would never be normal again. My parents had no idea what was going on with me, they thought my sleep schedule was just so twisted up that I was still waking up at night to sit on my computer, and was trying to avoid them. After a few weeks, I began to feel "normal" again, but still missing home. I had no motivation to do anything but sit at my computer and game my life away. I finally decided after living there for 4 months, 2 months actually clean from everything (aside from the bipolar medication) to talk to my Dad about me going back home. Most of my friends might not be my friends anymore, but some are better than none, and that home is my home, and always will be.
The room I had my name on the lease for at my old party house, was being occupied by someone else, who to my surprise, was not paying rent, living on my rent I was still paying to the house. That got sorted out pretty fast, but this girl who was occupying my room, didn't want to move out. I called my ex-girlfriend, and she told me her roommate just moved out and she would love for me to stay with her. I drove back 28 hours on my own, over the course of 3 days, and found myself back home, on 4/20 at my ex-girlfriends house who in no time became my girlfriend again. We had the lease with my name on it at the house, switched into the girls name who took over my room. I stopped taking my bipolar medication pretty shortly after getting back, and started to feel somewhat normal again. Took up drinking again, not as much as I was before, and was smoking cannabis again, also not as much as before. Shortly after the lease switch, maybe 6 months or so, the house I was no longer living in, was raided, and everyone there had already "gotten their freebie".
My best friend, who by this point had beaten the cancer, had moved onto harder things from the oxycodone. He was using heroin, and dealing it from the house, with no one in the house knowing exactly what he was up to. Everyone's room was torn apart, and everyone had a piece of the charges put to their name. I dodged a bullet (sort of). He moved back in with his parents, and was awaiting a court hearing.
I started dabbling in mushrooms (much smaller amounts ever since the freebie) and LSD over the course of the next few years. LSD for me was my new preferred hallucinogen, it gave me the pleasant effects of mushrooms without the discomforting come up, and anytime my mind would drift to dark places, I could maintain enough mental control to push it back down. Molly was a here and there type of thing since I kind of feared uppers after my Adderall occurrence, but one time getting a dose that seemed way too speed like, I stopped doing it after that. Molly never had negative comedowns for me, but this time I felt like I was literally losing my mind. I was paranoid beyond belief that my cat was mind controlling me, and that it must be why the Egyptians had made so many statues of them. It triggered a reoccurring nightmare I had which cannot be described other than a feeling of "working on something for an eternity, and then minutes before finally finishing it, making a mistake that makes the entire thing collapse". This dream I found myself having once every 1 to 2 years, and was the only dream that would lead me to sleepwalking and being "trapped" in it for an hour+ after waking up.
My girlfriend and I were holding somewhat steady jobs, her more than me. I was constantly trying different prescribed medications for depression and anxiety, and had a doctor conclude that I don't have bipolar, and they aren't sure how I was ever diagnosed since I never had a period of time that could be defined as a "manic episode". Nothing was working though. I was still jumping around between different jobs, where I'd excel quickly, become recognized, get promoted, become comfortable, and then throw myself into a hole where I'd get fired. For most of the jobs I'd get, they'd require a clean drug test, so I'd have to quit smoking cannabis for a few weeks, and then once I got comfortable at my job I would start gaming and smoking again, and then some day would come along where I'd decide "I'd rather just smoke and game than work" and would call in sick for a day. Then one day would turn to two, and then two days would turn into a week, and the week, would be me not calling in and just no showing. This job cycle repeated itself on and off throughout my whole life, and the two common factors that were always present were cannabis and gaming. I had a trip on LSD around this time, I don't know the exact dose, but it was a blotter stamp and a half, and was definitely my most intense trip. We were watching the reboot of "Cosmos" which was of course incredibly mind blowing and enjoyable. At one moment I was sitting in my living room, staring at a light bulb in the kitchen, while my girlfriend was making food in the kitchen. I saw a time lapse spanning over the course of numerous years, her stomach grew in size, a baby in her arms, her wearing a white dress, a child running circles around her, another baby in her arms.
I found myself at a job that I was on the up and up about, we got our tax return and decided to go on a vacation together. I proposed to my now wife at some restaurant that I had the waiter put the ring on a desert tray covered and she of course said yes immediately upon seeing the ring I got from her mother. We planned for a 1.5 year engagement, interrupted by our first born son, which turned it into a 2.5 year engagement. I continued during the pregnancy and after the birth of my first son, to be an irresponsible adult. I was still not holding a job down for any longer than it took for me to get promoted and become the best person to ever work the job. I had become so damn good at failing, and having to climb out of a hole when the pressure hit. The climb is what I became addicted to as a byproduct of my addiction to cannabis and gaming. I knew how to learn anything, quickly, but never to learn consistency.
We got married, on our parents dollar mostly. It was a small but great wedding that I never ever want to do again, 2.5 years of something approaching that I can't run away from was terrifying lol. We ended up having a second child not too long after. My wife was now no longer able to work becuase I was not the most attentive father, and I was constantly trying to find something new to make us money. Eventually our bills caught up to us, and we were being evicted. I was bailed out by my father (again) who put a down payment on a house near my wife's mother where it is ridiculously cheap to live. The catch was that I needed to have work lined up, and an interview at a promising employer before he'd put the money down. I had work going, at home customer service - easy as pie, and didn't lock down my computer so I could game and smoke while on the job. The interview, was at a battery plant, who was always looking for more help, and paid the best in the town we were moving to. So, Dad bailed me out. The pressure was off, but I was still going to get this job since I have warehouse/production experience.
I go to the interview, and I crush it, like I always do. I am very good at selling myself as a professional. I had cut the cannabis use for about a month since 1) we had no money, and 2) the cannabis we did have went to my wife who has been a daily "one hit quit" (usually) user since she was 16. I won the interview, so I had to go and get a physical and drug screen. While at the doctors office that I was seeing for the first time ever, I had numerous forms to fill out, 2 of which I knew were related to the employment, and one was a general psych history that I thought was for the hospitals use only (not to be disclosed to the employer). I filled that form out indicating that I had been diagnosed as bipolar, but that I had stopped medication years before with no episodes, and that a separate doctor later on concluded that I probably didn't have bipolar. Anyways, I pass the drug screen and I am ready to get meh job. I get a call from the nurse at the employer, and she indicates to me that I need to start taking my bipolar medication again or they won't hire me. I tell her that it was a misdiagnosis and that I haven't taken the meds for years with nothing negative happening from it. She tells me I have to go and see someone they approve of to determine that. So I do, they conclude I don't have bipolar, and even verify with the previous doctor who told me the same, and then I call back again to the nurse at the employer. She tells me that the company has decided to rescind my offer because of my "confrontational attitude about my mental health issue" ????? Absolute BS, but whatever, I am not about to argue over the phone to work at a battery plant. I kind of wish I had, but come to find out, the year is 2020, and we all know what happened that year.
The battery plant closes its doors 2 weeks after my offer is rescinded because of Covid. My customer service from home job, takes off like a rocket, because now we have a new contract for "customer service for a test proctoring service". Easiest job of my life with unlimited hours at my disposal. It's text chat customer service, hell yeah. Cannabis and gaming galore. This job goes on for over a year, until schools start opening up. I held this job tight, I could sense my ability to look forward was becoming more clear, but still slightly foggy.
I start doing an overnight personal care assistant job once the customer service hours end, and then adding on data entry (I can type 130-150 wpm with my eyes closed). I'm not making great money, but enough to pay for our cheap mortgage, food, and support mine and my wife's cannabis needs. My best friend who had lymphoma (yes, he beat it), now lives 2 hours away from me again. I don't hear from him for a couple of days, when we were gaming together daily, and something is off. I know he was dealing with his addiction to oxycodone/heroin for a while even after the raid, but my assumption at the time based on what he had indicated to me, was that he was clean and had been through recovery for a year. A friend from that same house that was raided, sent me a message of a newspaper article. My friend was in a car accident, where he drove himself into the ditch, and his face was terrifying. I hadn't seen him in years, and it didn't even dawn on me it had been that long. He was charged with possession of heroin, cannabis, and methamphetamine. I should have seen the signs but I trusted him that he was getting clean, when in reality he was drowning. He called me a week later crying about how he lied to me, and I just told him that it's okay and that I'll do whatever I can to help him. He stayed with me for a week, we found a recovery center he could get into on short notice, and I drove him there with his parents and he checked in.
I am then propositioned by my cousin, who owns a photography company, doing destination luxury weddings. He saw some photos I took of my son on my shitty Galaxy track phone from Walmart and said I have a good eye. He wants me to start learning photography, and that he'd bring me on a gig with him sometime this year to see if I wanted to get involved. So I do it, I put all of my extra time off of gaming, into photography. I start consuming less and less cannabis, switching from smoking to micro-dosing edibles, to quitting it entirely. I learn fast, especially when I have an obtainable goal directly in front of me, and this one is a life changing career. I spend 6 months grinding this out, and then finally I get a call from my cousin with a plane ticket across the country for a 5 day wedding event. He hands me a professional camera body and lens and says "Just shoot. Don't worry about what you shoot, just shoot. Be creative." And I do. It was a blast, the weddings we do, are insane. He gave me a ton of harsh criticism, but I took it constructively, and I passed his test, the work passed mine. I want to do this, so badly. There's money in it, and it has an infinitely scaling ceiling called "art". I head back home, and he wants me to start doing editing between gigs. The editing side, I enjoyed mostly, but damn, the grind is rough. These weddings encompass 20,000-30,000 images and it's a lot to go through and get consistent coloring.
The editing continues, I drop the two other cheap jobs I had, and I have a consistent monthly salary coming in where I don't need to leave home, and that's just for the editing. The shooting side, was less consistent than I thought it would be, but more gigs will come. Time goes on, gigs weren't frequent enough, and I start to feel myself slipping. I am sensing my motivation and drive, and hyper focus is fading, quickly.
I call my general physician, and ask for a referral to a mental health specialist. I see a mental health nurse practitioner, I tell her what's happening, and then my story (going back further than this), and she concludes "it sounds like you've been dealing with ADHD your whole life, I want to prescribe you a medication that I think will help".
:Gulp: "What medication do you have in mind?"
"Adderall XR could work, if you experience many negative side-effects we can try something else"
"Okay sure."
And so I start taking Adderall XR at 10mg, to 20mg, to 30mg, to 40mg, and have been on it for about a year now. I noticed immediate positive effects a day into 30mg, that I knew I would, and more. I've been a workhorse grinding out my daily tasks, I started cutting back on sugary drinks and food, started going to the gym, and being a more attentive father. I no longer just edit, I manage the entire backend of my cousins company, while shooting once or twice a month in exotic locations around the US and world. I make more money in a year than I made for close to 5 years of my adult life. Some might say, it was a risk on my part to even consider using Adderall with the history that I had with it, but the difference now is that my mindset is different. After being able to prove to myself that I can quit cannabis and gaming (mostly, I play Fortnite with my now 5 and 7 year old kids once or twice a week for an hour or two), I have had 0 issues what-so-ever taking my Adderall as prescribed. I know it has it's long-term negative side-effects but sadly this is what I need now to stay on the path I can finally see with clarity.
My friend at this point, has now been clean for about 3 years, and is still clean to this day as far as I can tell. He's got a steady job, and just became a manager. We talk multiple times a week, and I've seen him a handful of times over the past couple of years. I think he's beaten it, finally.
So where does that leave me now, why am I here?
As mentioned, my wife wanted to consider micro-dosing psilocybin, I am of the perspective that I could probably take it or leave it, but hallucinogens were only ever "scary" to me because I had demons I was afraid to confront. I feel like my demons are mostly defeated at this point, but I also don't necessarily care to trip out, however if micro-dosing can provide me with more creative thinking that I am applauded for already, or just a new perspective on the work I do when it comes to shooting photos, I think it could be beneficial to me.
But secondly, and more importantly, why I even decided to write this whole mostly (maybe partially) drug-related story was because while I think that experiences written into words can provide a massive utility to individuals on the micro level, I think that also getting a more holistic view of the impacts that substances can have on you long term (both positive and negatives) with context related to events, might prove insightful to some. Cannabis and gaming, in conjunction with ADHD, ruined my life a dozen times over and over. I was self-medicating to a degree to mask some of the negative parts of my ADHD with cannabis, and then using gaming as another fix for my inability to plan for my future. Hallucinogens on the other hand, I think played a major role in my ability to be a good leader, the shattering of certain aspects of my ego drove me to become empathetic to those who work beneath me, to the point where I work alongside them instead. In addition to that, I truly believe they complimented my already analytical mind into one which continues to question my own presumptions about what is "efficient" or "the right way of doing things" so that I can continue to challenge a process in order to find a better solution. I will give myself credit where credit is due, and generally speaking, I am capable of approaching a problem, with numerous solutions quickly discovered with their positives and negatives all in mind, that can lead myself and my superiors into making the best possible decisions for our company. This continuous out of the box thinking didn't happen on it's own, and I genuinely believe I owe that much to my hallucinogenic experiences. And lastly, related to my problem solving skills, it lead me to "git gud" at learning how to do new things quickly (this could arguably be related to gaming as well).
Would I consider using cannabis again? Maybe. If I was in a state where I could acquire it legally, know what I am getting, to help me with my sleep, then maybe.
Do I have a problem with it, or others using it? Definitely not. My wife still uses it daily on my dollar since she's still a stay at home Mom.
Would I consider gaming again like I used to? Probably not. I am playing a new game now and it's called life which day by day I am growing more and more into.
Are drugs bad mkay? Not at all, if you're a person who can recognize a problem as/before it forms, and take the steps to acknowledge and separate yourself from it, then go crazy with responsibility.
The truth of it is, you can get addicted to anything. As I said earlier, anything which negatively affects your ability to balance your life in respect to your relationships, work, and mental well being, I consider an addiction. It's not exclusive to drugs.
This came out way longer than I anticipated and I doubt anyone will read it all the way through, but if you did, thank you.
And stay safe, not everyone actually gets a freebie.
