Unsettling

5g Mazatapec, later followed with 1.5g McKennaii. I did this trip alone after a change of plan. The week before, I'd had an absolutely mind blowing trip on 4g of unusually potent Golden Teachers. I was hoping for a repeat experience, but the shrooms had something else in mind for me.

I felt in a good state of mind beforehand, untroubled by anything in particular and up for a strong trip. I decided to use up the last of my Mazatapec mushrooms that I've had for a while. I have previously found this strain to be hit and miss in terms of strength, so thought they'd be ideal for tripping alone where there are fewer anchors to reality to detract from the intensity of the experience. 

I prepared a tea before going out to do some food shopping and when I came back, I strained the liquid into a cup. I noted that the concoction was very murky compared to the usual consistency. I got a few chores out of the way, prepared some soup so I'd have something healthy to eat at the end of the trip, and drank the infusion at around 1800. I waited for reality to be obliterated by those 5 grams but it just didn't happen. The potency of the Mazatapec must have diminished significantly in storage.

After around an hour I began to notice some subtle effects, but it didn't feel like the usual psychedelic experience. It felt flat and slightly unsettling and being left behind in reality felt a bit like having missed a plane to an exotic destination. I felt sad and disappointed, so I added 1.5g of dried McKennaii that I hoped might enhance the trip, but they gave me a bad stomach from eating them in dried form. I closed my eyes and attempted to drift away into the playlist I had enjoyed listening to so much on my previous trip, but the music felt hollow and dimensionless. There were some mild closed eye visuals and at one point - the only thing that felt vaguely psychedelic on this trip - I saw a space open up which I entered to find myself in a scene from the end of a very abusive relationship I had been in almost a decade ago. It didn't feel too intense though and my mind quickly wandered elsewhere.

Two hours into the trip, there was still no loss of reality on the level I had hoped for. I prefer a strong and overwhelming trip (within reason) to a moderate one. I remembered that there was a DMT vape belonging to a friend in my kitchen drawer. I decided that if the mushrooms weren't going to give me what I wanted, I'd get it from that, but the fumes felt acrid and synthetic and I could not enjoy inhaling them compared to the holistic earthiness of mushrooms, so I gave up on the vape. 

I don't usually look at my phone during a trip but I'd been fiddling around adjusting the playlist, and I noticed that a friend from my Ashtanga class had sent through some pictures taken that morning to be used as part of an art project. I have suffered with body dysmorphia and disordered eating since the age of 11 and being confronted with these pictures which were taken in very unflattering postures was extremely triggering during a trip. I tried to I focus on accepting what I was seeing without judgement but they still added to my overall sense of malaise.

Shortly after 10 pm, I accepted that I was not going to enjoy this trip at all and that none of the music I put on was going to feel quite right. I made a cup of tea which I took to bed and replaced the music with an audio book on mindfulness called Trusting the Gold by Tara Brach, whose voice I find very soothing. I understood that what I had experienced on my trip the week before is something that is within us already, but I couldn't quite shake myself out of this uncomfortable mindset and listening to this book felt like the closest I was going to get to accessing that state of blissful awareness.

As I lay in bed listening to the audio book, the effects of the McKennaii must have been building as memories and feelings that I must have been repressing from the relationship I mentioned earlier in the report, and the time surrounding it, began to surface with more intensity.

A vivid memory arose from early in the relationship of the first time that I had visited this man's house, of him being on top of me and I realised with clarity that I hadn't been in a state to give consent. I've never got on well with cannabis and I felt extremely sick and disorientated from the incredibly strong weed he had encouraged me to keep smoking all evening. I had given him no indication that I wanted to have sex with him. It felt invasive and something to be endured, and yet I did not say no because I had been so strongly conditioned to subjugate myself to the needs and wishes of others, so I just lay there feeling detached from my own body and let it happen. Other memories came up too, of the sickeningly abusive things he'd said to me, of times he had deliberately physically hurt me and the extreme emotional abuse that was persistent throughout the relationship. I remembered when I discovered incontrovertibly that he had been cheating on me, that it didn't feel worth the barrage of abuse and gaslighting that a confrontation or ending the relationship would initiate, so I simply pretended not to know about it. I felt strangely detached at this point, looking back at these events through an almost objective lens as if I was watching a film about someone else's life.

During this relationship, and while I was struggling with my own wishes to stop living, my friend Gregg who was a mutual friend of us both and at the time was the only person I was really close with and able to talk to, committed suicide. Instead of being supportive, he used it against me, telling me to fuck off when I wanted to talk about Gregg, suggesting that I could have done more to prevent his death if I hadn't just thought about myself, and once even asking me if I had ever had sex with him because if I had, that might be the reason why he had killed himself.

By this point I was struggling so badly with my own mental health and suicidal thoughts that the only way I could cope with the tension in my own mind was through self harm, which I did daily, severely enough to end up in hospital sometimes for my skin to be sewn back together.  I started seeing a therapist at this time but when the topic of self harm came up - I still feel like this is incredibly fucked up and I'm unsure if the therapist was a pervert or if he had some sort of Jesus complex whereby he imagined healing might occur through his physical touch - he asked me if he could touch the scars and because I had such poor boundaries at the time, I said yes, but I do remember feeling deeply uncomfortable and violated.

Very soon after this, the relationship ended and I also stopped going to therapy after the unsettling Jesus incident, and I suppose I must have packed up all of that trauma and stuffed it away somewhere the way you might push something to the back of a cupboard and forget about it. But during the trip, the feelings that I had been repressing for nearly a decade suddenly became very visceral and I realised that all of the trauma from this phase of my life had been solidified and embedded inside me all along, like a sharp stone that had become dislodged and painfully extracted under the influence of the mushrooms. It suddenly seemed rather absurd to ever have believed that I had left something of that intensity behind and was no longer affected by it when I had never properly confronted it.

So this trip wasn't magical or mystical. It was unpleasant and it felt like a poison being drawn to the surface, but I am grateful to the shrooms. I do believe they give us what we need. Back on the Golden Teachers next week though.