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Live writing from a first trip

On the tenth anniversary of my first trip, a reminder of the beauty we can find with each other.

I took mushrooms for the first time just after college, near exactly ten years ago. While coming down, sitting on a friend's balcony, I opened my laptop and tried to summarize the incredible things I had felt. Looking back, I was extremely lucky to have had the experience I had. I think I had unknowingly prepared myself, and been prepared, by the books I'd read and the culture I'd been exposed to growing up. This was also probably the time in my life where I felt the safest and most confident; and perhaps the most free. Call it folly of youth.

Some short context: We began in a park, but I quickly split off on my own. I peaked for hours at the base of a tree in a small wooded thicket, secluded from others. On the back of the wave (but still very high) I walked across the street into an Art Museum and spend an hour walking through the wings, at one point sitting down on a bench and quietly sobbing. I remember a security guard came up to ask if I was okay.

"I'm okay" I said. "I'm just having a really good day."

He left me alone for the rest of the afternoon. The perks of being a 22-year-old white boy next to a college campus are not to be underestimated.

Below is the first part of that trip report in its entirety. I've tried to reproduce the formatting as best I can, but I haven't corrected run-on sentences or weird breaks, it's part of what I was communicating. Without further ado:

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Every moment is perfect.

{A page break}

I have to wonder, how much of the way I process thoughts has been structured by the environment I grew up in.
Country city neighborhood class race.

Trip experience:
Periods of incredible connection. Feelings of recognition across boundaries of space, time, and persona. Incredible peace knowing that where I’m going has been walked before (other psychonauts)

Interspersed by fears that my normal experience has been rigorously structured by my environment. Fear that barriers have been erected by society. Recognition of those barriers in a a visceral way. Feeling them through experience rather than through intellect (normal way is through intellect). Sympathy towards artists trying to break through those barriers and incredible gratitude towards them. Sympathy for artists that really HATE those systems. I’ve always understood (through intellect) how that divide can work. But today I really felt it through experience. I felt the barrier, not necessarily the experience of the person on the other side of it. And I recognized artwork as:

Guidance
Empathy
More things besides, but all subtleties of empathy. It meant so much that this person was able to communicate.

[I paused here]

"Ask the Gods, then ask the kings, then ask the farmers, then see what the dog has to say."

That’s the best advice on world-building in fiction. It’s important because it lets you create a world that’s as complex as reality. This trip was characterized by recognizing how complex reality really is. How invested with detail is every particle. And how connected. How rich. Before I knew through intellect. Today I felt through experience. And no matter where you are. Remember how many other places you could be. And then remember that there are people in those places. And that some of them were you. But not NEARLY all of them.

First I dealt with the natural world. A tree, then...

I realize how hard it is the impose linearity on this trip. At almost every moment I was struck by the juxtaposition of different systems and spheres of being. I’ve never

Trip Experience: Exposed. Aware.

EXPOSED.

AWARE.

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It ends there, on a dramatic but very honest note.

Truth be told, I'm not a fan of trip reports. I think the nature of tripping makes it hard to recount even in the best circumstances, and individual experience is so subjective as to make comparison improbable.

I think the best reports, like any travelogue, are less about the sights and landmarks and more about what the place meant to you. The impression that it left. Reading those has always done me good. Count this as a personal attempt to add to that worthy catalogue.

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