Thursday, March 25, 2010
My Magic Bus Ride
In addition to our semi-impulse buying but awesome iPod Touch shopping experience, the fiancé and I were also excited to try shrooms for his birthday. I don't really do drugs. I don't even smoke pot. We had never taken them before.
I am still trying to sort out what happened. I can't call my experience good or bad, depends what perspective I want to take. It started to go downhill the first moment I spent alone, when I went to use the bathroom. My visuals went from nothing to interesting to freaky and then to scary. My thoughts were even more trouble. I got stuck on the bad thought train and couldn't get off.
Before I took it, I did Internet research for two weeks so I would know what to expect. In one experience I read about, the person said he sort of came to this fork in the road: a pathway to heaven or hell. A great night or a bad night. Freaking out or letting it work it's magic. He ended up chosing the right path and had a great time. I thought that was pretty cool.
What was not cool was that for hours I felt like I was walking that fine line between the two places. No matter how much I wanted to choose the good path, the happy fun path, or how I would have even settled for an introspective but not uncomfortable or negative path, the bad kept pulling me back in. It was like trying to ride a wave out to shore but never getting there because the undertow was too strong.
I thought about my sister. I thought about my mom. I thought new thoughts about the past, but yeah, none of it was good, or even profound. Just more things I couldn't change. One painful thought led to another; when I tried to reroute it was like "new subject" but whatever was new wasn't any better.
I spent the night fighting for my mind while trying not to let on how terrible I felt. Everyone else was having a good time. I wanted Toby to have a good birthday. I almost cried more than once but caught it. We sat in camping chairs outside by the fire listening to music. They even let me make a playlist, even though everyone was listening to Phish and enjoying it -- everyone but me; it freaked me out.
I kept looking through my iPod for something happy. Almost nothing was. My happy music from the past is mostly depression under a mask of riffs, or unabashed indie angst in your face like blood on the floor. Maybe rocking out always made me happy before but now it's all very confusing.
And in my state, the struggle I was having, on top of rechanneling the bad thoughts, was this duality. This argument. The old me and the new me. The depressed me and the happy me. The dark me and the light me. My angels and demons, duking it out, fighting over which ones were more real.
The next day, I told Toby maybe after the wedding I should go back to therapy. I said I still have things to work out.
Then Saturday we went out again. We celebrated a lot! I decided to take some again but not as much. We had an amazing, silly time. Much later I had sobered up and was talking to a friend. He said I'm in a stressful time; so much going on. He said everyone has thoughts and memories that haunt them, that I'm okay. I do feel OK, only my biggest concern from the first night came in the thought that I may be hard-wired for depression.
I've spent nearly my whole life battling depression. From the time I was a small child; to when I started crying uncontrollably at about 9; to losing my shit in the classroom in 6th grade all the time and getting made fun of for it; to going on to high school and leading a double-life, posing as a good girl without traumatic issues and keeping my lips pretty sealed about my past so as to maintain appearances; to college where over the years I picked up cigarettes, pot, acid, xtc, more pot, and then tons of alcohol, along with depressing music, in that order, all the while trying to find a boy fucked up enough to relate to me but perhaps just less enough to save me and fill the hole deepened every year in a snowball created out of daddy issues and a long history of abuse.
Then a miracle happens. An accident that left me scarred and in pain and hating myself even more for awhile but alive. ALIVE. This November that will be four years ago. I am still healing. I am still learning how to be happy. How to appreciate things. How to not sweat the small stuff, and how to not allow the big stuff to take me over either.
I felt better about this stuff actually when I thought about it again later. The fact that I was able to keep up the fight, even as the drugs were trying to turn on me is impressive, I think. I guess I was just wrong in assuming that the battle would be easier on the other side of the moon. The truth is I'm still fighting it.
In addition to our semi-impulse buying but awesome iPod Touch shopping experience, the fiancé and I were also excited to try shrooms for his birthday. I don't really do drugs. I don't even smoke pot. We had never taken them before.
I am still trying to sort out what happened. I can't call my experience good or bad, depends what perspective I want to take. It started to go downhill the first moment I spent alone, when I went to use the bathroom. My visuals went from nothing to interesting to freaky and then to scary. My thoughts were even more trouble. I got stuck on the bad thought train and couldn't get off.
Before I took it, I did Internet research for two weeks so I would know what to expect. In one experience I read about, the person said he sort of came to this fork in the road: a pathway to heaven or hell. A great night or a bad night. Freaking out or letting it work it's magic. He ended up chosing the right path and had a great time. I thought that was pretty cool.
What was not cool was that for hours I felt like I was walking that fine line between the two places. No matter how much I wanted to choose the good path, the happy fun path, or how I would have even settled for an introspective but not uncomfortable or negative path, the bad kept pulling me back in. It was like trying to ride a wave out to shore but never getting there because the undertow was too strong.
I thought about my sister. I thought about my mom. I thought new thoughts about the past, but yeah, none of it was good, or even profound. Just more things I couldn't change. One painful thought led to another; when I tried to reroute it was like "new subject" but whatever was new wasn't any better.
I spent the night fighting for my mind while trying not to let on how terrible I felt. Everyone else was having a good time. I wanted Toby to have a good birthday. I almost cried more than once but caught it. We sat in camping chairs outside by the fire listening to music. They even let me make a playlist, even though everyone was listening to Phish and enjoying it -- everyone but me; it freaked me out.
I kept looking through my iPod for something happy. Almost nothing was. My happy music from the past is mostly depression under a mask of riffs, or unabashed indie angst in your face like blood on the floor. Maybe rocking out always made me happy before but now it's all very confusing.
And in my state, the struggle I was having, on top of rechanneling the bad thoughts, was this duality. This argument. The old me and the new me. The depressed me and the happy me. The dark me and the light me. My angels and demons, duking it out, fighting over which ones were more real.
The next day, I told Toby maybe after the wedding I should go back to therapy. I said I still have things to work out.
Then Saturday we went out again. We celebrated a lot! I decided to take some again but not as much. We had an amazing, silly time. Much later I had sobered up and was talking to a friend. He said I'm in a stressful time; so much going on. He said everyone has thoughts and memories that haunt them, that I'm okay. I do feel OK, only my biggest concern from the first night came in the thought that I may be hard-wired for depression.
I've spent nearly my whole life battling depression. From the time I was a small child; to when I started crying uncontrollably at about 9; to losing my shit in the classroom in 6th grade all the time and getting made fun of for it; to going on to high school and leading a double-life, posing as a good girl without traumatic issues and keeping my lips pretty sealed about my past so as to maintain appearances; to college where over the years I picked up cigarettes, pot, acid, xtc, more pot, and then tons of alcohol, along with depressing music, in that order, all the while trying to find a boy fucked up enough to relate to me but perhaps just less enough to save me and fill the hole deepened every year in a snowball created out of daddy issues and a long history of abuse.
Then a miracle happens. An accident that left me scarred and in pain and hating myself even more for awhile but alive. ALIVE. This November that will be four years ago. I am still healing. I am still learning how to be happy. How to appreciate things. How to not sweat the small stuff, and how to not allow the big stuff to take me over either.
I felt better about this stuff actually when I thought about it again later. The fact that I was able to keep up the fight, even as the drugs were trying to turn on me is impressive, I think. I guess I was just wrong in assuming that the battle would be easier on the other side of the moon. The truth is I'm still fighting it.
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