My First Time Legally Getting High

Yesterday was my birthday. I was going to write a blog post, but I couldn't log in. Now I have something altogether different to write about than what I was going to write about. I would have written about this anyway, but now I'm not going to wait.

A few weeks ago one of my friends had a birthday, and one of her friends gave her some legal mushroom gummies, and she gave me two of them because we've talked about mushrooms as part of our discussions on spirituality. They were two different brands. The first one, as I mentioned, made me exhausted and didn't have any noticeable spiritual effects. I tried the second one last night. I don't know if "spiritual" is the right word, but it sure had effects. I wish my description could do it justice. I don't want to overstate it, but I don't want to downplay it either.

I took it around eight p.m. in case it made me exhausted. It took about forty-five minutes to really kick in. I noticed that my mouth was dry and my head felt a little heavy when I moved it, but I didn't know if that was just my imagination. And then since the sun was going down and the insane heat was dissipating, I decided it was time to go toss away some stale bread in the wooded area that I use for compost sometimes. And I thought that maybe I shouldn't be standing near the edge of a steep hill while I was on drugs, but I wasn't feeling very drugged, and I thought it would be fine. A block from my apartment, I decided that I shouldn't be standing near the edge of a steep hill while I was on drugs, and I turned around and went back. I noticed as I walked that my mouth was frozen in a grin. And then reality seemed to close around me like a tunnel, and then I was laying on the couch. Leaving my apartment and coming right back were a distant memory, and I wasn't sure they'd happened at all. I had to look at the kitchen counter and see where I'd placed the bread after I brought it back.

That was a recurring theme - ending up back on the couch, things becoming distant memories seconds after I did them, and having to verify over and over that I'd actually done them. The couch was like my home base. My returns to it seemed inevitable, beyond my control. The passage of time became weird. Over and over again, I looked at the clock on the stove and saw that only a minute or five had passed since the last time I'd looked, reassuring myself that the last time I'd looked hadn't been a dream. Since I couldn't remember much of the walk home, short though it was, I thought maybe I'd done something crazy and the neighbors had called the police. With my kitchen windows open, it seemed like everyone in Logan was walking down my quiet little street and being needlessly loud, and every noise made me imagine that the police were coming to my door to be assholes as usual. I got up and looked out the window a few times to verify that they weren't parked out front. But I felt no fear. My heart felt like it wanted to be afraid, but something was gently suppressing it. I just felt warmth and peace. The noises outside and of my heavyseat upstairs neighbor creaking around would have normally been very jarring, since I have misophonia, but now I was able to be fully aware of them and simultaneously remain in my semi-delirious state. I still swore in exasperation a little bit. I wasn't completely at peace yet. After ten minutes or an hour, I got up and closed the windows. Then I looked over and over again to verify that I'd really gotten up and closed the windows, and that I'd failed to close one of them properly.

​I felt like my consciousness split into three parts - the delirious drug-addled part doing weird things, the self-aware and skeptical part that analyzed and verified, and a running commentary of how I was going to describe this experience to my friend. Every time I thought of telling her that the first gummy did nothing but this one did something, I laughed a little. But that part faded away as I became more immersed in the experience. These three streams of thought ran alongside each other, intertwined, and very, very fast. I wondered if I was approaching a near-death experience, but nobody said anything about it being so fast. I hoped that consciousness after death didn't run at this speed forever, because it was like a roller coaster and I couldn't get off. Yet despite that preference, I felt no fear and no real discomfort. It was peaceful. I kept mentally stumbling and repeating my thoughts like Porky Pig, and my mouth kept moving along with them. My eyes kept darting all over the place, whether they were open or closed. I had the power to stop these motions, but it was easier to just go along with them. Periodically I moved something to make sure I wasn't paralyzed, but the motions seemed to precede my decisions to move. The word "grounding" kept coming to mind, and I kept feeling the texture of the couch as if I would melt away into an entirely disembodied state otherwise. Over and over again, I had this thought: it was as if I had agency, and yet no agency.

Over and over again, I questioned whether this experience was really happening. Over and over again, I reminded myself that I'd taken a drug, so yes, it was really happening. Over and over again, I wondered if this was a dream, but over and over again, I realized that I didn't have the mental capacity to dream this up. I wondered if this would last forever. Again, no fear, but I wished I knew when it would end, because even though it wasn't unpleasant, it would impede my ability to exist in the world if it lasted forever. I thought about how long it would take me to starve if I stayed on the couch all the time, and how long it would probably take for somebody to check on me. I didn't really think I would die in this state, but the possibility occurred to me, and I decided that was fine because I couldn't imagine a better way to die. I wondered if I should try to resist the high or surrender to it. I didn't fear the loss of agency as I thought I should have. When I did relax, close my eyes, and sink into it, I felt as if I melted into outer space and sensed my body right there below me, yet no longer quite so attached to me. I was myself, yet connected to the universe - and this is a part that I don't want to overstate, as I'm sure it wasn't the grand spiritual epiphany that some people have had with drugs, but it was neat and I don't know a better way to describe it. The couch pillow on top of me felt like an extension of myself. I forced myself back into lucidity to verify that there was a couch pillow on top of me. Then I let myself fade again, and it felt like someone embracing me.

I randomly thought about an older gentleman I knew growing up who'd just wished me a happy birthday on Facebook. I thought about what a classy, respectable guy he was, and realized that he was probably bothered by how crass I am sometimes on social media, but he stayed my Facebook friend anyway. I decided I should be less crass on social media for his sake. I thought of my upstairs neighbor who gave me a little jar of earplugs one night when all of his squeaking in the kitchen was driving me crazy because my own earplugs were worn out, and I figured he's been very tolerant of me yelling at my stupid computer, so the least I could do was offer to give back his little jar of earplugs (minus the ones I've used). My natural impulse honed by years of poverty to hold onto whatever I can get was replaced by a genuine desire to return his property. And I thought of someone I'd wronged in a more significant way, but since it wouldn't be easy to do anything about that, I let that thought go. Then my mind went through just a few of my traumatic experiences, but I felt no trauma. I wondered at the time, as I do now, if that was a taste of the "life review" that people often describe in near-death experiences and I'm not looking forward to. People describe reliving their lives and feeling how they made other people feel. The first two people I thought of seemed like random choices, though. I'm sure I've caused much more pain to some other people.

I coughed sometimes, and I yawned a lot, and tears streamed down my face, and I had to blow my nose. Like the noises, those physical things all seemed like distractions that I registered on a different wavelength without losing my high. I got up a few times to look in the bathroom mirror at my dilated pupils and my moving mouth. Whenever I did, I sang in my mind, to the tune of a Maroon 5 song, "This drug has taken its toll on me..." I thought that was funny. I fell asleep, and then it was 12:23. I felt normal. I made it to bed and got back to sleep in record time. Then I stopped feeling normal. The aforementioned experience continued through the night - in waking, or dreaming, or somewhere in-between, I can't tell. Sometimes I had to check whether I was in bed or still on the couch. Then I got up around quarter after nine, and the real craziness was over. I listened to "Because I Got High" on my morning walk and thought that was funny. I continued to be noticeably high until about six p.m. The mouth and eye movements continued to a much lesser extent, I had to continue grounding myself to a much lesser extent, and I continued to grin and be easily amused by things. Again, I wondered if this altered mental state would be permanent. But in fairness, I was never really normal in the first place. It seems to be over now, even though my pupils are still dilated as I type this.

I can't explain why this experience was so great. It was just a wild ride, yet a peaceful one, and it felt good and it blew my mind. Happy birthday to me! I want to do it again, but not soon. And I'm afraid to try a full dose.