Ya, right, as if one drug, one time, can change your life forever, right? Oh but it can. And as much as you hear drugs are bad, don’t do drugs, blah, blah, blah, most of us don’t believe anything until we experience it first hand. In high school, I had an English teacher who said he was once in love with an amazing girl. One day, he went to go meet her at a party, but once he arrived he found her in a corner, going insane on LSD, and she was subsequently checked into a mental institution, never to know who he was again. I heard this and it made me sad, but I figured that I was invincible; a spell was caste on me when I was born to say nothing bad would ever happen to me. That’s what 15 year olds think right? When you are a teenager, you don’t understand your own life, its possibilities, its limitations. You don’t really know why you are alive, and you don’t really care, you just want to enjoy the ride because it’s all you can do. You don’t care about school; you care about how you are going to get alcohol on the weekend. Just reread some old notes passed in class if you don’t believe me. They probably sound like this: “Hey man, so bored in class right now.. have any clue who can buy us liquor Friday?” Sound familiar? When you’re fifteen, you take so many things in your life for granted. Your parents, your education, your friends, your life itself. Your brain is going through changes as you turn from a child to an adult and your judgements and perceptions are questionable at best.
Let me tell you about the worst day of my life. Its time for me to talk about it, as a way of healing, even if it is ten years later. I was hanging out with a girlfriend and someone told us they had a friend selling LSD. I had done it before and it had made things shiny and exciting, so I thought, why not? My girlfriend and I went to the dealers house, just some local dude about our age who we didn’t know very well. I took two hits of double dipped LSD on two little pieces of seemingly harmless looking paper he "man on the moon" and slipped them on my tongue, my friend took one, double dipped. It was sunny outside. We went for a walk. We talked and laughed. We stopped in at a local coffee shop and talked to some friends. My boyfriend was there, and he was mad at me for taking the drug. I said, “whatever dude, you do it too, don’t be a hypocrite.” We left, care free. Spat the paper out, it had been long enough. We walked down a path, it was late in the day, the sun was sinking low in the sky. The stones on the path cast long jaged shadows. My friend said “Oh no, oh no, the stones are moving and scary!” I laughed and told her the stones were fine. She was relentless, the stones were scary and things were bad. Eventually, I believed her, and the nightmare began to set in. The rest of the walk and going into her apartment is a blurred memory these years later. What I do remember is lying on her bed for hours, experiencing absolute hell. I felt extremely uncomfortable in my own skin, like jaged shards of electricity were coarsing though my veins. I tossed and turned and took my clothes off, nothing helped. I experienced horrible visual hallucinations that encompassed all of my vision. There were disturbing, unidentifiable cartoons plastered over my eyeballs, strange animated brightly coloured shapes, ungodly animated beings; something like Egyptian heiroglyphics. There was a loud creepy voice in my ears, that wasn't really there, or was it? There were triangular, black vortexes opening up within my visual hallucinations, threatening to consume my conscience. There were waves of blood running down the walls, rushing through my body and out into my vision. I told my self, as I lay tourtured, the consoling thought that none of this was real, but eventually this thought was misconstrued into thinking that nothing in the universe was real. I cried and screamed in histaria for hours as I dissolved into absolute madness. My friend lay beside me this whole time staring at a drawing on a paper that she said was moving. I looked at it. It was a girl. It was moving. But I had way bigger problems. Our experiences were very much unique. Lying in the same bed, but worlds away. My body eventually didn’t feel like my own. My mind was engulfed in the vortexes of nothingness. It was in this place that I ceased to exist on a conscious level. I thought I was not human, just a mass of blood and electricity. Hours passed in this black hole, I had no consciousness, I was either nothing, or dead, but not asleep. This was the most terrifying moment of my life, the moment I was no longer a conscious being.
The next morning when I got up, the hallucinations were gone, but imprints of them seemed to be on my eyes. Everywhere I looked I saw the black noise that was once a hallucination. I went into my friend’s bathroom and threw up, and threw up, and threw up until dark purple blood vessels had burst under my eyes. I looked in the mirror. I didn’t recognise my face. I stared into my eyes, they looked unfamiliar and my pupils were huge. I stood there staring at my eyes, unable to pull myself away. After all that, here I was. In the flesh. Everything I touched felt weird to my hands. Scary, like electricity, prickly, like anxiety. Like the prickle in your finger tips you get when you touch a hot stove or a sharp knife. Eventually, I went home. Home to my parents house were they waited lovingly with open arms. I avoided there gaze. They asked me how my night was, I said “fine,” and I went upstairs. It wasn’t fine, it was hell. I found my baby sister playing in her room. The most precious little being in the world. I held her, and I cried. I thought I had lost her forever. I thought that this beautiful reality that I lived in had ceased to exist as I knew it. My dad stood in the door way of the room and smiled at me, what he saw was two of his beautiful daughters. I didn’t look at him because I knew how freaky my face looked.
Here I am, 10 years later and I still have anxiety about this traumatic event in my life. If I touch a cold object, hear a strange electric sound, see weird visual effects, have a conversation about certain things, for a few seconds, I feel like I don’t exist, and I get waves of anxiety. Of course, logically, I know I exist, but it's a feeling inside, one thats not easy to describe. You can call this ego death. You can call this a stupid decision or a shitty situation, but I call it hell.
For ten years I haven’t told anyone the details of this story. I kept it inside because it gives me anxiety to even talk about. It scares me. It makes me question my sanity. Recently I met someone that I felt close enough to, to talk to him about this. He has helped me face it, as ignoring it hasn’t gotten me anywhere. We all have fears, regrets, secrets. Carrying around the weight of them will only set you back. I beg you not to make the same bad decision that I did, but I must live and let live.
This is my story, what’s yours?
