Can Cracking Your Back Trip Off of Acid Again
The first and simply time I've done acrid, I was on a nude beach on the cardinal declension of California. The shore was empty save for the five of the states, fully clothed, and an older gentleman stomping around in the waves, fully nude. I saturday cross-legged on a towel and appeared deceptively at ease, playing with sand, gazing out at the h2o.
Unlike natural psychedelics, LSD is unmistakably chemical. Information technology did not make me feel at one with nature so much as fearful of it. I watched, uneasily, equally freckles swam around on my thighs like tiny autonomous bumper cars. I dipped my easily into the sand over and over, observing how the granules clung to my skin similar sticky magnets. I watched the murky bluish expanse in forepart of me as it tilted almost imperceptibly towards me, the h2o threatening to eat me whole.
Equally I disappeared farther into the trip, my physical surroundings were drowned out by the gravitational swirl of my mind. To this day, I don't have the words to describe where I went, except to say that I was trapped in abstract idea, struggling to remember where I was, simply occasionally registering that I was me — on a embankment, okay — earlier disappearing back into the inky wormhole.
At some betoken, I took my friend Ian aside. Our designated sober guide. "I am losing touch," I told him. "Am I okay?" I kicked at a loose rock in an try to stay present. He jogged a lazy loop around me, the visual drag of his torso encircling me in a bind I couldn't escape.
"You're totally fine, Haley," he said, slowing to a cease with a laugh that sounded menacing. "You're practiced. Nosotros're going to a concert after this and it'due south going to be and then fun."
"A concert," I said, forgetting what the word meant.
Several terrifying years later, known to the sober globe as 2 hours, I came to: I was continuing among my friends. I felt cool grass under my bare feet, a warm cakewalk against my skin. The lord's day had sunk behind the water and a familiar melody floated over united states of america from a nearby stage. We'd made it to the prove, and I'd fabricated sweet, beautiful contact with reality.
I've been haunted by that acid trip for years. For a long fourth dimension, nothing could convince me the mind-bending idea-spirals, which made me feel like an unwilling captive of my ain mind, were worth the funny story. Just it recently occurred to me that my trip, incomprehensible as it was, might be an apt metaphor for the human being condition — and may be the most concentrated glimpse I'll e'er get into the mode our minds command usa.
A couple days afterward the testify, as my friend Lydia collection united states of america support the coast, I proclaimed myself done with acid forever. "A bad trip is scary," Lydia replied between drags of her cigarette, similar the sage 21-year-quondam I believed her to be, "but adjacent fourth dimension yous can just remind yourself that yous're tripping and pull yourself out of it, you know?"
This was a common creed among our group at the time — that a bad trip was one rational idea away from being practiced. But it never quite worked in my experience, because drugs warp your mental makeup, sometimes beyond recognition. That a detail line of thought might back-trail you to the other side is never a guarantee. In fact, this is central to the appeal of most drugs.
This is also the prevailing catch-22, I've come up to realize, of emotions in general. We are perpetually trapped in our current experience, whether the condition is clear to us or not. And knowing the truth, intellectually — I'm just tripping, I shouldn't feel like this, I'thou smarter than that — doesn't necessarily modify annihilation. Y'all'll nonetheless be high, or you'll still be sad, or you'll nevertheless know better. Because we see the globe through whatever glasses are strapped to our faces at a given moment: rose-colored, psychedelic, the muted palette of depression. The truth, in other words, doesn't always set us free. Begrudging this is the stuff of great literature, and probably many diaries.
I've ofttimes assumed that life's ultimate pursuit was somehow learning to meet across these limitations. To embody whatever is my "truthful" perspective, unencumbered by such trivialities as mood or hallucinations. And I'd do this by sheer force of wisdom, past letting my less evolved qualities shake off in the process of growing up, by reminding myself that I'm merely tripping. Only like that twenty-four hours on the beach, such clarity eludes me over and over. Emotions and delusions cling to my mind like sticky magnets.
I'm just now beginning to meet this for what information technology is: human being. I don't remember information technology's right to assume that there is an authentic version of me, buried under all the moods. That very view is what has lead me to believe my emotions are something to solve, or my swings something to diagnose. It's what makes me recollect, I only haven't felt similar myself lately, when what I actually mean is: I only don't like how I've felt lately.
Information technology's a separation I no doubt adult to cope, simply which has the unfortunate side effect of making me believe at that place is some rendering of me that is truthful: I am good at writing; I have interesting ideas; I am a social animal. Only these traits are simply as ephemeral every bit moods. They ebb and flow like waves in a puddle, greeting and then leaving me without my consent. Sometimes I cannot write, take no ideas, and don't want to meet a soul. My affections wax and wane, too. No one state is "me." Or rather, they all are. I tin can no sooner escape that cycle than I tin can intellectualize my style out of an acrid trip.
Information technology's hard to remember this when the tide rolls in, though, specially when it brings the best version of myself: happy, energetic, curious, compassionate. It'southward far more satisfying to call up, my work has paid off and I have evolved, than it is to think, this is temporary, ride it while you tin, baby daughter. But as fourth dimension marches on, I'm beginning to see the latter as more forgiving. Information technology may rob me of some credit when I'm buoyed by optimism, only it also ways I need not panic when, inevitably, that energy dissipates like pee in a water park wave pool. Because it always comes dorsum, unfortunately and fortunately.
Some time betwixt the bumper automobile freckles and the cool grass, my friend Thos and I were standing in a sandy nearby parking lot, preparing to walk to the concert venue. "Want me to bring this?" He was holding my backpack upwards, staring at me. I stared back, dislocated and unsure. "We'll bring it," he said finally, kindly.
Afterwards, we laughed about the moment. "I fully lost the ability to respond questions," I said, dumbfounded by my encephalon'south capacity to alter so completely. Only in fourth dimension, that surprises me less and less. As I circular the corner on my 30th yr, my capacity for multitudes — along with anybody else'due south — has revealed itself equally one of life's only constants.
I ever imagined that getting older meant inching towards a more than static version of my personality, but it'south turned out to be more about embracing transience as a default. And treating ebbs and flows as marks of blitheness rather than proof of an unreliable self. Being loftier, in the cease, is not and then different from being sad or happy or fulfilled. Each is its own small unit of insanity, showing us parts of ourselves, blinding us to others, and then slotting in as another step on the road to being us, and being alive.
Animation by Madeline Montoya.
Source: https://repeller.com/bad-acid-trip-taught-me-everything/
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