I guess I've been a drug addict for about a decade now; ever since I was a teenager every weekend was alcohol, cocaine, MDMA, weed, xanax, LSD, K, benzos, amphetamines: I'd go on but I think the point has been made, in the parlance of our times, my group of friends were the people who could find, whatever you may have needed.
For about 5 years though, I haven't really been into the party scene, certainly not the way that I was in college; don't misconstrue my words, I still take my share of drugs (and your share, and his share, you get the idea...) but they've been much more focused on whatever intellectual, moral and spiritual trip that I definitely believe (through my actions and as far as I can ascertain, my actual feelings) that I'm on; aided at times with psychedelics, my preference appropriately being LSD, which I guess is my long winded intro as to why I've chosen to post here.
When I was younger I used to party on LSD, I used to take a couple hundred µg, probably candy flip, blow some lines, take some ambien; take whatever came my way, really, wake up not remember much except that I generally had a good time. There was no introspection, there was no substantive change in world view beyond perhaps the slight natural uptick in empathy that tends to come from having shared even mild psychic experiences with others. It was a trip, it was a ball... but it was no trip.
In the last few years a number of this group that has been tighter than the pants on Will.i.am has been trying to cope with a lot; members of our group have committed suicide, family members have died, one of us was institutionalized after breaking mentally to an extent I hadn't even considered in my youthful exuberance, most of our SOs who were still around finally boarded the lifeboats; in short the lights came back up and the world hit us like a ton of bricks. We've gone through awful phases with dissociatives, major benzo/oxy/alcohol abuse, we've made decisions that make teenagers seem responsible and have been seemingly just trying to self-destruct without anyone wanting to press the button. At the same time, as people often do as they see their lives falling apart; our conversations have become darker, more nihilistic, less connected to the reality that we're feeling scorned by.
Continuing with our good decisions, in the last year or so, we have decided that despite the disaster areas that our minds have become, doctors heal thyselves, and have plunged (informed intellectually, but entirely unprepared) into psychedelics hard and have frequently (monthly, at a minimum) been melting on significantly higher doses than before, somewhere in the 900-1200 mcg a trip range. It doesn't seem necessary to say to anyone who would understand, but it hasn't gone well. The growing sense of nihilism, absurdity, anxiety, dread, loss, fear permeate our sessions from the get-go; if no-one has a meltdown these days it's considered a successful trip. I've seen friends, brothers, people who seemed mentally stable (relativity) to me hours before lose their connection to this plane of reality and months later have not returned, they're no longer the people who went in. When my dad used to tell me stories from his less reputable youth he would use the phrase "never come down," which I mostly hand-waved as anti-scientific D.A.R.E.-eque nonsense; once you understand, I guess you really don't want to; what I would give a lot to be able to have that conversation with him knowing what I know now...
Yet, we seem unable to stop; we've created our own delusional world that makes perfect sense to us, but ultimately has to be considered madness as no one could appreciate our thought paradigms who even entertains consensus reality, maybe we're those black swans who somehow figured it all out but statistically it seems more likely that we've lost it (whatever it was,) we somehow certain in our conviction that the answer isn't to back off and let our brains process the trauma (for lack of a better word,) that we've been putting them through and try to integrate it into the world we're forced to exist in, but rather to delve deeper into our madness until we either snap or find a way to integrate back into functional human beings.
I know I can never see the world the way that I used to, I don't think I'd want to. That being said, I'm so lost in my head; so without hope, direction, purpose, grounding and perhaps most important, my fucking identity, that I don't know if I can ever rebuild my mind. I don't know if I can ever convince myself of the importance of what is real ever again. I don't know if I can continue to move forward with my head down in a world that used to seem to have such clear dividing lines and now I can't even begin to know what to make of it.
I'm far from the only person that this is happened to, I hear and read about similar things all the time. If there's anyone out there who got out though, did you ever feel good again, did you ever find something meaningful that agrees with this world again, how did you do it?
tl;dr: My brain is a fried egg.
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[–] BoracicBaronetYr [S] ago
"Reduced me to my foundation" is almost exactly how I would put it. I feel stuck in a rut where the rock on which I base my identity is that I am a person; no more, no less. I don't know if I ever was anything else; but it's encouraging to hear that it's possible, forever is a long time.
Thank you.