Last Wednesday, I woke up exhausted and despondent. I started drinking alcohol before the sun rose, and had no intention of going to work. By 11am I had ingested 2.65 g of mushrooms, by 2-3 pm I was suicidal.
That’s the synopsis, the details were somewhat more involved.
I have been drinking heavily for around a year. Before around 3 years ago, I never drank at all. Very rarely.
However, with the failure to achieve a romantic relationship that was the dream friendship I had wanted all along, my will to do anything was non-existent for months.
Wednesday was the single most terrifying thing I have experienced in life. I generally don’t get scared. There was an abject terror of being alive at the same time as an abject terror of being dead. Thankfully, one of the directors of the company I work for rang me and she is extremely experienced in life’s deep dramas. My middle son came over and I fell into his arms. I was distraught that he should see me like that, but I realised both then and later, that it precisely because I never saw my own father open up at all (we never really talked about anything, especially nothing about the horrible things that had happened to him), that I had been “toughing” it out for over 20 years.
I was horrified at human nature. Horrified at the war going on and the “video game” like coverage. Horrified that I had been sympathetic to the lies of Putin.
Horrified that I was traumatizing my son, but just as sensitive to the fact it was too late 21 years ago when he was born.
What was most apparent was that “survival” for me was to be in “limbo”. Not really alive, but not dead.
Terrified of living or dying.
I remember saying over and over , “life is so delicate, so fragile”.
Something changed in me though. I saw how malicious I was to everyone. I saw how the psychic reality is like a murky swamp with monsters just under the surface. Dead and vicious things ready to engulf people. I was always pushing others to “change”, stirring them up.
My own swamp was unexamined.
I would never suggest or recommend anyone using psychedelics. I completely understand why they are illegal, and why for thousands of years they have been very carefully hidden in rituals and strict belief systems. As, without a belief system, they are extremely dangerous.
There is an ironic twist though. The belief system I was indoctrinated in was most definitely a psychedelic death cult. It worships the sacrifice of young men. Indeed, a very significant part of my culture is dying young. Christianity is the glorification of killing young men then creating gods out of them. Indeed, it’s the basis of western culture itself.
It may seem insane that I would do what I did last Wednesday. However, there was actually an upside to it.
The fact is, nearly a year to the day I had nearly killed myself illegally riding a motorcycle, drunk, at night in the rain.
This “normal” me has been angling at a way to die for a while.
To put a happy ending to this post, I had a real surge of “get busy living” after Wednesday.
The determination to enjoy whatever I can, and be as kind as I can to everyone has been life changing.
