algidity
Esteemed member
Hello everyone!
Feel free to call me M, or by my username. Or by nothing at all, really anything is fine. I'm returning to the world of psychedelics and expansion of consciousness after an extended hiatus. I am quite excited to be back here again.
To be blunt about it, my life has been unhappy and difficult for some time now. I've struggled with depression since my teenage years, and spent most of my 20s in what now feels like a haze. I've taken to calling it the blackout. It's punctuated by periods of happiness but by and large, I feel I was coasting through life and had normalized how unhappy I was. I call it the blackout because it feels like that. Just a void in my life lacking in distinct memories or emotions.
I'm familiar with psychedelics from my time in college. They granted me insight then and contributed greatly to the foundation of who I am today. I'd lost touch with them for so long, though, and with that I lost so much perspective on myself and my environment. I've been doing a tremendous amount of work to make some incredibly difficult but necessary life changes over the past 18 months and although it's been a never-ending battle, I'm finally improving! Last year at what may have been my absolute lowest and when, candidly, I had started to become a danger to myself I was reminded by an old friend with whom I'd reconnected that I'd signed up the prior year to join a group attending EDC in Las Vegas. I knew nothing about electronic music and was in such a terrible point in my life at that time that I'd completely forgotten I'd even agreed to go. I very nearly backed out but went purely out of knowing that if I didn't, I would guilt myself endlessly about it.
I was a bit of a broken woman at that point and was maybe unknowingly using this as a last ditch effort to add meaning to my life. If I'm going to be this miserable, I thought, I may as well lean into hedonism. It turned out to be entirely life changing for me, despite whatever intentions I'd initially had. I had many heart-to-hearts, both sober and under the influence of a cocktail of things, with old friends, new friends, and complete strangers. I was introduced to an entire culture, set of values, and type of music I'd never before seen. I found other people who had similar stories and were able to empathize and even heal with me.
I came back with a fresh lease on life. I managed to quit drinking, after a decade of alcoholism. I made new connections and rekindled old ones. I found a new job I actually enjoy and feel proud of. I started creating art. I started therapy. I began to use psychedelics and dissociatives as therapeutic tools and integrating those experiences into my life to improve it. In December I tried DMT for the first time, and had the most beautiful experiences I could imagine. Nothing could have prepared me for that. I remember trying it for the first time and before losing myself to hyperspace, realizing how fundamentally different this was going to be from any other psychedlic journey I'd ever taken. My experiences with DMT allowed me to realize I can love myself, and let me forgive myself for things I had been holding onto for so many years. My avatar is an imperfect but reasonable approximation of the entity (although in the mythos I've created for myself I refer to them as angels) that showed me how little difference there is between me, you, and the universe. And how love is fundamental to the constructs of reality.
I'm an engineer by trade, a scientist at heart, and have always been a staunch rejector of the metaphysical and supernatural in favor of empirical evidence given to us by science. Perhaps I am suspending my disbelief, or perhaps I really do believe it, but DMT forced me to confront the idea that there might be more to this can we can measure or observe, and more to it than we may ever be able to understand. The underpinnings of reality may not be quantifiable or knowable, and that's okay. It shattered my cold cynical atheism and gave me instead a sort of spirituality I've carried with me since and which has given me so much happiness, comfort, mystified awe, and a voracious appetite for life. A hybrid model of what I believed before, and I think a much healthier and happier one.
This has gotten quite long so I'm going to digress here for now. I'm excited to see how my journey progresses, and hope this place might become a perhaps small, but meaningful, component of my life.
~M
Feel free to call me M, or by my username. Or by nothing at all, really anything is fine. I'm returning to the world of psychedelics and expansion of consciousness after an extended hiatus. I am quite excited to be back here again.
To be blunt about it, my life has been unhappy and difficult for some time now. I've struggled with depression since my teenage years, and spent most of my 20s in what now feels like a haze. I've taken to calling it the blackout. It's punctuated by periods of happiness but by and large, I feel I was coasting through life and had normalized how unhappy I was. I call it the blackout because it feels like that. Just a void in my life lacking in distinct memories or emotions.
I'm familiar with psychedelics from my time in college. They granted me insight then and contributed greatly to the foundation of who I am today. I'd lost touch with them for so long, though, and with that I lost so much perspective on myself and my environment. I've been doing a tremendous amount of work to make some incredibly difficult but necessary life changes over the past 18 months and although it's been a never-ending battle, I'm finally improving! Last year at what may have been my absolute lowest and when, candidly, I had started to become a danger to myself I was reminded by an old friend with whom I'd reconnected that I'd signed up the prior year to join a group attending EDC in Las Vegas. I knew nothing about electronic music and was in such a terrible point in my life at that time that I'd completely forgotten I'd even agreed to go. I very nearly backed out but went purely out of knowing that if I didn't, I would guilt myself endlessly about it.
I was a bit of a broken woman at that point and was maybe unknowingly using this as a last ditch effort to add meaning to my life. If I'm going to be this miserable, I thought, I may as well lean into hedonism. It turned out to be entirely life changing for me, despite whatever intentions I'd initially had. I had many heart-to-hearts, both sober and under the influence of a cocktail of things, with old friends, new friends, and complete strangers. I was introduced to an entire culture, set of values, and type of music I'd never before seen. I found other people who had similar stories and were able to empathize and even heal with me.
I came back with a fresh lease on life. I managed to quit drinking, after a decade of alcoholism. I made new connections and rekindled old ones. I found a new job I actually enjoy and feel proud of. I started creating art. I started therapy. I began to use psychedelics and dissociatives as therapeutic tools and integrating those experiences into my life to improve it. In December I tried DMT for the first time, and had the most beautiful experiences I could imagine. Nothing could have prepared me for that. I remember trying it for the first time and before losing myself to hyperspace, realizing how fundamentally different this was going to be from any other psychedlic journey I'd ever taken. My experiences with DMT allowed me to realize I can love myself, and let me forgive myself for things I had been holding onto for so many years. My avatar is an imperfect but reasonable approximation of the entity (although in the mythos I've created for myself I refer to them as angels) that showed me how little difference there is between me, you, and the universe. And how love is fundamental to the constructs of reality.
I'm an engineer by trade, a scientist at heart, and have always been a staunch rejector of the metaphysical and supernatural in favor of empirical evidence given to us by science. Perhaps I am suspending my disbelief, or perhaps I really do believe it, but DMT forced me to confront the idea that there might be more to this can we can measure or observe, and more to it than we may ever be able to understand. The underpinnings of reality may not be quantifiable or knowable, and that's okay. It shattered my cold cynical atheism and gave me instead a sort of spirituality I've carried with me since and which has given me so much happiness, comfort, mystified awe, and a voracious appetite for life. A hybrid model of what I believed before, and I think a much healthier and happier one.
This has gotten quite long so I'm going to digress here for now. I'm excited to see how my journey progresses, and hope this place might become a perhaps small, but meaningful, component of my life.
~M
