OLD TRIP: First Time With My Own Mushrooms

Sunday was a journey day. 

This is what I wanted to grow the mushrooms FOR - I am enjoying all of the mycology, the agar work, the beautiful and bizarre forms, the unusual biology... but for me, it's a quest to sort out some really stuck trauma issues, some treatment-resistant depression, and other icky things that have been getting in the way of me being my best self. 

I started with one gram, mainly to see how these mushrooms compare to (very few) experiences I've had before. I would normally go at this fasted, because the impact is much greater, but this was on a stomach full with delicious Easter brunch. I chewed the first round, mainly because I've never had one of these mushrooms in my mouth; my prior experiences were all with ones that had been ground up by someone else and mixed into chocolate, so I wanted to see what they taste like, and how the texture is. The texture isn't awesome - it's definitely "chewing a dried mushroom" - and the texture was mild but slightly bitter. I had never seen a whole Psilocybe cubensis mushroom in real life (i.e. not a picture) until mine grew. I had a friend who was acting as a virtual sitter, chatting with me by Messenger, although anything less than about three or four grams is not really the kind of thing that needs it - but it was a comfort to have an experienced compadre listening in, and it was a nice way to be able to record some of the trip in texts. 

After about forty minutes, the visuals were with me, although not very strong. I could see them, lying in bed with my eyes closed, but nothing was very intense; small kaleidoscope-like patterns of pink and green, light and dark. Listening to Michael Sealey's soothing voice and musical background was, as always, relaxing and calming, but I wasn't getting much of a boost from the mushrooms. Physically it felt pleasant, like a mild to moderate cannabis body buzz, very mild visual morphing if I looked at something with a close texture like the terry cloth towel on the chair arm. 

I decided on another gram, and mixed it with lime juice to speed the come-up and intensify the effects. It definitely was stronger, although next time I want to start with something more like 2.5g. 

I went back in and laid down again, Jackie and Cowboy lying beside me like little guardians. They seem to know that I'm OK, not quite sleeping, not in trouble, but they need to be with me. More Michael Sealey, but I ended up just kind of texting and thinking, and working through things. 

The psilocybin gives me a LOT more access to subconscious emotional material. It feels, a lot of times, like the mushroom kind of takes me by the skull and points my face at things and makes me LOOK at them. It's not mean-natured, or scolding; it's very gentle, sometimes kind of sad, but always kind. It really is like someone who loves you saying, "You did this, and you could have done better." I was very aware of how much good I have in me, but also aware of so many things that I've done wrong, out of selfishness, fear, insecurity, anxiety, laziness. It was a challenging but very therapeutic couple of hours. I sent Husband a lot of texts too, explaining what was going on in my head. Looking at my phone, the letters would swim as I tried to type, and it appeared that they were at the front of something deep, like they were on the front glass of an aquarium and there was a great deal of depth behind them; they swam around and the lines would not lie straight. There is a phase that I think of as the purple-and-green phase, and during that part I am very conscious of all my bones, and my mortality, and the way that everything passes and fades. This makes perfect sense to me, with mushrooms - they're all about breaking down organic material and returning it to the earth. We are glorious, but we are BRIEF. I had a strong image, halfway between an actual hallucination and an imagination, that my hands and the phone's keyboard were covered in vines and leaves and soil, with tiny crawling creatures; I had to work through them as I typed. It felt like I was in an ancient jungle temple, lost and grown over. 

Autocorrect was a dick, the ENTIRE time. It was like the mushroom was making me own EVERY SINGLE LETTER of what I wanted to say, and not giving me a pass on anything. I'm very attached to language; it's incredibly important to me, both for the ability to communicate, and for its beauty and its purity - I'm not going to use the word "hard" when the word "challenging" is what I mean. And for every thing, especially the tough parts that weren't easy to look at, it fought me tooth and nail, and I had to type it with those swimming wiggling letters, one letter at a time, the whole word. Sometimes I'll let go of my obsession with spelling and grammar and orthography, but this time it seemed important to keep it all correct, because I needed to have it right, and I needed to own each word of it. 

After things started to settle down, I realized it was time to get up and walk the dogs and feed them. I needed to eat; eating usually breaks the spell for me and brings me back to regular reality. I had a little Satsuma orange; I need to remember to eat MORE to break the spell, because that wasn't quite enough. I walked the dogs, and I had a perfect moment visiting with one of the neighbors, talking about how neither of us is twenty five, or thirty five, any more, but we're growing into a new stage of life, and just LOOK at him. He's a big muscle dude, and even though he's aging, and working on scheduling his second hip replacement, he's still smoking hot, and he runs a successful roofing company and has a married daughter and grandkids, and he just bought the house they had been renting, and he is constantly working on making it good. And we talked about how the best way, is to stop messing with Just for Men, and OWN the silver in your beard, and lean in to being an older man in a different role. 

And then I looked around, and realized the house was a mess because I've been ignoring too much of it, so I called one of my oldest friends and spent two hours cleaning the kitchen, doing laundry, sweeping, mopping, and making things nicer for Husband to come home to. I ended up kind of headachy, and I'm not sure whether that's the psilocybin, the crying, or the sheer amount of emotional material I sifted through, but I took a sedative with evening meds just so I'd sleep. Dreams were intense and vivid, although I don't remember much about the plot aside from driving an old-fashioned car through a fountain.