It was a bad mushroom trip that did it for me. I had a good one in college: kaleidoscopic visuals, nonsensical laughter, an ineffable sense of connectivity. The second time, however, was darker—much darker.
Things were actually going well, until they were not. A joint of my buddy’s home-grown marijuana (later nicknamed, “Devil-Grass”) was the turning point. Upon first hit, the exuberance of the day was briskly replaced by an omnipresent grey. The music we were listening to turned demonic. The greenness of the foliage in our chosen spot became ashen and died. Even the familiar faces of my three friends began morphing into something out of the darker half of a JRR Tolkien story: I was losing my mind.
Fast forward to you reading this. Do you see me in a different light? Do you read on, subconsciously wondering what it would be like to go temporarily mad, knowing these are the words of someone who owns that experience?
You should.
And if you do, it means that I have done my job as a writer, and that we’re both doing our jobs as humans.
If successful, a little bit of you was with me on that day. If successful, I removed you from the limiting confines of your own mind, and transported you into mine. If successful, you were sitting next to me in a clearing with the woods to our right, overlooking a grey sky to our left, when a bird (maybe real, probably not) abruptly changed course, and began a rapid descent towards our faces, igniting what to this day, was the deepest, darkest 20 minutes (maybe three hours) of our lives.
You see, prior to that joint, I was still Guy Macchia, the handsome, charming, 25 year-old man, or so I told myself. I did so because knowing the perils of psychedelic drugs, I created a fail-safe, in which I would repeatedly check in with my ego to reaffirm this character was still there. Unfortunately, I forgot to notify my fail-safe not to mix drugs. Oops.
Although I may have bitten off a little more than I wanted while floating in mental purgatory for an undisclosed amount of time, I am forever grateful for what I gained on the other side: A new perspective.
When things went south—and that’s an understatement—I must’ve died 1,000 times. I kept experiencing a recurring vision of myself walking through a familiar, but distant place from my childhood. It felt as though salvation was right around the corner, only a couple feet away, but I never made it there because I kept turning the wrong way—and falling into the abyss.
I am still not entirely sure of what to make of this, but time has led me to believe that it is exactly the message I am trying to convey: Around the corner will always be the old, comfortable, inward-focused, easily-accessible narrative you have told yourself since the day your conscious mandated you tell yourself something. Yet on that day, my inability to turn that corner and snap back to reality was my conscious forcing me to see that there is a choice; an option to see the whole story and not just my own.
As nice as that is, in that moment, while still tripping my ass off, I didn’t really have a choice in the matter because who even was Guy Macchia? I was experiencing life as Looney McLooneytoon of Whatthefucksville, and there didn’t seem to be an end in sight.
Just when it seemed that I might be adorning a straight-jacket for the remainder of my days, a passing deer snapped me out of my trance (real and confirmed by third parties). Emerging from the mental abyss, I chased the deer into the woods, claiming aloud that I had discovered the meaning to life.
It’s unclear if I did or not, but I definitely stumbled upon something.
The answer was in the deer’s freedom. I was consumed by the way it evaded my chase with such ease, only to wander wherever it next saw fit. This freedom caused me to question even the most fundamental constructs of our society: time, geography, Tom Brady. With the exception of Tom, who I came to realize was objectively great, the value of these other things is not real, only perceived: one man thought he had a good explanation, others reinforced this explanation, and those that thought differently were silenced until they became extinct, allowing the original thought to pervade. My newfound appreciation for sanity caused me to view these constructs as a double-edged sword; serving to simplify the abstract nuances of our shared experience by providing common frames of reference, but doing so at the expense of us experiencing them as the nuances they are.
The same thing goes for the narrative we create to simplify our own lives. We cling to a story and character because it’s safer that way, forgetting that life isn’t supposed to be easy, it’s supposed to be interesting. Part of what makes it so is not having a story, but venturing into the wild, naked and unsure, in an effort to discover meaning and truth the only way one can—through understanding.
A disruption to my ego led me to this crazy place, the temporary suspension of yours has allowed you to traverse it with me. While envisioning what it would be like to trip magic mushrooms and lose your mind for some time between five minutes and five hours, you were not you—you were we. Your curiosity into the mind of someone who has been on both sides of the sanity coin has hopefully transported your mind from the stress-inducing, laundry-list of tasks your ego is mandating you to complete, to a shared, open space; one that did not exist prior.
This bizarre experience showed me that the successful human does not entirely rid themself of their ego. Rather, they practice awareness to appreciate their ego’s potential to do good, bad and everything in between—or they streamline this process with magic mushrooms. By understanding the endless amount of ways a human can internalize what they hear, feel and see, the successful human does not judge, but observes, and seeks only to empathize with how that unique perspective came to be.
Life boils down to creating synergy: When two beings willingly let their guards down and have an honest conversation about the most interesting thing a human can—their own perspectives of reality. When this happens, they both come a little bit closer to understanding what the hell we’re all doing here. By listening to others with compassion and empathy, we make ourselves vulnerable, and allow our conversations the same boundlessness as our individual potential.
With that said, take pride in your scars and first-place trophies. The way they have impacted you makes you the most unique creature on this planet. Share these experiences with as many of the other, equally unique, 7.5 billion humans on this planet that are willing to listen and share theirs. If you try hard enough, in time, maybe you’ll finally figure out just how this thing called life works.
