Over a year ago I had a very intense trip which I put into words directly after. I just reread it and decided it was wild enough to stand alone. Sorry for the length.

I had tripped heavy before and I felt strong when following my hunch to again take from that acid. Overly confident I disregarded everything I know about psychedelics and just took the tab sheet from my fridge. I’m not handy with scissors and so it turned out to be 9 tabs that I casually munched on while rolling a joint with some old and dry weed as my only preparation.

Blackout.

Next thing I know I’m standing in my bathroom, screaming into the shower head that’s blasting cold liquid in my face. \ I’m down to my boxers and one sock. The whole room is soaking. It’s an old building, there are no tiles on the floor. A thought of the past strikes me with a very demanding clarity - this is how people get institutionalized. \ People? I look in the mirror. The monke I will become in a few hours is not there yet, there is only particles and colours. I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what I am. I start panicking. Maybe if ‚I‘ leave something on paper via a pen, ‚I‘ will remember. I find the paper by wrecking my printer, but no pen is in sight. Close to flipping out completely.

Only two things are certain: 1. Proof of my self can only be found in creation by my self. 2. The body and my surroundings are not clean and need to be scrubbed asap. I find a sock. I make a knot. I make a knot. My self is proven. Now it must clean fast. I find sleeping bags that luckily will turn out to be trash sacks and start shoving everything unclean inside. I do this until I can no longer bear my own filth and run (float?) to the bathroom again.

Before I can partake in my ritual laundering I must first conquer the concept of dry wet. I don’t know anything except for dry is good. But everything is wet. \ And even when I finally make it to the shower again, I completely fail at setting the water temperature right. To be fair I live in a very old house and even sober the game of hot and cold can seem a bit like Tom and Jerry. I realize there is no way of me handling the situation as the need for clean starts to grow even more and I start feeling reeeeally bad. So I grab the shampoo bottle and begin smearing head & shoulders on my dry skin. \ Bad Idea. Everything is bad. I need good, badly. I stumble into my bedroom, shouting voice commands at my phone while trying to figure out how to ‚make it loud‘. \ After an unpleasant eternity I somehow manage to let a lofi playlist run via in-ear headphones. The music makes everything turn into this sundae-candy-eske LSD asetheatic. The drums sound like the clinging of ice cubes in a lean cup (DeeBaby - Never Gon End for reference) Pianos work, strings not so much. The music helps, but I still am the pinnacle of filth and will quit existing if I don’t manage to clean up soon. So I wobble back to the bathroom. The next eternity I will spend pulling out headphones, pushing micro usb cables in lightning adapters and vice versa and getting madder and madder. I know that electric devices and the wet don’t go together, but I cannot live without one or the other. I find my knot-snock. Looking at it soothes me but I also recognize it as a symbol of the plague of human intellect. Making knots, putting things in bags, storing bags in cupboards, locking them - It’s all the same task and it’s all completely in our heads.

I make sounds to feel the reflection of the sound waves and I realize this whole physical plain of existence is utter chaos. \ I feel scared. One more Blackout.

I stand in my kitchen, starring at my phone. I see nothing but swirls of candy and there is a sound coming from it. A sound, that carries something so pure I have never felt anything like it. It reassembles parts of the ever-chaos so they resonate with something greater. Something my whole being is saying YES to. I don’t know how, but my phone is playing ‚Don’t worry, be happy‘. I am fine.

Holding on to that device of good as hard as I can, I trot towards the bath again. I take my time. I move slowly, keeping my awareness pinned to the sound of light. I make it past the shower and start letting water into the bathtub. I touch cold water. Cold is the absence of life and all my instincts tell me to be very careful with that. I touch warm water. I feel it. It’s there. Life. God. Nature. What happened next still to this moment leaves me in awe. \ As I focus on the energy in warmth and music my consciousness gets pulled out of my reality. I experience an extremely overwhelming, pulsating sensation. I recognize that I’m feeling too much and I am very proud now that I manage to take a step back and observe, instead of just feeling everything. And I realize it’s all one. I feel the sound of ‚Don’t worry, be happy‘ and the warmth that gives life to water. I feel my mother’s love for me as a child, I feel the sun. \ Life is sacred. \ No more errors. \ Right then and there in my bathtub I make choices that still make my hands tremble when I write them down now.

I will take care of my elders. \ I want to have kids and love them. \ Now I can wash. \ I passionately don’t worry and scrub every inch of my body. Through my eyes the water turns pitch black but I see it as the filth I’m leaving behind. \ I feel so good. I am happy. \ I sighingly lay down on my bed, McFerrin on repeat. \ After some time of not worrying and being happy, I leave the bedroom to go on little adventures. \ One time I end up in the living room and forget about the other rooms. \ There is no life here (mindlessly I only look outside my body). \ I remember a very unsettling message from a friend I received just prior to tripping and having chosen to deal with it afterwards. Well, not my choice anymore. \ I start treading a very dark path. Before I completely reach hell, my will to live kicks in and makes me run. \ I stumble into my bedroom and start laughing like a happy baby. | How could I have forgotten? Don’t worry. I will never leave this place. Be Happy.

It’s been 12 hours since the drop. I can look at screens again without them being 100% alien but I’m still tripping hard and the darkness triggered by the message tries to find its way inside my mind when it wanders too much. \ So I spend the next 8 hours (!) actively listening, not worrying, being happy. \ In the last 2 hours I regain the power to read, I hop on reddit and I type in ‚selfcare‘. \ It’s my first time being exposed to this kind of content (namely the doodles) and it’s just what I need. \ I sort by top posts of all time and read some amazing, positive ideas and I screenshot away. 20 hours after the drop I manage to go without McFerrin for minutes on end. \ I put on a lot of comfy clothes, let the music on hold (headphones still on) and slowly wander to my local park. There is nothing clearer, sharper, than sunlight reflecting in morning dew. I sit down on a bench and feel the force of life in the sun on my face. I gaze at humans walking. So weird. And they are all the same. They? I understand that I’m encapsulating myself from their weirdness, so I get up and also start walking weird. I am human. Walking, happy human.

Later on I watched 30 minutes of WallE (great choice) and the last thing I remember is smelling and tasting the acid leaving my body before fading into sleep for 1 hour. It’s the evening of the day after dropping when I’m writing this and I am still slow, mindful, determined and happy. I’m already looking forward to waking up tomorrow, so I can take care of my self and clean my apartment.

Update: It’s the next day and I have slept 10 refreshing hours. I’m still very sensitive and that’s okay. I’ve got the whole day to myself and the sun is shining. Went outside and watched the current marathon from a distance. Humans look almost normal again. I checked my selfcare screenshots again. Not all of them are as smart as I thought :) But some definitely are and I’m having a great time setting up the app ‚Habitica‘. I still am happy and grateful for life and I am also still 100% convinced of the choices I made in that bathtub. \ Not everything I experienced yesterday was good. Some was horrifying, some was amazing. Most importantly I feel like I found some truth in this crazy existence. My primal trust is stronger than ever.