This was 10 years ago a music festival with a friend.

We had taken shrooms and LSD given to us. Mind you, we were very young. However I had done a good amount of research prior to taking and it was a "bucket list" thing for me. My friend went it a bit blind.

Before this experience I was full of life, love, and extraversion. I'm sure I had some sort of mental health issues in hindsight but I was adopted so context was lacking for me and mental health wasn't very known then.

We had consumed our doses (albeit, too much) and headed to a late show. I was allowing myself the experience and leaning in. My friend, let's call them Jane, had actually had gone "on a trip" earlier in the day and this was her second. Side note, she loved drugs, marijuana being her drug of choice.

As the show is about to start I see her sitting on the ground zoning out, looking off. I asked her what was wrong and she, with a blank face, said "I just don't want to be tripping anymore."

This alone snapped me out of whatever bliss I was experiencing and suddenly the world around me went dark. Everyone around me seemed like a lost lab rat with darkness in their souls and I recognized that I too, had darkness in me. As if my eyes were "opened" and all ignorance had disappeared in a single moment. In hindsight I might had called this paranoia which I do get with high doses of marijuana (I don't smoke but the few times I did it was not enjoyable). However this felt a little different than the paranoia I would usually get. It felt like my entire world had utterly shattered.

Jane wanted to go back to our RV but I kept trying to tell her we were having a bad trip and we needed to go meet up with our larger group of friends because that's what would anchor us, and that isolation was a terrible idea. She wouldn't listen and I didn't want to separate. We went back to the RV and laid in our "bad trip" for essentially the next 12 hours. It was pure mind-shattering hell. Each moment traumatized me more than the last until morning when it began to wear off. I couldn't form sentences. My nervous system was fried to oblivion. I'm glad I held on to the knowledge I had prior "I'm having a bad trip and I know this will end soon." Jane wasn't so lucky as she was having demons tell her to k!ll her$self I came to find out.

We didn't sleep obviously.

And when the trip wore off I had completely lost my sense of identity. I remember looking in the mirror and literally was so dissociated I couldn't recognize myself. At this point I was in shock, no words. When we finally met up with our group of friends later that morning I literally could not describe what we had just experienced. Thoughts couldn't form enough to come out of my mouth. It actually felt like my brain was fried, like physically, it was buzzing.

Life didn't feel the same after that.

Once we were back home my boyfriend at the time came to pick me up as a sweet surprise. I knew it was him but I couldn't "recognize" him anymore. I was on edge and a but paralyzed. I was too young to make sense of the experience. I went on a "soul searching journey" for years after trying to figure out what the fuck had happened to me. In hindsight maybe I should've gotten psychiatric care. I went on to get diagnosed with PTSD by two separate practitioners. I lost all of my relationships including Jane (a different story, my boyfriend, and my social network). The worst being the nightmares and flashbacks as if I was constantly reliving it even when I was asleep. I would experience scary episodes of disassociation, derealization, and panic.

Eventually psychiatric medication intervention brought me "out of it" along with a lot of therapeutic processing.

To this day I wish I could make sense of what I experienced and if others have had this as well. A part of me grieves the person I once was and who I would have been without this experience, and another part thinks that person wasn't on the right track anyway and this experience "saved me."

Anyone?