“And remember this: the page you are looking at now, I once typed the words with care with you in mind under a yellow light with the radio [Spotify] on.” – Charles Bukowski
PSYCHOSIS
I was slowly beginning to deconstruct the world around me. Without realizing it, I was heading towards the abyss.
The psychosis came on gradually until it didn’t. It started out as viewing everything as a sign or that the universe was trying to communicate with me through signs.
Everything had a connection.
Everything had meaning.
All day.
All the time.
I’m exhausted just thinking back.
My first glimpse of psychosis came a few days after my session. I was driving past a bunch of men doing road work and I remember looking at the guy holding the ‘slow’ sign and giving him a wave, but he didn’t wave back. It was like he was frozen in time. Just standing there smiling, not moving, not doing anything.
I questioned myself thinking, “did I just see what I saw?” As if that didn’t seem weird enough, I looked into my rear-view mirror and all the other guys working were frozen too. Before my brain had a second to process what was happening, it was as if someone hit the play button on a movie and they all started to come back to life.
Now it was like my world had just stopped.
“What the fuck just happened?” I said out loud, barely holding it together.
I was already a mess leading up to this point. I felt as if I was starting to see the world in a whole new perspective; a perspective that was too much for me to properly digest at the time. Needless to say that this didn’t help.
I continued driving for a local state park. I needed to go for a walk to clear my head from whatever was going on up there. But, as I pulled into the parking lot, the intensity of fear and paranoia were starting to consume me which left me questioning if I should even go in.
“By myself? In the woods?”
It seemed like I was in over my head, but I didn’t want to let the fear stop me. I was at the beginning stages of categorizing everything in the world as either good or evil. In my eyes, to not go in meant that I would be giving my power over to evil by letting fear win.
Even though I pushed forward with my hike, no part of me was ever at ease. I was unaware that my psychosis had already started. This altered state of consciousness only amplified everything that I was feeling.
I was so paranoid on that walk and so sensitive to everything around me that I felt as if I allowed the energy of fear to enter my world in a way that’s not possible without psychosis. Hardly able to take another step, the amalgamation of fear and thoughts had reached a boiling point. Out of nowhere, I heard loud footsteps sprinting up behind me.
I remember the moment clear as day and the sound that each step made as they stomped the ground closing in on me. Immediately, I thought back to my guide during our session talking about how things from nature are a good tether back to the physical. Right away I bent down and picked up a rock to keep me grounded, and as a way to overcome the fear that had manifested as footsteps behind me.
[Yes, I’m well aware that this may sound pretty out there. There will be many more moments in my story that will sound out there due to the altered state of consciousness that psychosis leaves you in. But I’m not here to debunk whether the footsteps that I heard were merely auditory hallucinations, or that there was something more taking place within the realm of metaphysics.]
Over the course of the following two weeks, I would experience on and off moments like what I had just mentioned. Rather than being able to give these experiences space so, that I could properly analyze them through a rational and objective lens, I had been sucked into a state of mind that I can only describe as the bridge between heaven and hell.
When I felt joy and happiness, I felt it in a way that I never knew was possible. The entire world looked as if someone turned up the saturation dial. But when I felt fear and paranoia, the entire world was out to get me. Everything, in my eyes, was conspiring against me. Too afraid of the nighttime, I would only sleep for hours at a time because I couldn’t let my guard down. A lack of sleep, mixed with a lack of eating, soon left me on the verge of skin and bones.
I had lost all rational perspective, but I couldn’t see it. At the time, everything had a connection or deeper meaning. I didn’t think that I was God (which happens with a lot of people experiencing psychosis), but I felt that it was my job to figure out the world.
I had begun to read between the lines of anything and everything.
I would watch TV and either see it for what I thought it truly was. I watched a Hallmark movie with my mom and instantly saw how they plant unrealistic seeds of expectations for relationships and their movies are a way to keep people numbed out (I still think this to some degree). Or I would think that every moment in a show was specifically directed towards me telling me what I needed to do next.
When my thoughts seemed to be the most crazed, I would hear an orchestra of crickets out of tune. But when I felt in order, I heard one steady chirp from a cricket letting me know that I was ‘on track.’
There was one moment, after taking a class online in which I was practically debating the professor and a couple of students in the class, and the first post I saw on Instagram after was talking about how death is a master teacher and “how important would it be to argue online? Or would you rather want to choose to Love.”
I instantly broke down in tears after that because it felt as if the post was directed just for me. In my eyes, it was a confirmation to everything that I was thinking. It was confirmation that there was more to the world than just the physical, even if we can’t fully explain it.
My life had suddenly taken on the mission of figuring out . . .well, who really knows what I was trying to figure out. However, that all came to an end the day I found myself in a car accident.
THE ACCIDENT
[These next couple of paragraphs may be hard to read. I thought a lot about whether or not I would exclude this section, but this story wouldn’t feel complete if I did. It would only mean that I hold judgement over truth. Bear with me as I tell the story exactly how it happened]
The morning of my accident followed another sleepless night.
The day’s agenda consisted of taking it easy around the house until it was time to meet up for a drive-by birthday for my niece (oh, the quarantine days). Up until it was time to leave, my morning had been filled with more moments of ‘connecting the dots.’ Although my quest to figure out the world at large was rather harmless, that was all about to change.
As I look back on that day, there were four important ‘seeds’ that had been planted which led to the accident.
The first seed involved hearing the words ‘drive-by’ for my niece’s birthday. Instantly, I had associated those words with an actual drive-by shooting. This wasn’t enough to get the ball rolling, but the seed of paranoia had been planted.
The second seed had come right when my mom and I were about to leave the house.
She was eating garlic bread and the smell, to me, was absolutely rancid. It was as if the smell had been magnified tenfold and my brain had now pinned this back to the drive-by comment in a negative connotation which caused paranoia to insidiously creep its way into my psyche.
It may seem like they have zero connections (and you’re absolutely right), but my thought process was that these were negative signs warning me––this was the type of mental torment that I was dealing on a day to day basis.
As I grabbed my keys to leave, I smelled the strangest thing. It was like burnt rubber, mixed with another odd smell that I couldn’t quite place at the moment. I would soon learn that it was the same smell as whatever chemicals are involved when airbags go off.
Those smells would be the third seed that made my stomach drop to the floor. I obviously didn’t know that I was about to get into a car accident, but in this altered state of consciousness, somehow I had smelled the smells of my accident before it happened.
I don’t hold on too tightly to this, but I also don’t try to explain it away.
I was beyond hesitant to go at this point. I had fully convinced myself that if we were to go, there was going to be a drive-by shooting solely based on us going. I kept trying to make excuses on why we couldn’t go and my mom’s confusion was on alert, but it wasn’t enough to know what was truly going on.
The fourth seed, that sealed the deal, came when I turned on my car and an aggressive song came on. It was as if the universe was telling me that something bad was going to happen. As I punched in the address on the GPS, I knew that ‘they’ were tracking us through the phone, whoever ‘they’ were.
I could barely keep the wheel straight as we headed there.
The feelings of dread, paranoia and fear had finally won. They had complete hold of me. I was their puppet. As I started driving, I was making negotiations in my head, pleading for the drive-by shooting to not take place.
What could I give in return to save my niece’s life? Then a thought came that felt like an absolute knowing: “a life for a life.” It felt as if the universe had told me, that if I didn’t want there to be a drive-by shooting, then I’d have to give up my life in return.
The realization was too much for my mind to accept and I thought there has to be another way. Of course, in a state of psychosis, you’ll find 100 other ways that are all justifiable, yet make zero logical sense.
“J, what are you doing,” my mom asked me as I pulled off the highway only to take that same exit ramp back on because I couldn’t decide what to do. The storm that was brewing in my head, jumping from crazed thought to crazed thought, mixed with complete hopelessness, is something I wish on no one.
I knew I needed to decide because it felt as if time was running out and that the universe was waiting on my decision. I thought back to when I saw a sign for the police station at an exit ramp that I had just passed and knew what I needed to do.
I had decided that I was going to turn in my guide because a trade of equal magnitude had to be made. I pulled into the precinct fully committed to do it, but as I walked up to the doors, they were closed––when are precincts ever closed?
My mom was now in full panic mode.
“J, what is going on,” but I wouldn’t answer her.
In my mind, the transaction wasn’t completed. I felt defeated. It was as if the universe was telling me “Times officially up.”
As we pulled back onto the highway finding ourselves in bumper-to-bumper traffic, out of everything going on in and out of my head, all I could hear is the car next to me blasting that song Dance Monkey by Tones and I:
“Dance for me, dance for me, dance for me,
I’ve never seen anybody do the things you do before.
They say, move for me, move for me, move for me,
And when you’re done, I’ll make you do it all again.”
That was the last straw. The universe was telling me that it had won and that it had me. I can’t accurately put into words how I felt at that moment, but it was as if my life was officially over. A feeling I’ll never forget.
As we headed back towards the house for the drive-by, I knew what I had to do. In the full-on chaos that was ensuing in my mind, I had decided that I was going to take my life in exchange to save my nieces.
I pulled off the exit ramp for the last time, grabbed my moms hand and said, “you have to trust me,” and then proceeded to drive my car through a telephone pole.
What happened next was nothing short of a miracle.
As I drove through the telephone pole, all I remember is the outside world fading away and a white bubble enclosing me and my mom. It felt as if we were protected by this force and nothing inside of it was allowed to be touched.
Looking back on that whole two weeks in psychosis, it felt as if I was in the middle of a war between good and evil. Maybe that’s the war I wage on myself playing out as what seems like metaphysical principles, or again, maybe there’s more to life than meets the eye.
Who. Fucking. Knows. Man.
[If there truly is a universal war between good and evil, that goes beyond the physical, it is something that we may never know with absolute certainty, but it’s this need for certainty that also helped fuel the fire the fire of my psychosis.]
Initially, the darker energies had won. They got what they wanted by getting me to drive through the telephone pole.
But what I do know is that, in the end, my mom and I were protected because when the car finally came to a stop, other than a minor scratch on my moms knee, we were completely untouched sitting inside a totaled car.
You would think that would be enough to shake me awake from my delusional thoughts. Two people in a pile of scrapped metal with a telephone knocked over as a result. Shit, that would snap almost anybody awake, but unfortunately it wasn’t enough for me because my first thought when the dust settled after the accident was, “fuck, I didn’t complete the transaction. I’m still alive. What do I have to do now?” Literally not a single care about anything else.
This is the power of psychosis.
I’m going to stop my time with psychosis here for multiple reasons:
First, I think you get the point. Second, it’s only more of this until maybe a day or two later when I felt as if I was finally coming back down to earth. Third, I want to make it very clear that while yes, I have battled with demons over the years, as does everyone, at no point have I ever considered suicide. To this day, my mom still insists that that was not me in the car that day.
This may have been intense to read, but I share this with full transparency to illuminate the seriousness of the potential negative side effects of psychedelics when safety repercussions can’t be taken due to potential legal consequences on behalf of the facilitator.
I have endorsed psychedelics for years, and still do (we’ll get more into this in part 4), but my careless endorsement for them is long gone. It has been replaced with nothing but extreme caution and respect for them. As someone who had always prided themselves on being able to handle their shit well when it came to psychedelics, never in my wildest years did I think I would find myself here, and if this can happen to me, why can’t it happen to anyone else?
What came of the wreck though was a lot of heartache, serious legal troubles that I thankfully got out of, a falling out with my guide, a strain on longtime friendships, and what would be some of the hardest days that I would ever have to work through as I toiled away trying to make sense of everything that happened.
The road to recovery seemed bleak. It really did. Help was waiting for me though, and in a way, my original prayer was about to be answered.
I’ve also done a podcast with my therapist speaking about my time during psychosis. The episode mostly goes over the safety aspect, as this series will focus more on my story. Regardless, you can listen to that episode here if you want more information all things psychedelics and safety
And lastly, I feel that many others may have had a psychotic break of sorts whether it be from drugs or something entirely different. I know that a subject like this isn’t what you go screaming to the world and is heavily stigmatized. If you have never properly talked about it with someone or have always felt ashamed, I am here to talk. Before reaching out to me I’d suggest a therapist, but after that I’m always around to talk and you can either email at jalito526@hotmail.com, or slid on into my DM’s, bay-bee.
Much Love guys and thanks for reading.
Edited by: Patricia Hendriks
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