In the Afternoon of Life
Last February I flew back to Ohio for my godfather’s funeral. Sitting around with people I’d known since braces and bad haircuts, a high school friend: smart, grounded, 55, the kind of person who has her life in order, visibly recoiled when I mentioned I’d taken LSD many times in the past. Not disapproval, exactly. More like I’d told her I used to juggle knives.
I’ve been thinking about that flinch ever since.
Here’s what I want to say: I’ve done a lot of psychedelics, across three decades, on two continents, and I am, by any reasonable measure, fine. Better than fine, actually; I have a life built on purpose eight thousand miles from where I started. Some of the most important architecture of who I am was put there by mushrooms, LSD, and twice, memorably, DMT. This isn’t to shock anyone, though I’m sad we've filed a genuinely sacred category of experience under ‘things responsible adults grow out of’, and I don’t think that’s at all true.
My first trip was freshman year at Ohio State University, guided by my friend Daniel, and it remains one of the most stupendous experiences of my life, an early memory that lodged itself at a different depth than the ones that followed. My nearly twenty years in San Francisco gave me more trips, all life-enhancing, none of them the disaster my Midwestern upbringing had prepared me to expect. The DMT came later and hit differently; it was the most intense thing psychedelics ever showed me, and not something I’d hand a beginner. Start with mushrooms or acid. DMT can wait.
What I actually want to talk about isn’t the drugs, though. It’s what happens inside them. Every serious trip has opened onto something vast and old and unconditional; not comforting like a hug, but slightly terrifying, the way the ocean must feel to someone used to swimming pools.
I lost my mother when I was 17, right as I was finishing high school and stepping into whatever came next. She died at 41, and for years that number sat in me like a deadline nobody wrote down but everybody understood; a fear of not having lived, of reaching the age she never got past without having done anything that felt like mine, much like the Carl Jung quote that “the greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of the parents”.
In December 2010, a few months shy of my own 41st birthday, a psychedelic experience here in Bangkok cracked something open, and within six months I’d packed up nearly 20 years of memories in San Francisco, the whole accumulated weight of a life, and moved to Thailand.
I’ve long resisted calling it a midlife crisis. Jung thought life splits into two halves, and the tools that serve you in the morning: building, achieving, proving, aren’t the tools the afternoon asks for. A crisis, in his read, is someone frantically running the morning’s programme after it’s stopped working. What happened to me was closer to individuation, an inward turn, a reclaiming of parts of myself that ambition and grief had crowded out. Psychedelia didn’t cause a crisis; it opened a door already there, and an opportunity walked through it almost exactly when my mother’s life had run out.
So here’s my case, gentle reader, to anyone still flinching: these aren’t recreational shortcuts or symptoms of arrested development. For a meaningful number of people, myself included, they’re a form of church. Not a substitute for meaning, but a direct encounter with it. Research on psilocybin keeps finding what people who’ve taken it already knew; most describe the experience as one of the most spiritually significant of their lives, on par with the birth of a child or the death of a parent.
I don’t know if my friend in Ohio has thought about that conversation since. But if she has, I hope this is what reaches her and others of like mind: not an argument, just an account. Something met me in the same way in that brownstone in Columbus, in San Francisco, and again in Bangkok, and it has never once let me down. Nobody needs to take my word for any of it; just don’t assume that when someone says ‘acid trip’, it’s a confession rather than a plain fact about how they got here.
