Your Magic Mushroom Stories

Hi,

How are you doing? I ask that genuinely, because opening one's eyeballs each day feels increasingly disorientating at the moment.

But as mad as it gets, I think it's really important right now to remember we are surrounded by good people. I keep thinking of the mutual aid and love I saw in Minneapolis. We're meeting good people all the time in the supermarket, on the street, online. They're here in Webworm in the comments section.

(Speaking of which, any Webworm supporters who happen to be in Austin, Texas on April 1 – I am doing an event for you!)

Today I wanted to share a bunch of your feedback to my piece on "Fixing Brains With Magic Mushrooms". I'm always blown away by the breadth of lived experience that exists in the reader base of Webworm – and I wanted to highlight that today.

Don't worry: This isn't becoming a psilocybin newsletter. I'm not trying to be Michael Pollan. But maybe with all the noise and chaos, I have enjoyed spending the week thinking about the ways our brains interpret the world.

Let's get into your stories, before I share a few more thoughts at the end.

Jemiah

I'm one of those people for whom the psychedelic experience was immensely healing in a way that nothing's ever been before or since.

If I hadn't taken LSD when I did, I might have given in to the downward slide of crushing, self-attacking depression. Instead, I woke up the next day full of calm joy and appreciation for the most mundane aspects of life and consciousness – and that feeling strongly stayed with me for weeks.

And in a significant way, it never actually went away.

Shellie

If you look at my life today, you will see the most typical boring “American dream” life: Happily married, two healthy kids, a house and a dog. A perfectly nice life.

What you don’t see is the deep-rooted trauma causing extreme rage episodes that have been tearing me apart from the inside out. I had a severely traumatic childhood. I was an “accident” baby, born 10 years after my two siblings, and was largely ignored and neglected. I was Matilda, without all the magic.

My parents were heroin addicts. My older brother smoked and dealt meth. My dad died when I was seven, and the following four years were bouts of homelessness, shelters, changing schools, and never having a feeling of safety or home. I moved out on my own the second I had the opportunity. I’d just turned 17 and never looked back.

I went to college, I worked my ass off, and built myself a safe and stable life. I married the love of my life, I had kids, and we have successful careers. People constantly assume I have always been so ‘lucky’.

In my mid-30s, I found out my dad wasn’t my dad. I was the product of an affair my mom was having with a random man she met at a bar. I got his name from a relative I matched with on 23andMe and when I asked my mom, she just casually admitted it was true like it was no big deal. He too was long dead. A year and a half or so later my mom passed away as well.

I’ve always been hot tempered, but the older I got the worse it became. Suddenly all that repressed trauma decided it needed to come out and be processed, and it was manifesting itself in me as pure, unbridled rage.

I could no longer handle the normal annoyances of life. When my kids were toddlers and one of them had a tantrum and threw an entire smoothie at the floor of my car - a non-extraordinary event with a toddler - it filled me with such rage that when I got home I took a baseball bat into the house and beat the shit out of my mattress while screaming at the top of my lungs.

If I was working on a DIY home repair project and it wasn’t going well I would start punching holes in the drywall and breaking tools. If I was driving alone and someone cut me off I suddenly was white knuckle gripping my steering wheel and calling them the filthiest insults I could muster.

These things all somehow managed to stay mostly contained to hurting only myself. I tried my best to not let my kids see it, but they did. Of course they did. I tried to only have a bad outburst alone in the car or when my husband wasn’t home and I locked myself in the bathroom.

But as my kids got older and I started to see them get nervous when they heard me starting to get even slightly annoyed, I knew I had to do something. 

I started seeing a therapist. I took weekend spa trips all by myself to relax and recharge. I vented to my girlfriends about life’s annoyances. None of it truly helped.

I don’t remember when I first started reading about psilocybin and the effects of mental health, but last year I watched a documentary about veterans using psychedelics to treat their PTSD and depression. 

It was eye opening and had me yearning for the opportunity – I just knew this could help me. But I didn’t have the free time or money to go on a weeklong trip to a special center to be dosed and monitored by actual medical professionals. 

But I was so ready to try, I reached out to some people I knew with more exciting lives than mine, and got my hands on some magic mushrooms.

I tried it first with my husband when we were on a kid-free weekend. We started really small, hastily chopping up stems and caps and mixing it with chocolate pudding to see what would happen. We had a fun mild trip and I never got completely lost in the high, but I noticed immediately that while on the psychedelics I could almost feel my brain making new pathways of understanding.

The kids came home the next day, and the weeks following I noticed myself not getting quite as upset at little things and being able to recognize the anger coming before it got too out of control so I could step away to regroup myself. 

I wanted to try again in a bigger way.

Once again, I found myself kid-free and got to it. Two grams of magic mushrooms precisely weighed and ran through a spice grinder. Mixed in a small glass of orange juice, and down the hatch it went.

The effect hit fast. 

I got dizzy and nauseous and laid down in my bed. In short order I felt trapped inside my mind. I could not verbally communicate. I was conscious and there - I could understand my surroundings - I just couldn’t get the words out. 

I closed my eyes and let my mind take over. It’s hard to describe it in any eloquent way but I got lost inside of my own consciousness. My brain took me to my childhood trauma. I felt as if I became my mom and was thinking as her. Some very uncomfortable truths came to the surface. I sobbed. I lay in my bed and sobbed for the better part of four hours, feeling the full range of feelings deep inside my own mind. Eventually I was able to get up and get back to the present, but my brain had irrevocably changed.

That experience was a month ago, so I have no long-term results per se - but the last month my inside personality has been completely different. The deep, core anger has reduced by a dramatic amount. The little things that used to always send me reeling over the edge suddenly had their reactions “right-sized”. 

I know deep down I somehow healed something inside of me with the psychedelic trip. I hope it lasts, and I hope I get another opportunity to do it again. I think the FDA finding ways to make it safe and accessible to the public will have drastic good effects in the long term.

I’m no advocate or expert, I know there are dangers involved and I’d never try and convince someone who wasn’t ready to do it. I’m just a woman trying to live and find whatever is out there to help make a peaceful and happy experience with my one life.

Beck

I have never had the psychedelic experience, but I have had the chronic major depression one, which lasted for 30 years.

I have always been so sensitive to drugs of any kind, so while I was fascinated by this research I had always been too scared to try it. I had made myself a promise that I would, however, if I wasn't able to improve things myself.

It took 15 years, but I did improve things and I think my transcending moment came from being in the bush, predominantly alone, for almost three weeks. The trees, the water, the birds (thank you NZ whenua!) fundamentally shifted something in me where I came out of that experience with a newness I couldn't go back from.

And it's kept getting better since now I know that secret. Depression creeping back: get into a forest, to a rocky shore line in a gale. It's like a switch turns back off again. Amazing.

We all deserve a beautiful cube or wild moment in nature to feel alive in the most wonderful way.

Mary

Yesterday, I finished an eight week course of Ketamine, 12 courses in total, in Australia. My brain has changed for sure. My life, too.

A few people have had bad experiences, I was told. Some leave on the first session. Luckily, I had 12 extraordinary experiences/trips, each one completely different. I've felt, variously, ecstasy, peace, awe, gratitude, love.

I'm not a Christian but there was Jesus, at the centre of the universe. He was there in most sessions. People in my life were there. My father took me flying around the universe in a Gypsy Moth open cockpit plane.

What the bloody fuck! None of it makes sense. All I know is that my brain has changed. Less reactive, less triggered, less stressed. I am no longer plunging into sadness and loneliness and despair.

I cannot explain how grateful I am.

Some people have harrowing experiences, too. Nightmarish. That needs to be studied. But I was told they are in the minority – and that most have benefited.

K

I had a psychedelic experience as a teenager with real ‘acid’ that was similar to your ketamine experience, David.

Someone within my circle of friends at the time had a ‘bad’ trip and ended up in psychiatric care, institutionalized. He had been driving when an accident occurred and a passenger in the car died. I think the acid trip after this with all that untreated trauma was, well, simply too much for him.

A few years ago, I revisited some past trauma myself and became very anxious and was unable to stop thinking about it. I micro-dosed with psilocybin for a year. I followed other experienced people’s recommendations for setting dose and timing for breaks. It not only alleviated anxiety, I found my tendency to be ‘over analytical’ reduced too. Maybe that was just part of the anxiety.

As a side note, I never sought out the ‘magic mushrooms’ – they appeared in my life at a time of need. My partner recently received an anxiety-inducing medical diagnosis. It’s one of those ones where it could be okay, but it might not be, too.

They are not usually an anxious person, but started to feel anxious about possible outcomes. So they micro-dosed for a few months and now find their anxiety gone. It did resurface at a lower level a few months later and after another week of micro-dosing once again it ceased.

David here again. Thanks to those of you I emailed for clarifying details, and thanks for giving me permission to publish your experiences here.

Before I go, I wanted to mention a few things.

I got to see Nine Inch Nails play this week. It's the most impressive technical show I've ever seen. Webworm reader Linda – an OG Webworm supporter from way back – sent her family along. They dug it too:

"On your recommendation, I made sure that my husband and son went to see this NIN tour. They were blown away and have a lifetime memory of seeing an awesome show together." 

In amongst the noise, there was plenty of time for reflection, too. "A song that gets more and more fucking weird and relevant every day," Trent Reznor said as he introduced "I'm Afraid of Americans", a song he did with David Bowie.

I won't bang on about the concert, but it appears they were recording it professionally – so hopefully we all get to see it one day. Meanwhile, here is a little clip I took that shows some of the production trickery that I loved.

Finally, I was lucky enough to see a preview of Steal This Story, Please!, a new documentary about Amy Goodman, the investigative reporter and absolute powerhouse behind Democracy Now!

Mainly it's a film about the power of journalism, as Goodman helps draw the world's attention to incredibly important stories – ranging from the Santa Cruz massacre, to the North Dakota pipeline protests, to the genocide in Gaza. She's always there, boots on the ground, talking to the people who tend to be ignored by the mainstream media.

It's also a huge warning about the consolidation of the media giants, and the United States' ongoing greed for oil (it's always about the oil).

Goodman was there for a Q&A afterwards (she had really good shoes) and my friend asked how she stays so upbeat while reporting on such grim shit for decades.

She smiled and made some jokes (an answer unto itself), but also reached her main point: Most people are good.

We can't forget that.

David.