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I havenāt taken acid since 2019 but last night I dreamed I was back in that altered state of mind, a high fidelityt reproduction, indistinguishable from the real thing I wish I had good advice when I started tripping in my early 20s. every acid trip I ever took was intensely challenging, at least in parts thatās probably normal for people who are a bit jumpy/neurotic, unless the setting is carefully controlled for someone with my constitution, itās just so easy to get caught in a paranoid loop. all the circuits my sober mind uses to maintain a sense of safety suddenly become unreliable and Iām forced to confront the depth of unsafety I feel when my coping strategies are offline wow, thereās a lot. unsafety is too small a word. terror! for a couple decades my emotional baseline was āoccasionally interrupted terrorā itās kind of unbelievable now in retrospect, how significantly my inner landscape has been terraformed there is no moral of the story. Iām just reeling, donāt want to look away
if I've ever given you the impression that I'm smooth, untroubled, confident, at ease... know that I built that piece by painstaking piece, at great effort, with extraordinary companions, and more than anything else I was blown along by great gales of grace
every baby knows terror: as soon as she grows a separate sense of self, her evolutionary impulse kicks in. she knows in her guts, to be abandoned is to be annihilated ideally she learns early on she has support when she needs it, and she can take care of herself in the meantime
I... did not get that memo I learned that safety is highly contingent, abandonment an everyday threat I learned very early on that people sometimes get excommunicated, an earthly foreshadowing of the eternal infinite suffering theyāll find in Hell, evicted from grace
parts of me always knew this is a lie but I didnāt have the courage to cross the chasm until I was about 20. it took me that long to trust that my solitary knowing was correct, despite literally my entire community telling me I was wrong, threatening me with infinite consequences
this is grim but it's also the origin story of all my best qualities: I won't reject you for thinking different. I won't force you to do something against your will. I won't reject you for being jerky or weird. and I can see potential in you that you would. not. believe.