How Taking Psychedelics Turned My Life Around
By: Nicholas Martinez
Tags: Self Love, Self Improvement, Mental Health, Psychedelics, Life Lessons

It is very odd to even think about the person I was before I took psychedelics. In many ways, that person is about as a part of who I am as the same 6-year old me who once thought that the sporting brands New Balance and Nike were the same thing. Yet as I think back to those initial instances where I experimented with these perception altering substances I realize how important they were not only for me turning my life around, but simply enjoying life for the unique experience and opportunity it truly is. In many ways trying to describe a psychedelic experience is like trying to explain the feeling of sex to a virgin. Words such as “ beautiful and enjoyable” would only be doing the experience an injustice, yet that is the case when it comes to describing those initials trips that in my opinion were a catalyst for me becoming healthier individual both mentally as well as physically.

Like most kids who went off to college, I ate unhealthily and became really overweight to an embarrassing degree. The insecurities that followed along with other personal issues created a person that was not only always upset but could easily be angered at the slightest provocation. What resulted was someone that truly was not a good person in any sense of the word. Whether it was the underlying hopelessness I felt because of a lack of direction or the insecurities that inevitably fall to people who become overweight there was clearly a sort of mental block that prevented me from not only enjoying the affection of the people around me but also prevented me from expressing the mutual affection back. I had bouts of extreme depression where I wouldn’t even bother leaving my dorm room at how upset I was with who I was. It was the worst time of my life and is almost a night and day comparison to how I am now.

My interest in psychedelic drugs began when I read a random article concerning the late co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs. In the article, Steve Jobs was quoted as saying “ Taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things I did in my life.” What really stood out was this was Steve Jobs, the same one who changed marketing and technology forever. I mean taking some drug, which to that point I just thought made you go insane, was one of the most important things he did? It must have been a mind blowing experience. To say that the article sparked my curiosity was an understatement. I soon discovered other influential people who experimented with psychedelics and how that experience changed them.

For example, Kerry Mulis a Nobel Prize-winning Biochemist was quoted as saying “What if I had not taken LSD ever; would I have still invented PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction, a method used to copy DNA sequences)? I don’t know. I doubt it. I seriously doubt it.” Phil Jackson, famous for winning six NBA titles with Michael Jordan in his book “Maverick: More Than a Game,” claimed a psychedelic experience helped him appreciate team play more and ultimately shaped the coach he became. Former Major League Baseball pitcher, Doc Ellis once threw a no-hitter while on LSD. I soon discovered there were countless examples of people who had these profound experiences that influenced their lives onwards. While my life was clearly heading nowhere in a hurry I couldn’t help but feel the need to see what all the hype was about.

The night I first took my first tab of LSD was one of the most memorable times I have ever had despite it being a regular night in my room. I had bought a small square blotter paper from a trusted friend, as directed I placed it under my tongue and waited for the effects to kick in. Ten minutes passed, still nothing. Half an hour passed still nothing. I remember what happened next was something that defies explanation. It was a sensation that I still hold dear to me to this day. It wasn’t the sort of addictive or dependent sensation other drugs like alcohol creates, it was much deeper than that and more profound than your typical drunk dialogue.

I remember being in my room and having this wave of happiness overcome every bit of my being. Think about the happiest moments you’ve experienced. For some maybe it was that moment you fell in love. For others, it may have been the moment you finally graduated high school or college and received that degree you worked so hard for. For me, it was that split second of euphoria when you score a goal in soccer, only a bit different. Moments like the ones I describe are just extremely happy moments, ones that last a split second but stick with us forever.

Yet when the LSD hit me it felt like a concentration of these split-second moments of euphoria. This sort of overwhelming sensation of peace and love, for lack of a better description, seemed to consume my very being. I felt the need to let everyone in the world know I loved them. From my parents to the random person who held the door for me last week, all of them needed to be bathed in unconditional love. It felt like the most natural thing in the world, love. This may seem like some silly hallucination yet it felt every bit as real as the ground I walk on. In many ways, it felt more real than everyday walking reality.

Today I am a college graduate who has a zest for life. Every day I am able to find something to be happy about even if only momentarily. “Not every day is a good day, but there is some good in every day” is a quote I tend to live by. Things no longer bother me and I never feel paralyzed with depression to no longer be productive as I once was. I write things that people enjoy and now exercise and eat well. Thankfully I lost all the weight and the insecurities that came with my bad choices. I no longer am so bothered by external factors beyond my control nor do I have this unhealthy attachment to people or material things. In many ways, I have turned my life around in both the mental and physical sense. I have never felt so at peace with everything that goes on. Even when things don’t go exactly my way I no longer despair and simply choose to be happy, a choice that I felt was impossible to conceive before I experimented with psychedelics.

So, what happened? How did that initial psychedelic experience change my perception so dramatically? In my opinion, the reason why psychedelic experiences are so difficult to describe is that they dissolve boundaries in every sense. They shatter our conditioned perception of reality and allows us to form our own views. Linguistic truth and our attachment to words to describe everything are completely abandoned under the influence of Psychedelics. This sort of perception could potentially be helpful to our society if used responsibly.

A lot of the ills of the world are caused by our indoctrinated perceptions of the world that often come at the expense of others. Think about things such as racism, sexism, xenophobia, all of these are unexamined values and behaviors, which cause immense amounts of evil in the world. Yet these are all ideas that we often learn as a result of our environment, they aren’t intrinsically a part of being a human being. A child doesn’t come out hating another race or people, they, unfortunately, learn it from their parents or the environment around them. What the Psychedelics do is dissolve the perceptions we have always known and at the very least make us reexamine them. In the words of Steve Jobs: “LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important — creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.”

That is exactly what happened to me during my experimentation with Psychedelics. All these negative thoughts about life and myself seemed irrelevant. If negative perceptions and thoughts were messy lines on an etch-a-sketch, psychedelics were the hands that shook it up thus erasing them. No longer were these feelings of hopelessness a part of my mind. These substances allowed me to go beyond the sort of mental limitations that I had self-imposed on myself for so long. A psychedelic experience is like going back to perceiving the world as you did when you were a child, so much optimism and hope. It deconstructs socially, culturally, and in my case personally imposed boundaries and limitations.

Many people will dismiss mine and other’s experiences as a mere drug-induced hallucination. They will say it wasn’t “real” or that it is dangerous to take these altered states seriously. However, in the same way, science and language will never capture or quantify the love a mother has for her child, the same can be said on how mystical and wonderful the perceptions, as well as the insights my experimenting with psychedelics, has given me and others. While I would encourage anyone to be cautious of these substances as they are not for the faint of heart I realize that cultural attitudes are slowly changing. There is research going on to use psychedelics in psychiatry. Hopefully we will one day look past the culturally sanctioned propaganda that has demonized these substances for so long and allow true freedom. I end this with a quote from Ken Kesey, the author of the critically acclaimed novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest which has also been adapted to be one of the best films ever made:

“I believe that with the advent of acid, we discovered a new way to think, and it has to do with piecing together new thoughts in your mind. Why is it that people think it’s so evil? What is it about it that scares people so deeply, even the guy that invented it, what is it? Because they’re afraid that there’s more to reality than they have confronted. That there are doors that they’re afraid to go in, and they don’t want us to go in there either, because if we go in we might learn something that they don’t know. And that makes us a little out of their control.”

-Ken Kesey

Sources:

https://www.si.com/mlb/2017/06/12/dock-ellis-acid-no-hitter-pittsburgh-pirates-anniversary

https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-lsd-daniel-kottke-cnn-2015-1

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/trip-of-a-lifetime-ken-kesey-lsd-the-merry-pranksters-and-the-bi/