The Journey to Oblivion and Back Background: I’m 20 years old, male, and a junior college. Outside of smoking pretty often, I’ve done ecstasy, shrooms, and 2c-I, all once and spread out by 6 and 9 months respectively. I read that 2c-c was fairly mild, so I decided to take 50mg alone. This would reportedly give me a calm, easy going trip. How wrong these reports turned out to be. Part I: The Beginning of the End (T+000)
Planning to walk around in the woods, I take the self-prepared capsule at around 3 in the afternoon on a Friday. After about 30 minutes, I leave my dorm and head towards my destination. The come up is extremely jarring. Instead of a smooth gradual immersion into the new world, I go from normal, to feeling slightly weird, to being out of my mind, over the span of the next 30 minutes or so. When I realized I was in for more than I bargained for, I decided against going into the woods. At this point, I am having difficulty walking and have to keep sitting down. I get the feeling people are looking at me strangely, but I am most likely appearing normal. Worried and wanting somebody to talk to, I call one of my friends. When I tell him what is happening, he exclaims laughingly to somebody he is with that his friend is on drugs. This is not what I wanted to hear. The words reverberate through me negatively.
The body high is now coming into full effect and it is overwhelming. I needed to be with somebody I knew. My friend’s freshman brother was in a nearby dorm, and despite knowing that he would be completely judgmental, I go over. As soon as I told him what was happening to me, his tone and the way he looked at me changed. I don’t really fault him for this, as I probably would have been the same way in his position, but it hurt. He simply went on playing his video game while his friends looked at me like I was some sort of zoo animal. I joke to one of them that this was going to be him in two years. All the while, I am dissolving into an unknown existence, scared because I have nobody with me who can really understand. I smoke in the bathroom to ease the nausea, and soon after, the ceiling starts morphing. I call my good friend J, who has drug experience as well, and tell him I’m going to need somebody. I leave the dorm, and as I walk down the stairs, I can feel them moving beneath my feet.

Part II: The Dream (T + 1h30m) I find myself lying in a field by one of my school’s dining halls. Life is merely a dream to me now. There are people all around me going about their business, and here I am, melting into the earth. All my senses are crisscrossing. My body doesn’t feel like my own anymore. When I touch something, it feels as if an echo of myself is touching it. My mental facilities are breaking into pieces. I would describe the experience as trying to put a puzzle together, but the picture keeps changing and the pieces keep shifting around. I put earbuds into my ears, but my ears don’t seem to belong to me. Music is intense. I’m not able to localize the sound, but instead, the sound creates a vast landscape. I look at the mostly clear blue sky and notice that it is breaking into fractals. I am disassociating from reality. The thought crosses my mind that I could easily walk in front of a car and not care if it hits me. My inner consciousness, despite being in some unknown location, is still intact enough to know that this would be bad. It is then that J finds me. I’m ecstatic that he’s here. I attempt to communicate with him and bring him into my world, but this ends in failure. J tells me I am completely coherent, but I feel like I am rambling, delusional, and unable to make sense. My voice doesn’t seem to be mine anymore. I roll around in the field, marveling at the sensation of putting grass in my mouth. I get up and start walking with J. It feels like he’s been with me a long time, but it has only been about five minutes. The body load is intense. I marvel at the world and how distant I am from it. Everything is shifting around me. Colors are changing, the ground is breathing, trees are swimming, and I am having fun. We go exploring for a bit. I find an interesting spot behind a dorm. Some girls spot us and laugh. To them I am probably just a goofy drunk. We find a hill and collapse on the wonderful feeling earth. The small amount of walking has been exhausting to me. I have an overwhelming desire to be close to somebody. Holding onto J, I am filled with a sense of relief. I roll down the hill. J and I and walk to another hill nearby. The whole area seems huge. I walk around as J talks on the phone, believing that I have put a fair distance between the two of us. To my surprise, I turn and see that he is still close by. I attempt to convey what is happening to me, but again, I can’t. Feeling defeated, I decide to listen to music. Sitting with J, the music fills with me a sense of serenity, so much so that I am almost moved to tears. Fittingly enough, the next song to come on is “Real World” by Matchbox 20, in which the singer asks, “Is this the real world?” It is becoming increasingly difficult to tell what is real anymore, but what I can tell is that J is getting bored. I feel bad for pulling him away from his life to take care of me. My whole time with J had seemed like minutes, but an hour had gone by. I choose to release him from his duties, telling him that I will be fine alone. I was wrong.

Part III: The Descent (T + 3h) I am scared. Every step I take seems to vibrate into some other dimension. My limbs do not belong to me. I feel like I am a walking Picasso painting. My campus is bustling and it is too difficult to exude a sense of normalcy in the face of all those around me. I am heading in the direction of my dorm, but have to sit down to rest. I pull out my phone, but cannot tell if it is upside-down or right side up. At this point, I feel completely stranded and unable to function. I call my roommate and tell him I need help making it back to the dorm. He gets me back, but is not able to help me beyond that. I am incredibly lonely. It is getting harder and harder to breath. I call a few friends, but none of them are able to understand. Everybody is busy with their Friday night and I do not expect anybody to come to my rescue. Even if I asked for somebody to help, that person would be annoyed at having to take care of me. This would only make me feel worse in my current state. I go to my computer. Every key stroke I make feels off. As I sit there, my outer vision is filled with a tropical paradise. I see a clear blue sky and palm trees around me. I want to lie down, so I go to my room.

Part IV: Punishment (T + 6h) I had never felt so mercifully alone in my life. Writhing in bed in complete darkness, I alternated between hysterical laughter and being on the verge of crying. Every ten minutes seemed like an eternity of torture. I barely even existed anymore. My brain was not able to take my sensory perceptions and put them together. I was either, my thoughts, my music, or my sense of touch, but never all of them. Before taking this drug, I wanted to be alone, but the one thing I wanted my whole trip more than anything, was to be able to have meaningful interaction with other people. Sadly, this was the one thing I could not have. I am a guarded person, due in part to my interactions with others, especially my parents, growing up. I lie on a daily basis, not with my words, but with how I act. Humor is my defense mechanism, my safe zone. I use it not only to distance myself from others, but to disarm them as well. In my mind, people are always going to end up hurting me; it is only a matter of time. I hate relying on others, and the closer I get to somebody, the more I want to pull away. The one time I truly let my walls down was for the only girl I’ve ever loved, and she ended up breaking my heart. She told me that people have their time and place, and that once their time is over, it is alright to leave them behind. I took this philosophy and made it my own. I stopped caring about the people around me. They were only there so I could extract what I wanted from them and move on.
Many of my friendships were weakened, especially with J, who was my best friend at college at one point. I was more than content to bury myself in my schoolwork and music. It didn’t matter to me. I was happy going through life not letting myself become invested in anybody. I thought about a girl who liked me, and how the prospect of being emotionally close to her scared me. Being close to her was the only thing to make me feel genuine affection in a long while, and this made me feel weak and annoyed. One night, I told her something about myself, something I hadn’t told anybody. The next day, I was angry at myself for doing this, for letting a part of my inner self go, but more importantly, I hated her for having this insight into me. I did not want her or anybody else to have any power over me. Now when I needed people the most, they weren’t there. I was getting what I deserved.

Part V: Redemption (T + 7h) Even after all the distance I put between us, J ended up calling me and coming over. It was then that my trip became more positive. We walked around outside for hours, talking about many things, including how I am with people. He told me he understood why I am the way I am, and it amazed me that he would still take this time to be with me. He even ended up missing a planned event the next day because he was up with me for so long. This unconditional compassion reached me at a level I thought was long gone.

Final Thoughts