Psychotic For A Day
The trip that cracked my reality and changed how I wanted to live my life
I watched him from the moment he took the pill, hoping to catch the instant something changed.
He’d taken acid. LSD.
“It’s pleasant. Coming on slowly. Just a nice, easy feeling. Relaxing.”
His demeanor never changed. He sat on a rock, sometimes looked out across the Joshua Tree desert, sometimes gazed up at the bright sun. He smiled like he always did.
Steve was my husband, and he moved through life like someone who’d never met tension. What I didn’t know at the time was that he was usually high on something.
Nothing about him seemed altered.
We were alone, as if all of Joshua Tree belonged to us.
I kept probing. “Any changes?”
“No. Just peaceful, like floating on a cloud.”
For the third or fourth time, he asked if I wanted to try it. This time I said, “Yes,” because I hadn’t seen any of those extreme reactions I’d read about. Steve looked like Steve, talked like Steve, and acted the same.
He gave me a whole tab of acid.
It didn’t take long before I had extreme pain in my belly, strong enough to double me over. I was on the ground, rocking back and forth, my head down, when I heard someone scream.
I looked up, and it was me. I was screaming.
I had split in two while I’d focused on my stomach pain. It was as if one part of me stayed curled around the pain, while another part hovered just above, watching. I didn’t know which was real. Maybe neither was.
Steve jumped off the rock and started pacing in front of me. “What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do?”
I was no help, trapped in a place where nothing made sense, where even my own voice didn’t feel like mine. Reality couldn’t get in.
I don’t know how long it took, but he decided we needed to go home.
I don’t remember getting into the car. I remember speeding down the San Bernardino Freeway toward Los Angeles, our home. I remember crawling around the inside of the car. Maybe I was screaming, maybe I was silent, but something tells me I made noise. Lots of noise.
When we’d come close to another car, Steve would tell me to stay still. And somehow, I did. It’s like the sliver of sanity and control I had left realized if I didn’t behave, we could get into big trouble. There would be consequences.
But the second we passed the car and the road was empty again, I began moving.
I settled down in the back seat for a while. Steve kept talking. Half the time he chastised himself. “I shouldn’t have given you a whole tab. I should have known better. What was I thinking? You never give someone a whole tab their first time.”
But the rest of the time, he was my lifeline to sanity.
If Steve had been cruel, he could have told me the moon was made of blue cheese, and I would have believed him. The moon would have become blue cheese and nothing else. I had no ability to tell the difference between reality and my hallucinations. His voice kept me as close to grounded as I could get.
As we exited the San Bernardino and merged onto the Santa Monica Freeway, I screamed, “Reality is better than this!” I wanted out of this hell. “Reality is better than this!” I yelled again, as if saying it twice could shatter the terrifying bars trapping me inside this psychotic prison.
I didn’t know that break from reality had cracked something open in me. From that moment on, and for the rest of my life, I couldn’t look away from what was real, no matter how much it hurt.
Even with everything I’d been through, with all the pain and struggle that had defined so much of my life, I wanted to come back to reality, but I was afraid it was a destination I’d never reach. I wanted out, and there was nothing I could do but ride this insanity.
Those hours felt like I was trapped in quicksand, pulling me under and further away from any chance of reclaiming myself.
Once we made it home and I was inside our apartment and felt safe, I was able to relax. I began to watch the hallucinations. I sat at the piano and stared as the black notes danced all around the page of music on the stand.
When I went to the bathroom, the green striped wallpaper moved. A paisley pattern in motion on the back of my hand buzzed as it swirled. Whirling buzz, zzzz, zzz, zzz.
No longer afraid, I became bored with the hallucinations. I just wanted it over. I wanted my life back, but I was too wired to sleep, forced to stay put in this split world.
The next day, I was in bed when we got a call that my sister-in-law had given birth to her first child, a daughter. The contrast between my psychotic yesterday and a new member born into our family was jarring at the time.
But maybe her birth also symbolized my own arrival into a new awareness about how I wanted to live my life.
I was 21 years old.
💌 Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Your support helps me keep writing reflections like this through The Other Side of Young. This journey’s better shared. We learn from each other.
No matter how you subscribe, free or paid, I thank you for reading.
How frightening. So glad you came away with a new lease on life and an understanding of the beauty of reality - warts and all!
Wow!
what an unexpected ride, scary and prescient..the self watching itself, the existential question "what is reality?" I have had no equal or even close experience and appreciate your sharing.
Only once do I remember leaving my body, hovering above and observing, when I was almost 15 and supposedly medicated before an appendectomy! I was in the operating room watching the Dr. look over my chart and I was reading it upside down, it said something about my ovaries. I remember thinking "I have those!". Then I guess the stronger meds kicked in and it was over when I awoke..
It Really was Over! I had been given sodium pentathol and my mother used the opportunity to question me as I regained consciousness. She discovered that I had become sexually active with my boyfriend during the previous 6 months. He was 4 years older, just over 18, and had recently enlisted in the service. The breach into my privacy unbeknownst to me at the time meant that when bootcamp was over and my boyfriend arrived unannounced, proudly wearing his uniform and knocked at the door, my mother informed him that he could never "see" me again and that she would file statutory rape charges against him if he did!
I saw him arrive, hopeful, then leave, dejected as I watched through a window. I played dumb and asked my mother who had knocked on the door…and she informed me of her decision! She tried to dismiss my tears by saying glibly, "there are other fish in the sea". I was not uplifted by her pronouncement.
I will never know if it might have been better to have a heart to heart discussion about her concern for my safety, for the possibility of unplanned pregnancy and so many other parental worries. She acted out of fear and enlisted my silence on the matter so that my father would not know and be heartbroken over my loss of virginity!
My experience only deepened my lifelong distrust issues.
Yours opened a door to a shift in conscious awareness, to alternate ways of seeing. Perhaps it informed your future professional choices.
I am grateful for you sharing.