There are thousands of people who made big life decisions based on realizations they had on psychadelics. And none of them seem to regret it.
Published
Last year, when writing on psychedelics, I spoke to a professor who told me that people’s perception of psychedelics is often colored by pop culture: people who see pictures of hippies tripping acid will sometimes embody stereotypes of hippies or Woodstock after tripping acid themselves (genuinely so), because they’ve projected this cultural understanding of psychedelics onto their trip. Likewise, people who believe psychedelics open demon portals, can sometimes project this Satanic understanding onto their trip and can have some pretty terrifying audio-visuals.
Reflecting on this, I realized that our cultural understanding (and expectation) of psychedelics is mostly binary—for both users and onlookers: it’s either a radically positive, loving experience, or a fast-track to demonic possession. I don’t often hear about the more raw, nuanced revelations and experiences that come from psychedelic usage, the choices that were life-changing, but not terrifying, and that also might make someone say ‘huh, I’m not sure that was a good idea.’ In short, I don’t think we hear enough about the risks we take on psychedelics.
I used to live in Delhi, and there, I made friends with a woman who was 36 and was proudly child-free. She had mentioned to me that her partner had really wanted children at the start of their relationship, and that she always thought she could be ‘open’ to having them, even if it wasn’t her first choice. I pressed further, wanting to know how this fuzzy ‘okayness’ evolved into hard boundaries around being child-free. She revealed to me that she had taken MDMA (also known as ecstasy, considered to be a mild psychedelic) in an effort to exercise her brain (‘biohacking’), and become overwhelmed with a sense of dread around the thought of having children that she had been suppressing.
Matching this foregrounded sense of dread was an equally overwhelming urge to ‘confess’ this boundary to her partner (which she did, while still high). She held that, had she not done MDMA, she might be saddled with children she never wanted. She held that the feeling of having this boundary was felt so strongly that it oozed from her pores and changed her brain chemistry. She was less afraid of saying what she wanted.
I tried shrooms for the first time as an undergraduate student, studying politics and living with friends who, like me, were into any kind of counter-cultural scene. I dreamt of radically changing my life, living abroad, causing a public disturbance, but in reality, I was a very stereotypical university student in an exceptionally quiet Canadian city—which is to say, largely uninteresting. When I took shrooms for the first time, I became somewhat obsessed and began micro-dosing almost weekly for about three months. I didn’t have a shaman or any kind of psychedelic community, I hadn’t read enough about safe tripping protocol, and I certainly wasn’t setting any kind of ‘intention’ for my trips. At the time, I was convinced my brain was expanding and that every choice I made was a good one: that trip cracked open a sense of possibility that I didn’t know I had.
As a 21-year-old (in quite a vulnerable position, I might add), this sense of possibility manifested into me moving to Berlin to live with a far older boyfriend, which lasted all of six months. When I moved, I mostly stopped using psychedelics (not for any reason aside from not having the same network and community), and when my penchant for counter-culturalism slightly subsided, I started to realize that some of my choices might not have been the best. I didn’t feel regret (and still don’t), but I became interested in teasing out what role psychedelics played in my choices and the goods and bads behind them. So, I turned to the insights of others.
Anyone into psychedelics and digital psychedelic subculture will typically point to two key websites: Erowid and Reddit (r/psychedelics). The former is biblical for beginners and those interested in more intellectual debates on psychedelics and innovations in the field, while the latter offers more candid and interactive forum discussions. To find a sense of community in my search for others who had made extreme decisions on psychedelics, I went to Reddit.
R/psychedelics and r/drugs can be cesspools (I got countless ‘wanna sesh?’ DMs after posting and revealing myself as a woman), but they can also be where people are their most anonymous and candid selves. Scrolling past the ‘need help IDing this mystery drug I just took’ threads (of which there were many), I began my own threads and DMs with users, asking about the risks they’ve taken. One user reminded me of my friend in Delhi, but the inverse: it was only on mushrooms that she really did want children, and that she could be a great mom. She now has a one-year-old, and wrote that her mind hasn’t changed since that trip: she loves being a mom. “It was the most life-changing experience I’ve ever had(until I brought my kid home of course!),” she wrote. This received several upvotes, with one user reporting the same experience.
The most common answers seemed to be about relationships (like my own), except, compared to these users, my answer looked like child’s play. One person had realized they still loved their ex, DM’d her, and got married to her—twenty-five years ago. Another user has recently gotten engaged to their partner, also because of a trip revelation. One user, interestingly enough, got sober after a psychedelic (he didn’t name the type) trip. It might be easy to compare psychedelic-induced risks to the choices you might make when drunk or high on another substance, but in my experience, and in my conversations with others, they’re completely at odds with each other. No one that I spoke to regretted any decision they made while on psychedelics, and most still shared the same feelings that they discovered on their trip. In my experience, the opposite is true for drunk decision-making. That being said, on the inverse, the idea of a trip that gives you rose-colored glasses for life is equally as false.
While I recognize that many of the decisions I made were not great (the middle-aged boyfriend, mainly), I don’t necessarily regret them. Instead, I’ve realized that psychedelics don’t offer any kind of esoteric life advice. What they do offer is a temporary collapse of prejudice and conditioning, allowing us to see multiple paths before us. The real magic of psychedelics isn’t in the risks themselves, but in the self-confidence—sometimes false, sometimes revelatory—that they give us. There’s a reason the people I speak to online and in my own life have a sense of self-assuredness about their actions, and many of them no longer use psychedelics: understanding yourself as a risk-taker, as someone who can articulate their needs and enforce their boundaries, is something hard to walk back on once you’ve felt it first-hand. This confidence, if we’re conscious of it, is something we can cultivate even without the drugs. And that is the magic of mushrooms.
