Mushrooms Saved My Life but You Don't Need Them to Save Yours: Part I

I have gone back and forth countless times at this point about whether I wanted to share this experience. I have come to the conclusion, however, that to not do so would dishonor the assignment that God has given me in this particular season. I do not take this lightly. One thing I truly want people to understand is that though the height of this story is about taking psychedelics, it's really about my unique journey.

This story will also be broken into three parts because it ended up getting quite long, but also because I want to make sure that I highlight each area on its own: The Why, The Trip, and The Aftermath.

Disclaimer: I am not advocating for anyone to take psilocybin mushrooms or any other psychedelics. Also, for the sake of all the algorithms, this is a purely fictional tale for your entertainment purposes only. Okay, now that's out of the way.

The Why

My pastor preached recently from 1 Samuel about David's time in the cave of Adullam while he was on the run from Saul. He talked about how this cave for David and his men was a place of development. Even though David was on the run and in distress, God needed to put him in a place where he and his men could develop into the warriors God needed them to be for the mission ahead.

This is what life had been like for me since about 2019. I was at a peak, a pretty good place that year. Now, I'm not going to say it was quite like David slaying Goliath. But in the spirit of this particular comparison, let's just say I was similarly high on life after some big moments.

I had an amazing new marriage, my career was going well, and I was entrenched in political advocacy work that felt like I had found my life's calling. Life was by no means perfect, but it was good. Then everything came crashing down. I will spare the details here, but I talk about this in some of my past content. The point is, things got real, real fast. I would spend the following four years in a place of depression, anxiety, and battling with thoughts of suicide while constantly clawing and fighting for a way out of this cave I found myself in.

As dark as this time became, it remained clear to me that God was with me. That this pain was necessary, and these few years were the time for me to battle the demons I had allowed to accumulate over the previous decades. This was a crossroads where I could choose to work through the pain or crumble and lose myself to the darkness.

I know I’m giving a lot of lead-up to my actual “trip”, but that is because nothing I’m going to say is really about psychedelics. No, this story is about the journey that we each have to take to discover who God has truly called us to be. This journey requires us at times to accept sustained moments of pain and setbacks while still continuing to get back up and lay ourselves at God's feet for the answers.

It was during this time for me that I went through multiple therapists trying to find some mental peace. When the therapy didn't work, I felt so defeated. Particularly as I often faced stretches of weeks contemplating how and when I would make my exit from this hell called earth.

Soon, however, my wife and I found an amazing church home, almost as if God was throwing me a rope to remind me that He was still there. But even as some prayers were answered, I was still falling. More therapy, more exercise, meditation. Still falling.

I eventually lost my ability to focus at work, which is not acceptable in an aviation career. I gave in and decided to see a psychiatrist. I found myself on depression meds that certainly muffled much of the pain I was experiencing, but it was still there bubbling under the surface. Moreover, these meds came with some serious side effects.

Prozac was the beginning. It felt as if a cap had been put on my brain. Nothing really changed, but it caged the depression. All that pain and darkness were still there, still present, but it was as if it simply got moved to a deeper part of my brain. I want to come back to this thought later because it becomes key in understanding how psychedelics, particularly psilocybin (the psychedelic compound in Magic Mushrooms), work differently than SSRIs.

Anyway, the Prozac was not an enjoyable experience. The "muffled brain" feeling was just one of quite a few side effects that included negative sexual side effects (I'll spare you the details). So I tried to go off the meds, thinking, "I'm probably good now anyway." I wasn't good.

Once I had finished weaning off, I found myself right back where I started. So then it was onto the next meds, Wellbutrin. It seemed at first to be the answer I was looking for. It was more effective than the Prozac with fewer side effects, but the depression was still there. It was deeper in the labyrinth of my mind, but still there. And then came the memory issues. I started to notice myself losing thoughts in conversation. Mid-sentence there would just be complete holes—terms, ideas that normally flowed easily were now gone. It was as if someone was just deleting files on a hard drive in real-time. To make matters worse, my psychiatrist insisted the medication did not cause memory issues. "It's probably because you're stressed," he said. This, despite me noticing an acute difference in my memory within a week of his changing my dose. This, despite the fact that I was finding a multitude of other people online expressing memory loss on Wellbutrin.

I think this is when things felt the scariest. I was trapped. My depression was relatively under control; specifically, I didn't actively want to be un-alive every day. But at this point, my career was now gone because I was taking medicine unapproved by the FAA's flight surgeons. My mind, which has to this point been my greatest differentiator, was now not functioning at full capacity, all while facing the inevitable that I was going to have to fight past this and build a new career after almost 13 years in Air Traffic. I was scared to get off of the Wellbutrin and fall back into a worse depression. But I could not live like this.

By now, I had also finally found a therapist who was really helping me work through this maze of chaos. Over the course of about four years, this was probably therapist number five. Why? Because I'm a lot, and I refuse to spend money and time to have surface-level, cookie-cutter conversations with no solutions and with people who are not equipped to deal with a neurodivergent Black man who needed real support. I digress.

This therapist got me, though. There is something refreshing about a mental health practitioner that gives you real tools instead of simply facilitating a conversation with yourself. I'm introspective enough as it is; I need a real conversation. In my quest for good talk therapy, I needed a place to feel safe, to take my armor off.

I remember telling her during one session that the most frustrating part of my depression is that outside of a few people really close to me, nobody really believed me. When I would tell people, "I'm overwhelmed," "I need time alone," "I'm going through it right now," they would smile and nod and proceed to pile more on me. I have always been the fixer; I have always been the leader. I'm the guy that can take any amount of stress from any number of people, put it on my back, and keep moving.

I couldn't do it anymore, though. I was broken. Yet I found myself in numerous positions of leadership with people looking at and counting on me, and I didn't want to let them down. Every time I opened my mouth, I was in charge of something or starting some new great thing. But deep down, I wanted to just "be" for a while. I wanted to be able to enjoy activities or do things I was passionate about without the weight of being "the guy," and without having to have the answers.

Even in therapy, I felt like I often outmatched my therapists. I'm not saying this to be a dick. I remember this one therapist, this young lady in Brooklyn. I was speaking to her about my productivity journey, talking about some of the books I read, and one in particular on Bullet Journaling methods. She seemed so intrigued; the next 15 minutes were her asking me questions about the book and methods I had tried. I thought this was a therapy technique, but it didn't end in any additional feedback for me. Instead, the next time I came to her office, she had the book I discussed sitting on the coffee table. Smiling, she said, "Look, I got the book you recommended, it's really been helping me."

I felt dead the whole rest of the session, and I never went back to her. I quite literally was doing everything in my power every day to convince myself not to jump off a bridge. Then the very person who was supposed to be my lifeline was using me as her intellectual mule. To be clear, I have no issue with a therapist getting insight from a client at all. It was this feeling of being unseen, of feeling like my only purpose was in how other people could use me.

As I'm typing this, it's crazy... I have had so many things people want. I know it; God has poured blessings into my mind and life. To complain that people want you to lead, trust you, and want knowledge from you is wild.

But my mind was tortured beyond what most can understand. I just wanted rest and safety. I wanted someone else to tell me that they got me and that I'll be okay. I didn't want to hear anyone else tell me how brilliant or smart I was. I actually wanted others to see how broken I was inside, to see the monster lurking beneath the surface trying to devour me.

But God!

God delivers at the right time, all the time. I had to acknowledge how bad things had become, and I had to keep fighting, I had to keep praying. This new therapist was one answer to those prayers. Session after session, the layers were being peeled back. I was relearning myself, learning how to embrace the chaotic parts of my mind and to accept them instead of fighting them. She was helping give me the tools to operate as my authentic self in the world, to get rid of the noise and accept how God made me.

Simultaneously, I was finding so much growth in my church. I began participating and volunteering, showing up for more services. I found a pastor I could submit to. As a man, especially one called to lead in so many places, feeling safe to submit in some places is a Godsend. Feeling that you can trust someone else to lead and just let you be a soldier—I can't begin to express how freeing it can be.

While all the above was going on, I had also spent the last year plus researching psychedelic mushrooms. While things were getting better, the depression was still there. It would take me out sometimes for a day, sometimes a few days at a time. I knew I would have to take medicine again eventually. Wellbutrin had some lasting effects after I weaned off, but they were fading.

Taking mushrooms sounds crazy, I know. I won't go down the rabbit hole of my frustrations with laws surrounding psilocybin mushrooms or how big pharma would rather pump us full of synthetic drugs that require dependency when God created everything we need in abundance. Nope, I won't go there.

I will say however, after over a year of my own research, the results sounded overwhelmingly positive. Psychedelic mushrooms had been shown to alleviate or cure depression, anxiety, addiction, OCD… the list goes on. The most shocking part is that so many people either microdosed for a while, took one big dose, or a combination of the two and never had to take mushrooms again, or only used them sparingly.

So, I decided it was time for me to take the plunge and give it a try.

To be continued...