I went into this trip with intention: I wanted to understand why I kept sabotaging my relationships. Made tea with lemon and ginger to help with nausea. Set up my room with low lighting, comfortable bedding, a curated playlist, and a journal.
T+0:30 nausea hit hard despite the ginger. Rode it out without vomiting. T+0:45 the come-up anxiety was significant — racing thoughts, body tension. I breathed through it and reminded myself this was the medicine working.
T+1:00-2:30 the mushrooms showed me exactly what I asked for, and I hated it. I saw with crystalline clarity how I push people away before they can leave me, a pattern rooted in childhood abandonment. I cried harder than I have in years. Not sadness exactly — more like releasing something I'd been holding for decades.
T+2:30-3:30 the intensity plateaued. I wrote pages of stream-of-consciousness in my journal. Insights came rapidly. I made connections between behaviors I'd never linked before.
T+4:00-5:00 gentle landing. Emotional exhaustion but a feeling of lightness, like I'd set down something heavy.
The next morning I read my journal. Most of it was coherent and genuinely insightful. I brought these notes to my therapist and we worked with them for months. This trip was uncomfortable, at times agonizing, but it compressed years of therapeutic work into hours.
Difficult is not the same as bad.