Kirk told me that he, Ben and Ben's brother Nick were going to drink mushroom tea and go for a walk in the woods, and that I was welcome to join if I was so inclined.

I was in my junior year at Evergreen, had just celebrated my twenty-third birthday, and had been taking Zoloft steadily since the previous spring - about ten months of fifty milligrams a day. Before that, I had spent a year off of meds - before that, I was taking Lexapro, before that, Effexor and Ritalin, before that, Adderall, before that, Concerta and Prozac, and back and back to age sixteen when I started the medicinal roller coaster. Throughout life, I had gotten messages from my mother, father, stepmother and stepfather that I was depressed, overly sensitive, obsessive to the point of paranoia, overly negative, and burdened with Attention Deficit Disorder. I was used to thinking of my negative thoughts and feelings as pathologies that required medication, and used to blaming sad feelings or erratic behavior on my complicated, unsolvable "mental illness".

The Zoloft had been working wonders, it seemed. I was uninhibited, desensitized to others' emotions and tyrannical about pursuing my own social agenda. I had a million friends, threw great parties, slept around a lot, and didn't care that much about how other people felt, simply because I couldn't feel a lot myself. I was extremely task-oriented and accomplished. Zoloft made the world slide into place in a sterile, agreeable way. It also stripped away all the spiritual integrity from my environment, simplifying the world immensely. It also altered my natural tendency to focus on details instead of main ideas, which, while convenient for a production-based society like the one we live in, was not at all who I had known myself to be. However, my pre-med self was a lot less successful than my post-med one, so I accepted any personality alterations as welcome adjustments.

I drank the mushroom tea. There were a lot of little bitter mushrooms floating around the top. The tea was green-ish brown. We sipped from our mugs while Ben strummed the guitar. Nothing much happened for about thirty minutes. I was beginning to seriously doubt the tea. Then, suddenly, Kirk announced that the bus was coming and we should head out the door. I gathered my things and stepped out onto the porch.

I looked around and realized that it seemed much brighter outside than it had an hour earlier. I felt that suddenly my eyes were letting in more light than they could before, or maybe it was just that I was seeing more clearly how much light there was in everything. It was a cloudy day in February, but the sky seemed so white, and the sidewalk seemed so white, and Kirk's blonde hair seemed to have so much white in it too.

We got onto the bus without incident, and sat near the back. Now, I just felt vaguely happy. I was loving how much light I could suddenly perceive, light in the bus floor, light in the seats, light in my friends' hair, light outside. I remember wishing I could always see how much light there was in everything. We got off and walked towards the woods, where we started our journey towards the beach. At first I felt connected to the little group of boys I was in, reacting to the funny things they were saying, listening to them. Nothing was terribly amiss or different, except that Kirk was doing his best imitation of a squirrel, and he suddenly appeared incredibly, raucously funny to me. He just seemed like a clown, a little squirrel-clown who belonged in the flat-bed forest nook we were exploring, brown like the ground, red like the ground, he belonged there. And I then saw myself, in a relationship with Kirk, just playing a game with him. Just going through the motions of being his girlfriend, just playing the Girlfriend Game. I was suddenly pulled inward as we marched along the traill; I became solitary and fell behind the group. I started thinking. A lot. Suddenly, myself, the circumstances of my life, and my placement within the web of everything started to materialize in a way I had never seen it before. I no longer cared about having pleasing conversation with the boys. I walked alone. Kirk was muttering about nature, ecology, something about how the water system could be improved, and I was just stuck in firm cogitation about myself. Brief moments of guilt at being obsessed with my own ego came, and then passed, in short waves. Why wasn't I thinking about nature, too?

Eventually, I fell so far behind the group I couldn't see them anymore. I took a different path down to the beach. I was alone, and was strongly attracted to a little creek, where there was a tiny waterfall created by a log that had fallen over a rock, off the edge of which little droplets of water cascaded. I knelt down and stared at the water. The sounds of the water became crystal clear, and I stared at the rocks and at the leaves. The leaves became greener, and I heard something speaking to me. I didn't literally hear a voice - it was more that information, in the form of thoughts, started appearing in my head. I had never thought them before. It was new information. I felt that, suddenly, my intellect and history was deconstructed and laid out on a plane before me. I remembered who I was as a child (I wrote the following immediately after the experience):

Do you remember this little person? She was a delight, and took delight in herself without judgment, without blame. She knew she was a little arrogant, and would sometimes extend her grace to pat the little people around her on the head. She was intelligent, and not afraid to be so, because how else could she be? She is herself, and she has an interest in a great many things around her. She liked to stare at things for a long while, and didn’t worry or fret about being alone because she had such confidence in herself that why would she need anyone else? She knew they were there, and she would come to them eventually.

___________

I just was suddenly put back into myself, into who I was for years and years and years, in a way I had completely forgotten. I remembered having childlike confidence. I remembered being excited to explore the world. I remembered loving music - MUSIC! It had been years since I cared about new music. I remembered how interested I was in everything - science, dance, flowers, bugs, people, buildings, cars, dolls. I remembered my natural sense of superiority. I remembered how I got bored easily in school and devised ways to make things less boring. I remembered how I liked to draw and doodle all the time. All of these things got spread out like a map, while I was looking at the water. What was also shown to me was my own darkness and how it had occurred - namely, that I had intuited things about my family situation at a young age - I had intuited that things were going horribly wrong - and my parents had never validated my instincts; in fact, they had shot me down and told me I was wrong, that my sense of reality was distorted. So I stopped relying on my instincts, after that. And that's when my self-confidence faded, that's when I became depressed, that's when I started losing myself. I was sensing truth, and no one in my universe at the time would tell me that it was true and I was right. So I started giving in to the idea that I knew nothing and didn't have the tools do deal with any situation, because I was fundamentally "incorrect". And there were certain benefits to be reaped from that, like relaxing and letting others take care of decisions for me. By self-convincing that I was wrong, by denying my own gifts, I simultaneously suffered and became used to the benefits of suffering. I saw all of this, while walking by myself, while staring at the leaves and the water. It was a paper map that someone had drawn for me and shown me for the first time. The beautiful thing about it was that I was also shown that I HAD all the tools, and always had. I had EVERYTHING I needed. All the tools were there, waiting, at my disposal. Not only that, but I had been given a particularly good toolkit. My tools were finely honed. I had just forgotten where they were all this time. 

   "Oh!" I thought. "I have everything already? I can stop searching? Thank God. Thank God."

I met up with the boys, down on the beach. I looked at Kirk and realized I wasn't in love with him, I was in love with his roommate, Ben. I was with the wrong roommate. How funny! We traveled up the cliff, back into the forest. I lay with Kirk on the cliff and stared at the sunset, and a feeling of complete awe and appreciation for the majesty of the Earth washed over me. The colors in the sunset were so brilliant, and the forest was so alive, and there were so many, many things in this world, so many wonderful things, and what was I worried about the most? MYSELF. This thought was hysterically funny to me. I laughed out loud at my own egotism! I couldn't believe that the universe was so, so big, and here I was, little me, stuck on thinking about MYSELF. How funny! 

At that moment, I was experiencing a taste of (what I have been told was) the sublime. I was awash with wonder and excitement, and instead of berating myself for my inconsistencies and insecurities, I was tickled by them, in the way I imagined God must be tickled by all of us. My problems - our problems - are not so big. Not nearly big enough that they're going to upset the natural order of the universe, not nearly big enough to warrant the buckets of self-loathing I usually dumped on myself. I can't remember a more perfect moment in my life than that one, when I lay on the cliff staring at the sky, hearing the water breathe, watching the sun wink through the trees, letting the wind blow gently around me. I felt wonderfully held by the universe, nested, soothed by everything around me, comforted by the knowledge that I was truly connected to everything. I was saddened that I hadn't let myself sense this before, when it had been there all the time.

(I don't have a computer, so I have to finish writing this sporadically, at weird places and weird times.)

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The sunlight started to fade, and as the woods became darker, we started picking our way back along the trail home. I don't remember a lot of the walk, except that as the light faded, my awe and wonder started to subside into something more meditative. I went back into myself, and suddenly the issue of my medication sprung up. Why was I taking medication again? I had once been just fine. My brain was just fine as a little girl, and I made it through most of life fine. Why was it that I, of all people, needed to take medication? For what? Depression? Wait, that doesn't make sense to me. Then, it was shown to me again - I say "shown" because it was as though someone was holding up a mural with all of this drawn out for me - that I had a gift of special sensitivity to others; a natural gift of being extra-ordinarily emotionally tuned in, able to intuit things, able to understand other people, a special set of antennae. And that this was, unquestionably, a GIFT. And also, unquestionably, that what the Zoloft and other drugs were doing, specifically, was TAKING IT AWAY so that I wouldn't be hurt so easily, so I wouldn't feel things so intensely, so that I could function and ride the waves of normal life without feeling anything particularly deeply and thus function like most other people who don't have the special antennae. I stopped walking. I stared down at the bridge we were crossing and at the creek water underneath. This was unbelievably fucked up. This was very intensely not okay. This was awful. What has this medication done to my brain? What has it done to my personality? Is the gift still salvageable or has it been washed away? Have my neurons been destroyed? Who am I? Who am I without that gift? That's what made me different in the first place, that's what shaped my entire childhood, that's what differentiated me from everyone else and without it I am shoveled into the ranks and my spirit, my soul, is completely gone. Though I am much more "functional", if "functional" is defined as "paying bills on time", "turning homework in completed and on time", "having lots of friends", "being on time to everything", "keeping my room clean", etc, etc, etc. But everyone can do that. Everyone can do that stuff. I can learn to do all that stuff. But not everyone has the antennae.

Holy good god, i need to stop taking these meds. Right now. I need to stop immediately. There is no turning back from this. This is exactly what's happening. The meds are taking me away from myself. They are leaving my true self lying alone by the roadside and creating someone new, baseless, groundless, focused only on tasks, without a core, without a center. This new person isn't terrible, she just doesn't know what her own meaning is.

I realized that all the things I thought were terrible about myself when I got off of meds were not terrible, they are who I am. My tendency to be late, to stare at things for a long time, to think deeply about things, to focus on details instead of main ideas, to be creatively disorganized, to be uncomfortable wearing girly clothes, those are all me, all truly, uniquely me, that's it.

We walked back through the woods. My mood darkened with the hour, and by the time we got back to my apartment, I was feeling anxious, unnerved, upset, restless, confused, unsure about Kirk, unsure about my apartment, unsure about my environment in general. We ordered a pizza because we were all hungry but too disturbed to venture outside for food. Our friend James worked at a pizza place in town, so we called his pizza place and asked, specifically, that James deliver us a pizza. I was nervous. Ben noticed, and asked if I just wanted to go lie down for a little bit. I did. Kirk followed me upstairs and lay next to me. We lay there, not sleeping, not speaking, just bathing in the white comforter. I wondered and wondered and wondered.

The next day, I called my psychiatrist. I told her I wanted to stop taking Zoloft. She told me I was at such a 'low dose' anyway (50 mgs), that it shouldn't be a problem for me to take half doses for a week, then quarter doses for the week after that, then to just stop completely. I did what she told me, and it didn't work. I felt horrible. My heart was palpitating all the time. I felt woozy. I felt raw. And then I went to Guatemala with Kirk, my roommate, her boyfriend and two other girls. I was still withdrawing hardcore from the medication, three weeks after I followed the "protocol". Slowly, painfully, the medicated veil began to drop, and the colors and sounds and sights of Guatemala were like staring into the sun - everything was painful and real, and too much, and my depression came roaring back, and my anxiety came roaring back, and I realized that Kirk was completely wrong for me, and my best friend was not my friend, and these people were not my people, and there I was, in Guatemala, having to deal with scorpions and Spanish and dirt and heat, and I was just beginning to wake up. Kirk was a horrific support - he criticized my character, we got into fights all the time, he wasn't sympathetic, he started ignoring me ... all things that were terrible but that were true to my original vision in the woods - I wasn't in love with him, and in fact, he wasn't even that great in the first place. 

My psychiatrist was wrong. It did not take two weeks to successfully get off the meds, go through withdrawal symptoms, and recover - it took me about a YEAR AND A HALF. All those years of brain drugs, up and down, up and down - it took me a year and a half for my chemicals to restore to normal levels, for my emotions to regain balance, for me to solidly feel in touch with reality, to know that I'm not crazy. It took a couple of serious supports - a new boyfriend and a new therapist who didn't suck - to go through the steps, to delve back into my family history and discover, like archaeologists, the things that led me to medication, depression, suicidal thoughts, self-harm, crippling anxiety 'disorders', and a host of toxic relationships. I graduated from college and had to move home with this new information, and dealt with some very poisonous family relationships. I worked hard to physically and financially separate from them and no longer listen to virtually anything they say. I'm learning to listen to myself. I'm learning about who the hell I am, for the very first time in my life. It's been hard. It's been terrible. I'm nowhere near done. There are a million times when I actually did not think I would survive. But I do now authentically own everything I feel, see, think and desire because I know it comes from ME, and from nowhere else - it's me, all me, and life is so much richer and more beautiful because I am actually connected to my center - of everything I've ever been - then and now.