He was right. I felt like a fallen angel gracing the earth that night.
Last night I traced the light fine lines that have settled under my eyes and remembered a time when I thought I’d be young forever.
When time stretched out in front of me as a limitless expanse in which anything was possible. When I would wake up with dewy skin and never wash my face or use skin care or makeup unless I was going out-out.
I don’t remember ever classifying myself as a party girl. I did not go out looking for parties. They actively came and found me and swept me off my feet. But I do remember being the only one of my friends in my Psych class who would come rolling into class on Monday still a little bit high from acid and mushrooms and ecstasy.
Except for one of the few guys who took a Psych minor alongside a journalism major. He and I would share secret glances and smiles and pretend to pull triggers to our heads in a gesture that meant “kill me now”. We are still distant friends to this day, though I would have to look him up to remember his name.
I was a good girl. I didn’t do drugs or get drunk. I was innocent and naive and just trying to figure out what on Earth I was supposed to be doing on this planet.
Six months earlier I was working as a receptionist at a tiny film editing studio in London’s Soho. We mostly made ads for B&Q and other ads, that’s where we made our money. Like a men’s cologne that was directed by a famous director who would rack up so many lines of coke at every meeting during production that by the time the ad was done both he and the main actor were so bloated that they didn’t resemble themselves anymore.
Every morning on my way into the office I would greet the transgender junkie that seemed to live in an empty access to an abandoned store as she flicked needles onto the ground nearby. My co-workers said it was mostly methadone because she couldn’t get heroin.
I was young and without life experience and found it both scary and sad.
That winter, cold and determined to do something different with my life, I decided to study Psychology in the hottest place I could find. I found a university in Far North Queensland, Australia, set in a small jungle edging the Great Barrier Reef. At the time I still had a permanent residency visa for Australia on account of my mother immigrating there when I was a child. I applied, was accepted, and booked a flight to begin my new life.
My boyfriend at the time was a manager of a pub in Old Street. One where all the lawyers and barristers would go and get drunk after work. In the very pragmatic way that only teenagers can, we agreed to part ways when I left.
I started my four-year degree committed and high-spirited. I would apply myself. I would study hard. I would complete and hand in my assignments early.
One day my friend’s friend and his friend called me and asked if they could use my car park to sort out their car that had broken down. I said yes, of course, and was delighted by the excitement of young men and cars and who knows what might happen. One of those men asked me on a date and a week later we were a couple.
Slowly I discovered that my new paramour was a bong-swilling pot-head which confused and unnerved me. Mostly, because it felt like there were always three people in our relationship. Him, me and weed.
Later I discovered that this is a common trait amongst addicts.
Substances take priority and create an impassable distance between vulnerability and intimacy. I could write a lot on intimacy, romantic love and substance abuse, but that’s a story for another time. Leave a comment below if you want to read it.
I resisted and resented his habits but I was young and naive, had low self-worth and self-esteem and didn’t know that I could just walk away. So I stayed and tried to change him while he tried to change me.
The first time, he convinced me to come to a secret party in the woods which in Australia they call a ‘bush doof’. He popped a magic mushroom in my mouth and I promptly went to sleep right there on a blanket on the ground. I had just finished a shift waitressing at a pizza restaurant on the beach and no amount of magic mushrooms or loud music could disrupt my 20-year-old self and a circadian rhythm that lives and dies by the sun.
In the morning he asked me if I felt anything and I said “No, I was asleep.”
The next time, it was my birthday. He gifted me a tiny white capsule filled with fluffy white powder that he said was called ‘MDMA’ and would make me feel amazing. There was a white party — which, as the name suggests means that everyone wears white — that Saturday night and had to take it there.
That night I donned a white tube dress and slung a wide belt low on my hips (it was the mid-2000s) and a group of us drove in my boyfriend’s beat-up car to the party. Before we got out we all popped pills filled with white dust in our mouths and swished them down with water.
Soon, I found myself floating, my feet not touching the ground from room to room of the candlelit, flower-bedecked white party, eyes the size of saucepans, an unmoving soft smile pasted to my face. He was right. It felt chemical. And it also felt amazing. I felt like a fallen angel gracing the earth that night.
After that, I was no longer sceptical. I decided that some drugs, not all, but some were something I wanted to explore and discover more.
Especially because I loved music and dancing but not drinking. I hated the ways I saw my girlfriends pour out of bars and clubs wasted, doing things that would ripple shame through them in the morning.
But drugs were empowering. I felt in control, astute, aware of myself and safe.
That summer, a year since I started my degree, and 6 months since I started seeing this man, we went on a road trip to go to some festivals. A convoy of hippies from the jungle travelled from the north to south of the country and back again in 2 months, working on farms to fund our travels and stopping at music festivals along the way.
The first one we went to, one of our friends asked if I had tried acid. I shook my head, scared by the name but curious.
“What’s it like?” I asked. “It’s unexplainable but it will give you a spiritual journey beyond your wildest imagination. The experience is unique to each person.” I was told. “You won’t like it,” my boyfriend told me.
I walked up to the dirtiest man with dreadlocks so long they almost touched the ground and asked him if he had any acid. He looked at me surprised. “It’s my first time” I explained. He smiled and told me to hold out my hand face down and stretch my fingers so a little divot formed between my thumb and forefinger pulling out a tiny bottle with a dropper, dropping a drop of brown liquid in the hollow. “Now lick it,” he said. “And if things get weird, just remember that it’ll pass.”
I went to the edge of the dance floor to wait and see what would happen.
Later I found myself having danced for eight hours straight while having the most healing cosmic epiphanies and internal psychological healings and thought loops closing in such a way it felt like my entire world and life had been put right for the very first time.
My boyfriend was wrong. I did like it. I liked it very much.
Months later, back at university, during a neurobiology lecture my professor inadvertently confirmed my suspicion that not all psychoactive substances are created equal or necessarily bad for you and that there were ways to work with these substances that had a positive impact on the brain and human psyche.
I wrote more about that in curioser and curioser.
I had rules:
- no alcohol
- no buying drugs (I relied on generous gifts)
- no going to parties with the intention to take drugs
- no getting into a habit of taking them or feeling like I need them to have fun
- no nightclubs or bars. I only went to outdoor parties in nature, a rule I broke 3-4 times
For six years I experimented explored and tested my edges with various substances. I discovered what my limits were, what I could take and where those experiences could take me. I understood what worked together in little psychoactive chemical cocktails. I learned how to eat well to recover fast.
And then, slowly at first and then all at once, I lost interest. My party girl era was over as another season of my life journey seduced me.
I found that I could reach many similar states of expansion, insight, growth and healing through spiritual and self-awareness practices, self-attunement and alignment, and by working with energetics.
It became so much more satisfying to be able to reach heightened states without the crutch of chemicals.
Fun found in a different form I deeply treasure human connection in sobriety. I cherish the nuanced and delicate reading of energies that arise within interactions from moment to moment. Fragile whisps sensed through the air that I became sensitive to in my party girl era.
Last night I looked at my face and wondered how it has changed between the era that led to another. Tracing freckles and lines I gave thanks for every moment that contributed to the memories imprinted in my skin softly starting to gather.