The Impetus
The Impetus
You might be curious as to whom would write such presumptuous, out-moded, dare we say… sexist content in our modern age & why would he (boldly assuming my own gender, how retrograde) be concerned with such a ‘toxic’ material? Well, glad you asked…
So, there I was, 18 years old, an outwardly confident, brash, arrogant jock who was internally riddled with anxiety and trauma. I was at a friend’s house with my fellow stoners, gathering around our local kingpin & shaman compatriot to draw our requisitioned dose of LSD on the ubiquitous paper tabs.
My anxiety was like a group of monarch butterflies (happily called a kaleidoscope scientifically) on migration, roiling around my stomach, causing my hands to sweat, as my dose was placed into my palms. We all looked at each other with giddy anticipation and nervously ingested Albert Hoffman’s psychedelic synthesis on our tongues.
That day was rife with Bathos. We needed to wait 30 minutes for the drug to take effect. We migrated out to the back yard, on a day that looked like a windows screensaver from the early 2000’s. We played around like giddy children until about 45 minutes had passed. This is when the euphoria hit. The sheer elation is only comparable to memories of innocent childhood play, like going on a rollercoaster for the first time. Two of my friends were playing in the homeowner’s garden, exclaiming, ‘we’re cabbage patch kids!’ and exploded into laughter.
An hour and 30 minutes in, I am now standing alone in the coolly air-conditioned, upper middle-class, McMansion first story bathroom. I am staring at myself in the mirror. The face I see looking back at me is no longer the one that I typically look at with chagrin every morning before school. Instead, it is relaxed, perhaps dazed, searching for answers in my own eyes.
Without warning my face melts, metamorphizes into one with fangs, a snout, shaggy pointed ears & yellow eyes. Just as quickly, I see a little innocent girl reflecting back at me. Then yet again I see an ancient looking, impossibly lined face of a Buddhist Monk in a saffron robe.
My heart starts to beat intensely as I lose all sense of the familiar, my grasp of reality rushing out like the tide. Making the moment all the more intense, my curiosity is simultaneously immensely piqued. Before the trip had begun, I’d set my intention (albeit unconsciously at the time) that I would ‘Figure out Life’ on this trip. And now, my God, Life seemed to be answering me back.
As I pondered the meaning of life in this dainty, bourgeois commode, my own puny ego offered to the impossibly large, yawning void of the universe the answer I thought I ‘knew’ to be the true. The answer that I thought that everyone knew. The one that we were all searching for how to answer. Everyone wants to be Happy.
I doubt there was an actual thunderclap, but the answer the universe seemed to retort to my piping up seemed to have the same effect on me, as if there had been a sonic boom in the very bathroom I was in. My mind was instantly filled with images of the newsreels of the third Reich. Hitler in an open procession car saluting thousands of adoring, rabid followers. The Nuremberg rallies filled with pulsing, adulating masses of goose-stepping Nazi’s. The crowds roaring in response to Hitlers diabolical, exalting speeches; an entire nation baying for the blood of Europe & the rest of the world.
My body was filled with an overwhelming sense of recoil & horror. I was seemingly fathoming all in one moment, directly through my body, the most palpable antithesis of my puerile big TOE. A dizzying wave of panic swept over me, producing a feeling akin to deep nausea from airsickness. The didactic response to my TOE seemed to be the penultimate pathological aberration of the path to “Happiness” possible.
I reeled back in horror, immediately feeling the symptoms of a panic attack set in. My face flushed hot & crimson, my heart thudded like a train engine or a looney toon cartoon & I broke out in a cold sweat. I burst out of the bathroom & began to pace around the house in a great agitation. My friends noticed me on the 2nd or 3rd lap around the house, the terror obvious in my demeanor. They gathered around in attempt to assuage and tend to my now officially ‘bad’ trip.
Now, barring everything you know about male teenagers who have the strong propensity to smoke a lot of pot & play copious amounts of video games – what do you think their solution was? No, it wasn’t helpful in the least.
They bade me, their dear panicked friend, to just ‘relax!’, hit this bong! It will solve all your problems! It always has for us.
So, trusting the deeply earned sagacity and wisdom of my comrades I ripped a large bong pack as they gathered around me, earnestly wishing this attempt at a solution every success. Well, dear reader, what do you think were the results?
My poor shell-shocked psyche went from being terrorized to being atomized. Which, as you might expect, supplied even further & greater terror.
A wave of nauseous panic swept over me like an 80-footer on the North Shore of Hawaii. I could no longer locate at all any differentiation between myself and the physical world around me. My locus of consciousness was simultaneously my own perspective while also seemingly the entire sky at that moment. It was a distinct and radical shift of consciousness.
Seeing the increased stricture on my face, my friends began to panic with me, as they had apparently overdosed their friend on psychedelics and weed. Our kingpin leader shook me by the shoulders, trying to snap me back into the present with vigorous abandon. His panic-stricken face looked earnestly into mine as I continued to internally melt down. But just then, as all seemed lost, a miracle.
A friend’s girlfriend, the sole female in attendance of this ad-hoc shit-show, called me over to her. Four of us sat around an outdoor patio table. I was still hyper-ventilating, looking around wild-eyed & startled. She looked at me calmly through huge, beautiful, blue eyes situated in a handsome face of midwestern good looks. We were in the same English class all senior year, I sat behind her. She said to me: “When I have panic attacks my therapist tells me to feel the sensations in my hands & feet, to pay attention to my breath and to just allow myself to be.”.
I did this. I began to calm down. An angel had guided me back to safe ground from the terrifying Icarus like heights of pure consciousness. For the next several hours I barely kept it together, but I was on the other side of the ‘peak’. We watched some ESPN, ate pizza and eventually I went home. I took a long, hot shower and immediately went to bed, sleeping most of the next day.
Yet, to my continual horror, I was not out of the woods yet. Over the next several months I would repeatedly re-enter the trip at its peak moments; reinvigorating all the same exact sensations & emotions of the panic attack throughout an ordinary day – family dinner time, college lectures, alone in my dorm room.
As you might have surmised, this timing was serendipitously aligned with my leaving for freshman year of college. I was five hours away where I’d no longer gave access to football friends, family or teachers that had been immensely stabilizing factors in my life up until this time. Oh, & did I mention my decision to take acid had precipitated a bad break up with a toxic girlfriend who I was still on and off with? No? Well… yeah!
I fell into a deep depression. Having started school at the end of August, by mid-October I attempted to take my own life. I walked to the 10th story floor of my dorm building hoping to at least peer over the edge, seeing if I was brave enough to jump. I imagined what it would be like to fall through the air. How long would it take? Would I feel the impact? Would I instantly regret it, the moment I stepped over the ledge?
Mercifully, the door was locked. I thought about the logistics of buying a gun at Walmart as I trudged down the flights of stairs back to my dorm room. That was at approximately 10:30pm. After the most painful, abysmal ‘sleep’ I’ve ever had, I burst awake around 2:30am. I instantly leapt out of bed and fell to my knees, praying emphatically.
For the first time in months the weight & chaos within me seemed to lift like the sun cutting through the morning fog. I heard an inner voice say – ‘you can be great’. In that moment I felt all the possibilities that still lay within me, all the dreams I’d ever deigned something that I would like to do or would be worthy of accomplishment rushed into the forefront of my being. I had found my will to live.
This was my rock bottom. This was also my saving grace. This was the impetus to put one foot in front of the other on my 1,000-mile journey. Insert any other cliché of appropriate humility, wit and import of your choosing.
That moment was the impetus of this website. Ove the last seven years I have spent tens of thousands of dollars and thousands of hours into seeking how I can be ‘great’ or how I can be a great man. I’ve read the best books I could find, tried numerous practices & disciplines, traveled and sought out elevating, developmental experiences of all stripes. Constantly in seeking of how that answer would manifest in my life.
It seems I’ve done a decent job of this – 1. I’m not dead & 2. I’ve had many an adventure along the way that may be worth telling. I will offer the stories and lessons as best I can here, in the spirit of providing my 18-year-old self, and all the others like me, the things I’d wished I’d known when I started out.
Ultimately, you must find your own answers. But it is my hope that even if you get nothing else from this website, it will at least demonstrate you that it is possible to hunt the answers to the deepest, hardest questions in your own life. And in that, you may just find what you seek.