Essays
Lucy Paul
1/3/23
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My Psychedelic Experience
Excerpt:
I could see a light in the distance past some shapes. I didn’t know what the light was but knew I had to follow it. We were advised before going in to take every opportunity and not run away from anything, and suddenly, I was eager to find everything I could. I was excited and the nausea had passed. I chased the light, but it kept flickering away from me. Sometimes I could almost see it, flashing like an incredible sunset splashed across my vision, but then it vanished again. I kept running and running following the light, getting more and more excited. I went through gates and walls, they were all crashing open or crumbling around me. Eventually I was running up a slope, and completely bathed in beautiful yellow light. Just me. Nothing else. I was on my own, the light was shining all over me and it felt amazing. I felt a confidence I had never felt before. Like I was whole and unbroken and there wasn’t anything wrong with me. I basked in the glow, feeling like maybe I was actually fine and great and just like everyone else, and then I felt my mouth start to smile. Realising it would look ridiculous to everyone in the room, I instantly tried to stop, but no. I could feel the medicine pulling up the corners of my mouth, willing me to smile. What reason was there not to be happy? I couldn’t think of one. The overwhelming message was this:
“The only thing stopping you from being happy is you.”
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Jaazzmina Hussain
15/11/22
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Something To Believe In
Two a.m.
A cold and dingy flat, cluttered and dirty, now crowded with strangers, three of us, pens, notebooks and papers readied.
A young woman is on the floor, in a terrible state. Heavy in the cold, damp air, the chilling and sickly-sweet smell of blood, which should be inside and is now outside of her body in frighteningly copious amount. It seems so wrong on a visceral level that it grabs my attention away from the smell of the cat urine and faeces which makes the floor a hazardous place to sit or even stand; away from the smell of an unloved body, in unloved clothes, in an unloved dwelling.
We all knew this young woman, and yet did not know her at all. We only visited in the middle of the night, when a neighbour or a worker assigned to her grew sufficiently concerned about her behaviour. We only ever came to take her away—from what, we didn’t know but we all agreed she shouldn’t stay in that flat and there was only one other place we could put her: the psychiatric ward.