DOSE: T+ 0:00	1 tablet	oral	MDMA
T+ 2:00	1 tablet	oral	MDMA
T+ 2:00	0.5 tablets	oral	MDMA

BODY WEIGHT:

143 lb

I am not very fond of stimulants. Because of this I have, despite years of various drug experience, including many psychedelics and other hallucinogens, abstained for the most part from MDMA - the whole comedown syndrome of stimulants is a horrible thing to me, or such is at least the memory imprint I've been left with as a result of a brief but fairly intense love affair I had with Methylone in the fall of 2010, and the sporadic stimulant experiences I've had with various substances since then (4-FMC, 4-FA, 4-MMC, Amphetamine, 4-MeMABP).

I had already had some experience with MDMA, and it hadn't really fit into the mold of the other stimulants, being a state that is much more easily affected by the environment, the company, and the constant movements of discussion with said company. Furthermore, out of the five or so MDMA experiences I've had, none of them have actually been all that plagued with harsh comedowns. In fact, MDMA hasn't really seemed to even have a significant comedown for the most part. It didn't have one this time either.

It was going to be the first time I took MDMA alone outside. I enjoy dancing very much, and I am often a very energetic and imaginative dancer. Previously my clubbing drug of choice has been GHB, or GBL, coupled usually with Pregabalin or Gabapentin - somewhat egoistic highs that fit the show-off atmosphere of club dancing. I mostly dance for myself, but I wouldn't go clubbing for it if it weren't enjoyable to me to be watched!

Since MDMA has a reputation as a tremendously fine dancing drug, I had been wanting to try it out at a rave or a festival for quite some time - however, there hadn't been any local raves, and I had just acquired two very high quality pills (a green herbalife and a white bugatti). I was growing impatient with them, and decided this one friday night to first check out the array of DJs available at my hometown that night, and, having made my choice, to set out into the night.

At around 23:30 I stepped outside my home, and promptly devoured the green herbalife pill. I was somewhat anxious, but this had mostly to do with anticipating the comeup - the first time I used MDMA a few years back, I was pretty much dumbstruck at how rocket-like the comeup can be, and how lightheaded it can make one feel. The substance is still fairly unknown to me.

Well, I walked around in the city centre for almost an hour, checking out various clubs, asking the doormen how many people were inside. During this period the comeup was manifested, though it was very gradual and easy this time around. I simply noticed that my thoughts consisted of more sympathy for myself and love for myself than is normal. Some anxiety, however, remained. After around 50 minutes or so I decided to take a booster of roughly 70 milligrams, the lesser half of the white bugatti I split with my teeth.

I ended up at the club I was planning to enter to begin with, a small club with a trendy and clean upstairs lounge, and a very smoky and reddish downstairs dancefloor. Almost immediately at seeing the place I began to suspect that coming to a place like this alone on a drug like MDMA might not have been the best idea, a feeling that was strongly reinforced when I was attempting to go to the bathroom. There was a posse of six persons going into the sole bathstall two people at a time, obviously for some manner of drug use. They might've just been rolling joints, but I didn't quite get that impression, especially since they went in in pairs. I began to think about my own experiences with more purely dopaminergic stimulants, Cocaine, Amphetamines and such - and of my own experiences clubbing with GBL and GHB.

What was I doing here? Why did I want to come to a place like this? The drug was pretty much peaking, but I wasn't at all happy, instead I began to feel fairly ugly. What was I looking for, in a place like this, where most of the people on the dancefloor are simply jerking side-to-side monotonously, over-sexualized? I had discovered my love for dancing at the S.U.N. festival of 2013, in Hungary, and had attempted to reach similar vibes here, back home - but there were none to be had here. This was something completely different, something darker.

While I was waiting in the bathroom line with these constantly darkening thoughts, peaking on the love-drug, another guy came up to the queue behind me, and with great aggression shouted 'Fuck! Why the fuck is this taking so long!' That was the proverbial final nail in the coffin: undue aggression.

I left the club, and for a moment's time in the free air outdoors I started getting emotionally back on my feet. But no, my tribulations were not to end. For on the street I suddenly saw, in a moment of great but highly unfortunate coincidence, a local celebrity with his wife. This celebrity, earlier on in this spring, stabbed in the stomach by a young man for motives that were unknown to the public, and unclear even to the authorities. But not as much to me.

The stabber had been my ex-boyfriend, the first true love of my life, with whom I broke up in September 2013. We had used many drugs together, shared a complex and difficult year of uncertain world-views and the use of hallucinogenic substances - substances I had supplied, and introduced to him because he was showing interest. He had always been a bit unstable, but what could I have done? He was interested in drugs, and I loved him, and I appreciated psychedelics tremendously. I was, too, somewhat blinded because of my own difficult relationship to drugs.

Us breaking up didn't help his mental state, though he had been the one who wanted to separate. His drug use continued, and he began to isolate himself more and more from his friends and other close people, including myself, and though I saw this, and I saw he wasn't well (despite him saying he was better than ever), I didn't dare to pursue his company. How would I have deserved the right to do so, since he didn't want me, or my company?

He was hospitalized in late winter, and after some weeks of forced observation he was given freedom to wander about, during the day. Two days afterwards he bought a knife, waited for the victim on which he had apparently projected everything he felt was wrong with himself, and stabbed this person with murderous intent. This person I now saw, my booster rising within me, hobbling on the nightly streets with a tired expression on his face, alive, but requiring the assistance of his wife to move about.

For a moment I thought I should speak to him, to speak for the stabber, my ex, and to tell him why he did it. But of course what I really felt was my own guilt at having allowed a fragile mind to be shattered and turned dangerous, first by way of supplying drugs he probably never should have used, even if it was out of love and interest, and then by way of looking from the sidelines in helplessness as he spiralled out of control.

But I didn't go talk to him, and I'm glad I didn't, for the ensuing mental state was even without the confrontation truly one of the deepest, most terrible feelings of despair and depression I have ever felt. There I was, walking home in the night from a place that didn't feel at all like myself, thinking about whether the ugliness of the club was something within myself instead of something external, and tremendously guilt-ridden. I was rolling strongly, and at the worst moments I could mentally do nothing but gape in paralyzed hopelessness at myself , at what seemed now to me to be a thoroughly ugly and hopeless situation and human being. Every ounce of love I had for myself left me, and though I kept moving, I started feeling suicidal for the first time in many, many years. Though I fought back, my thoughts kept gravitating towards the thought of ending myself, ending this project that is my life, for it was worthless and evil. I felt like I brought no light to the world, only darkness.

Everything had gone so terribly wrong, and when I came home, no one was initially there to greet me and help me. I called my elder brother, with whom I have lived ever since our childhood home - we moved out together, and have always lived together - one of the most solid and most loved and loving people in my life, my hero, who knew that I was taking MDMA that night, and knew about the reservations I had already had before-hand. Fortunately he was already on his way home.

When he arrived, about two hours after my first dose, and an hour after my booster, things started to get better. By way of my love for him I could start regaining my love for myself again as well, and I could talk to him at length at what I was feeling. He reassured me, as he has always done during my whole life (thank you eternally, my dear, dear brother!), that I brought immense light to his life, that I constantly offered him both priceless companionship and support. This helped me, and as a result there was no acute comedown, actually on the contrary, and nothing came close to the absolute horror, the all-encompassing despair, of the peak effects. I attempted to prolong this reparative phase, in part in fear of a comedown that never came, by ingesting the remaining ~120 mg or so of the white Bugatti - but I never felt the effects. My journey for the night was emotionally at an end.

One more thing of some note did happen, though. As I was lying alone in my bed, already fairly happy and feeling mostly at peace, I received a vision of two men having incredibly erotic and loving sex, a vision that was followed by another: a little girl with a venetian mask, unmasking herself. I have had relationships only with men, but after the already mentioned separation of this murderous ex of mine, I began to eye women more than I had before. My ex had thought that our separation resulted from emotional problems that were manifested because we were both men, a ridiculous thought - everything that really happened was because of what we were like, him and me, and this was obvious to me, but he was already weird and explosive enough that I didn't much dare press the point. Instead, perhaps as a perverse way of attempting to make things up to him, I've started cultivating the possibility of having my next relationship be with a woman, something that has been psychologically a very complex thing to me. Part of the reason for me to go clubbing in a straight bar was the possibility of heterosexual contact, but perhaps it does clash with something in me. I won't go into many further details, but when I was a child, I was told that I was expected to be a girl; and my name is somewhat ambiguous as comes to gender associations. I've grown up to be something of a hybrid, and in some sense, I still feel that there is something of a little girl, or nowadays a woman, in me as well - and it may well be most of all my behaviour during homosexual sex where my feminine side is, indeed, 'unmasked'.

I fell asleep around five hours after my first dose, and two hours after my last, though I slept restlessly. Now, the next day, I find myself once more alone. My brother has left me due to a wedding he simply cannot skip, and I whole-heartedly understand this - he was reluctant to leave me, even though I felt and said I was feeling better, and his reluctance and the empathy it showed is again a huge comfort for me. He understands me. I unfortunately cannot say the same about our other roommate, perhaps my best friend, but not the best people-person, who actually managed to remind me of one of my faults, that I sometimes talk too much, on one of my worst moments. For the first time ever I had to tell him that this was not a good way to go about doing things in a fragile situation like this, and though he at least seemed grateful that I had given him something very valuable to think about there, I feel guilty for speaking against his words. He left because he had nothing to do at home, and so I was left alone, and so I began to write this text.

Why am I writing this? First of all, of course, to get a grip on my feelings , to find out what it is that still causes my such terrible anxiety, and that it did. What haunts me the most is my guilt, my tremendous guilt, for what had happened: the stabbing. For the most part I have managed to avoid it overcoming me, since in many respects I am strong, and I know I did nothing bad on purpose, everything I did was out of love or further guilt. I didn't mean any harm. But the end result was catastrophical. Perhaps it would have been so even if I had done everything differently, and professionals of mental health have told me that the drugs could have at most only sped up his degradation - whatever are his problems and his own guilt, they are ancient, things he has always carried with him. But I may have helped in bringing them up to an unprepared mind, and the mind had to turn against others in order to cope. And I didn't help him when he started distancing himself from me... But I will survive, and no one has died, and perhaps my feelings are simply those that close ones cannot avoid when faced with a tragedy like this.

Second of all, I am writing this because there are, I feel, too few reports available of how sensitive a state MDMA induces. Pure MDMA is obviously in an entirely different class of its own from other stimulants, there is no forced euphoria, there is no massive ego-boost, at least not for me. I thought MDMA would help me see the best in an ugly situation, and love even the ugliest things - and perhaps it would have done so on another day, or with company. Instead, this time it made me feel that the ugliness of the environment was in me, a feeling of guilt that was overwhelmingly reinforced by perhaps the strongest symbol for it that I could have possibly encountered, the hobbling, wounded, tired man on the nightly streets. Setting seems to be almost as crucial to the experience as they are with psychedelics.

I would therefore stress the point: MDMA is not a toy, and it offers no ensurance of bliss. These things are not how they might seem from the modern and misunderstanding, purely neurological or neurochemical standpoint, a very, very limited paradigm that often turns a blind eye to human emotions! Whereas for me the comedown from the psychologically incredibly difficult peak experience was a happy one, I wonder if these tables wouldn't have been turned if I had been able to force myself, by way of the drug, to love the ugliest in my environs. Perhaps there truly are some things that are not worthy of one's love, and the realization that love has been given to something that is actually disgusting and repulsive might lead to the most terrible of feelings after the loved up peak has passed - one of many possible constituents of a comedown. There is nothing that is just neurochemistry; alternately and equivalently stated, everything is just neurochemistry. Neurochemical chains of reactions are chains of reactions in the psyche - they are identical things, simply looked at from differing perspectives (the 1st person vs. the 3rd person), and we are thoroughly psychological. One should always try to seek causes first within oneself and what one feels, and not to allow oneself to stop trying to understand one's emotions and psyche properly, and in the way humans have always done, without escaping into artificiality.

Exp Year: 2014	ExpID: 103641
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Dec 7, 2020	Views: 846
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
MDMA (3) : Various (28), Sex Discussion (14), Difficult Experiences (5), General (1)