Chapter Forty-One: A Fungus Among Us
In which we voyage from Saint-Maxime to Amsterdam for a much-needed blast off.
One misty day schlepping home from the supermarket, I got a call from my friend Berthe. She’s German but lived in Los Angeles for years as a glossy magazine correspondent where she immersed herself in the agave-sweetened superfood Kundalini Kool-Aid I grew up with. Berthe had since gotten into psychedelics in a big way and was doing PR for a psilocybin truffle clinic in Amsterdam.* (Truffles come from a different part of the plant than the magic mushroom, which makes them technically legal in the Netherlands.)
“The place looks like Soho House,” she said in her throaty accent when she called to pitch me. “It’s very serious. Serious research, serious doctors. No statues of Ganesh anywhere.” She said that the people who had so far been signing up, mostly in tech, had come to some kind of crossroads in their lives and wanted a reset. “Major breakups, changing jobs, people needing a creative boost, people with illnesses who want to reframe what’s happening to them.”
Yes please! One of the boons of being a fluffy lifestyle journalist is getting to have fancy immersive experiences on someone else’s dime. This wasn’t a hard pitch to land, at British Vogue.
The short version of the info-bits in the link above: psychedelics enhance neuroplasticity, making your brain’s pattern-making facility more supple. If we gain wisdom as we age, we lose the ability to easily set new neural pathways. Psychedelics—whether in a very high-dose, one-shot trip like what I was signing up for, or in barely noticeable amounts via regular microdosing—can restore some of that lability. This means you can potentially be both wise and flexible. That is an aspiration worth having.
By this point, in Spring 2022, I had been living in my house, figuring out my village, and getting into a rhythm long enough to feel something like firmament had formed beneath my feet. With a place to stand, perhaps I could dip back into the muck that had ejected me to this patch of countryside in the first place. I was out of panic mode. It was time to reflect.
I don’t mean reflect on my relationship and my breakup. That was the tip of fifty-some years of calcified bad patterns, only their most visible and recent effect. I knew there was something bigger behind my unwillingness to merge with other people. Being forced to watch myself make new friends for the first time in a long time, all at once, showed me how rigid and thick my self-protective husk had become. I had done enough talk therapy to know that wasn’t going to break down on its own.
I knew that my well-worn habit of retreating was probably also keeping my inner tuning fork from finding proper pitch in other areas of my life. What did I want to write about, if it was just me deciding? Two years ago, I honestly didn’t know. Now that I had low enough overhead and some time, though, such questions had started to take up space.
After medical pre-screening (some illnesses like bipolar don’t mix) and a bunch of Zoom therapy sessions with a very lovely shrink on the team called Jeanine, the adventure took place over two days in Amsterdam. As Jeanine and I discussed what I wanted out of the experience (clarity, mostly) she urged me to try to welcome any small or sad or insecure parts of myself, should they make themselves known while I would be under the influence of 25 grams of truffles. She recognized that I had a wildly overactive inner critic, and figured it was shutting down a whole bunch of stuff. I would have to find out what.
I imagined the world’s whiniest board meeting of trembling inner children, but what I got was something very different. Ensconced in sheepskins, my eyes covered in eyeshades and a headset playing ambient music, I gagged down a full cup full of truffles, and then another after vomiting up the first just as it was starting to kick in. That added up to a dose and a half, but what was math once the show got started?
My father’s disembodied voice was the first thing I heard in the darkness, thanking me for having carried him. I took that to mean, thank you for not making my life hell after all the bullshit I put you through as a kid. He really was a manipulative, neglectful asshole when I was very small. I had spent a lot of time and anguish in reaction to that ever since, even after my father had matured into a much nicer person. You’re welcome, dad. I guess? Then the fireworks began.
If someone inside my constellation of repressed personalities felt insecure or tentative, they stayed well hidden. What showed up instead was a Viking hellbeast that wore horns and burned down villages. I slit throats and raided and ransacked and laughed. I emerged from the belly of Sasha’s dog Diana like one of her puppies, covered in blood and screaming into life.
I’ve never liked gore as a movie choice, but my unconscious mind clearly has a taste for guignol because it went on and on and on. I caused it all, unsentimentally, with no guilt. I had an out-loud conversation with a guy friend who I knew found me a bit threatening and unladylike. I told him, “You haven’t seen anything yet.”
Some hours in, after all that throbbing, primitive destruction, I felt a wave of intense devotion. I made karmic declarations to my stepkids and thanked people who crossed my mind—my mother, my siblings, a few other close friends who counted. (Not my dad, though.) I felt like I needed to hammer a stake into the earth that said I AM HERE AND SO ARE YOU.
After five hours, soaked in sweat and tears, and occasionally being coached to breath by a very nice trip-sitter, my eyeshades were sopping and humid. I ripped them off as I came back to something like normal consciousness.
The message was loud and clear: the countless times I had chosen to seek consensus over conflict came at a cost. So many unworthy people I never elbowed past, so many editors I didn’t fight with to make a story better—no one was going to give me a prize for any of it. All the fights I refused to have with my ex, all the energy I had invested in thinking that everything was copasetic with my father at the end of his life when I still had plenty to be angry about—I swallowed all that injustice and never really digested it. I took myself out of competition to keep the peace too often, and in doing so, hid far too much. Example 345 out of infinity: I wrote one of the most iconic stories of an iconic magazine launch in 2003 and didn’t even put my byline on it.
Now that self-promotional muscle of mine had atrophied into dust from all the neglect, right when people in my profession needed it more than ever. I earned a large part of my living as a ghost writer (still do), where my contribution was, by definition, unheralded and invisible. No wonder my furious, competitive, ambitious, righteous, egotistical main character needed a stage.
It is easier to enjoy yourself as a writer once you admit that, even if the stage doesn’t always manifest at the same time as the desire for one does.
Enjoying yourself is a faster route to it, though. As time has worn on from that axis-shifting afternoon in 2022, I have since found out what it is I want to write about. And it is silly and foolish and, for now, strictly for my own amusement, as unfinished first drafts of fiction usually should be. If it gets its legs under it, I will take it out for a walk one of these days. But this project existing at all is already an achievement in itself. I spent most of my adult life as a journalist because talking about things that actually happened was a recourse from the chaos and unpredictability of my own imagination. I have since learned that I was missing out on a lot of fun. Better late than never!
I also saw that I really did care about people very deeply, some of them more than I was presently showing. In the two and a half years since that trip, that situation has been simpler to remedy. The maximiens have made for good practice. We see each other all the time here. At some point in every evening, someone will say, “Don’t we have a great village? Can you believe all the amazing people here? Who would have thought?” It’s a repetitive monologue, but so far it still hasn’t gotten old. Appreciation will do that.
*The clinic I visited has since closed, but two leaders of the team, including the lovely Janine, are now leading group retreats in Amsterdam as the Experiential Training Institute. I’d really like to go back for another bite at the apple with those guys again.
What bold brilliant elegant memoir writing! So much respect and affection for this pith of truth! xo
Insightful experience well rendered- like a scene in fiction😉.