DOSE:

MDMA

BODY WEIGHT:

115 lb

As a child, I was very interested in Wicca, Ouija boards, meditation, lucid dreaming, and anything related. With all these things, I quite easily entered into what I thought were alternate planes of reality, so naturally I am open to trying any drug at least once.

When I took molly for the first time, I was 18, recently out as lesbian, dating this woman named Jen, who provided me with the drug. She was a 20-year-old college dropout who lived in Brooklyn, having dropped out because she felt she was too smart, and was doing quite well for herself, making $75k a year. She had bought Belgian MDMA off the DeepWeb’s Silk Road, an online anonymous drug market. This was during January, and we had been fooling around for about a month at this point, nothing serious yet. While watching her measure out the molly to put it into capsules, I suddenly got a jab of, “Who is this person measuring drugs in front of me? Do I really know her?” We had met on an online dating site, so there was that added paranoia.

At the time, I was dissociating constantly, which is basically emotional numbing, like being out-of-body or fading away, for reasons I’ll explain later. It’s a coping mechanism that helps one avoid intense emotions.

Right after I took the pill, I got a subtle, impending sense of dread. I always try to push away my emotions, so I told myself I was fine, I was fine. I then Googled “bad molly trips” and couldn’t find anything, so I kept telling myself I would be fine, but deep down knew I wasn’t. Jen went to the bathroom and I followed her into the kitchen and stood at the sink and tears began rolling down my face. She came out and asked, “Why are you crying?” I looked at her and said, “I don’t know.”

I told myself it couldn’t have kicked in already, but I usually trip twice as hard as others; I am a skinny woman, after all. And I always take more than I should, because I don’t want to be the ‘lame’ one who gets high easily, and I’m impatient. At this point Jen had called a cab already to take us to this LGBT dance party in the city, where the molly was supposed to have kicked in.

In the cab my head was spinning. Colors and sounds were fading into each other. I had to close my eyes. I felt nauseous and leaned back and could only mumble when Jen asked me how I was. Hers began to kick in during the cab ride, but she had rolled once before, and is not as prone to introspection as I, so she could handle it.

“I think we have to—can we make a fuckin’ pit stop? I think she’s gonna—I think she might hurl,” she said to the cab driver, at which point I leaned forward. She shoved her hand under my mouth and I threw up a little into it. I remember making repeated eye contact with the driver, he was nervous.

We were still in the cab and I was flying. Everything was rushing by me and under me but somehow all in my head, like I was hurtling through channels of space and time, yet staying in the same place. It must have been the movement of the cab, magnified. At this point Jen began a long-winded confession on how she loved me and wanted to be with me. This was too much for me. I was so dazed I could barely handle reality, let alone the mysterious and beautiful complexity of achieving human connection in a world where we are ultimately alone. (I know it might sound overly romantic or overly cynical, and this is not necessarily what I think now, but I’m attempting to explain what was in the moment.)

We got out at the club. If you are from New York City you know the sidewalks accumulate slush puddles in winter that can be knee-deep, and I stepped right into the middle of one. Everyone on line stared at me, waiting for me to freak out. Too dazed to care, I stepped out and crossed the street into a little island, away from everyone. I heard a car horn approaching and passing from my right, and saw lights, all meshed together. It was all very, very close, like I was part of it, just a vehicle through which these things could pass.

It was like being an infant, unable to discern or make sense of all the different parts of reality so you feel overwhelmed, and cry. But instead of crying I threw up again, and again. I bent over and threw up four or five times. It felt like I was seeing reality. It was a brush with the wondrous brightness and loudness of reality that dissociation had numbed me to for so long, and it was too much, it was too real. I was not ready.

I was shivering and my mouth was set in a tight line and all I could say was, “I want to go home. Take me home. I want to go home.” Jen called another cab. We jumped in and drove back to her place. Finally being in a warm area helped to turn the trip around. We climbed into bed and she brought a bucket in case I needed to throw up, water, paper towels. We lay next to each other and talked. She kept telling me to put my tongue between my teeth to make my jaw, which kept seizing up, go slack.

And all of a sudden I felt the most intense euphoria. I can’t describe it but it’s like flying again, it’s like being lifted to the very precipice of colors and sounds inside your mind where you have to close your eyes and you are sprung to the top. It was amazing. We couldn’t stop talking about our lives, pasts, hopes, dreams.

At one point I saw/felt—I didn’t “see” it as in hallucinate it, but saw it as one imagines a visual in their mind—a grayish, formless fetus, which was myself, starting to unfold inside of me, and I choked out “No.” My throat was clogged up but it felt very important to muster all the “no” I could. I could tell it was something—some terrible thing—some memory, or perhaps some greater realization about the world—that I was not quite ready for. I could not unfold that part of me, yet.

Jen and I told each other we loved each other, and talked until 6 in the morning. I was unsure about telling her I loved her even on the molly, so I knew that I didn’t. But even though it was molly-facilitated, the connection remained, because we cannot un-say all that we shared. We dated for six months after that.

The comedown lasted a week. The best way I can describe it is being tired while awake, ornery. I couldn’t really handle class. But the dissociation took the edge off the comedown, I’m sure.

Until then I had only tried weed, adderall, and klonopin, and I had heard molly was a fun party drug, so I assumed it would be good no matter what. As it turns out, molly is about set and setting. It magnifies, rather than ameliorates, anything you are feeling. It’s been used in therapy to help people gain insight to themselves and to connect with each other.

So, in retrospect, this slight discomfort I felt about not “really” knowing Jen, along with my already-intense introspection, and all my unresolved issues, caused a bad trip. I came from a family where all immediate members (mom, dad, sibling) were severely mentally ill, resulting in verbal abuse, neglect, some physical altercations. I had eating disorders and depression since young childhood that I resolved myself, because I was determined to have a better life. At age 18, I was, without realizing it, dissociating constantly. I sincerely believe this is what made me survive and seem to be well-adjusted on the outside.

All that unresolved stuff that I had shoved behind my dissociation, combined with the loneliness of freshmen year, plunged me into a darkness. I was always sort of quiet and cerebral, and had a rich inner world that I rarely showed. On the Myers-Briggs personality test, I tested as an INFJ, which apparently is the “rarest” personality, quite complex, and prone to feeling misunderstood and disillusioned, able to see through veneers and reality. I don’t take the Myers-Briggs to be some golden standard, but I do believe certain personality traits of mine are congruent to the INFJ description. I do, and always have, felt quite different from others. Whether this is inherent, or a product of an environment that has provided me with enough grief to look inward more than most, I don’t know.

In any case, MDMA is a very powerful drug and can make one look intensely inward if one is wired that way. If you have any unresolved sadness, it can bring it to the fore. But I do appreciate what I learned, and since then I have tried molly once more and had a great trip all around, where I felt like I was at one with the divine. For drugs like acid and molly I have to be in the sun and with a few people I like and can talk to, I don’t think I would enjoy it in a dark club or in the winter.

In the future I’ll remember to be more careful with drugs that plunge me intensely into this ultimate reality, which I simultaneously crave and am terrified of. In some ways it’s similar to psychoanalytic theories like the Lacanian Real, and I want to feel it, but I will wait until I’m ready.

Exp Year: 2013	ExpID: 107237
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: 18
Published: Mar 4, 2016	Views: 20,556
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MDMA (3) : Difficult Experiences (5), First Times (2), Small Group (2-9) (17)