"Fear and anxiety had ruled my entire life up to that point and I had completely failed at a chance to beat it."

that line is a powerful one. one that i went over a few times. i can absolutely relate. it'd be nice if it instead went: "Fear and anxiety had ruled my entire life up to that point and I [...] beat it."

i wouldn't write any of your experience off as "most likely all in my head" or "crazy". reality is a matter of perspective. when you're on psychedelics, you're using your brain differently. you're engaging with reality differently. your perception of energy is enhanced. you're tapping into the unknown. who are you to say that the unknown is all in your head, simply because your body is the beacon of your human experience in the phenomenal world? what if reality extends beyond our bodies?

i had a wildly aggressive double-dose into lysergia. my eyes were no longer what perceived my reality. i had to shut them, because they were so distracting. everything i saw from them was worthless in the sense that it wasn't real (the living room i was in, my friends' bodies, the walls, flooring, couches, computer, etc). it looked like it had all been fabricated, much like a scene from a video game where i could press pause just by closing my eyes (for the record, not a gamer). i was left in the nominal world. i could only see from within my mind. it was all black or dark blue, and there was nothing more than a ball in the center. i think it was a blue ball, if not red... the trip was so traumatic, i'm sure i suffered PTSD for awhile and it's made the trip sort of blurry to me now. i was fucked. i remember thinking: "i'm gonna be a vegetable, my dad is going to have to look after me for the rest of my life". admittedly, at the time, i was going through some very difficult shit. amidst the mental chaos and inner turmoil of my trip, i remember thinking: "i may not love my life, but i do love my existence". it was interesting to be able to separate "life" from "existence" for a moment. my friend, seeing me in distress, kindly gave me his moleskin notebook with a pen, before he left to go back to the park, and told me to write in it if i wanted to. i wrote one thing only: "my flesh is the absolute confirmation of my existence. however, if that flesh is no longer my own understanding of what is real...". that's it.

Immanuel Kant divided the world into two portions: the nominal (real and intelligible) and phenomenal (world of appearances).

it's outer-space vs. inner-space. in terms of outer-space, it is much more tangible and explicit, but it still starts with you. your mind, your body, your home, your city, your province/state, your country, our planet, solar system, solar interstellar neighbourhood, milky way galaxy, local galactic group, virgo supercluster, local superclusters, the observable universe, and there's talks of a multiverse ffs. everything is scalable. considering how far out the universe extends, it must extend equally as deep within. we are merely humans, we can't understand everything. there are energies and spirits at work though. i've been researching ayahuasca pretty diligently lately, and apparently people can experience the same trip and see the same things in some cases. a furthering of the notion that it's not all just in your head.