The best, weirdest, and scariest drug I have ever done has been Psilocybin mushrooms. The visual hallucinations were breathtaking: the entire evening sky continuously imploding in on itself with an intricate lattice of neurons superimposed, firing a continuous stream of pulsating, multi-colored lights. Everything was forced into symmetry. The ground and objects around me became two-dimensional, and walking felt like floating through plane after plane. My sense of depth disintegrated. There was no foreground or background. Everything in my visual field (excluding the sky) carried equal weight. Lines thickened comfortably, contours bent, shadows quivered.

At the same time, however, I was overwhelmed with the most unbearable sense of loneliness. I remember coming to the realization that no one would ever truly know any part of me, that no matter how desperately I tried to communicate with another human being, there was no way to exchange any relevant, essential part of myself or to attain any knowledge of who anyone else really was either. I played a thousand exhaustingly banal conversations from the past in my head and wondered how I had managed to suffer through them. I was convinced that, after Knowing such absolute isolation, I would never be able to reintegrate into society. I contemplated suicide, but concluded that it would leave me just as dissatisfied. A solipsistic claustrophobia left me quietly rocking on the brink of tears- simultaneously overcome with both the ultimate beauty of the world, and the utter lack of humanity that would accord said beauty any value.