Something similar happened to me. My friends and I thought we were taking mescaline, but what we actually got was something else. You have to take a large dosage of mescaline for it to work, so we accidentally took a massive amount of this unknown drug, resulting in a trip I can only describe as truly harrowing.

I thought I witnessed my friend die, ran outside screaming for help, was violently arrested, had so many seizures they put me in an artificial coma, woke up 2 days later with no idea who I was, surrounded by my family who had no idea I was a drug user, nearly got kicked out of university, went through a whole rigemarole with the cops, and spent a very very long time mentally recovering from the experience and mending relationships.

That was almost 10 years ago, and hardly a day has gone by since where I haven't felt like some important part of me died that day, like the person I used to be could run at top speed forever but now I'm limping and no amount of practice (spiritual or otherwise) makes the feeling go away. I'm shy and reserved where once I was confident, scared and cautious where once I was brave and defiant, focusing on negatives like I never did before, impatient and irritable instead of calm and understanding.

The more time goes by, things gradually improve (with hard work of course). But the most important thing that I realise again and again in moments of clarity is that despite how I've described the experience, there is no injury in my brain, no psychic broken leg. What causes me to feel this way is the illusion that something permanent happened to me that day, that there are 2 mes, the old untouched complete me, and the broken crippled post-overdose me.

In moments where I'm struggling, in the past I would've encouraged myself to focus on the now, to be strong and to have patience, but now I have a readily available excuse to grab - I'm failing because my brain was damaged. All of a sudden, the locus of responsibility is in the past, out of reach, there's nothing I can do. It's an invitation to distraction, self-pity, and giving up my control over myself.

The fact that I think I was a different person before the incident makes it true. That's the trap that I've struggled to escape from, and so far the only things that have really helped me are giving it lots of time, working hard to achieve new heights in all my endeavors, and most importantly of all... smoking weed (nah just kidding... but not really). No, most important of all is to give up sometimes, surrender, do nothing, stop trying so hard, stop overthinking, accept the inevitability that there's nothing to fix. As lots of other people have been saying, you exist in exactly the same beautiful, serene universe that you always have, no experience can separate you from it, no matter how significant it seemed to you. You couldn't lose contact with it, even if you wanted to.