Vietnam and Mushrooms: Discovering the Day my Childhood Ended

The second time that I did mushrooms in Vietnam was possibly the most intense and simultaneously profound thing I have experienced in my life. I thought that the first time was life-changing, which it was but the second experience gave me insight into something that has haunted me for over 20 years; the day my childhood ended.

DO NOT ATTEMPT TO BUY ILLEGAL DRUGS IN VIETNAM.

Drugs of any kind outside of alcohol and pharmaceuticals are highly illegal in Vietnam and unlike The United States where you might get a fine, lose your license, or thrown in jail. In Vietnam, a joint could get you a decade in one of the worst prisons on planet earth. A bag of mushrooms might get you incarcerated for life. I do not recommend doing illegal drugs, especially in Vietnam.

The octopus is likely the most intelligent animal in the world. It is capable of camouflaging itself, solving critical thinking problems, and has three hearts. It is also an animal that freaks me out, but that is just because everything at the bottom of the sea freaks me out. Between things that glow in the dark and Xenomorphs, the ocean scares me I typically stay on land.

The first time I did mushrooms I found myself protecting a small child version of me and promising to take care of him and keep him safe. Psychedelics may have opened a new door to discovering the vulnerability in myself. During the space of time between dosing, I felt most in tune with myself mentally and emotionally. It was like a new better version of me emerged from that trip. I felt more willing to be open to possibilities and more clear and concise in what I wanted in my future. It also gave me an added sense of self that I had not previously had. I don’t want to use the word enlightened because that isn’t really what happened. It was more like a newfound feeling of compassion and trust developed.

The things that I used to lack were self-love, happiness, and respect. That sounds odd to me in retrospect in consideration that I have led what I can only call as an exceptional life. I have traveled the world, fallen in love, ate Portillo’s chocolate cake and yet there has always been a sense of depression and anxiety that sits with me. It doesn’t matter what I do or where I go I have ever had an impending sense of doom and a crippling sense of not good enough lingering over me.

Death…

As a child, a sense of fear came from my step-father, my asthma, and my mother, as an adult that came from my autoimmune disease. I don’t talk about my sickness very often but I will soon. The feeling that at any moment I will die does two things: inspires me and terrifies me. I always wonder if today will be the day I die. I’ve been on my back on a hospital bed more than once looking up at the white lights knocking on heavens door.

The first time I was 6. I was in Kentucky with my mother. She left me with a stranger that I had never met to go to a wedding. By the time she loaded me into this person’s car, my mother was three drinks in; it was 11 am. I begged my mother not to make me go with the strange woman but she didn’t listen, and by the time the car hit the corner to wherever it was we were going I was in full on hyperventilation. I have no reason to believe that I was going to be harmed by this person, but I was 6, in a city I’d never been, my mother was gone, and I was scared.

I woke up in an emergency room hospital bed with my grandma by my side, and she was holding my hand. My mother was in the lobby on the phone with the insurance company. My arms were laced with I.V. Tubes, monitors, and another one of those little plastic ID bracelets. By this time I was collecting them like baseball cards. My hyperventilation sparked an asthma attack that was so bad I passed out. I overheard the nurse telling my mother that if I wouldn’t have had my inhaler in my bag that I would have died; one of the few times my mother was responsible. I spent the next 24 hours in that hospital bed. My grandma didn’t leave my bedside once except to tell my mother how irresponsible she was. I could hear her from the hall.

For years I thought that this was the day that caused me to be a hypochondriac. It made sense. Facing death as a child fucked me up and it kept happening. I was the person who called 911 when my grandma had her first stroke. I called my aunt first. Grandma yelled about me saying she couldn’t afford an ambulance and that my aunt should come and get her. I called my aunt, and he told me to call 911. Grandma yelled, but I did it anyway. I was also there ten years later when she had a stroke that put her into a coma.

Death is everywhere, and I rationalize that as a part of being a human being. We all will die. I will die. You will die. I dealt with death like I worked in a morgue, but it wasn’t my mortality nor my grandma’s that set me up for a lifetime of fear and self-induced sickness.

I recall the heat of the day which was unusual for mid-October Indiana. I couldn’t wait to get out of my uncomfortable church clothes; I always hated wearing them because I hated going to church. We had just come home from an afternoon Mormon church ward meeting. I sat in the back with my recently newborn brother. He was seven months old. My mother drove, and my step-father sat opposite her. My two younger brothers spent that weekend at grandmas.

I slide out from behind of the folded passenger seat of the black Chevy Cavalier. The car was covered in dents and rust. Most of the damage had come from my mother driving intoxicated. My step-father took my baby brother from the car seat and handed me the keys to the front door. My job was to hold the door open for them and to make sure that nothing was in the way of the path to the bedrooms. There was always something in the way.

I opened the door and walked in to kick the shoes that lined the now blackened white carpet out of the way. As I reached down to take off my amazingly uncomfortable church shoes and replace them with my tattered Goodwill purchased L.A. gears, I heard my step-father screaming for me from the driveway.

“Michael call 911!” His voice carried past the front porch and into my ears. I laughed and poked my head out the door to see what was going on. He and my mother often joked about calling 911. In retrospect, they were like the boy who cried wolf. Between the violence and threats they shared and the times that they play fought I never knew which way was up.

My step-father caught my joyful gaze as I stepped down from the front porch, but his expression didn’t mimic mine. As he rounded the back of the car to the driver side, my mother was planted back down on the gravel driveway convulsing as she choked on her own vomit. One of her legs caught in the seatbelt that was attached to the open door and her other leg hung on the steering wheel. She had taken too many pills again, and this time she was holding on for her life.

“Call 911 you little retard.” My step-father screamed as he pulled his wallet from his back pocket stuffing it into my mother’s mouth to keep her from swallowing her tongue. “Does it look like I’m fucking playing?”

I was caught off guard by what I was seeing. To say I was caught off guard would be an understatement. I was in shock. I couldn’t think, speak, or move. I was frozen in time as I watched my mother writhing on the ground next to the Cavalier.

“Go call 911!” He screamed again propping my mothers head into his lap. The second scream brought me back to consciousness, and I sprinted back into the house. I grabbed the white brick cordless phone. I pressed the power button. It flashed three times and the little red light faded. It was dead. I ran to the kitchen to use the phone that was mounted to the wall. I picked it up and put it to my ear, but there was no dial tone. I set the phone back on the hook and took it off again — no dial tone. I unplugged the wire from the base and the wall and plugged it back in — no dial tone.

Two days before that phone was broken. My brother was in the kitchen calling my grandma to come and take him from our house after another vicious beating at the hands of my step-father. This one was worse than usual. My brothers and I examined each other’s bruises and welts trying to take care of each other the best way that we knew how after being beaten. My step-father heard my brothers conversation with my grandma, ripped the phone from his hands, pulled it from the wall and slammed it to the ground, and threw my brother across the kitchen into one of the cabinets. The cordless never worked because that battery was always dead and my step-father destroyed the phone in the kitchen. There was nothing I could do.

I ran back out and told him that the phones didn’t work. This sent him into a fury.

“Call 911 you stupid ass! Now. Get the fucking phone and call 911!” He screamed.

I tried to explain again that the phones didn’t work but was interrupted by a voice coming from behind me. Our neighbor heard the screams and yelled that they had called 911. They never called for the cries of children. I guess that’s just how it goes in 90’s Indiana. Despite the middle of the night beatings, the pleas to stop, and the little boys walking around covered in bruised no one ever called 911 for us. I could hear the sirens coming from down the street. We lived less than a mile away from the fire station, and I could hear the sirens all the time.

Medics arrived first and helped stabilize my mother. A ladder of firefighters followed shortly after and I stood on the porch paralyzed watching every second. One of the firefighters walked over and asked me if I wanted to wear his helmet. I said no. He wondered if there was anything that he could do for me. I asked him to take me with him. He patted me on the head and told me that he couldn’t do that. This wasn’t the first time nor the last time that my mother overdosed and I asked someone to take me.

My mother’s overdose would be the beginning of a significant period in which my brothers and I would stay with countless families and friends of families from the Mormon church and our neighborhood. After the 30th different family I stayed with I stopped keeping count. Sometimes I was with my brothers, but most of the time we were separated. The compassion and open-heartedness of the Mormon community is not lost on me. They didn’t have to take in abused junkies kids, but they did it because that’s the kind of people they were. That didn’t make living out of a backpack and on occasion sleeping in worse conditions than my own home better; it just meant that I wasn’t homeless, at least during this period.

“Are you trying to keep me from finding the truth or are you trying to keep the truth from finding me?” I asked the Octopus as I laid in a pool of water looking at the stars. An hour prior I had taken a bit over a gram of mushrooms, and they were entirely taking ahold of me.

I came into my second experience in the same way that I had during my first with psychedelics. I was willing to allow the universe to bring me whatever it was that I needed to see and feel. I accepted the fact that since I was taking a larger dose than the first time that I could end up in a dark place. What I didn’t expect was that this experience would give me an insight into my life that I had been seeking for over 20 years.

As I laid in the water and looked up into the dark sky stars began to appear. Each one sparkled brighter than the one next to it, and I felt a calm fall over me. My body felt heavy, and all the tension seemed to melt away. I felt peace. The sky looked familiar, and two stars start came together only inches apart. Then they became encircled by a collection of more bright shining balls of fire. From there long strands of stars joined to create a multitude of arms. Each going its separate way. The illusion became real as the Octopus emerged before me.

The Octopus was beautifully translucent yet shimmered in the night sky. The light reflecting off of it shot back into my eyes and suddenly the pain that has been in my stomach for the last five years, the very same pain that was the catalyst for me getting sick went into overdrive. It felt as if my guts were being ripped apart from the inside — a familiar sensation to say the least. Suddenly, I was transported inside of my body while somehow watching myself from the outside. I was tripping balls.

I could see the darkness that lived inside of me. It was the blackest black that I have ever known. That darkness had rendered me as a slave to its will for five years, and I was coming face to face with it for the first time. As I stepped towards the darkness, I asked it why it would not let me go. It didn’t answer. I stepped closer.

“Why won’t you let me go?” I asked again to no response.

“What do you want from me?” I screamed into the darkness but still no response.

As I stepped closer, I felt a wrenching pain in my gut. It was much more than even on the worst days before. The pain was so intense that it shocked me back to reality. I reached my hand back and placed it on my stomach and closed my eyes. I wasn’t done, and I wanted an answer to my question. I slowly began to fade back into the darkness.

I stepped towards the darkness again and as I did was pulled into the depths of the water. I submerged and began swimming. I could see a small glimmer of light far below me. I swam closer and as I did the light became brighter as if some kind of beacon guiding me to what I needed to see.

I came close enough to see that the light was being expelled from a chest not much unlike that of a paid bounty to a gallant envoy of a kings vessels. It was covered in gold and jewels with a lock that looked like it belonged on the outside of Fort Knox. I edged to the lock and felt the weightlessness and pressure of being submerged rush over my body. I reached my hands to the lock and as I did the octopus appeared wrapping its tentacles around the chest throwing me back into the depths.

I gathered myself, and as I approached the chest again, the octopus wrapped itself tighter and tighter around the chest.

“Are you trying to keep me from finding the truth or are you trying to keep the truth from finding me?” I could hear myself saying the words out loud and as I did the octopus and I locked eyes. Somehow I could tell that it was trying to protect me. I wasn’t sure what could await me in that chest. I stood fists clenched and pleading with the octopus to open it. It looked at me with weary eyes conveying its concern that whatever was inside would forever change my life. It slid it’s now dark blue and glowing tentacles away from the chest.

Slowly in a way that made me think the octopus was giving me one last chance to say never mind began to open the lid to the chest. As it did debris from the bottom of the sea started to build up. Then like a light switch flipped, I was transported to the sidewalk of the house on Allison Ave.

The octopus was trying to protect me from a memory that haunted me. I never forgot what happened the day that the phones didn’t work and how it set up the next couple of years of my life for pure chaos and insanity. Watching my mother overdose has played on repeat in my head since the first time I witnessed it — each time since was like bricks being stacked on top of each other.

I stood and watched the memory play again and again. I heard every scream and felt every emotion. I felt the helplessness of not being able to help my mother. I felt the put fear of my step-father’s voice threaten me and break me down. And I felt the real raw emotion that I had not experienced when I was a child.

Tears streamed down my face as I witnessed the young version of me that I had promised to protect watch terrified and afraid. The pain of that moment was buried so deeply that the octopus began to pull me back to reality. As I was on the cusp of being pulled back in, I told it that I could handle what was happening. I was ready for whatever else would come.

I laid in the pool of water grabbing at the pain in my gut — tears rushing down my face refilling any water that had splashed out. The vision was so vivid and real. It played through me a million times over but at the same time felt like only a second had passed. I had experienced watching my mother nearly die on more than one occasion, but I had never honestly felt the emotion attached to those moments.

I cried for what could have been an hour or 10 seconds. I have no idea. I could feel the pain begin to subside but not entirely and as I tried to allow myself to go deeper the octopus appeared once more.

“This is all for today.” The Octopus spoke to me in a booming and compassionate voice. “There will be more.”

As it spoke, I was shot back to reality once more, and in an instant, I was a million miles from what had just happened. My face hurt from crying and I felt an instantaneous shift of self-acceptance. Something happened that I didn’t expect. I was always the person that didn’t care, and at that moment I felt acceptance for myself and my mother. Her drug addiction was more than just what came from getting high. She, like me, was in a tremendous amount of pain. I let the tears dry on my cheeks and thought about the strength of my brothers and sister who for better or worse keep my mother in their lives. They had something that I have only just discovered, that is empathy.

I realize that these dark places I’ve been shown recently are being shown to me because I have been disassociated from them. Maybe I have convinced myself that they aren’t that bad, I mean, after all, no one ever called the police to help me. Is a child being beaten until he passes out that bad? It is. I know that from first-hand experience. Maybe my darkness meter is skewed. That’s the result of trauma. Perhaps these are merely memories of times that have impacted my life so profoundly that they require a reexamination from my subconscious. I believe that becoming associated with the memories of my past is the gateway to my future.

That darkness was the epicenter for my neurotic obsession with death, my hypochondria, and the day that my childhood ended. I used to think that it was the night that my step-father beat my brothers and me in the middle of the night for putting away wet dishes, but I am confident that watching my mother almost die was the catalyst for the next 20 years of my life. It was more than just her fighting for her life; it was everything that happened in those few minutes. My self-worth, identity, and capacity to not follow through was likely spawned from that very incident. Or maybe it wasn’t; I am still trying to figure it out.

I know that the octopus has more to show me and I am ready.

The Temper Trap — Miracle
“Something else comes over me
Grace has come to set me free
In your hands, you hold a new forever”