trippin' on god

by guest contributor Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa

For the last eight weeks, my grandfather, a devout Christian minister and perhaps the person I love most in this world, has been teetering on the edge of life and death. He was the first person to ever teach me about Jesus, and one of the few who actually loves others like him. 

For the first month, we had no clue what was wrong with my “Papa” beyond a hematoma on his right thigh that just wouldn’t heal. Eventually, however, a huge fast-growing sarcoma was discovered. A week later, we had to yeet the whole leg, and now I’m happy to announce that he’s finally on the road to recovery. 

But it’s been a whole saga. A long, tedious, grueling, HEAVILY MEDICATED saga. And somehow, during all of this, I became the person appointed to ride out his “bad trips” with him.

Some of these drug induced trips are spent with him singing worship music that only he can hear. Others are him trying to recite scriptures from memory, while giving some of the most bizarre and disjointed sermons you’ve ever heard, but the bad ones, well, the bad ones are really bad. He’ll be hallucinating that he’s stuck in a lake, being mauled by alligators. And those are the ones I’m the best at helping him navigate.

A few weeks ago, after a particularly nasty  imaginary alligator excursion, while sitting at his bedside holding his hand, the following conversation took place as he was coming out of it (and only because I knew he likely wouldn’t remember any of it did I admit the following to him)…

Me: “I’ll be happy when we can get you off these crazy drugs. I know you don’t like how they make your brain feel.”

Papa: nods in agreement

Me: “I understand because, well, I’m really bad at being on drugs too. I mean, I know a lot of people like them, but I just hate feeling out of control of my mind, ya know what I mean?”

Papa: “I do, granddaughter. I understand that completely… but hey, at least we can’t say we didn’t try!”

A truer statement has never been made. We certainly did try. And now we’re both users… and losers. Being bad at drugs must run in the family.

Besides my Papa, I’m pretty sure I’m the only person I know of who can’t do drugs right. At least not the supposedly “fun” kind. Most people are either really good at them, or don’t do them at all. But not me. I’m bad at them, and yet I’ve kept trying, never one to be a quitter.

In junior high, I experimented with pot like most teens, and I absolutely hated it. It felt like I was watching my life through a tiny TV screen across the room, and I had almost zero control over any of my words or actions. It was as if I was “playing” my character in a video game, but I was using a controller an older sibling had unplugged, so I was just pretending to play myself. This would of course then lead to me hyperventilating and assuming I was dead, so I swore off marijuana quite a while ago.*

Then, in my 20’s I tried MDMA (a.k.a. Molly/ecstasy), and decided drugs like that were actually just joy gobbling time machines. My theory goes like this: As soon as you take ecstasy, your brain travels to the future and collects up all of the serotonin you were supposed to feel over the coming week. It gobbles it all up and you feel it the full totality of it at once for a few brief awesome hours. And it does feel amazing, don’t get me wrong. The only problem is, for the rest of the week you’re now totally S.O.L. on joy juice while your body works to refill those happiness silos and rebalance your brain chemistry.

It was at this point that I decided maybe drugs just weren’t for me, and I’d pretty much sworn off all narcotics until the end of last year. 

That’s when I found myself at a party telling a friend how I thought I might finally need anti-anxiety meds like the rest of our generation but how I was really leery of prescription meds because I didn’t want to have to be on something forever just to be normal. They recommended pot and I told them how bad I was at altering my mind, especially with THC, and then they suggested trying psilocybin, or “magic mushrooms” as most people know them. 

The friend said rather than pulling you OUT of your body, they make you feel more at one with the universe than you could ever imagine. Oh, and the best part - there was no hangover like there was with Molly.

I was intrigued.

However, I was also scared. I mean, I read articles. I’ve seen the stories about fentanyl deaths, and honestly, feel like kids today can’t even really do drugs anymore because clearly the Feds are trying to kill us all for population control or something, so nothing’s safe anymore.

Then, a few weeks later, I procured some safe ones. 

And I waited two full months before trying them.

When I finally did, it was everything my friend had promised. I lit candles and had a deeply spiritual experience. I prayed the rosary, even though I’m not Catholic, and talked to God while watching the support beams of my house breathe for hours. The next day I realized that the dread and anxiety I’d been dealing with for the last few years had decreased substantially. I suddenly understood why they were called “magic.” I thought I had found the cheat code to life. I immediately became a mushroom evangelist! If a friend told me they were struggling with anxiety, or depression, or hell, even an ingrown toenail, I knew the cure. 

Mushrooms and Mary were my new religion, and that was a good thing I figured. Or, at least a move in the right direction, since I’d gone from Protestantism to agnosticism a few years back (much to my grandfather’s disappointment). And at least now I was interacting with a higher power of some sort again, and THAT felt wonderful.

For months, I was doing great. And in hindsight, I probably should’ve left good enough alone. But I didn’t. Of course I didn’t. I decided to give psilocybin another go. I mean, it had already done so much for me already, so why stop there? I was on the road to becoming Ram freakin’ Dass, and nothing was going to stop my psychedelic spiritual awakening! Or at least so I thought.

Then round 2 happened… and it was hellacious. I’m still trying to work out the PTSD caused by those stupid fungi, which were not fun guys at all. But more on that in a minute.

The reason this became relevant to me at this particular moment in time was because as my grandfather’s health was declining, we were all beginning to find our proper roles in helping him. Who would’ve thought that knowing how crappy it feels to be not fully in control of your mind could actually be a valuable asset to a struggling loved one?

Certainly not me. At least not until the last month. 

Up to this point, I’d always just been the comic relief in my family. No one has ever expected more than a silly song and dance from me. 

But then, after a particular grueling jaunt to the restroom, wherein my grandfather had used up every bit of energy in his bedridden body, he started throwing up. And the only thing worse than throwing up, is throwing up on drugs. And I was suddenly really glad that I was the one there to help him because I knew that feeling all too well, and all too recently.

In his dazed state, he asked me to hold his tummy, so I gave him a big bear hug while rubbing his back and encouraging him to get it all up. I assured him he was going to feel much better soon. And most importantly to the impaired, I made him feel safe.

My family was watching this all happen in real time on the nanny cam we’d set up in his room, and my mom joked she was going to start calling me “Florence.” 

But I knew the truth. 

None of this came from me being a natural caretaker, because unfortunately, I’m not one. It came solely from a life of making poor chemical choices and that particularly horrific second mushroom trip I’d recently experienced. 

During it, I’d been terrified out of my mind, and just needed to be held by my husband for a full 6 hours.

I threw up multiple times that day while tripping. And while it was only 6 earth hours, in my mind I was gone for millions of years, as I worked tirelessly to sew together new fibers of existence at the edges of the universe, in a cold, desolate, Godless wasteland.

Every few minutes I’d ask my husband to take me to the hospital because I was sure I was dying. He’d simply rub my head and reassure me that I was fine, or at least would be soon, and that, no, I hadn’t permanently broken my mind. 

At one point he tried to read me an article about psilocybin. In it was a line that I’d heard before - “You don’t always get the trip you want, but you always get the trip you need.”

At the time, I thought this was utter bullshit, and quite honestly, I’m still not completely on board with this way of thinking. Because see, the whole premise assumes that we should trust our stupid brains to begin with… that they know what’s ultimately best for us when we hand off all conscious control to the toxic motherboard between our ears. And for me at least, there’s not a thing on this planet that I trust LESS than my own brain most days.

 

After all, that’s what led me to experiment with mushrooms in the first place: A brain that was increasingly trying to make me insane. A brain that’s resting state is constant existential dread, and that even completely sober operates more like grey matter made up of ADHD on meth; a brain that is full of the Bible (thanks to my grandfather) but is constantly making me question every perceived contradiction as well as the very existence of God, and if there is actually a God out there, it tells me they probably don’t like me all that much; a brain that had started making me believe perhaps we’re all just highly evolved AI energy sources, creating electricity somewhere in the universe while we gleefully think we’re “alive” but are actually just in a “life simulation”… so, yeah, no, no part of me trusts that piece of shit jerk wad.

Like, at all.

And my second trip only confirmed every bit of those reservations. It also reminded me that I truly am fucking terrible at doing drugs and that even the “good ones” are bad. At least for me. 

So I thought back to that trip, and I held my Papa. I reassured him. I smoothed out the soft silver hairs on the top of his head and rubbed his belly gently while telling him it would all be over soon. And I continued to do this every time he felt out of his mind for the last month, because I know exactly how terrible he feels, and sadly he doesn’t have a say in stopping it anytime soon. He has to keep taking that awful poison. So, the least I can do is be there for him during it.

If you asked me the moral of this story, I would say I don’t always (or like ever) get the trip I want, but I did at least get the trip my grandfather needed me to have so I could sit with him in his misery and make him feel a bit better. And if you asked my Papa the moral, I’m sure in all of his pastoral wisdom he would probably just quote a slurred version of Genesis 50:20 from memory… “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done…”

So, like, in other words ‘you’ve effed up a lot in your life, granddaughter, but maybe it’s not too late for the God that may or may not like you that much… if he’s even up there… to redeem some of it.’

And perhaps this is some of that redemption. Or, perhaps, it’s the fact that being in a cold desolate Godless wasteland did show me that I don’t want to live in that type of existence, and I really should try to find God now… if only I knew how to. 

*Author’s note: Full disclosure, even though I said I was done with THC, I did try a dab pen a few years ago, and that shit is straight up cancer medicine. I don’t know how kids today do drugs. I took one hit and became a terrified vegetable for an entire afternoon. 0/10 would rec doing cancer meds when you don’t have cancer.

Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa is the HBIC at New Wave Feminists. @DestinyHDLR

originally published in cracks in pomo: the zine

check out Destiny’s appearances on Cracks in PoMo the pod here and here.

Drawings by Erin K. McAtee @erin.k.mcatee @arthouse2B