Introduction: Hearts & Minds

How psilocybin dropped me in the ring for a 15-year battle with OCD

The boy, clearly suffering, has no idea he’s being watched.

He stands before a room designed just for him. It’s painted in his favorite colors. It’s filled up with the things he loves.

But the boy can’t take more than a few steps inside this room without having to recheck that he’s locked the door behind him.

“Obsessive compulsive disorder,” a surgeon mutters, beyond a wall of one-sided glass. “You leave me with no option, kid.”

You’d think the surgeon would give the boy a second or two to work through his compulsion.

Instead, he immediately burrs holes in the boy’s skull, and cuts out the supracallosal fibres of his cingulum.

I was not a kid who watched much television. But this scene (I was paraphrasing heavily) from the episode “Hearts & Minds” — from the 90’s medical drama Chicago Hope — had me so immersed, I couldn’t look away.

For the first time in my life, I was seeing my own tendencies — which I had always believed to be normal — presented as if they were so terrible, a lobotomy was a better alternative.

As if every eight-year-old didn’t spend their afternoons checking (and rechecking) a lock until their hands were raw.

That night, I woke my mom up and blurted out: “What that kid on TV had, I have that! I have obsessive compulsive disorder.”

What I really needed was time to think this thing through. Unfortunately, the next morning I had to leave for a week-long class trip to Huguenot. While other kids were balancing on tightropes above ravines, or clamoring to peer at Orion through a telescope, I was staggering around uselessly, thinking about Chicago Hope and psychosurgery.

My brain was 100% checked out. During games of Duck, Duck, Goose, I would realize on a half-minute lag that I had been picked as Goose, causing my classmates (and teachers) to howl with laughter.

I was shocked with the new assuredness that I was no longer a normal kid; I was someone with a mental illness, which I always believed was much worse than a physical one.

When I got back home to Long Island, my mom looked at me in the rearview mirror and said she had good news: While I was away, she’d told my older half-sister about what I claimed, about my having OCD.

In turn, my half-sister revealed she secretly lived with OCD her whole life. Not only that, but my dad, who died when I was six, also lived discreetly with the disorder (he was prone to writing arcane symbols on finished woodwork; would spend an entire day leveling a shelf). And the very same was true of my grandfather (he was a hoarder who once jogged into a Toys “Я” Us to inform them the R was backwards).

Instead of home, my mom drove me straight to the doctor’s office. We were late to my appointment because I refused to enter the building unless a prime number of tiles materialized between me and the receptionist.

Thusly, I was officially diagnosed.

From there, I landed on the therapist’s couch, where I endured useless exercises, e.g. the therapist dropping a pen on the floor and asking me to pick it up, followed by: “Now, do you still think the pen is on the floor?”

In the scheme of things, the symptoms I experienced heretofore were disruptive, but not crippling. They were more like an annoying fridge buzz.

It wasn’t until I hit age twelve, and puberty, that my mind really found new and amazing ways to betray me.

I can still conjure the unique sensation of having my brain “molt” over the course of a single night: I went to bed with my mind quiet and clear (the brain I had always known), and woke up with songs, ruminations and random blabbering layered one over the another (the brain I’ve had since).

From that point on, my compulsions became more cerebrally-housed; what I consider now to be Phase 2 of my OCD career.

Phase 2

Phase 1 (ages six — eleven) was the domain of classic OCD stuff: checking locks, faucet handles, light switches, and sources of heat.

But Phase 2 (twelve — fourteen) introduced me to a series of bizarre, esoteric fears, each with their own rumination key.

I would spend entire summer days obsessing about whether or not I had ever lied to my mother or committed a crime (the same thing as far as I was concerned), or whether or not I had ever attempted suicide (wouldn’t I know?…OCD isn’t governed by systems of logic).

By age thirteen, I needed sleeping pills to get through the night. I was also in the bad habit of deferring my compulsions, which meant asking my grandmother to check the oven dial for me, so I could be off the hook for burning the house down and killing us all.

Here I learned an important lesson about mishandling this disorder: the transference of uncertainty can be a powerful thing.

Being insulated from the responsibility of something out of my control alleviated the distress that fueled my compulsions. If the house burns down and it’s grandma’s fault — so what? At least I’ll sleep soundly.

But in the end, this panacea proved to be short-lived. After all, did I really care so little about my family that I wouldn’t get up one last time to check the [insert potentially hazardous household fixture] was, indeed, off?

It took a lot of diligence and a lot of support, but by the time I got to high school, I broke through to the other side of OCD Phase 2.

I had my minor hiccups here and there, but I thought this was the last of it. I even naively believed I might have outgrown the whole thing.

But I hadn’t defeated my demons; I had simply worn them out. Subsequently, they retreated deep into my psyche, gathering strength, waiting to strike.

Phase 3

At twenty-two, I had been “free” of OCD for eight years. And while my mind still raced constantly — from the time I stepped out of the shower, to the moment I fell asleep — I was able to do well enough in school to land myself in an abroad program at Ireland’s Trinity College.

My roommate in Ireland — who I’ll call Brendan — came up to me one day and asked me if I’d ever tried magic mushrooms.

No! I told him. But I was always curious. Because I have this condition where I feel extreme nostalgia. Specifically, I am sensitive to the nostalgia for things that never happened to me. And I expected the most life-affirming moments, which had always eluded me, happened to people my age who were experimenting with psychedelics in blue fields under the moon.

I told Brendan all that.

He smiled and showed me his laptop screen. There were two plane tickets there, for Amsterdam. One for him, and one for me. “Let’s go kick down our sandcastles,” he said.

In no time, we were wandering the rainy streets of De Wallen, looking for a shop that sold mushrooms (e.g. beaded curtains / bad jam band music).

When we found the right place, we demanded the clerk give us the introductory dose of psilocybin.

“One sec,” she smirked, and disappeared behind a false wall. A moment later we were each holding a shoebox full of very long fungi.

“Eat all of the medicine,” she said.

“They look much bigger than the ones in the states,” I said, turning them in the light.

“That’s ’cause the moisture’s been zapped out of ’em by the time they get to you.”

I didn’t believe her, but I ate them all anyway.

Within thirty minutes, there were alleyways that stretched to a single point on the horizon. There was a map of the city that, no matter which way we held it, seemed to be written in runes. There were moments when we could communicate our upcoming emotions without having said anything at all. There were windows in the red-light district I begged my friend not to look into. There was a tram whose metallic grinding sounds might as well have been chains in hell. There were neon signs in the fog that made me feel as though I’d been naked out in the cold my whole life and someone just draped a blanket on me, straight from the dryer.

But in the end, I was just a snail without a shell: too overstimulated to confront the things that haunted me.

The day after our trip, we were quiet on the plane, our minds completely erased. The day was laggy and pleasant.

But that night, my brain felt all crawly. I was kept awake by a sensation that my thoughts were “loose,” or full of rushing gravel. I tried to shrug it off as a residual effect of the shroom trip, but really the feeling scared me — I had experienced it before, and it always portended very bad things.

It was this sensation that always used to accompany the onset of one of my bad OCD turns. And this was, as far as I could tell, the mother of them all—a 90 MPH hairpin.

Intrusive thought: had this drug experience shook free my OCD? After all the hard work I put into imprisoning it? Put another way: was I different now than I’d been thirty-six hours ago?

It was this series of paranoid musings that provided the scaffolding for the worst OCD trial I had ever experienced.

At least when dealing with a physical compulsion, one can always tie their hands behind their back (or throw out the stove).

But now, both the obsession and compulsion did their business in my head, and the compulsion happened so quickly after the obsession, it was hard to separate the two. 

There were many facets to Phase 3, but the obsession that fueled it came down to this:

By doing magic mushrooms, I altered who I am / damaged my brain.

However slightly, I feared I was a different person, that I now experienced reality differently than I had before my trip.

Some people might love that idea, but not me. As far as an OCD obsession goes, it played on my greatest fear: being disconnected from the living, and losing my love of life in the process.

As for my compulsion to alleviate this obsession, I would try to analyze and compare my reality as it was now — the texture of the light hitting the trees, the “feeling” of a field at night, even the quality of my eyesight — to how I remembered it being before mushrooms.

Of course, memory is impossible to compare objectively. And so the apparent rift grew between who I was, and who I was now, as my anxiety compounded (causing me to really feel different), requiring more elaborate and stressful assurances to alleviate the progenitor anxiety.

Eventually, I would simply look at a beautiful sunset, have the obsession (I’m changed/things look different) and check/rewind time/compare the before and after (the compulsion) in less than a second.

The rest of the Ireland trip — which had barely gotten underway — became a total wash: I stood in the flapping wind on the Cliffs of Moher, comparing the mental image of the interior of my Honda Accord pre- and post- mushrooms; while instead of taking pictures at The Burren, I leaned on a glaciated karst as hot sweat rolled down my back and the tour guide provided the group an example of what existential dread looks like.

Back in Long Island, it got so much worse. Unrelenting, lay-on-the-floor panic…for ten months.

I felt very alone — besides my sister, I knew nobody else with OCD, let alone someone who had recently had a difficult psychedelic experience, let alone someone with such a niche/bizarre obsession/compulsion combo.

Nobody knew the words to make the hidden door open. Including me.

I eventually found a therapist who had no idea what I was talking about, but who I really liked. Except I couldn’t afford to see him a second time. And so, with no hope, I lurched around Penn Station, just as I had lurched around the pine needle loam in Huguenot, fourteen years prior.

In a Borders Books, I only had enough money for a single OCD book, so I picked one out at random.

I was skeptical, but over the next few months I did the exercises (ERP—Exposure and Response Prevention) in the book, which involved confronting my obsession by sitting with it. I was to let the hot flash panic wash all over me, rather than defaulting right away to compulsion mode (not easy, because the compulsion hit almost at the same time as the obsession).

Through the book’s methods, I brought my reaction to the obsession from an unmanageable ten, to a nine, and, eventually, down to a one.

My mantra went from: no, mushrooms didn’t change me! to: yes I am so different now, essentially mushrooms were a missile that exploded my ego, and there’s no way the pieces could have gone back together again in the right order.

One day, around Thanksgiving, the whole feedback loop collapsed in on itself. I took my first step off the out-of-control carousel. An evening without the fear became a week. A week became a month. And a month became a year.

But now, fifteen years later, it’s back again. 

It never really went away.

They say when you have a difficult experience on psychedelics, you tend to be confronted by your demon. And when that happens, instead of running away, you’re supposed to stand your ground.

My trip had opened my demon’s cage, but the setting was wrong: I never got an opportunity to engage with it.

Instead, the freak hung around — well after the walls had gone back up — mauling important connections in my psyche, lighting fires, and shitting where it shouldn’t have been.

The demon was never vanquished, and I’m realizing now that I need to do everything in my power to defeat OCD, to get physically and mentally strong enough to take it down, or it will kill me, because as I’m getting older, my default willingness to do battle every day has waned. But this is a war, and I will die fighting.

The fight is showing up every day and doing the work. For me it’s twofold. Physical and mental. The physical: rock climbing, and running hard every day. Exhausting the body to strengthen the spirit. And the mental: the grueling ERP work (which I’ll get into in detail next time).

I mentioned earlier how alone I felt with OCD. I still feel that way. And that’s the thing. OCD is terrible. It’s terrible enough to deal with. It doesn’t need to be a lonely experience on top of everything else.

My primary method of OCD community discovery these days is: I Google my obsession, usually seeking reassurance, and eventually stumble upon a handful of forum threads made by other people who are suffering the same obsession who are also seeking assurance. 

That’s not a knock on OCD forums AT ALL (they can be extremely helpful) or anyone who Googles their own obsessions (which is a no-no (though I still do it)). What I’m trying to say is, this newsletter is my selfish way to find a community of fellow OCD-sufferers, which allows me to bypass assurance-seeking and allows you to watch me beat this thing, which definitely helps.

 And maybe you seeing my journey can help you vanquish your own demon.