2022-08-??
It's some time early August, 2022. Sunday afternoon. The weather is clear and spirits are a little nervous, but otherwise pretty good. I'd moved out of my parents place the previous weekend - at the late age of 24 - and had spent the day before at shopping Ikea and assembling flatpack furniture. The place is still full of unpacked boxes, but it's starting to really come together.
Outside of my own bubble the world as a whole is still recovering from the collective trauma of COVID-19. The Russia-Ukraine war reaches day 165. The threat of monkeypox looms, and right-wingers are trying to use it to slander the gay male community. My friends and I often talk politics, but it's not part of today's discussion.
Today there's four of us. ████, ████ and myself partaking and ████ acting as trip sitter. None of us have done mushrooms before. ████ has done LSD a few times, but psychadelics are new to the rest of us.
I know these people because we're a bunch of animals. We bark and bite and sometimes howl at the moon together. ████ and ████ are extremely close friends of mine. I'm not so close with ████ but he's cool.
When I arrive, ████ has already brewed us some ginger tea. It's to help with the nausea. We chat for a while as I struggle to get the tea down - it's bitter. I went to the bathroom, and found that the mirror had been covered up - apparently seeing yourself while
████ weights out the dosages - 2 grams for themself. 1.5 grams for ████ and I. We turn the mushrooms into a fine powder using a cannabis grinder. The other two elect to mix theirs with yogurt and eat it. I'm not really a fan of yoghurt, so I quickly scour the internet for other methods, deciding to bew mine into tea.
Mushrooms are brewed at 100°c for about 12 minutes. I mix it with black tea (brewed for 3 minutes) for flavour reasons.
Years ago, I had a friend who was well aquainted with drugs. I no longer associate with them, but during our time together, they told me this:
"Shrooms are like a mountain. You go up, and then you come down."
I originally wrote this piece - or wrote half of it - a few weeks after the trip. Momentarily, I thought it was a really important experience that I had to document. Not something I've had the impulse to do before then, and the drive rapidly faded. I've dug the essay up three years later and, completely honestly, I am not a fam of my previous writing style. I am unable to articulate why, but that's just the way things are right now.
The English language is weird. It's often described as three languages in a trenchcoat masquerading as one. I dabbled in learning French and Japanese during early high school, but English is the only language I can understand. My inner monologue is the sound of my own voice, speaking english. Deciphering glyphs on a page is efortless. Occasionally a sequence of sounds will get stuck somewhere during the deciphering process and I'll have to ask people to repeat themselves. But this is the language in which I do most of my communication.
Some words in the English language, despite their literal meaning, carry additional information. For example the word ilk, meaning "of the same kind" or "family" can, depending on who you ask, carry with it negative or deragatory sentiment, while others see it as completely neutral.
Some of the most common - and most contentious - information-laden words are pronouns. Up until recently(-ish), referring to a singular person in the third person, you had the options he/him or she/her. Both of these do their job. Without them, one would be saying people's named repeatedly. It would sound weird, but probably only because we're not used to it.
However, these words also convey ideas about gender. They unavoidably convey ideas about gender.
Some other languages, for example spoken Mandarin, use only the word tā for a third-person pronoun. You can refer to someone without conveying ideas of gender. English has adopted they/them as a third-person singular pronoun, although its use is contested by certain people who never made it out of the lexical brine pool.
English has one first-person pronoun: I. The word conveys no gender. For the vast majority of the population, the word is sufficient and functional, but it's made it somewhat difficult to articulate my own experience.
There's only one person writing this. You can call me Paf. That is the name of my fursona. It is the name I use around my closest friends. It's the name I use with the weird people I run with. It is not the name I use in front of my family or at work.
Unix fork function
Puppy Lasagna
I'm going to cry
I want massive balls
Normal (deer dog picture)
"I'm the soup dog"
I like helping people
I feel like I'm halfway there (I was not).
I'm going to cry (but for real (but for real))
I don't like myself much but I'm glad you do
I saw myself, and there's not much there, and I don't like it.
It was so fucking horrible
I absolutely, absolutely never want to go back there.
Felt like my soul kinda split in half, like it was wrenching itself from [deadname].
Slowly, somehow managed to separate from the dead weight.
Kinda feel like a coin, flying through the air, but turning over very, very slowly to the other side - I don't think this metaphor really captures exactly what happened very well though.
I am the person XXXXXX wishes he was
"I" had reached the top. And I knew where I needed to land. The three people in the other room were all some form of male: A trans man, a cis man and someone who started the trip as a cis-man. They had supported me so well up until this point, but I knew in that moment that they weren't what I needed.
I needed a woman to guide me into land.
I called ████, the trip sitter, into the bathroom and asked him to contact ████, a really close trans friend of mine. She's been my first point of contact and guide throughout my gender problems. She's kind and gentle and so incredibly supportive. Luckily she was at home - only a suburb away.
I left the bathroom and made a declaration to the room that XXXXXX was dead. I possibly spooked everyone else somewhat, and for that I'm sorry.
There's a gap in my memory, but I got ████ to hold me. I shut my eyes and burried my face in my chest. I whispered hello to him. I told him I was new, that I'd just been born. I think he asked my name. I told him I didn't have one. I told him that noone names themselves when they're born into the world, and that he would name me, if he wanted to. He didn't. I'm was ok with that - naming someone is a huge responsibility. He called me a puppy. He called me a good girl. He's a good boy. It felt extremely straight, but in a queer way, not a cishet way. It was euphoric.
I saw myself, and there wasn't much there. And I was beautiful.
I felt like a shooting star, burning through the sky. Brilliant and beautiful. I felt so light. So full of hope. So new.
I'm not sure if XXXXXX would have chosen differently, had he known what was going to happen. He was always unreasonably scared of things, and heavily avoidant of his problems. He really, really struggled to change. He was, for better or worse, very, very stubborn. He had problems that he was unable to fix. He was - and I say this carefully, but deliberately - some form of suicidal. He held a kind of self-loathing within him that was unfixable. He desperately wanted it to end.
XXXXXX couldn't save himself, but he was willing to rend his soul so that I could be born into this world.
And I am so, so happy to finally be here.
— Paf