This is a personal recount of the most unusual experience I have gone through and how it changed me.
The year was 2011...
...And while some of you Crypto-heads were laughing to the bank with new found bitcoin riches, I was struggling away in the pits of despair. 21 and full of dumb, all I cared about was smoking weed, writing raps, and drinking liquor.
Sadly, I kind of peaked in high school and thought I knew everything there was to know about life. As you can imagine I was sorely mistaken. I went nowhere after graduation, ended up homeless for a short period of time, and eventually ended back at my mother's house working a part-time job to pay board.
Safe to say, my life was boring and my own damned ignorance had led to that state of boredom.
And so, after moving back to my mother's house, situated in some dusty outback town called Ayr, I found myself struggling to stay amused. My friends lived miles away and the outback crowd that I now found myself among didn't quite like the look of a tatted hoodlum with brown skin. I envy anyone that has never had to feel that kind of indirect disdain. It's a feeling I have felt on the regular as I'm of a Maori decent. Luckily I'm quite fair skinned and most people usually aren't racist enough to assume I'm anything "less" than European. People are good but stereotypes suck...
Anyway, I found a job working in retail. I have worked my whole life since I was 12 with one of my high school jobs being in retail and so this was nothing new. However, I hadn't been working for the last two years as I had been stuck over in New Zealand living on the streets - a story for another time. It was hard to readjust to society again after being an outcast for a lengthy period of time.
I found myself dealing with negative stigmas. I felt worthless as I watched the friends I grew up with in high school boasting on Social media about how they were acquiring university degrees and traveling the world. I was feeling disgust when I looked in the mirror as I was nothing that I'd aspired to become as a teenager. The only thing I did have going for myself was the fact that while I was homeless I indulged in Political activism. Activism helped me to see more of the real injustices in the world and by doing so it helped me see that society is merely a fallacy built off of systemic misinformation and social biases. If you see this too then you also now how fucking depressing that can be when you're the only one around who sees it. All of this negativity combined was hard to cope with and so I coped with it the best way I knew how - drinking and smoking.
In the town where I was there wasn't much around. Every town has a bottle shop but smoking weed in Australia can be a pain because it's illegal and hard to acquire at times. I remember the first time I smoked I was only 14 years old underneath a friend's house and ever since then I'd been smoking daily. Up until that point in my life Mary Jane was my favorite addiction.
I was skateboarding again to fulfill part of my life and found myself asking around at the local skatepark if anyone knew where to "get on". Turned out marijuana in Ayr was about as scarce as a drop of rain - I still live nearby and we've been in a drought for the last 3 years.
One of the locals did happen to direct me to the tobacconist where I was told you could buy synthetic marijuana. You're probably guessing right now that this is going to be the reason I thought I died and you're right. The high I received that night was the worse high of my life.
I remember coming home with this bag that had a skull and cross bones plastered to one side and a bikini model on the other. The skull and cross bones should've been enough to stop me right there but I was desperate for a smoke. I also had a 12 pack of beer in the fridge.
I settled down at my desk which I'm sitting at right now, and mixed the synthetic marijuana with some nicotine. I didn't keep bongs in my mother's house in case my parents found them so I had to make one. After smoking for so long this didn't take very long. You become pretty savvy when finding something to smoke out of.I'm the equivalent of Mac Guyver when it comes to making a good smoking pipe out of just about anything.
I remember the initial hit. It was okay but it wasn't Mary. It had this strange taste, as if it had been doused in some form of alcohol and then pissed on by a cat. The crystalline texture on the leaf looked like some sort of lab experiment as it glistened in the lamp light. It burned bright like magnesium and smoked just as much. The nicotine burned the back of my throat, a strange sensation I had come to enjoy over the years. Immediately my head started to hurt. I started zoning in and out with the strangest of thoughts. I remember thinking that I was somehow connected and communicating to spiritual forces. I wasn't tripping out, rather my mind had run far, far away.
Then came the strange part. It's hard to recollect but I think I may have been talking to someone on the phone. Either that or I was talking inside my head to forces I imagined were there. More the prior.
I started to feel sick. I remember I was freestyle rhyming to whoever it was that I was talking too. For some reason I think it was a group chat among friends. If they're reading this, it would be nice if they told me that they really were talking to me at the time it happened because it's still all a blur.
I fell into a trance whilst I was rhyming. I started to gag and splutter. Before I knew it I was being sick. I started vomiting (apologies for the imagery). I couldn't control it. It wasn't your usual sickness. It felt like some ungodly force was ripping my soul out of my stomach and throwing it all over the ground. I was still talking to whoever it was I was talking too. I was saying to them at the time that I was dying and it may have scared the shit out of them. I recall asking someone to call my mother and tell her what was happening. My final thoughts were to be, "damn, I don't want my mum finding my dead body."
I had vomited everywhere. All over the laptop I was using; all over my phone; all over the carpet of my bedroom. It was then that I died. Or at least I think I did...
I had passed out for a few minutes and awoken in a pool of my own mess. I knew what had happened to some extent as the evidence was all around me. My mind however was still coping with the mind-fuck it had just experienced. I was hazy and yet all I could think about was if I was now in another reality. I was still high. I went to the bathroom and chucked up whatever else was still in my system. My parents came out to see what all the fuss was about and being the pro that I am I managed to shake them off my trail. If they'd seen the mess I'd made I probably would've been thrown out of the house.
The next morning was kind of funny. I tried to clean up my vomit without anyone noticing by using the vacuum. That vacuum died moments later. I was in the shop later that day replacing it. Still, I was trying to comprehend whatever the fuck had just happened the night before.
To this day I still can't recall exactly what happened that night. All I do know is that from smoking synthetics I wrote-off a phone, ruined a laptop's keyboard, broke a household appliance, and quite possibly died. No one has ever approached me about what happened and so I most probably had been talking to myself during the whole ordeal. I have never smoked synthetic marijuana again. I threw out whatever was left that night and vowed never to fuck around with unknown substances again. I always had a rule of thumb to never touch anything man-made. I guess this was karma for breaking my own code.
The experience however did change my life. Thinking that I had died, or that I'd almost died, changed my perspective. I realized that even though things looked bleak, I still had life. Life seemed much more precious after the experience.
I changed my ways from that day forward.
Three years later and I'm now 24 years old. I view every second as an opportunity not to be squandered. I found a real career as a social worker shortly after the experience, around October of the same year and moved to the nearest "big" city. I've since become more enlightened in the way that I think about life and I now see why it's important that I don't slip into the same negative rut.
Depression is a bitch.
I'm not saying that depression was the root cause here, but it did lead to a quick fix for emptiness. I've slipped back in and out of depression between then and now. Last year was bad. I slipped back into old drug addictions which were worse now that I have money to waste - something for another time.
If you're suffering from depression then take it from me, you don't have to be. The choice is yours. I've chosen many times to let my sadness bring me down but every time I decide to fight it I come out on top. I know that sounds like rubbish right now but believe me, you can do it. Don't let life control you, instead, control your life. Once you do, nothing can stop you.
So, in conclusion, this was definitely one of the most fucked up experiences of my life so far. I try not to touch drugs anymore and I rarely even drink because of it. I'm sure that there will be some other strange stories in my life to come that will be worth sharing on here. Until then I hope you enjoyed my mess of a tale and I hope it's enough to scare anyone way from touching unknown substances, especially synthetics.
