I'm entering this week's Promo-Mentors writing challenge by Hive account@futurethinker, to write about an experience we learned from. I only found out about the challenge a few days ago but really wanted contribute to this one. Learning is very important to our life experience, we expand our horizons by learning new things!

A big turning point happened in my life where I had to be true and honest to myself. Everyday I would wake up restless and unhappy about what my future would be. I didn't know what I was suppose to be doing with my life, except the expectations that society considered normal for a young woman to do.

Honestly I was never ready to ‘grow up or enter the real world’ . All around me I saw people living the rat race, the people in the suits scared me, growing up in inner city London was like being in a zombie horror film. I'll never forget as a child being at Victoria train station at the crack of dawn, everything was tranquil until the first train pulled in, it was like a chaotic military drill, stern faces, glazed eyes, arms swings and the clopping of leather bound shoes. Not one person looked happy.

Somehow my personal situations in life have always left me feeling like I’m different, I naturally was drawn to queer people without realizing the labels or even needing to know them. When some of my friends came out to me, it actually just seemed normal from my perspective. I’m not surprised by the diverse nature of our universe and how it these expressions manifest themselves. As a child I always gravitated to stuff that was considered for ‘boys’ and although I’m physically a girl, I also identify with my own inner masculinity and if I had to categorize myself, i'd be non-binary.

If Esotericism had been an option at school that would of been my subject of choice but the only thing I found close to that was Philosophy. It didn’t provide any answers to the nature of the universe which I’d always pondered upon. But at least it was a subject area that questioned everything and kept my mind open.

My life long quest for spirituality in the rational world I was being conditioned into, started when I stumbled across all sorts of new age books in my teenagers years to do with lucid dreaming and astrology. To escape my dysfunctional reality I started living in a separate world, which I had already been doing as far back as I could remember. Probably because I had no siblings and drank a lot of Coca Cola I developed a strong imagination which led me to have hallucinations when I was alone in my room. I’ve always been an escapist at heart, so I guess it was natural for me to dabble around with illicit drugs eventually.

I’ve always had a rebellious streak and I’m thankful for that because it’s the only way I have avoided being programmed by mainstream society. Still I had misconceptions about certain things, and was cautious when it came to certain types of drugs.
The first time I got hold of a psychedelic, was an acid tab and it wasn’t a conscious decision but my higher self knew perfectly well what was going on. Some moments in my life are destined to happen, still I would not recommend acid to anyone. It does get the job done, opening up the doors of perception, when you want it to end, it takes you even deeper. I didn't do the trip with friends, which is normally recommended. Instead I was alone in a new city, dealing with some internal trauma. I was begging for the experience to end, at times I felt my face melting away and saw some scary faces from my past morphing into gremlins. There were moments however, that I knew were very special, I saw a life force inside the natural world, the aura of leaves beating and trees dancing to the rhythm life.

I was suppose to be on my academic exchange for 3 months but it became 6 months of therapy. I was living in a city that had a party every night, that would carry on for days and if that ended there would be an after hour. I would spend days and nights away from home, I felt a complete freedom when I hit the dance floor, I would be in a kind of trance like cathartic, primeval state of being and healing! I’d learned in art history that the earliest forms of human expression and spiritual experience were to take narcotics and express yourself among other human beings doing the same thing. The release became addictive and over excessive, I stopped eating and sleeping. It was scary to see from the outside, everyone I left behind had no idea what happening to me. And I didn’t care, I would say they were some of the best days of my life but its certainly not sustainable or productive in the long run.

Short term it fulfilled its purpose, and it wasn't done at half measures! Lets just say I’m person who goes at things intensly. I’ve always wanted to feel like I’ve given life my everything. Because of that mentality I would feel some of the highest highs and lowest lows but the lows just started getting too much, I needed to regain some control soon. When I went back to my 'normal' life in the UK, things began to calm down but it was not out of my system yet.

One day in October 2013 a good friend had some DMT, I had been told about some of its effects and was very curious. I didn’t expect after a small toke on the pipe to completely enter another universe, everything went black in seconds. I went into outer space and was flying through a worm hole until my inner eye was opened and I could see a whole world of inter-connectivity. It was like being able to see every particle energy in the universe flowing in the great cosmic rhythm. In the world of the microcosm there is no separation. I envisioned myself as a purple being and my hand dissolving into the fractal matter. You become apart of everything and you are nothing all at once. For days after my dopamine receptors were fully charged, it was like everything was set ablaze, life became a magical journey and not some boring realm I constantly needed to escape.

Source

Some of you reading this already know I’m vegan, becoming conscious of what I eat in a spiritual sense started out from being part of the rave and drug scene. I cleansed my mental capacities of a lot of unhealthy thought patterns, which helped me to release a lot of pain from my past. Now post drug using I’ve cleansed my body of so many impurities on a physical level too, its much easier to get high just off life now right now! I haven’t needed to go on a ‘trip’ but I’d only keep it to natural substances now if I did want to, such as mushrooms or ganja.

There are many types of human beings and human experiences, there is not one right or normal way of living and sometimes the most effective self healing comes internally, to know who you really are. You know yourself better than anyone but there are many forces at work to program you into thinking you are someone that you are not. Well at least that's my experience. That's my trip in life, i'm still learning, growing, evolving everyday. I don't know everything, i'm not perfect because knowing everything and being perfect are unobtainable, they are idealism's that make us fall short of who we really are.