21 years old, living with HPPD for eleven months

[Aaanna]

Hi everyone ! 

I am so happy to have found this support forum and sad I was not aware it existed when my symptoms of HPPD first arose... 

Anyway, I wanted to give a bit of an introduction. Here we go:

I am turning 21 in ten days so let's just go ahead and say I am 21. I have been living with HPPD for eleven months and two days... And it has been a struggle at times. In the beginning, it was horrible. Absolutely debilitating, depressing, dark, lonely and hopeless. It seemed like every day was just terrible. What I think struck my case of HPPD was the amount of acid, research chemicals and finally, shrooms I did from New Years 2018 to March 28, 2018... I was tripping on some sort of tab three to sometimes six times a week for three months. Usually what I thought to be acid but, looking back, I really have no clue what was blotted on them. I had some really nice times, though. 

I believe in balance and that's why I accept and completely embrace the fact that I had many amazing, beautiful trips and also quite a few scary, dark and stressful trips as well. The last time I tripped was when I was in Amsterdam on my Spring Break last March. I was with six people. None except one of which I wanted to be with. (If I ever trip again, I will never trip with people I don't really, really fuck with !!! obviously! ). This trip was horrible. My brain was already feeling kind of strange from some acid I did two days before... It felt almost as if my brain was rewiring itself or something while I was tripping acid so frequently during the week... So when the shrooms hit just FIFTEEN minutes after consuming, I was a little concerned. I thought to myself, "This should not have hit so strongly and QUICKLY."

Almost the entire trip was focused inward. I was spending almost every second thinking about myself, my childhood, my current life, my lack of direction in life, the trauma of emotional and physical abuse that occurred when I was a child, the trauma of my rape and every failed friendship and relationship was closely examined. I thought a lot about being someone with borderline personality disorder and how just, for lack of a better word, fucked up I was. 

I have dealt with depression and anxiety for many years. The depression began when I was in the sixth grade, age 12 or so and the anxiety was also a prevalent issue in life seeing as I could not sleep alone until was ten or eleven years old. I have always been a slightly anxious person and this trip was spent being very anxious and just scared, sadly. I had taken the strongest level of mushrooms at the mushroom store in Amsterdam. It was a little shop. If anyone has been there, cheers! and if you are planning on visiting in the future, although if youre on here, you should not, do NOT take the strongest level. there are three levels. do chill or mild before strong. I was foolish for doing this.

So, the actual trip lasted from 3PM until 2AM when everyone began falling asleep. All day, I was pretty miserable. I was stressed out over literally every little detail in my life and I was fucked up about it. I could not stop thinking about every thing I have ever done wrong. I kept telling myself, over and over: "This is going to end. This is going to end. This is going to end." So, after we spent hours walking around a dreary and rainy day and going in and out of coffee shop dispensaries and God knows what else, I laid there next to my best friend who I was secretly in love with (who would later become my girlfriend) who we will call Lee and I had this feeling in my body that I was always going to feel this way and that my brain had forever been changed. We smoked some weed which I thought was helping me at the time.

For the next week, Lee and I traveled together to Paris and Barcelona. The entire time there was so much sexual tension between us and a crippling anxiety within me that made it impossible for me to sleep at all.

 

more to come -- need to do some work. 

Edited February 18, 2019 by Aaanna

[Jay1]

Welcome Aaanna. Glad you found the forum!

[MadDoc]

I was relived when I found this forum.  When I first started noticing symptoms, there was no Internet and even talking about drug use wasn't well received.  For decades I thought I was the only one in the world who had this condition.  

Edited February 23, 2019 by MadDoc
Foolish typing