Tell the DJ to Fix It in the Mix

This past Saturday, I took a mushroom trip. This is something that, in 2023, I did monthly and with intention. I’d done some research about psilocybin and neuroplasticity and I was cautiously optimistic that tripping might be a useful tool in dealing with my c-PTSD. These trips helped tremendously. In hindsight, I’d liken them to another monthly ritual that finds me flushing little packets of septic system bombs down my toilets. The organisms in the bombs eat up the shit and help keep the septic tanks from overflowing. 

There’s a lot of shit in my head. Some days the system is so clogged I am psychologically incapacitated. Not a single day passes without my mind being assaulted by one triggering trauma memory or another. Frankly, it's exhausting. Tripping hasn’t entirely relieved me of the struggle. But when I am in that state of mind, my constant background anxiety quiets and fear diminishes. I can hold up to the light the things that scare me and examine them with less judgment and more curiosity.

Some of those 2023 trips came with the benefits of mild hallucinations. Time warped, I could sustain a sense of being in the present for hours at a time. Colors were brighter, sounds more beautiful, a walk around the ranch offering a sense of true wonder at the glories and mysteries of nature. Eventually I switched to microdosing, three days on, four days off, minuscule amounts of the stuff, any effects imperceptible in the moment, but cumulatively resulting in an overall brighter outlook most of the time. 

Saturday’s big trip was, among other things, a farewell to the last of the stash of a no longer available product, the producer having closed shop and moved away long ago, no forwarding address. The journey was planned in the hopes of scrubbing away some lingering suffering from an event that occurred in August, one I’m still not ready to write about, might never be. I will only say that the struggle has been very real, the residual pain constant and cruel. (In fact I did touch on the root of it in a long ago rambling post years ago, not anticipating then that things could get worse, which they have.)

If I had live-streamed myself tripping, and if you had tuned in, you would not be here to read this today. Because you would have died of boredom. Here is what it looked like— a sixty-year old woman sitting in bed with three dogs, embroidering a peacock. That’s it.

If, on the other hand, you could have tapped into what was happening inside of my mind, you would have gotten a bigger bang for your buck. Like a roller coaster built inside of a mirrored fun house, the climbs and dips and warped reflections were kaleidoscopic and revealing. Also, I like to think you would have loved the soundtrack. 

I have a very intense relationship with music. My “father,” the greatest perpetrator of crimes against my mind, was utterly obsessed with music. Despite our poverty, every pay day he would go to a record shop and return home with ten new 45s. This was great. On the other hand, if you accidentally scratched a record or broke the stereo needle, the ensuing panic, the knowledge of what punishment was in store, delivered the sort of crippling anxiety that haunts me to this day. Also, when he was very angry—so, pretty much always—he would lift the trap door to the basement, storm down there, and seal himself into his man cave, alternately blasting the soundtrack from Jesus Christ Superstar and his collection of disco. To this day I have no clue how this man—racist and homophobic in the extreme—found himself so drawn to the likes of Donna Summer and the Village People. But he did, and we kids followed suit. 

I could have become an adult who eschewed music, found it too much to bear given the paternal connection. Miraculously, this was not the case. Despite my love of reading and writing, if I were forced to choose between giving up books and giving up music, there would be no contest. Music would win, books cast aside. 

And yet, over the course of the past year or so, a handful of live shows notwithstanding, I have found it nearly impossible to listen to anything other than reggae and chanting monks. Because I cannot listen to a known song without being subjected to an overwhelming flood of memories and emotions. A song is not simply a song to me. A song is the soundtrack for mind movies. Even happy songs and happy memories can feel too much—delivering nostalgia, wistfulness for my youth. (While I’m not entirely clear on how reggae escapes this categorization, I am enormously grateful.)

But there I was Saturday, my big fat fancy overpriced headphones hugging my ears, and I was listening to music. Not just any music. I was playing a set list created for me by my nephew Matt, a renowned Philly DJ whose professional handle is Reed Streets. Matt lived with me, very briefly, more than a decade ago as he tried Austin on for size, debating whether or not to make a permanent move. Kind and quiet, he communicates through his turntables. I am extremely proud of his success (and if you want to know more about that, here’s a NYT profile of him). 

I did not recognize most of the tunes, which is a big reason I could dig in with abandon—no associated memories. And yet the beats, the tunes, the words, the feelings provided much insight. 

It occurred to me that if there were no hormones, all DJs would instantly go out of business. Listening to those get-up-and-move grooves helped me cut myself some slack for my worst choices in life, every single one of which revolved around pairing up with one wrong man or another, choices driven by a strong and heady mix of internal chemistry and external cultural messages insisting coupling up was absolutely required to have a complete and satisfying life. 

I feel strongly that anyone who says they have no regrets is either lying or certifiably psychopathic. I have a lot of regrets, the overwhelming majority of which directly tie into abusive men I chose to waste precious time with. This regretfulness, in fact, directly relates to the August Trauma I have been battling, the ghost of a very terrible past choice I made decades ago come back to haunt me. 

Listening to the lyrics pouring into my ears, I was of two minds. At my age, and informed by the hard earned wisdom that actually I am best off flying solo, I could clearly see the ridiculous nature of what amounted to a common refrain, worded differently from song to song, but nonetheless the same: Baby, baby, baby, I want you, I want you, I want you. On the other hand, my defenses having morphed to inquisitiveness courtesy of the psychedelics coursing through my veins, I could also cut myself a whole lot of slack. So strongly could I feel the allure of the sundry love-desperate protagonists, I could forgive myself for succumbing to similar longing in my youth and all the attendant shitty choices, to recognize them as utterly unavoidable. 

I happened to have had the great fortune, the night before this trip, to have received a call from Nigel. Nigel and I were fuck buddies in the late eighties, he the English lead singer of a popular punk band in our town and me a truly wild child. As I listened to the set list and thought about my regrets, I was filled with gratitude to know that I had this one man, still in my life nearly forty years later, who only ever brings me joy to think about. I read once that we humans lock in our perception of lovers related to when we met them. Technically Nigel and I know we are old people now, but in each other’s voices we hear and feel and remember our youthful selves, the joy we shared together, and it is such a tonic. Too, I can say to Nigel something along the lines of, “I was so fucked up and crazy back then,” and he will be quick to flip the coin and show me the other side of it—“But you were SO FUN!”

Great DJs are masters of remixing. So, in my experience, are mushrooms. Just as samples of older songs work their way into the DJ’s mix, when I am tripping I am experiencing new variations of old memories, shifting my perspective, coming up with new ways to perceive old experiences. To wit: an especially challenging part of my Trauma Brain is that I spend an enormous amount of time perseverating on trauma I inflicted on my son, worrying myself into a stupor that my own actions in his childhood have left him, like me, tormented. I want to apologize and process on the regular, even as I know this is not at all what he wants. This latest trip helped me to do some rearranging, to see the overcompensatory nature of my misplaced abasement, to recognize how it is driven in great part by my well-intentioned but totally wrong desire to give my adult child not what he needs, but what I wish I had gotten from my own mother. I am reminded that I need to rearrange, make room to bring into the mix of Mothering Memories that there were many good choices and happy times, too, and also to honor that my son’s process is different than my own, that he gets to lead, that I cannot not dictate the direction of that process.

All of which led me to conclude that truly, I do not think there is a more complicated role in this world than being a mother.  

And then, a couple of hours into all of this, another benefit of the mushrooms visited me, too. The ability to see myself being surrounded by all of this thinking, this constant thinking, to recognize the rumination as something that needed releasing. The importance of Shut Up and Dance, which happened to be one of the songs on Matt’s playlist. And so I did. We did. The dogs and I rising from the bed, cutting the rug, getting down and getting funky, just letting all the shit go, if not forever then at least for a few glorious moments. 

NOTES:

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