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Last year in Oregon, Michael took a journey.
It was very, very much like a kaleidoscope, if you will.
That's how it started off.
He saw colors.
He witnessed his life from an entirely new perspective.
He realized what was truly important to him.
He says this experience was one of the most transformative of his life.
Michael did mushrooms.
From the Boston Globe, This is Love Letters.
I'm Meredith Goldstein.
Last November Question 4 on the Massachusetts ballot let voters decide whether to legalize and regulate some psychedelic drugs, including psilocybin, also known as magic mushrooms.
The initiative didn't pass, but if it had, we wouldn't have been the first state to allow for these kinds of mushrooms.
Oregon and Colorado are already on to this.
Proponents of the ballot question in Massachusetts believe that psychedelics could create a massive change in the way we treat all sorts of mental health problems.
And I wonder... how that might change relationships.
Today's guests can speak from firsthand experience.
After a life of anxiety and a marriage that was on the rocks, they found change after a journey with a chemical compound found in fungi.
I really, as a kid, worried about my parents dying.
And I don't know why, honestly.
I don't know where that came from.
You know, none of my parents were in like a major car accident or anything that could explain that.
Meet Michael, an attorney who lives in the western U.S. with his partner, Steve.
Michael and Steve are not their real names, by the way.
Both of today's guests requested anonymity in this episode because today's topic is still a bit controversial.
Ever since he can remember, Michael has had anxious thoughts.
He worries about everything all the time.
He struggles to understand where these thoughts come from or why his mind tends to focus on horrible possibilities.
Michael is Mexican-American, and he says mental health isn't something his parents talked about.
Latinos are, in the past at least, have been notorious for not believing in Western medicine in terms of mental health and whatnot.
This worry is something I can relate to.
It started for me when I was... Actually, you know what?
I don't even know when it started.
I always worried. about my sister, my parents.
Then whenever something bad did happen, I felt validated.
Anyway, Michael is very relatable to me.
Michael eventually seeks out treatment, which he hopes will be simple and accessible.
But what he realizes is anxiety doesn't have a simple solution.
In college, you know, I decided to take things into my own hands and seek out, you know, a mental health professional to help with my anxiety.
You know they run you through the whole gamut of.
Well, you know, let's try this antidepressant or let's try this class of drugs.
And it was frustrating, to be honest, because those medications aren't really designed for that.
You know I mean.
Antidepressants are designed to deal with depression and not anxiety, and those are not the same things.
But Michael keeps looking for things that will help, because this anxiety thing is messing with his ability to live a full life and to live fully in his relationships.
You know, anxiety takes a toll, especially when you've been dealing with it for decades.
And not only on yourself, but on your relationships and everyone around you.
Michael meets his husband after he finishes law school.
They connect on a dating app and go to a restaurant.
Michael says the moment is crystal clear in his memory.
One of a few in his life where his anxiety melts away.
There's always a debate about true love and love at first sight.
And I won't say it was actually love at first sight, but i did feel a connection from the very outset.
I just you know his eyes and like his smile and his presence, like just really spoke to me and i connected really well with him and i could tell from the outset that he was a beautiful person.
But this clarity doesn't last long.
His anxiety, the inability to stop worrying about things doesn't go away.
It starts to affect the relationship.
They move across the country and buy a house together.
The stress builds up.
At this point, they've been married 12 years.
To be frank, I've been struggling with a midlife crisis.
I just felt like I had been in this huge rut and pretty unhappy, you know, with myself.
And I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Revolutionary Road, but that's exactly how I felt.
You know like I get to this point in my life and after working so hard to get into a top law school, to advance in my career, and then just feeling like, is this it?
Like, is this everything I've been working for?
Like, there has to be more out there.
Things get pretty dark, and Michael has an epiphany.
He needs help, or things are just going to get worse.
And he doesn't want to lose his partner or himself.
His husband broaches a topic that they've spoken about before.
It's a new treatment, one that's supposed to help people with things like PTSD, depression and you guessed it anxiety.
Some call it a natural medicine.
Others call it a Schedule 1 drug.
It's both.
Michael is thinking of taking psilocybin.
So what did you know about psilocybin when you first started looking into the possibility of this?
I really didn't know much.
I'll be honest and say that I had tried a very small dose at a concert one time with my friends when I was younger.
I got the visual colors that some people get, and that was about it.
It was not really too intense at all, and it was a very mild experience.
It was enjoyable for sure, but that's pretty much all I had known about it.
I knew that it was a natural medicine, but that's about it.
I have a question about the colors because I've never tried this.
What was it just like, ooh, colors, tell me more?
Yeah, it's kind of like you see, I think it's different for everyone, but it's kind of like you, you can see like a kaleidoscope if you will.
Um, and like people have, I would say the closest thing I could say to what would be called an aura um, you know, kind of just light, like emanating from objects and people, different colored light.
Magic mushrooms, shrooms, a psychedelic found in hundreds of species of fungi.
I will say here, I don't have much experience with mushrooms.
My psychologist friend Jenny, who listeners might remember as the mental health professional whose husband built a ball pit in his basement.
Well, Jenny works with a lot of clients on anxiety and she told me what I think was like four years ago that she was going to start training in psilocybin because she saw it as a real future for happiness for a lot of people.
Since then, I've wondered about it for myself.
As I mentioned, two states, Oregon and Colorado, have been allowing its use in clinical settings for a few years.
They have clinics where people go to trip out with supervision.
Oregon has over 20 centers and over 200 registered facilitators.
Michael decides he wants to try it.
I wasn't even sure like where this was happening in the United States, because you know, at the federal level it still remains an illegal drug, or schedule one drug.
And so I wasn't sure like which states were doing it or where it was legal.
I looked at Oregon primarily because they had established a program already and they were just starting to issue licenses to clinics.
Michael calls a few different places.
He doesn't really know what he's looking for.
Some of them seemed a little bit more transactional, if you will, you know, because they were like selling bundles of like you know, like have five experiences for so many dollars.
And I wasn't even sure like I would want to do it more than once.
Michael picks a place.
Before the actual experience, he does a few things.
He gets educated.
He fills out the necessary paperwork.
He gets a guide.
Michael asks that guide what to expect.
He said typically the experience lasts four to six hours.
And, you know, he really made no guarantees.
He was very clear that, you know, whatever I put into this is what I'm going to get out of it.
And so one of the things that we did was we came up with mantras that would help keep me centered and focused during the journey.
Michael really wants to embrace this experience.
He practices these mantras ahead of time.
One of the mantras was.
There were three mantras one centered around trust, the other one centered around safety, the other one concerned self-worth.
And so the trust one was I trust the universe to bring me my highest good, and trust in my own ability to manifest my desires.
And that's because I was concerned about where my mind would go in the journey and I wanted to make sure it stayed focused.
Also, same thing with safety.
No person, place or thing has any power over me.
I am the master of my own fate.
And then self-worth is I am brave and powerful.
I am a gift to the world and I am enough.
I didn't get much sleep the night before.
I had to use a ride share app to get there.
I was out of town and didn't have time to eat breakfast.
So I was a little nervous beforehand.
First thing in the morning on an empty stomach.
Michael goes to the facility.
Soon, it's time.
I ask Michael to walk me through it, what he did, what the guide did.
You know, you can either be sitting or laying down.
I was laying down and they're in like a chair across the room, which isn't too far away.
They're in close proximity to you, but they're observing you to make sure that you're safe and that you feel safe, and taking notes too.
So they'll take notes of anything that you say.
They grind up the mushrooms, like right in front of you, and then they put it in the tea and then they add like honey and lemon stuff to help make it taste better and to go down more smoothly, and then you drink the tea pretty much within like 10 minutes.
If even that, like you start to feel the effects, it's really fast at first like you don't feel it coming on right and um, and then it kind of sneaks up on you and at first i started to see like fractal images.
It was kind of like the same light experience.
I had, you know, experience before when I tried like a much smaller dose with my friends.
And but so it was more intense.
And it was also like I don't know if you've ever like or seen like a magnification of like in science class of like skin under a microscope, where it has all those lines crisscrossing each other.
Like that's kind of what I saw.
It was very, very much like a kaleidoscope, if you will.
That's how it started off.
And then like I felt myself die.
That's part of the experience.
He feels himself die.
He experiences ego death.
Michael has been told about this concept, and it's actually kind of a goal of the experience.
And they explain that you know ego death.
Really it's different for everybody, but that's usually what happens.
Is you experience death in some way right?
And that's why, a lot of times, psilocybin is used for people who have cancer or another terminal illness, because They're trying to prepare them and make death less scary.
And so in my journey, I felt myself melt into the earth and just become part of this wider network, which was really surprising for me because I grew up very religious.
I was raised Catholic.
So I thought maybe I'd have an experience similar to that.
But I think mine was more probably what maybe like an atheist feels like or an agnostic, where there was no deity involved, right.
It was just me connecting with the earth, melting back into the fabric of the universe essentially, and becoming one with everything.
And so actually experiencing death and feeling myself melt into the earth, was actually very comforting.
I felt like I could rest for the first time in my life.
I get emotional about it because you know you get so used to being like stressed out all the time with anxiety and being turned on like being like always, like in the on position as far as like your mind racing with certain thoughts or always worrying about something.
And I felt like I, for the first time in my life, I didn't have to worry about anything.
I didn't have to think about anything.
And it felt as you know.
The dying process felt as natural as falling asleep in your mother's arms when you're a kid, after a long day.
It felt so peaceful and welcoming and not scary at all.
After this ego death, Michael starts reliving memories from his childhood and life in general.
It's like he can see these important moments without the weight of his anxiety.
And I could just see how not being present really impacted those memories and impacted my experience in life.
I remember during one of my first dates with my husband, we had taken this picture outside of my apartment.
It's a very special picture to me, but I relived that memory.
For the first time, I could see the sun shining down on his face and I could see the wind blowing in his hair.
It's so odd because I never noticed those things.
My mind was just so occupied with anxiety that I didn't know the finer details in life.
I didn't notice a lot of things. you know, colors, textures.
It's almost like being a kid again and experiencing the world for the first time without all the baggage.
Did you believe that day, like as soon as that night, that it would improve your life?
I did, for sure.
I believed it during the journey, like I could tell.
I even said to the guide something like I just can't believe how unnecessary and useless all that stress and obsession over over these things was and how it impacted my life.
And I'm never going back to that.
On the flight home, Michael thinks about his marriage.
He feels hopeful.
You know, I'd gotten to a point in my marriage where it was difficult.
Like, I had anxiety about every interaction because things were just not going well.
And so But on the plane, I thought about it, and I just couldn't wait to see my husband.
I missed him so much.
It felt like at the beginning of our relationship again.
The slate had been wiped clean, so to speak.
When he picked me up in the airport, I smiled at him.
I gave him this big kiss in public, which I never really do, because I grew up in the 90s when being out wasn't really acceptable.
But I didn't care.
I didn't have a care in the world, really.
It made me realize, I guess, what my priorities in life are, are truly and what they should be.
You know, work is definitely important and i take my career very seriously.
I have to um, and i always will, but what i was not doing was making any space for my personal life at all and um, and that's part of what led to, you know, issues in our relationship, in my marriage.
Michael gets home and the feeling of freedom continues.
He feels like wildly good.
But while michael is feeling completely different steve, his husband, hasn't had the same experience and he has his own anxieties.
For some reason I just thought like, oh well, he's just going to be so glad that I'm changed now and everything's going to be wonderful and great.
But I think it was anxiety inducing for him in and of itself that I was this new person, so to speak.
And then I had changed because you know, growing up you kind of recognize other people who have anxiety and you can relate.
And so I feel like maybe that changed or maybe that raised a question in his mind.
I know it did for me.
How do I relate to this person now that I don't have anxiety to relate to?
And obviously that's not the only thing that connected us in our relationship, but it was a large part of it.
It's a large part of who we are.
And so it was a little bit unnerving because I felt like I was on this different plane, now achieved enlightenment, so to speak, and i felt like he wasn't a member of the club and so, trying to communicate that and work with it, it was difficult.
Shortly after michael gets home, he and steve have a big fight.
Michael is worried that they won't be able to come back from it.
One of the things that they say is not to make any major life decisions for 30 days and um we, You know, got into an argument and I felt like it was pretty devastating just based on the things that were said.
And so I started to question my own marriage and whether this was going to work out long term, because I felt like we're in such different places now.
Michael realizes that for them to find common ground again, that Steve might have to go on his own journey.
He wants his husband to experience the same thing.
But will Steve be up for it?
We'll find out after the break.
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We're all out of the ordinary.
There's a battle playing out right now over who should control American universities.
We're going to bankrupt these universities.
In season one, we were guessing what was to come.
Now, we know.
We want nothing less than $500 million from Harvard.
From the Boston Globe and on the media, it's season two of The Harvard Plan.
This time, it really is personal.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
So, after Michael's journey with psilocybin, he wonders if he and his husband will be able to find common ground again, one without the constant presence of anxiety.
So he decides to ask him to try it, too.
For me to ask him to.
You know, consider having his own journey and trying the experience himself was a pretty big deal.
But the more I talked about it, the more interested he seemed.
I just, I really wanted that for him.
Like I know how much he struggled with it himself, and I wanted him to experience life without these chains.
Meet Steve, Michael's husband.
Michael had been the very anxious one in the marriage who needed a new kind of therapy.
But Steve, he has anxiety too.
He's a veteran who grew up with a mom who was often alone.
She struggled with alcohol addiction.
He didn't come out till his 30s after marrying a woman and having three children.
I grew up in a time when it just wasn't talked about.
I didn't know that being gay was an option.
Nobody ever talked about it.
So I didn't know how to deal with the feelings that I was having and kind of settled on this like it's a phase thing and that everybody always said like oh, it's a phase, and people have it in college and then you'll grow out of it.
I finally realized, like, this is not a phase.
It's not going away.
So I have a lot of sexual anxiety, or I had a lot of it around.
You know that guilt and shame and all that stuff.
Steve calls himself a high-functioning, anxious person.
Maybe he's hidden it better than Michael, but the anxiety is always there.
And now it's that much more obvious after Michael's journey.
Steve says Michael was different after his treatment, and he noticed it right away.
He was very relaxed in a way that I didn't see very often, but it was more consistent, and it was...
You know, no matter what we talked about, he still maintained that same calm, I guess.
And that was unusual for us, because different topics would cause different, you know, anxieties for us.
Steve had supported Michael getting this treatment.
But to be fair, he didn't really get it.
I grew up in the dare generation, so it just seemed like a recreational drug for me.
I mean, so I just I really had no concept of it.
And I thought people just used it for fun.
When Michael originally went out to Oregon, Steve had some fears.
I had a little bit of skepticism because I felt like some of the things that he was dealing with could only be helped by therapy and talk therapy or whatnot.
And I just didn't think that there was some kind of magic pill, so to speak, that would help that without the therapy.
And so I was very much interested in the outcome.
But there was also that element of I thought, like he's going to improve so much and I'll still be the same.
And so he may want to abandon the relationship because I won't be on the same level and I'll still be dealing with the same things.
I mean, I think that was my biggest fear from it.
And that's sort of what happened, right?
Michael is in this new changed place.
And that's why Steve says, OK, I'll try psilocybin, too.
I really wanted to just improve our relationship.
That was my biggest goal.
Two months after Michael's first trip, they fly back to Oregon together and Steve goes through the same process.
Steve's journey is different than Michael's.
He does not experience ego death.
And he doesn't like laying down.
He has his eyes open and is looking around the room.
I'm a person that likes to control the environment and myself and feel like I have that control.
And so realizing that I was losing control was a little unnerving.
And so...
I couldn't deal with the eye mask being on and the visions being so intense, so I took it off.
Steve worked with the same guide that Michael did.
In Steve's case, it totally helps that the guide is also a veteran.
I talked to him, I would ask him questions, and I think that's what I needed was someone that I perceived as an authority figure.
He became a deity in a way to me and was like an authority figure um, and that I could ask questions and the definitive answer was coming from him.
And you know I, you know I told him that I'm so tired of you know carrying all this weight and you know he just told me, like it's okay.
You can, um, I'm sorry, you can put the weight down and you don't have to carry that anymore.
And that's when it really clicked for me that I didn't have to do that anymore.
It just it was okay.
You know, growing up and going through my life was that I felt like I almost felt like an alien in this world, like it was kind of an experiment.
And I said that during my journey I was like I feel like an alien and that it's just an experiment to see you know what somebody in my you know body and condition could you know function in this environment.
And, you know, it's really taken that away.
Now, About a year after the experience, Michael and Steve are doing better.
They're both less anxious and more present.
Yes, they had different experiences with the treatment, but both say it changed their perspective on life in general.
I don't feel like I have to push my conditions on things anymore in the relationship.
You know I had preconceived notions about the way things should be or how something should.
You know, how you know, like a, the house should be organized in some way or something, or how something should be kept or something like that it.
It's taken all that away which caused i which unknowingly caused a lot of pressure on our relationship because we have different opinions and it's allowed me to appreciate more that you know, somebody else likes things a different way and we can still maintain some boundaries and around certain things and and be okay with it.
What before seemed like an insurmountable problem now seems manageable.
They're seeing parts of each other that they haven't seen for years.
And they're still in love.
I think this has been so life-changing for me.
It opens a whole new world to you that you wouldn't get to experience otherwise.
And it's a beautiful experience.
And I would agree with that.
I just think that it's important to have a guide or a therapist there to guide the journey.
Because in my experience, I saw how if I didn't have that, it could have been very, very terrifying.
But the guide made it. exactly what it should have been, and I got the most outcome from it.
Two things that occurred to me during this episode.
One, ego death.
This is the second time the phrase has come up in an episode this season.
The first was in the clown story.
Fumi experienced ego death as a clown, and now psilocybin ego death.
I think it's interesting that in both stories, people found change by letting go of their personal fears and and accepting that they're part of a much larger thing.
Like, we're all pieces of the universe.
Not to sound trippy, but this ego death concept seems like it can help us let go and be happier.
Number two, this story shows how change can happen.
I do believe Michael rewired himself.
The second.
He had this psilocybin experience, but that change led to discomfort in his romantic relationship.
So there's a lesson.
When others change, We have to give them some room, some grace.
Michael went from being the miserable, anxious one to being more at ease, which meant Steve became the one who needed more help.
It was not comfortable.
Part of positive change might be that loved ones have to learn to sit with their discomfort.
And then everybody redefines things together.
By the way, in Massachusetts, the people behind that ballot question haven't given up.
They want a new question.
They want support.
I talked to a journalist in the Boston Globe newsroom who covered this election and the psilocybin question.
And his take was that a lot of people here did support it, but that the language would have been too much because it would have allowed for home growing in a way that made people uncomfortable.
He said that as a reporter who considers addiction and as a person who cares about mental health in general, he's interested to see what happens.
And I agree with him because change through psychedelics seems possible.
Michael, who I saw on Zoom not long ago just to check in on him, and Steve says he remains changed for the better.
It really made me see that like, at the end of the day, we have this one life.
You know at least what I took part of.
What I took away from the experience is there is no second chance, right?
Like this is the one life we have and we have to make the most of it.
And making the most of it is our connections and who we love and what we do for those people while we're on this earth.
Love Letters is a production of the Boston Globe.
Our producer is Christine Ahanatu.
Our executive producer is Kristen Nelson.
Uzair Ahmed does our audio mixing and mastering.
Sound design by Christine Ahanatu.
Maddie Mortel is our audience engagement manager.
Special thanks to Nancy Barnes and Linda Henry.
Our music is from APM.
Remember, Love Letters is also an advice column.
Send any questions about dating divorce marriage singlehood whatever, to loveletters at bostoncom.
And if you like this show, please leave us a review.
Learn more at loveletters.show.
Like the guide was there.
He's in a chair.
He sits in the corner of the room.
He became enhanced.
To me, it was like Max Headroom, if you've ever seen that.
He looked just like that.
I'm Meredith Goldstein.
Thanks for listening.
