On Mushrooms

Airing some things out of the house.

By Rocky Rūb

Illustration by Em Bennett

In an episode of the podcast, Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, the host asks his guest, Jia Tolentino, after an extended conversation about her essay on a college internship in Venice: “At 19, what did you need to air out of the house?” 

She starts, “I think—”; but before she goes further, I think there is something to hold on to here. This particular subject/verb combo is anything but atypical. In fact, it’s probably the most common precursor to all contemporary dialogue of our global culture (though I’d need a linguist to check that). In the first writing workshop I participated in, two of my peers commented that I seemed to use this phrase as a way of deflecting. The deflections made it harder to trust me as a narrator, revealing my insecurities about stating my opinions and preemptively shielding myself for being proved wrong. At least, that’s what I think the two women who identified it were trying to say.  

Jia Tolentino, on the other hand, does not start her sentences with I think because she thinks she’s wrong. She’s one of the most confident writers I follow (and that’s why she holds the top spot as my favorite millennial). Rather than submitting prematurely to doubts, she is submitting to the fact that she is a different person now than who she is describing. She isn’t succumbing to anything except for the temporal difference between her psyche then and her psyche now. This probably doesn’t seem much different, but I promise it is. It’s contextual, and had I not cut her off, one can see when she finishes her response to Fragoso’s question about what she had to air out of the house at 19, that Tolentino does not deflect, but instead leaves open ended:

(I think) it was seeing who I was with no one around me and no familiar context and no purchase on anything. I have an instinct to drive myself to this anyway, it’s one of the reasons I like hallucinogens so much, it’s that you kind of get pushed to your edge and you feel the same feeling as like, ‘every window’s open!’, like there’s nothing but bare experience here, and like sort of my metal is being tested, my like fortitude, my ability to retain stability in the midst of like profound waves of dazzle or fear or terror—I enjoy seeing what’s left and remembering that what’s left is actually a huge amount, and I think that’s what it was, that’s what was being aired out.

Rather than “I think, therefore I am”, it’s “I think, therefore I am building my schema based on my past experiences and trying to infiltrate a consciousness of my past self who I no longer am.” She says, “I think,” because she has changed. At the same time, analyzing her dialogue is a lot different than analyzing her writing. The key difference being unconscious colloquialisms and intentional, astute decisions to inscribe a permanent relic of the author’s thinking at the time. I suppose it’s a bit trivial—or hopefully just nuanced—and mostly a fixation I have that is distracting from what I really want to say, which is that I, too, have done hallucinogens to drive myself to that bare experience Tolentino is talking about. 

…

The first time I did them, I don’t think I consumed enough to even consider it a microdose. But the second time, the same day of the 2024 NYC Marathon, two days before the 2024 Presidential Election, under a large oak tree in Central Park, laying down over a place and time in the middle of a tense and critical shift of terrain, culture, season, history, and collective trauma, I was definitely trying to air some things out of the house. 

I’ve experienced few days more beautiful than that one. And it stands as this moment I can’t help but idealize in comparison to the nauseating revolutions we’ve all been riding around since Donald Trump reoccupied the White House in January. The compounding variables which amplified the day in their own singular ways absolutely contribute to what made the day memorable. What’s blurry is whether the mushrooms I ate were such a determinant factor in what made the impression of it so intense. Nonetheless it was all very hopeful. 

Addison Rae recently said that she doesn’t like to give dating advice because all relationships are very unique. There are many reasons why this could mean nothing and should be disregarded, including the fact that she said this in her recent Chicken Shop Date appearance, hosted by Amelia Dimoldenberg. But she seems earnest, in a good way, and I feel similarly about substance use. 

Mushrooms are the only substance “harder” than marijuana that I’ve tried. Which, of course, makes them exciting. But they also exist as this almost separate entity from other drugs for their therapeutic reputation. It’s like how mushrooms and LSD have extremely similar effects on the body, yet I wouldn’t take LSD if I wanted to speak to God, and when I eat mushrooms, I think He’s trying to speak to me. This is also about time and place: I think of God when I think of mushrooms because at the time, I was transfixed by my relationship to religion (or the lack of this relationship that I grew up with) during a period when I was convinced that I was going to die soon. 

Leading up to the trip, I had been seeing a therapist once a week for about two months to confront the anxiety that was manifesting into this fear, though I never told her this. She reminded me too much of my mom. 

I’ve been trying to shake this inclination—to match pitch with the frequencies my counselors want to hear—but awareness famously is not salvation. So it’s best for me to keep these relationships parasocial. Instead, I fixate on thinkers who seem to have worked out the problems I’m going through in their own writing, hence, the heavy references to Tolentino. Before her, it was Mary Oliver, and before her it was Didion (Joan, duh). Somewhere in between them, there seemed to be answers in rereading Salinger’s Franny and Zoe, and I hesitate to admit that in proximity I was strangely attached to David Foster Wallace. It’s less a desire to be told what to think and more a need for permission to think in these ways. 

It's a pattern I’ve developed of trying them on and stealing their voice until I can tell what pieces of them I want to keep forever. And I feel permitted to do so because Didion used to do the same thing with Hemingway, so confidence must be something we can borrow until it’s our own. 

At the time of the climactic, profound, and life altering trip, I was much less confident. Overwhelming feelings of doom will do this to a person. I wrote, after the fact, “I seemed to unconsciously ask the universe: “Is death scary?” and, “Why is it that I’m so afraid?” The sparrows perched on the oak tree echoed answers that bounced around the space the psilocybin carved out inside my head. Time seems to always be running out, and when I take mind altering substances it is easy to think that the grass will pull me prematurely into the afterlife. A sign that maybe I shouldn’t be taking mind altering substances.” Actually, this was the very reason I needed the substance. It’s all very degrading, but so is the act of writing. And it gets a person to that “bare experience” Tolentino was talking about.

This is just a more literary and tautological way of talking over the scientific research that should instead speak for itself. In a CNN article, How psilocybin, the psychedelic in mushrooms, may rewire the brain to ease depression, anxiety, and more, Sandee LaMotte describes exactly what the title proposes. It’s a good metaphor for establishing the relationship between science and prose writing on the topic of mushrooms. Science writing is necessary, and without it, it would be reckless to consume such substances without the proper research about its effects. It's a helpful generalization. But the experience is uniquely subjective in a way that only prose can describe. It’s not the same as communicating the beauty of it, the clarity in your surroundings. 

For instance, during a trip, I look at the flock of sparrows sitting in the oak tree branches and they assume the power of a jury of my peers. They have flown to this perch together, entering into my gaze from their deliberations with the verdict to some question that I had forgotten I’d asked. I create narratives in my mind to process what I see and somehow feel that I’ll be found guilty, or wanting. When the sparrows tell me to look no further, I don’t know what to do except close my eyes. When they tell me it’s happening, I reopen them expecting the world to collapse on top of me. 

Animals are instinctual, and bird migration patterns foreshadow the movements of the planet before we can feel them. This is scientific, but it’s a disservice to communicate it without poetic appeal. And it’s good to realize these things and to spend prolonged moments magnifying our fascination with it. But it’s just as important to come back down to earth after the fact. To wake up the next morning and distinguish that these are all just threats designed by myself for myself and the real questions I should be asking should have nothing to do with when the world is going to end and everything to do with what I’m going to wear to work in the morning. What is happening cannot be stopped, but we can give attention to it. 

The past makes you feel like somebody else. Mushrooms create corporeal distance between the consciousness and the body’s present state. Thus, it accelerates that paradoxical hindsight effect that my professors are always bringing up in creative writing classes. Closeness to time makes the feelings vivid, but distance brings you clarity, and trustworthiness, and often, a better perspective. Doing mushrooms marries these all together in the five(ish)-hour period it takes to fully pass in and out the body, and when I do them, I don’t need the years I usually do to process the present moment holistically. Which is not to say that this essay wouldn’t be written ten times better if I tried again in five years; this effect is inexorable. 

It’s too optimistic to take a full swing in this direction and say that it makes us into our own role models. That would be a dangerous ceding of power to substances which universally pose (even the slightest) risk of dependency and abuse. But changing perspective, if only for the moment, brings the subject one step closer to personal cogency. It’s an omniscient development, even if just temporarily induced, that convinces the consciousness to trust itself. And this phenomenon is powerful. 

None of this could very well matter to anyone. Some days it doesn’t matter to me. The trip isn’t married to existentialism, and I want to take mushrooms at the club but I’m worried that I’ll be thinking about God on the dance floor. Maybe He’d like that. It’s hard to say, and I implore anyone who is tripping soon to ask this on my behalf. But it’s too unique and even if we ask the same questions and get the same answers there will be something missing in our translation to each other. When we come back down from the trip and into our bodies again, the shift is felt kinesthetically, and as our brains rewire, the nuances of the answer cannot be shared.

Then again, I am but a novice mushroom user and a less than amateur psilocybin scientist. Which is essentially the crux of this argument. That on mushrooms, I think I have the answers to these live questions which are constantly changing. I leave the trip more confident and more certain. Two weeks after that hopeful day in November, when I tripped under that big oak tree in Central Park, the world had already made another fold on itself, and I wasn’t questioning God anymore but more about how time will never linger on the good stuff and how tight my grip on it should be and if I can trust they will happen again. Change used to be the answer but that has changed, too. This is, of course, the fault of those who seek meaning out of the ordinary. But there’s always a chance something will be there, and I’m always scared of missing it.