The Lord will take control of you. You will dance and shout and become a different person. 1 Samuel 10:6
In the weeks after Sasha and I sent the final manuscript for our book to the publisher, I found myself crying a lot. In some cases, it made sense: Reading Aella’s writing on her mother’s death, for instance, or Bess Stillman on her husband’s, or Tatiana Schlossberg on her own. But other cases were more perplexing: A great plate of risotto. A warm breeze on a late December evening. A competitor on Physical: Asia holding an uncomfortable position for a really long time.
It took a while for me to connect the weepiness to finishing the book. But once I did, something clicked into place and I knew it was true: Writing the book had fixed something inside of me that I’d stopped noticing was broken.
This requires some backstory.
I’ve mentioned the fact that I’m a recovering drug addict a couple of times on this blog. I’ve said a little more about it in my TED talk and on various podcasts. The short version is that I spent more than 3 years, from 2017 to 2020, devastatingly addicted to nitrous oxide — an addiction that utterly wrecked my life, and that I’m lucky to have come back from.
What I’ve never said much about, even to many of the people who know me well, is: Why? Why did I get addicted, and why wasn’t I able to stop, despite being smart and agentic and all the other things people know me to be?
To the extent I do talk about it, I usually abbreviate the story to “I had a spiritual experience on drugs and chased it.” That’s not wrong, but by design it’s the least complete true thing I can say about it. It’s meant to move the conversation along.
To understand the why, you need to understand some of what the experience was like from the inside — so I’m going to try to explain it. I will preempt it by saying, I know what it looks like from the outside, though you are welcome to point it out to me anyway.
From the outside, I went insane, and thus encountered God. From the inside, I encountered God, and thus went insane.
For three months before it happened, I felt it coming, though I had no idea what “it” was. I’d already been experimenting heavily with psychedelics of all kinds when, in June 2017, I got really interested in nitrous oxide. The first time I sustained a nitrous high for a long time, with a friend feeding me balloons in the backyard of our Vegas rental after we busted out of some poker tournament, I felt myself shatter into multiple shards, like a mirror breaking. “I” dissolved and a swarm of simpler things appeared in my place.
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