All Drugs, No Love

 

Photo taken at an art show in Berlin
The artist is @rank.sss

I thought Colorado would be the perfect place to do shrooms for the first time, but it turns out I was dead wrong as usual. All these ideas other people have about Colorado colored my own perceptions, as is normal for a 16 year old. Colorado promises so much with all that elevation and properly rolled joints and 300 days of sunshine and the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson floating around, but even before I took that trip the delivery fell flat, and when I finally came down after what felt like a million years I became thoroughly jaded. I wasn’t having any fun, I can tell you that much. 

Long after that mushroom trip, which I’ll get into if you stick with me a little bit longer, I started meeting people from all over the world and I can tell whether or not someone is completely delusional based on how they react to hearing I’m a native Denver girl. I know I can’t trust someone if they practically have an orgasm right in front of me. Those ones are always so unoriginal, always in their 20s, always saying some shit about how they always wanted to go there and I must spend my free time skiing or hiking or smoking all that weed the dispensaries are practically handing out for free these days. I know so and so who moved there and they love it, those people always say. I can promise you that “so and so” is not doing well. “So and so” is living in a house with 6 other people and a few of them are doing whippets in the living room and one of them is asking if she can do a bump from someone else’s bag and another one doesn’t do a god damn thing except be an absolute menace. All of them are floating from coffee shop to retail to another job they have just to pay rent so they can watch other people’s faces light up when they say they live in Denver. Told you I was fucking jaded. Yet even now as a fully grown ass person I think I should go back just because of all the things I was promised *could* happen underneath the brown cloud of the mile high city. I could hike a 14,000 foot tall mountain in the morning and spend the afternoon sunbathing on a rock with a few beers in my system and go home and throw a party for all the other people my age who want the same things out of life that I do. I could be social and unbothered and living in a perpetual state of bliss. The way other people talk about Colorado makes it seem like a really nice place.

As for me, I grew up thoroughly circumscribed within the narrow mindset of private school kids. I was heavily bullied for reasons outside of my control that I only share with people I can trust. When highschool hit I was depressed, anxious, pissed off, and high. Oh so very high. Everyone else wanted to get high too, but because all my classmates were so obsessed with their rigid standards of education the drug of choice was adderall. Kids were popping it like candy! No one besides me and my other druggy friend had much interest in meeting up with a psychedelic dealer at 3am like I did. I was alone more often than not. Just me and my medical bag of weed and my opiates I got from all the surgeries I needed. And one day I was alone with a bag of shrooms. 

With all my angry thoughts and questions about why I wasn’t having any fun growing up in a state everyone else thinks is so great I should have known it was a horrible idea to be 16 and lonely and sad and take an eighth of magic mushrooms after drinking and doing coke all day while living in downtown Denver. That is not a good place to be trapped inside your own head. I went on a horrible journey that day. My trip was neither thought provoking nor stimulating and only contributed to my negative nancy worldview. I had a really hard time lighting the cigarette I desperately wanted to smoke and as I wandered the streets in a daze, suddenly very paranoid about how I came across to other people and very much aware that I was much higher than is socially acceptable for a teenager on a weekday, I could see everyone who happened to walk by me in a light that I found deeply unsettling. They were all wearing Birkenstocks or Tiva’s and plain tee shirts as if they had something to prove and it bored me to the point where I felt physically ill. I began to cry right there in LoDo at the fraudulence of it all. Why the hell does everyone look the same? Why are they all looking at me? Why are they all drinking beer outside? Does no one smoke cigarettes anymore? What kind of party is this? I couldn’t stop the tears at this point. I swear people stopped in their tracks to ask me if I was okay, which only made me more upset. Can’t a bitch have her little breakdown? Why do I have to be having a fun time? Why can’t I not be okay in public? It was painfully obvious that I was on drugs. My pupils were the size of saucers and I had this goofy blissed out grin on my face as the tears fell and no one was even pretending like they knew what’s good. The whole ordeal was such a vibe kill I walked back to my house because talking to my mom seemed a lot less like hell than where I was at that moment. She is the least druggy person I know. We all know how that went down. If you don’t, you belong in Colorado with the rest of those dodos acting brand new. 

I didn’t do serious drugs when I was out and about after that. Funny enough, I didn’t do psychedelics at all until I went to boarding school in Utah a couple years later. I expected too much from Colorado when I took those shrooms, thinking I was going to go on a magical journey in the foothills and maybe meet some real life hippies in the red rocks parking lot who were also tripping and maybe we’d all smoke a j together and do some downers when we were tired of tripping sack and maybe then I wouldn’t feel lonely or sad or angry anymore. That’s a lot to expect out of one bag of mushrooms. 

In my Colorado years I was all drugs and no love. I was filled with an abnormal amount of angst and was prone to emotional outbursts that had other people thinking I was a total psycho, which I was. I smoked weed out of cucumbers and snuck out of the house at night just to wander the streets and ask total strangers if they would buy me cigarettes. Newports was my preferred brand, which we all know is a terribly bad sign. I would steal my moms adderall and sell it because I thought that was the way to make friends. I would steal my grandpas arthritis medication and market it as a legit painkiller. I sold my depression medication and crushed it up and told people it was adderall. I was not a good person. I was sick in the head and I was desperate for a good time. The problem was no one wanted to show me a good time because I didn’t know how to handle my drugs and I was a bad drunk. I ruined parties and got kicked out of concerts and didn’t care about my expensive education and was a dirty liar and a menace in general. Colorado with all those happy people making the most out of their one life on this earth weren’t the problem. I was. Even when I was plopped in the middle of nowhere Utah after a journey through psych hospitals and a stint in a therapeutic wilderness program I was doing my best to get high and making judgments about everyone who didn’t behind my black colored glasses. 

All this has me thinking about a party I went to in Ibiza called All Day I Dream. It was in a club nestled up in the mountains. They played progressive house and decorated the venue with flowers and plants. I watched the sunset there and danced until I was ready to go to another party. I had a magical time there but I didn’t feel the need to dream about anything because everything I ever wanted was right there. A place where I could go on a journey in peace, a space where I can take risks without feeling like I have something to prove, of good music, of carefree crowds that live and let live, of a state that doesn’t come with any assumptions. I remember sitting in a cabana and thinking this was everything I ever wanted when I was 16 and tripping. 

I didn’t know at the time it was a no good idea to take those shrooms when I did, but I know now. For starters, you only want to go deep inside your own brain like that when you’re certain you’ll come out the other side as carefree as the person you were when you decided to take all those drugs. Otherwise you’ll end up jaded at 16, spending the next 10 years dreaming of a place you were in all along. 

Maybe everyone in Colorado, with their beer and weed and practical shoes and friendly, caring demeanor, has it right. Maybe all those 20 something “so and so’s” with their mile high lifestyle are a little closer to heaven than I am. Maybe all those people orgasming their way to the west have the right idea. Better to ask how someone is, show a little empathy, wear boring clothes and spend your time outdoors, be in love with where you’re at even if you’re not where you want to be emotionally, create a life for yourself underneath sunny skies with views of the mountains, accept that people aren’t always perfect but it doesn’t matter because you have each other and what could be more perfect than that? Better to do all that than spend your most formative years tripping and falling even farther down and convincing yourself you’re enclosed in hell when the whole time it was a hell of your own design. You’ll always come up short if you live your life expecting so much from everyone except yourself. Colorado or bust. I’ll see you under that brown cloud with a clear head and ugly shoes and we’ll share the same delusions and I’ll love you for being there with me.