You know those stories you hear that never quite leave you? The ones that unexpectedly shape your life forever without your ever fully realizing why at the time? This is one such story.
Someone I love (and dated many years ago in what can best be described as our beer commercial twenties) had the kind of guy friend group that movies were made of. Knowing each other since their early school days, they regularly got together to golf, camp and fish.
Epic tales from these trips were regularly retold. Some even many years later. But there was one particular story that no one spoke of. No ribbing, no joking, no retelling of it. Ever. My then-boyfriend shared it with me privately after it happened.
The story goes something like this. The guys (likely five to eight of them from what I can recall) all went fishing and stayed overnight in rustic cabins in the woods. Not unusual for them. But this time, as the evening wore on, they all took shrooms (aka hallucinogenic mushrooms).
One of the guys, I’ll call him T for sake of anonymity, had a ‘really, really, really bad trip’ while on shrooms. While the rest of the guys felt pretty good – or better than good and were able to crash and sleep easily – T had a harrowing night.
Apparently this ‘bad trip’ got so bad, so fraught with fear and danger that T spent the entire night staring at a single bare lightbulb in the cabin. He never looked away from it. Not once.
So afraid to be alone with his own mind in the dark, even for a millisecond, T white knuckled it in the pitch-black cabin staring directly at the lightbulb. Seemingly knowing on some primal level his very life depended on it.
He only stopped staring at that lightbulb once the sun rose the next morning. Happy to report in the end T was ok. But I never took drugs after hearing that story. I just genuinely never, ever wanted to proactively risk exposing myself to the possibility of that kind of terror.
This long ago story came to mind a few days ago without prompt or warning. Its recurrence invoked the same reaction it did the very first time I heard it. My fierce commitment to never proactively exposing myself to that kind of bad trip remains intact despite the intervening years.
However, in recalling this story in the here and now, I realize that as much as we may try to avoid that inky dark blackness, if you live long enough, life is a trip unto itself. Presenting each one of us with people, places and experiences that can render us mute, frozen and terrorized.
Taking us into the dark woods of ourselves. Where the rest of the world seems to be sleeping peacefully in the night and we are left utterly alone to face the dark knowing we may never be able to return to ourselves fully intact the same way ever again.
But in these ink black dark moments that can coat us so thick we can barely breathe or move?
We must train our eyes on the light.
In the quiet, still, haunting darkness.
Focus on the light. Relentlessly. The light.
Don’t even blink if you’re too afraid.
Just stay trained on the light. And wait for dawn.
Please hold on.
The dawn is coming. It’s almost here.