One time, I got so high that chronology kinda stopped existing and I was actually living in the moment. Memories are usually like photos, video clips, or notes on a timeline, but for a few hours, all my memories were a collage of photos in no particular order. I wasn’t sure whether I had gone to the toilet two or twenty minutes ago, or if I had gone at all because the toilet memory might have been from the day before. Forgetting things is perfectly normal when you’re high, but this feeling of memories as an unordered collage made me disregard the past, and the future too because all my plans, experiences, and whatnot, I had made in the past, and since my memory of the past was unreliable, I could disregard my future too. For a few hours, all I could perceive was the present, and as horrifying as flying through a vacuum with no past and future to anchor myself in was, it was also oddly liberating. All my worries were either in the future or in the past, and without either, I felt bliss.

This experience was also horrifying because I was constantly worried that I was dying (a classic, really), but in retrospect, I’m not sure if I ever felt so at peace before or after that night. I was having conversations in my head to calm myself down, watching a livestream to have some background noise, and fell asleep with the ceiling light on because the darkness was scaring me. I tried to experience this again four months later, but the magic of the first time was gone, unfortunately.

Me when I followed my therapist’s advice to stop dissociating