245: What if you were taken to the dark side?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. I was scared that reality wasn't wearing its usual face anymore. I felt like it was wearing a mask that it was going to take off at any time. Almost like I was navigating this giant dollhouse, like it was fabricated. And I was just clutched by these incessant thoughts of, well, what meaning does my life have?

From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 245. What if you were taken to the dark side?

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I usually describe my upbringing as being kind of normal, uneventful. My parents had this massive age gap. My mom was 24 when I was born and my dad was 41. When I was four or five years old, they ended up separating, but they never stayed far from one another. So I had two very present and very active parents in my life my whole childhood. I was born in a family of four.

I had so much love growing up. My mom is so fiercely protective and loving. She would like cuddle me until I was 13. Growing up, I could tell her anything. I could tell her anything about anything at all. And she would not be upset with me. She would only show me love and affection.

My parents were always really involved in my life and they expected a lot of me, but in the most precious way possible. I think my parents just saw potential in me and they wanted me to fulfill that potential. In turn, it became important to me. I wanted to be successful. I wanted to be a good, obedient kid who would never cause any issues or strife. And I wanted to make them proud. And I took it to heart.

After they separated, my mother got remarried to a man that she met in a chat room. And I had my little brother. I ended up being the youngest of three brothers until he came along and then I was the middle child, the only girl with four brothers.

All of my brothers had a pretty tumultuous past. They were basically adults when I came into the picture, and they had their own issues with substance abuse and alcoholism. And one of my older brothers had suffered from a couple overdoses, I think from opiates, when I was young. And I saw the impact that had on my dad. And I never wanted to be that strain. It was scary to me. It was stressful to me to imagine being a difficult child.

So I just tried to be the good kid. When I say I had an uneventful childhood, I basically just had an easy childhood. I diligently worked at school, came home, did my homework, and then I played Steam games for like four or five hours every night. And that was it for me. It was enough for me. It made me happy. I wanted it to be simple.

I wasn't exactly someone who stood out in a public school environment. I was the art kid, you know? I was just happy to be Ash, the girl that liked to draw. And I think I've just always been in my own head and I had this like fortress that I built up that kept me safe. I never had great self-image growing up. I was an overweight kid and I was an overweight kid until college.

I felt somewhat devastated with the fact that no one would ever really find me beautiful. I was convinced of that. I felt like no one would ever find me beautiful because of who I was. And if I didn't have any beauty or social currency or, like, allure, if I wasn't attractive to the opposite sex,

What did I really have to offer? Because when you're a girl being raised with media that perpetuates the idea that you have to look a certain way to be respected or loved or have any value, you internalize it. It becomes a big deal. My family was overweight, too, and we were all comfort eaters. And I carried that sense of like, I'm a burden or I shouldn't be looked at. I'm taking up space that I shouldn't be taking up.

So going through high school as the wallflower, the art kid, the bookworm, the teacher's pet, and overweight, I never felt like I had any social prospects. I never felt like I had anything to bring to the table outside of like, well, what are my talents? So I pursued things like drama. I was in acting classes and I did stage productions and I was in every single art class that I could get my hands on. And what I needed was a creative outlet.

I just wanted to prove to everyone or maybe even prove to myself that this is my worth. This is who I am. I would just become very fragile because I wanted to be perfect for everyone. And in any way that I perceived that I had missed that mark, I basically flogged myself. I convinced myself there's a reason I'm not the person I want to be.

But no one ever made me feel like I didn't deserve to be here. A lot of these thoughts just came from me. I ended up becoming my own worst enemy. I kept trying to convince myself any happiness I did find, I didn't deserve.

I would spend hours of every day in my room. I would just be on my computer tuning out and playing games and talking to people that I had never met in person before. But I think I just had some horrible, horrible body dysmorphia growing up. And it was kind of nice that they hadn't met me in person. They only had my voice and it made me feel like I belonged in a way outside of my own body.

I didn't realize for a very long time that the reason I was a homebody was because I had depression. And when I was 17, I was finally diagnosed with depression. I remember spending maybe an entire year of my life towards the end of high school where every night I cried myself to sleep and I could never place why. It was just kind of this abstract malaise, this feeling that something was off.

Rather than exercising love for myself, it was just all self-hatred. So I saw this therapist and she was a delight. She made me feel whole. She made me feel like I was okay to be myself.

My friend group in high school was all queer kids, and to this day I feel most comfortable with my queer friends because they accepted me for who I was and I didn't have to offer anything outside of who I was. So being in that friend group was really empowering.

During that time period, I had a couple flings with some of my friends. They were girls. And, you know, it made me realize that I was bisexual. There was no way around it. I was attracted to girls and they made me feel good. But there was still this, like, expectation. Like, well, what about boys? Like, all the other girls in your grade, they're dating boys. What about boys? I started seeing my first real boyfriend.

He was a musician. He was also a wallflower. He liked all the weird nerdy stuff that I was into. And that lasted for two and a half years. And I remember just absolutely adoring the experience and actually feeling what this conception of love is that everyone seems to be experiencing except for me. And it was nice to be held and loved, even though I felt that I didn't deserve to be loved or held.

When I graduated high school, I got into my dream school, really, on a half-ride scholarship. I'm performing super well in my classes, I love my professors, I love what I'm learning. Getting a degree in comic art, and it feels so silly and childlike, but it made me so happy to do something that I was passionate about. But it's in this period that things are starting to feel a little bit better, but it's shaky.

These thoughts and beliefs I held about myself, they're not going anywhere. Emotionally, I was still so fragile. And suddenly, all of those insecurities are highlighted again. By the end of my first year of college, that's when my relationship with my high school boyfriend began to really shatter. And because of all these insecurities that I had, he broke up with me.

I was so devastated. And again, I fell into that depression pit where I thought, "I can't change who I am. I'm not beautiful. I'm emotionally turbulent. I don't know what I want. And I'm struggling. I'm struggling." I took a very hard look at myself and I realized I can't live like this. I can't live hating myself. I had this love and empathy in my heart for people around me, and I accepted them for who they were, but I couldn't do the same for myself.

So I started going down a path of healthy eating. I cut back on my intake and really started to pare down my whole relationship with food. Food for me was the thing I could turn to when I didn't want to have to listen to all the hateful thoughts swirling in my head. So sophomore year of college starts and I've already begun to lose weight and it shows.

By the end of my sophomore year, I was in the communal studio area for all the comic art majors, and I saw a sign up for a local amusement park. And this internship was to do caricatures. So I started this amazing new chapter of my life. I got to be an artist. I got to be a professional artist. I got to draw and get paid to do it. It was so big for me. It was such an exciting time.

So I start interacting with my coworkers and I fall in love with them. They're talented and they're so bizarre and idiosyncratic and I didn't have to pretend to be someone else to fit in here. People loved me for who I was. Like, I was out here occupying the space with people that I admired and they admired me. And it was just so easy.

Mind you, I'm still losing weight this whole time. I'm still trying to drop down the pounds. I was about 240 pounds by the end of high school. And by the end of the summer of 2018, I was 140 pounds. So I had more value socially. And I could tell that I did because people wanted to talk to me. People wanted to flirt with me. People wanted to...

learn more about me and talk to me after my shift or invite me out to these spaces. And I saw what external beauty does for a person. I was just suddenly so cool. I was suddenly so interesting. That was so novel and strange because the person beneath the veneer had never changed, at least not substantially. I was still all in all myself.

At times it felt superficial and it made my nose itch. But because I had never experienced that kind of attention before, I really welcomed it. I leaned into it. I wanted to be the flirt now. I wanted to be the pretty girl because I had never been her before. I just thought, finally, finally, I get to know what it feels like to be this person. And I felt like I found my community. I felt like I found the place where I truly belonged.

I had met someone who was also pursuing an art degree

We just instantly clicked. We instantly bonded. He was so esoteric and in his own head and concerned about big picture questions, just like I was. But I didn't really have an outlet to talk about it because no one my age was interested in that. We could tackle things that really lit a fire in my heart. I am so attracted to concepts of life and death, metaphysics, the afterlife, why we're here, what is consciousness.

There was a point when I was 12 years old that I sat down both my mom and my dad at separate occasions and told them, I think I'm an atheist. Whenever they had me pray before bed, I didn't feel like anyone was listening to me. And the fact that there was that vacancy there, that emptiness on the other side of my prayer, made me wonder what I am talking to.

So when I met my friend, it felt like I had found a sounding board who was willing to talk about these things with me and not chastise me for not believing in God or not trying religion because I had and it didn't make me feel anything. When him and I were getting close, I discovered that this aptitude for deep thinking and darker themes around life, like he was obsessed with death.

As someone who had never been close to death at all in her life, I had never experienced losing a loved one or someone close to me up until that point. So for him to be so in tune with that side of life, I was attracted to that. We could talk about anything, no matter how morbid or painful, and just understand and give each other the space to feel how we felt.

I soon learned that the reason he felt this way was because a close friend of his when he was a teenager was murdered. To hear that revelation, I felt an immense amount of sympathy and it granted a whole lot more weight and importance to these conversations that we had.

To me, it was an intellectual exercise. It was to have a friend that I could confide in my deepest thoughts and insecurities and fascinations with the universe. To him, it was someone who would listen to him about this pain that he had been holding for such a long time.

He was very dry and sardonic. It's like he was carrying this edge with him everywhere he went. And he was personable, he loved people, but you could tell there was a side of him that he could never really turn off. And I think that was the darkness that he had to carry.

It was incredibly difficult to sustain a relationship with someone who could only see the world as a painful place at times. Whereas I am, I'm all sunshine and rainbows. I am peak optimism at this point. I am so happy at this point in my life. I'm working my dream job. I'm surrounded by people that care about me. I have some romantic prospects. I felt powerful and that led to a lot of strain.

He would often tell me, like, you need to stop assuming that everything is sunshine and rainbows because the world's an awful place and someday you'll see how awful it really is. And it always blindsided me because even though I didn't have any authentic experience to call upon, I knew that the world was a painful place. I saw the pains that my family had to go through and I knew about the residual trauma that comes through generations and I felt it.

But he had this very earth-shattering, real-world experience that proved to him that shitty things happen. He would make very clear that I'm doing so well, and he wishes he was as good as me, and how did I do it like that? Or there were so many moments where I could see his insecurity shine. And it was strange to have that kind of turned on its head, because I came from a place where I felt like I didn't have anything to offer.

He made it very clear how he felt about me and our friendship and how people perceived us and the jealousy, he wore it on his sleeve. He didn't hide it. And his behavior towards me became more and more retaliatory. Like, I wouldn't need to do anything to set him off. I always felt like I had to tiptoe around his feelings and be considerate of the fact that maybe I'm doing better for reasons that aren't fair.

But navigating a friendship when someone harbors that much self-hatred and resentment is next to impossible. The relationship took a pretty intense turn because eventually he just told me outright, I'm in love with you. But I didn't feel that way.

I had no intention of changing the direction or scope of my friendship with him because it felt so precious that if a romantic element was introduced, it would lose everything that was so important to me. There was definitely a shift in his behavior. But I just kept trying because I cared about him and he said that he was interested in staying friends and not convoluting what we had, but once that barrier was broken down, once that truth was told, there was no going back.

It came to a point where I was monitoring everything I was saying and everything I was doing because I was afraid of setting him off. I had to become smaller around him. I had to be less myself around him.

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and the next something goes wrong. But with ADT's 24/7 professional monitoring, you still feel safe. Because when every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com today. Growing up, I had no interest in doing any sort of partying or drugs or partaking in alcohol because I saw what alcoholism had done to family members and people that were near and dear to me.

But when I met him and he began introducing the idea of shrooms and psychedelics to me, my ears pricked because he came at it from the angle that you cannot overdose from these substances. They give you hallucinogenic spiritual visions and I promise it's safe and if you'd like to try, I have mushrooms at home. Do you want to do mushrooms with me?

I don't know what this spirituality that he's talking about is, but I want to know, because I don't have that. I don't have any sort of spirituality. So I go to his apartment, we both live in Minneapolis at the time, and he doses out some mushrooms for me, and we have a very nice, mild experience together.

I enjoyed it so much and nothing bad came of it. In fact, I feel better after doing this. I feel happier. I feel more in tune with myself. I feel more in tune with him. This is beautiful. And I wanted to go further and further. I wanted to try more. So we spent a lot of time doing mushrooms together in our free time. At a certain point, I was researching other psychedelics and I learned about this psychedelic called DMT.

I talked about these spiritual visions that you have where you interact with a different plane of existence. Maybe that's exactly what I need to complete this new version of myself that I desperately want to be.

So I go to my friend and I ask him, do you know if we can get our hands on DMT? He looks at me thinking, are you crazy? You want to do DMT? But I asked him and he was able to acquire it for me. At this point, it kind of felt like he was my mentor or my guide. So I would ask him, I'm like, what do you know about DMT? I know it's one of the most intense things that you can take. I've never done it before because it scares me.

I knew it was just as likely that I could have a bad experience as a good experience if I didn't take the necessary precautions. So I spent maybe two weeks preparing for this scheduled DMT dose that I wanted to take. And I prepared with my friend. I sent him all of the literature that I was reading. And I told him how much I wanted to take, which was 65 milligrams.

65 milligrams is about the highest amount you can take for this experience that's called blasting off, where you leave your body and you have a psychedelic vision in your head for about 10 minutes. And I wanted to experience that. So I tell him I want 65 milligrams. I'm going to slot out some time in my day where it's just you and me in my apartment. No one else will be there for the entire day. I'm going to have water and food laid out. I'm going to have aspirin. I'm going to have a radio playing ambient music.

I'm going to put away all my knives and sharp objects and scissors, and I want you to make sure I'm nowhere near them. And I just want you to watch me. I don't want you to be high while you do this. I want you to be sober and watch me. So I set out all these ground rules, and he agreed to all of them. In November of 2018, the day came. I had set up my living room to be perfect, comfy, cozy, safe. And we kind of look at each other. I'm sitting, he's kneeling in front of me. My heart's racing. I've been doing counted breathings.

And I just put the mouthpiece to my lips and I began inhaling. And that's when I black out. I could feel some part of me leave my body, like my body felt like dead weight. It dropped down and I was shot out of my body. I remember waking up in this black expanse and I don't remember who I am, what I had just done, or what is happening around me. It's just nothing. It's just absolute nothing.

I start to register this sense of panic, because why am I alive but I don't know where I am or what's happening to me? That's when I hear this disembodied voice begin to count down from ten, nine, eight. And as it counts down, I feel so heavy. I don't have a body, but I feel so heavy and I feel like I'm sinking, like I was being pulled away from whatever I was experiencing into nothingness.

Before the countdown reached one, I feel myself like bolt up and suddenly light, nothing but light pierces this black veil. And this intense hallucinogenic vision begins where I'm sitting in this white expanse and there's one person in front of me. This person doesn't even look wholly human. They have the shape of a human, but they're like this bright, undulating, electrified, white, yellow light.

I'm looking at them and I say to them, am I dying? They stand up and they start to approach me and they say, no, this is DMT.

They grab my hands and I get pulled at warp speed down this light tunnel. And I see so many memories and emotions and colors and sensations and sounds that I'd never felt or experienced before. And as this creature of light is dragging me through this tunnel, I felt overwhelmed with this spiritual abundance that people were talking about.

And it just keeps getting bigger and louder and more intense. And then it slows down and you calm a bit. And then it ramps up again. And the entire time I'm thinking, what's happening to me? Who am I? What is this? And it was such a bizarre and terrifying experience.

Because I didn't get to take me into this experience. I was the one experiencing it, but I wasn't there. I don't remember my name. I was a blank slate. I was just some random bit of consciousness plucked from that black expanse that I'd come from. And now this being was showing me what felt like everything.

I couldn't make sense of any of it. It just felt like going through a bunch of lived experiences, some of which that were my own, others that weren't my own. I was seeing colors that don't exist. It was scary and beautiful and intense. And to me, it felt like death. I felt like I was being inducted into the afterlife. And all of these things I was being shown were what everyone sees when they're being inducted into the afterlife.

One of the parts of the vision was I was being dragged up into the sky by many of these genderless beings of light, and then I fall, and I wake up, and I'm back in my room.

I still didn't remember who I was, and even though I knew I was in my room, my living room, because I recognized my walls and, yep, that's my off-white walls, but they're like this sickeningly neon-colored yellow instead, and the fireplace that I had was just like swirling and growing and becoming engorged and shrinking again. So it was weird taking that sense of familiarity and removing so many levels from it that I basically was in an alien space.

Not only was everything looking different, everything was behaving different too. I would fall through the floor just to land on the same floor a second later, and I would bounce around the room in ways that make no sense. And it was terrifying. I was like grappling onto the couch and the floor and my desk and my friend. I'm like, hold on to me, hold on to me. I don't want to teleport again. I didn't recognize him. His face was shifting in front of me. He looked like 10 different people at once.

When I begin asking, "What's happening? Am I dying? What's happening?" And he's like, "No, you're not dying. Your name's Ash. You're in your apartment. You took DMT. It's gonna be over in 10 minutes." And he holds me and he tells me, "You're gonna be okay. This will pass. You just took DMT. It'll be over in 30 minutes." I thought you said 10 minutes. No, it'll be over in 20. You just said 30. Yeah, 'cause it's gonna be over in 5 minutes.

That's when I realized that reality was repeating itself, and whatever he said to me, I couldn't necessarily trust, because it would repeat again and I would get a different answer.

And that was the scariest part. It wasn't not being able to control my surroundings, it wasn't having all of these visions that were very intense and alien and different. It was the fact that whatever was happening to me kept happening to me over and over again. I would walk to one side of the room and suddenly I would be walking to the same side of the room again. And it was in that moment that I truly went hysterical. I felt like whatever was happening to me was never going to stop.

It got to the point where I started clawing at myself and pacing the room and crying and screaming and falling to the ground and crying again. And it just kept happening. Again and again and again. It took a long time, but the effects of the DMT wore off. Instead of repeating something I heard two seconds ago, it would happen every two minutes and then every five minutes.

Slowly, the visuals would fade away and I could recognize him in front of me. "Oh, that's my friend." "This is my couch. Okay, I'm on my couch. I'm on my couch." "Oh, I'm Ash." And once I realized who I was, it was like, it was like a snap. Everything came back all at once. And the terror, the primordial terror that I was experiencing was gone that quickly too.

I was me again. And when I was me again, it was so much easier to deal with whatever that was that I just came out of.

It just felt like I was tuning into all of those deep, dark thoughts I had late at night when I couldn't sleep and all I could think about was, why am I here? Why am I alive? Except all of those thoughts were dialed up to 11. And in the experience, it was, here's life. Here's everything. Experience everything all at once. You want to know what this is? Here's everything all at once. And I was just intimidated by the immensity of it. I felt small. I felt...

foolish and ignorant. I felt like there was so much I didn't know, so much I was trying to understand that I wasn't meant to understand. I knew that what I had gone through was horrifying and huge, and I knew what had happened was a turning point in my life immediately. As soon as I came out of it, I knew that I'm going to be carrying that with me for the rest of my life. But for some reason, I just didn't care.

I just felt tired, like my chest hurt. I had labored breaths and it felt like any other anxiety I had just didn't matter because I made it through it.

On the other hand, my friend who was tripsitting me, he ended up pulling out a pipe and started smoking some weed out of my window and began crying. And I asked him like, what's wrong? Are you okay? And he's like, I never want to watch anyone go through that ever again. I just watched you die and come back. And that's when it started to dawn on me what had actually happened. And the emotional impact on him led to a very intense emotional impact on me.

I felt a mixture of guilt and gratitude. And the fact that I came out of it basically having a mental breakdown, I think it really shook him. And to hear him cry, it shook me. So we immediately bonded over this experience. We immediately bonded over the intensity of it. I look at him and I'm like, I'm so hungry. And he passes this box full of food to me. And he's like, how much have you had to eat today? And I said, nothing. And he's like, you need to eat.

I started crying while I'm eating this hummus platter and immediately I was faced with the realization that I wasn't living my life the way I wanted to. I thought I was, but I wasn't because as I ate that food, it dawned on me that

I had been neglecting my body so that I could lose weight. And I think both of us had this sneaking suspicion at the time that I had an eating disorder. And when he said to me, you need to eat, it got glued to my mind and I couldn't get it out of my mind. And I began eating. And I told him that night that I was going to go through an outpatient program for my eating disorder. I fell asleep that night like a baby. I felt really good. It felt like it had not even happened in a weird way.

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Then a week went by and every night of that week, it got harder and harder to fall asleep at night because as soon as I began to close my eyes, the walls would begin to warble and shift and take on this blue tint. And I realized I was hallucinating. And that went on for maybe a few months after the experience. I just kept waking up in the middle of the night to these hallucinations.

Then I started having nightmares where I was just stripped away and left to my own devices and I couldn't make sense of what was happening. Those nightmares, I would wake up from them and suddenly I'd be back in my room and, you know, my chest would be pounding. I would be doing like a little reality check, like, am I here? What's my name? Pinch my skin. But then I would like look at the walls and the walls are moving.

Now these rule bending effects and aesthetics are coming into my sober waking life. It made me realize that I couldn't necessarily trust what was right in front of me because if it wasn't going to behave as it normally would, when will it start behaving as it normally would again?

I was scared that reality wasn't wearing its usual face anymore. I felt like it was wearing a mask that it was going to take off at any time. Almost like I was navigating this giant dollhouse, like it was fabricated. And I was just clutched by these incessant thoughts of, "Well, what meaning does my life have? What do I do with this experience? What do I do with this knowledge? What do I do with this friendship that I don't know if I can trust?"

Life had lost its color. It felt very dull and superficial. And it's really difficult to articulate not trusting your own brain because that's all you have. Everything that I've perceived in my life, my memories, my experiences, the sensations and people I meet. And this one experience made me realize that this could all fall apart right in front of me.

I'm still going to school, and I remember interacting with my friends and my professors and pretending that nothing was wrong, even though I felt so insecure. And people registered the difference in my personality. That was when I really came to terms with the fact that what had happened with the DMT wasn't right. This feeling crept up in my stomach and clutched all my organs and wouldn't let go, and I felt nauseous. Something had gone wrong.

After that, I realized I needed help. I needed to talk to someone about it. But I think I wouldn't have tried to find help as soon as I did if it weren't for us going back to our shroom dealer about a month later.

We went there together to pick up some more shrooms that I didn't intend to take. I decided to completely swear off any sort of substance, so I was just there to chill out and have fun because he didn't have a car and he needed a ride. So I drive us down there and we meet our dealer and we start talking about the experience and he's telling our dealer like, "Yeah, she totally had an ego death. It was crazy, dude." And he looks at me and he's like, "Really? You did? How much did you take?"

I turned to him and I'm like, "I don't know, you're the one who measured it. How much did you give me?" And he said, "About half of that tincture." And I turned to the dealer and I asked, "How much did you sell us?" And he said, "That tincture had about 350 milligrams in it." And I turned back to him and we have this moment of wide-eyed terror as we both realized that he had given me 165 milligrams instead of 65 like I had asked.

When I made the realization, the shift in the room was palpable. There was just so much tension immediately. On the drive home, it took me a long time to work up the courage, but I asked him, I was like, "Did you know that you gave me that much?" And he swore to me, he swore to me that he didn't know. When he told me that, I genuinely chalked it up to a harmless error. This could have happened to anyone. Maybe it was just a freak accident.

I didn't want him to have to feel responsible for what I was going through. I forgive him and that I was just thankful that he was there to make sure I didn't get hurt. Sometimes he was remorseful. Most of the time it felt like self-flagellation, like he couldn't stand the idea of being a bad person or hurting me. I never felt comfortable with that dynamic of him badgering himself for something that I was trying to let go of.

I would draw comics about it for class and he would tell me to omit certain details or maybe not show his face. And then I would see a therapist and he would tell me, "Can you please not bring up my name when you go to your therapist?" And he wanted me to know that just because he was the one who dosed me, I was also at fault for taking the drug in the first place. And there's truth to that sentiment, but it always felt like it was about centering the story around him, centering the experience around him.

I was immediately overcome with feelings of silliness. Like, I felt like I had been so childish. Like, now this is my fault. I shouldn't have done this. I shouldn't have invited this into my life. Yeah, maybe he was the one who dosed me, but he didn't know better. I should have told him to get a scale or something. I should have weighed it myself. What did I do wrong? I kind of entered into a fugue for the rest of the year.

I was barely scraping by in class as my friend and I tried to fix this shattered friendship that we had. I felt this feeling that had been escalating and growing since the event that this friendship cannot stand up to this test. It felt gross and impure and I couldn't keep up with it anymore.

So the day came, we're in the studio together and I take him out of the studio and I say, I think we need to take a break. I think that we shouldn't be friends. I think we both need to heal from this separately from one another. And I would appreciate it if you don't contact me while we do so.

He handled it incredibly well, all things considered. He ended up leaving and we didn't talk much, but sure enough, he starts messaging me and trying to open the door. And that would become the story for a very long time. Just him trying to open that door again and me trying to close it. It was a tedious back and forth and it was really emotionally exhausting.

One of these periods when we tried to reconnect and try to address this tumultuous relationship that we had, we got coffee one day to try to talk about the overdose. And eventually the conversation took on a very dark note. He told me, "Maybe I wouldn't have done this to you if you weren't so obsessed with death. Maybe I wouldn't have done this to you if you would have left me alone about my own problems."

And I'm like, well, what do you mean? Are you saying you did it on purpose? He's like, yeah, I wanted you to see what the world is actually like. I wanted you to see how bad the world could be. And that's why I did what I did. He had meant to do it. It was intentional. This gap in our knowledge and our lived experiences bothered him so much that he wanted me to come to his level. In that moment, it felt like there was no coming back from that. It was really hard to keep looking at him.

And I had done all of this legwork to make him seem like a good person who had made a mistake and that it was going to be okay and that I forgave him. And suddenly he drops this bombshell that he wanted something bad to happen to me.

It felt like my world had just split open. I couldn't reconcile this idea I had of him, this best friend, and now this stranger who is capable of intense malice that wants me to be in pain, that wants me to see his pain to the degree that he would put me through a potentially life-threatening situation.

I was alive, but the mental repercussions? It was the worst thing I had ever gone through. He knew that I was going through it. He knew how painful all of it was.

All of these moments of shared intimacy as we were becoming friends, they were peppered with these moments of insecurity and anger and jealousy and offhand comments he would say about my life, how I look, how people perceive me versus how they perceive him. He was telling me the whole time who he really was. He was telling me the whole time how he actually felt about me. And it made me feel small.

It was like taking off the rose-colored glasses and seeing him for who he actually was. And I no longer wanted to have sympathy. I no longer wanted to try. I wanted to get him as far away from me as possible. I suddenly felt very alone. I started sheltering myself and refusing help or letting anyone in. I just didn't want to. It also changed the way I felt about everyone in my life. I started to question everyone's intentions towards me.

I didn't want other people to see how vulnerable and raw I was. I didn't want them to see it and potentially use it against me. I was terrified of that. I was terrified of being used. I was terrified of being betrayed. Everything I had known and everything that had made me feel safe for the last year was suddenly gone.

At the beginning of 2019, I finally got into an eating disorder clinic. I was able to get through the eating disorder and the PTSD with a lot of help. I had a very amazing team with my outpatient care. And I don't know what I would have done without it because I moved back in with my dad at this time.

I just wouldn't do anything except lay in bed and wait for my energy and strength to come back because I was kind of like a shell. I didn't have motivation.

I was going to be the first person in my family to go through college. And I didn't want to delay it because of some silly decision I made. And I wanted to do it while I was healing. And if it wasn't for the support of my family and my professors back then, they just understood and listened to me and let me go through this really troubling period of my life.

There were periods where it was easier to handle and I felt like I was doing well and then periods where everything just fell apart and I had to pick up the pieces again. That's just recovery. Anyone that's gone through recovery, they'll probably say the same thing. It's not a linear track. It's up and down. You go around, you circle around yourself. And I understood that I was on this road to healing that was going to take many, many years.

Once I graduated college, I threw myself 100% into my work because that was the thing that grounded me through this entire experience. My work, doing my art, is what kept me sane. It's what kept me from falling back into that mental state where I thought that the world was going to collapse around me or that reality was going to stop being safe.

Through my work, I was connected with artists all across the world and I found people with this very niche shared interests that made me feel safe and at home. I found that ever since the experience, the only thing that matters to me is just showing up day to day and being the best version of myself I can be. And that includes all my idiosyncrasies, that includes my lack of trust sometimes, that includes my inability to leave the house sometimes.

I'm trying to practice radical acceptance of who I am and how I came to be this person. Because despite everything that happened, I'm now a board member for an international organization for caricature artists. I've won awards for my work. I've worked on movies and projects that are dreams. They're absolute dreams come true to me.

And those little pieces of acceptance that I've experienced in my life have helped ground me in a way where I realize I can't let this experience be my whole identity. Because for a long time it was. For a long time it needed to be my whole identity because I was learning to overcome it. I was learning to work through it. But I wanted to be more than that. I wanted to be more than what he did to me.

I think about him pretty regularly. It's hard not to, but my only hope is that he finds a way to move through this in a way that's healing and helpful for him. That's the only thing I've ever wanted, and it has to be separate from me, and I'm okay with that. And I can only hope that that's what he's doing for himself, even if we never talk to each other again.

But at the end of the day, if someone told me I had to live through my entire life again, I would be more than happy to go through that experience. Because it taught me so much. It taught me coming to terms with, accepting, and being at peace with knowing I can't control how my life plays out. I can't control the good or bad things that happen to me. I can't control the things that literally I can't control, like my brain chemistry.

Not trusting reality is something that I never want to have to deal with ever again. But it made me realize how fragile a lot of this is. It made me realize how quickly it can come and go. It made me appreciate the bonds that I do have. People that deserve my time and attention, the people that deserve my forgiveness and my love. I think that I needed this experience to realize that there's a lot for me to learn and that I can't learn without scraping my knees.

I accept that I don't know everything and that that's okay. And it opened me up in ways that I've never felt before. Every day that I'm alive, since that happened, shows me that I am supposed to find my trust again. I'm supposed to find my voice again and prove to myself what I'm capable of.

When I came out of it, I felt nothing but gratitude to be alive. It's no longer that I have a fear of life or death. If anything, I fear that I don't spend my time wisely. But every day, I wake up grateful for what I have. I'm grateful that I get to kiss my partner or pet my dog.

I'm thankful that I get to make my art. I'm thankful that I get to travel the world and meet new people. I'm thankful for opportunities to talk about my story. I'm thankful that I get to live. And that is in me every day of my life now. I'm going to have another day to try again.

Today's episode featured Ash Stryker. You can find out more about Ash and see her illustration and artwork by going to her website, ashstryker.com. That's A-S-H-S-T-R-Y-K-E-R dot com. ♪

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I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York. I was like at my locker and she came up to me and she was like stuttering super bad. I'm like, stop f***ing around. She's like, I can't. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms, and spreading fast. It's like doubling and tripling and it's all these girls. With a diagnosis, the state tried to keep on the down low. Everybody thought I was holding something back. Well, you were holding something back intentionally. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah.

No, it's hysteria. It's all in your head. It's not physical. Oh my gosh, you're exaggerating. Is this the largest mass hysteria since The Witches of Salem? Or is it something else entirely? Something's wrong here. Something's not right. Leroy was the new dateline and everyone was trying to solve the murder. A new limited series from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios, Hysterical.

Follow Hysterical on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+.