Mind your own trip
Written by Noel Martin
Personal Essay
I have been drilled by the harrowing echoes of the psychedelic witch hunt.
Fallen prematurely out of an escapist’s tree, I came into trip-culture through pleas of capitalist boredom, rock n’ roll music, and the curious minds of hyperactive youth. Specifically, the skater boy pastimes, that one friend in High School who always had a few tabs of acid on him, meeting your creator, and my very specific and very unsurprising desire: curing my depression.
A heat wave in Brooklyn’s summer brought me to my first encounter with psychedelic mushrooms. I dashed inside of every single thing that looked alive; breathing, witnessing my breathing, playing with decadence, and sporadic highs in the city-sphere that made me feel truly old and independent. My friend, back then, was talking to a guy she liked. I would listen to her talk about him for hours. I remember a few days before their second date, her and I ate mushrooms in her living room. She was confident and calm about the whole thing, sat on her couch texting the guy while I lit candles, and changed her lights from white to blue. I don’t recall what music I put on but I know I had the volume too low and it sounded like water. Holding hands, floating with each other, we waited for everything to start to melt around us. I couldn’t decipher if it was the texts from the guy she liked or the drugs that made her cheeks warm up and eyelids swoop from the ceiling then back to me like a bird.
Bubbles turned my belly full of sparkles and diamonds and clear cut waves of softly saturated intensity that called me to lay on the floor and touch my own skin. I traced my ribs and felt almost as if another being inside me was humming, even though it was (and still is) just me. I tugged at my shirt. I became anti-material in this sparsely decorated apartment, drinking cold water turned me into a fish. I detested the carpet. The microwave seemed to mock me in its posture. After pleading with her to take us up to the rooftop, I took pictures of myself, plain-looking and confessional. My face, so quickly, became glass.With my ego still attached to my body, I took these mug shots as a trophy for coming out the other end.
On the rooftop we hid ourselves in between two fern-like trees that spoke to us in green-black shadows and whispered jokes, we couldn’t stop laughing. I was unfamiliar with this laughter, it wasn’t the same as the dummy throat-caught giggles I made when I smoked weed, or when somebody I love would tease and tug at my withered belief system. Too trusting of the kindness of anything as a young girl. We laughed as though it was our only duty to laugh.We laughed until the clouds changed shape; a roman sculpture of a man appeared in the sky and slowly the wind pulled apart his limbs until he was just a head.
The following trip after this I went through a great grief after breaking the soles of my converse that I’ve worn since middle school. I became so affected that I ran down central avenue at midnight in my broken chuck taylor’s and found that the street-light glare of a church brought me a hush of surrender. I stopped at the ivory steps; not that I responded to the catholic rhetoric or felt myself becoming particularly religious, just the sentiment of ritual implored a joyful wander into spirituality. Since then I have had many re-meetings and re-introductions to this medicine, each time worthy of an inward-outward recognition of shifting my obsession from wanting to “be better”, “feel better” to an impassioned inquiry into what lies beyond the boundaries of my physical mind.
I can’t say these experimentations have ridden my psyche of life’s painful conditions, but I have earned the power to express, openly and to beauty, to oddity and absurdism, honoring whatever may feel right in an overstimulating world. I don’t agree with the cattle hoopla that drugs make a person edgier, cooler, or lazy and destructive, I do not comply with political brainwash or fear mongering. I do not wish for consumption habits to define what this bag of flesh becomes, who I grow into. Connectivity is what I shall relate to. To be sensitive to opportunity is to be self allowant. Operating from a loving mind and centered heart.
About the Author
Noel Martin is a writer and poet from Indiana. In 2021 at 18 years old, she moved to New York City to study acting at the Lee Strasberg Institute. In her first only semester there, Martin was hand selected to be in a rendition of the play Bent by Martin Sherman. This is her debut poetry collection. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
In 2024 Noel Martin, alongside friend Elena Redmond, founded Bimbo Rhetoric, a Publishing House and Book Club. Bimbo Rhetoric published Martin’s debut poetry collection in August of 2024. Martin is currently in development with Bimbo Rhetoric on her second book, a work of fiction.
instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryan_noel18/
