There was a guy sleeping in my elevator, and I wanted to beat him with a stick.

Before you judge, hear me out. Shortly after I moved into my new apartment building, a homeless man figured out how to get inside and would sometimes try to sleep in the elevator. My front door was right next to it. I sometimes fantasized about catching him. Seasoning his eyeballs with pepper spray and whacking him with an old aluminum baseball bat that I kept next to the door. If he was going to sleep in the elevator, he'd at least better pay rent! I hated this fucker. How dare he invade my space?!

Well, a few months later, I wound up giving him a bag of sandwiches. Here's what happened in between.

I was four years dead sober… Now what?

Four years after I quit drinking, my life looked pretty good. I'd spent more than twenty years drinking heavily, with plenty of cocaine and all sorts of other shit mixed in, but alcohol was always the constant. Then I quit. No meetings, no therapy, no treatment. I just stopped and started rebuilding.

And holy shit, did I rebuild. I put myself through trade school and started a new career. After ten years without a driver's license, I got that back, then a motorcycle license, then a commercial license. I was legally qualified to drive anything on wheels. I repaired my credit and moved to the beach, something I'd once considered impossible. There was only one problem. I had no idea what to do next.

For most of my adult life, alcohol had furnished an enormous amount of activity. Granted, much of it was terrible. But there were shows, bars, parties, hangovers, and disasters. Relationships and apologies. Alcohol created chaos, and chaos gave me something to do. Take that away, and suddenly there was a lot of boredom.

I knew I didn't want to drink again. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that music, my identity, my entire life, was starting to turn into a secondary hobby instead of a defining purpose. I finally had a reasonably tolerable job, but I knew I didn't want to do it forever. I'd fixed all the obvious external problems. So now what?

Eating the Flesh of the Gods

Around then, I started hearing and reading about psychedelics in a way I'd never entertained before: not from old dead-head hippies, but from highly credentialed doctors and scientists. People like Michael Pollan, Sam Harris, Roland Griffiths, Terence McKenna, and Robin Carhart-Harris. Then I read Huxley, Ram Dass, Leary, and McKenna. This wasn't "let's eat some drugs and get fucked up." They were talking about mystical experience, trauma, consciousness, and the mind.

I was extremely protective of what I'd built, and I wasn't looking for a clever new way to destroy my life. So I researched the hell out of it. Then a friend and I tried mushrooms.

The first attempt was a bust. The gummies we found turned out to be bullshit, and the dried mushrooms were too little to do much beyond a slight head change. But I noticed something: I didn't crave more, and I still didn't want alcohol. That old compulsive pull wasn't there.

So I kept researching. I eventually found a way to get them. I had not forgotten all of my foraging skills from two decades' worth of hunting for illicit substances. I got some Penis Envy mushrooms. Yes, that's a real strain. No, I didn't name it. Nothing says "profound spiritual experience" like something named after a middle school dick joke, but there I was. I ground up seven grams, soaked it in lemon juice, then poured chamomile tea over it. And boy, was that the wallop I didn't know I needed.

Walking Around Inside My Own Head

I had spent four years not drinking, but I hadn't dealt with what I was avoiding with twenty years of drinking. I'd never gone to therapy or talked through what happened. I had simply stopped and moved forward. I had a graveyard full of unsettled ghosts that needed exorcising.

It came on strong. I had to lie down. It was an intense physical sensation I hadn't counted on or felt before. There were intense visuals with my eyes open and closed. I was in total awe. Before long, it felt like walking around inside my own mind with a flashlight. There were rooms in there. Some were beautiful. Some were horrifying, and the one containing alcohol, cocaine, and that whole era of my life was the darkest.

I cried a lot. Like ugly crying. Things came back that I hadn't thought about in years, including guilt over a few relationships I'd destroyed from drinking. I'd been atrocious to people who didn't deserve it. I had an especially intense feeling of guilt and shame over a four-year relationship that I destroyed with alcohol. There's no excuse for the bullshit I put that poor girl through. I knew that intellectually, but I'd never processed it emotionally.

The mushrooms didn't tell me I hadn't done anything wrong. Quite the opposite. They let me look directly at my actions without needing to run from them. It was a confrontation. A reckoning. I was able to trace the cord back to the wall and understand the roots of my behavior. For the first time, I could see those patterns as patterns instead of assuming they were simply me. And once I could see them, I could disassemble them.

The Sandwich Guy

I started having psychedelic experiences every few weeks, and I noticed some peculiar changes. I wanted to be outside more. I started going to the park just to sit and eat lunch. I felt more connected to nature, to other people, to everything, really. This was especially weird for a lifelong hardcore atheist. I didn't suddenly discover religion. It was simpler than that. For the first time, I felt like I belonged to something larger than myself. Call it nature, consciousness, the universe. I don't give a shit what you call it.

Then I started bringing extra food to the park and giving it to homeless people. Me, the guy who'd been plotting elevator vigilantism.

One afternoon I had a bag of PB&Js left over because nobody happened to be around. Then, on my way home, coming toward me was the elevator guy.

I handed him the bag. "Hey bud, do you want some food?"

"Sure!" he replied. And that was it.

A couple of weeks later, I saw him again. The building's gate had been fixed by then, so he couldn't get in anymore. He recognized me.

"Man, those sandwiches were bomb. Thanks!"

A few months earlier, I'd wanted to kill this dude. Now I was feeding him. His circumstances hadn't changed. I had.

What Kind of Drug Does That?

That question still makes me laugh. What kind of drug makes you want to sit under a tree and hand out sandwiches?

Alcohol made my world smaller. It made everything about me: my fun, my anger, my anxiety, my next drink. I couldn't wait for work to end so I could drink, and eventually I stopped waiting and had beers at lunch. That was craving. That was compulsion.

Mushrooms felt completely different. I could have them sitting around and feel no desire to take them. There was no counting the hours until the next trip. I don't think in the history of drug deals that anybody has called their dealer a thousand times at two a.m. because they were fiending for shrooms.

Some experiences were intense enough that afterward I thought, Well, I certainly don't need to do THAT again anytime soon. And once something had surfaced and been felt, it often lost its grip on me. It wasn't like alcohol, where you ruminate incessantly about the same thing and never make any progress with it. What lingered was an afterglow, sometimes for weeks. Not a hangover. Not regret. Just a sense that somebody had opened the windows in my head.

To be clear, this is one person's experience. Some people in recovery find psychedelics destabilizing, and I'm not offering them as a recovery method. I'm also still paying attention. Anyone with my history should be.

I don't believe mushrooms magically fixed me, and I don't think any substance will do your work for you. I'm certainly not suggesting everyone go eat six or seven grams of extremely potent mushrooms named after genitals because some asshole on the internet had a meaningful experience.

The point is that I'd spent four years rebuilding the outside of my life, and psychedelics showed me there was still an inside that needed attention. They helped me see how much guilt and fear I was still carrying. Most unexpectedly, they cracked open a capacity for compassion I hadn't realized was buried, and a sense of joy and connectedness I'd never had before. I don't know exactly what happened in my brain, and I don't need to pretend I do. I just know what happened afterward.

There was a dude I once looked at and saw nothing but a problem. Then one day I looked at the same man and saw a hungry human being.

So I gave him my sandwiches.

And apparently they were bomb.