Disclaimer: This is my personal story. It’s not medical advice. It’s not a how-to. I am not a doctor or a chemist. Don’t hit me up for shrooms or send me hate mail about why decriminalizing psychoactive drugs is the first sign of the Apocalypse. I am, however, totally open to your suggestions about menopause, but only if you have a vagina.
Two decades ago, I microdosed MDMA (ecstasy) in pursuit of a spiritual awakening. Perfectly content with that experience, I gave up most recreational drugs. I’ve eaten some weed gummies here and there, but don’t like how they cloud my thinking. Today, coffee and a well-made old fashioned (top shelf bourbon, not too sweet) are my drugs of choice.
Yet here I am eating magic mushrooms with my morning meditation, in an attempt to be, not enlightened so much as just me again.
Perimenopause has been a hormonal hellscape. As someone who has spent her entire adult life doing yoga, lifting weights, meditating, and eating right, I was certain I would be one of those women that just sail through menopause. I even planned to be really gracious about it, and only a tiny bit smug.
Joke’s on me then. Seems like I won the perimenopause symptom lottery: night sweats, hot flashes, weight gain, bloating, brain fog, rashes, dry skin, and a weird pH that makes me sometimes smell like a water buffalo. So far, I seem to have escaped the anxiety and depression that some women endure. When I do get my period, it’s erratic and heavy and is accompanied by cramps that often double me over in pain. I can’t even consider hormone replacement therapy – which is a godsend for almost 40% of menopausal women – while I’m still getting periods. And to top it all off, perimenopause can last up to ten years. Brutal.
I don’t have one of those doctors that dismisses my symptoms. In fact, she’s my age and also going through it. The problem is that modern medicine has only very recently had any sort of discussion around menopause. Our current medical system is built on research performed mostly on cisgender men, and 0% of those people will ever battle menopause. I was outraged to learn that clinical research wasn’t even required to include women (or ethnic/racial minorities) until 1993, when Congress passed the National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act. This means the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of all disease routinely fails to consider the crucial impact of gender’s role on hormones. So women over the age of forty often fall back on antidepressants because it’s our only option; in fact, one in every five women over the age of forty is currently on an antidepressant.
And while I’m so thankful for my mental health, I have been experiencing some writer’s block. This is a completely normal part of any creative life, and I’ve always found it useful to fill the time I’m not writing with interesting experiences. We can create around 700 new neurons every day and microdosing can help these baby brain cells make connections more quickly.
So, I’m eating shrooms. Or psilocybin to be exact, dried fungi ground and baked with cacao into wafers. My protocol was mostly intuited by doing some online research and talking to other mommas that have forged the microdose path. Every other morning for two weeks I ingested about a tenth of a trip dose (I tapered off my very low dose prozac before, though some antidepressants work quite well with microdosing).
About twenty minutes after microdosing, I felt … nothing unusual. There was no trip. The walls weren’t melting and I didn’t talk to God. There’s no euphoria and no crash. Weeks later, if I had to choose one word to describe my microdosing experience, it would be satisfying.
Most moments seemed satisfying and I didn’t feel compelled to do something else. I felt very connected to whatever was right in front of me, content to just be. Observing takes more energy than just seeing and I feel like microdosing strengthened my observation muscles. My lateral thinking expanded; I was able to make connections between things in new ways. Microdosing was a delight for the senses, gently amplifying my ability to discern sensation. I petted the dog and it was enough to just pet the dog. Standing on my yoga mat breathing felt like enough. Lying on the floor and watching the ceiling fan felt like enough. For the first time in years, I ate lunch and just ate lunch, where normally I read or work a Sudoku puzzle while I eat.
It didn’t interfere with my ability to go about my day. I taught all my classes, drove my car, returned emails, paid bills. But I didn’t feel the compulsion to multitask, didn’t feel the impulse to check my phone all the time, which felt like a huge step toward a happier life. I didn’t have my normal wintertime cravings for alcohol or carbohydrates. I had a hot flash without the amount of panic that normally accompanies one. My creativity returned, prompting me to spend hours making collages and playing my guitar. I felt more grateful for and loving towards my body, even after having to buy a new swimsuit in a larger size (something that would have sent thirty-year old Erin into a real spiral).
Life felt manageable and satisfying.
It isn’t a magic bullet. I still felt all the normal fluctuations of human emotion: irritation, boredom, worry, joy, anger, gratitude, confusion, awe. I just felt more aware of those motions as they arose, had more space around them to curiously inspect them before moving forward.
If someone had “slipped” me this amount of psilocybin, I might not have noticed anything except feeling emotionally even keeled. I can absolutely see why clinical trials show incredible improvements using microdosing to treat depression, anxiety, OCD, PTSD, and addiction.
Microdosing isn’t for everyone, but it was a perfect new year reset for me.
