Hi there! My name is Jacob, and this is my story. Sorry for the length, I have a lot to share. Most people don't even know a bit of this stuff, and nobody knows all of it (especially not my thoughts along the way, which are written here).
I've always been interested in the human body, the brain in particular. What it is capable of, how it works and the fact that everything about you is made possible by your brain - that is just amazing, isn't it? While growing up, I came to realize that what I was seeing, feeling and hearing in the world wasn't everything. People took stuff, crazy pills and herbs, just to feel things they couldn't otherwise, or see things that weren't really there.
A few years ago I would never have been able to imagine myself coming across some sort of drug. However, back then it was just an innocent interest. I just saw it as something fun to read about and try to understand, all that crazy stuff people experienced. I did well in school, and always have, upon which I chose to study natural sciences. While digging deeper into biochemistry and the understanding of the world, and the human body, the interest came to increase. Suddenly, after a few years, it was not only something to read about, but rather something one should experience. I felt that I should just try something, just to gather understanding and experience, for myself and for my future life in a medical or at least scientific profession.
I never thought that drugs would reach me or my friends, in our small county, yet one day it suddenly happened. One after one, most of my old friends, you know the ones you grow up with, fell into it. They started smoking pot. Nothing too bad in that, really, I had read so much about it, and I didn't really see big downsides with it, nor care for that matter - what they would do in their free time was up to them. I was never asked to join them, yet more and more I would come to hear about their experiences on drugs. At first I didn't really care for it, heck, drugs are bad! But over time, my view on it started to change. One day, about a year ago, I felt that I also wanted to be a part of it, just to see what everybody was talking about. Since I didn't know how to get it, and didn't wanna take the brown stuff my friends did, since it seemed to lower your intelligence radically, I tried using a famous Swedish forum, with total anonymity, to track something down. You can't really ask for drugs, since it's prohibited on the site, but I got contacted by a guy. I thought he was nice, and he had just what I wanted, clean strains of green marijuana, not any hash. I thought he was a nice guy to help me out, and we had contact for a while. During that time I took the step of asking a few friends if they wanted in. Some had smoked pot before, and some hadn't.
To make an even longer story shorter, the guy I talked to scammed me. He used pictures from a seller on a closed forum, and took my money by uCash codes on the 25th of August 2012. Nothing big, people I talked to had been through worse, but as a student with no actual income, 100 bucks sucks pretty bad, especially when my friends didn't bother doing anything. Of course I don't blame them for that, I told them I was going to fix everything to begin with, so it was my responsibility, it sucked though. Also, it took quite some time before they got to know about it. Either way, I created a thread about the distrust between sellers and buyers which the scammers create, and got plenty of response. In the end, one guy offered me 2 grams, if I remember it correctly, of marijuana. I even think it was AK-47, not that it matter. However, in return I just posted a thread for his selling site on the forums, since it's closed for too new accounts.
Some days went by, and one day I had it in my mailbox, the first drugs I would ever come to see. I didn't bother telling my friends, no, they never asked me to join them, so I thought that I would experience this alone. I can't remember when I tried the first time, but it must've been almost exactly one year ago. I got some rolling paper and filters at a store one day, and just waited a good time out. I was so bad at doing drugs it was just ridiculous Firstly I couldn't roll a joint, and secondly I didn't even know you needed tobacco in it. So I just put clean weed on the paper and rolled the best I could, then I went out. It didn't burn, tasted bad and I felt nothing. I had read that some people don't feel it the first time, however, looking back at it, I just utterly failed.
I would come to try it two more times, perhaps three or four months apart, from last year to this year. I still sucked at rolling, but if I recall it correctly, by then at least I understood that I needed tobacco in there as well. I can't remember feeling anything on these separate occasions, and if I did it was probably just placebo, or me trying and wanting to feel something. The only thing I really can remember of it is that I, at one time, felt tired, perhaps even heavy in my head, and just went to bed. This was in the middle of the week, on a regular afternoon, so of course it could just have been that I was tired from school. I never tried weed again.
This is where the relevant stuff starts coming in. I'm very aware of my intellect and memory, and care for its wellbeing very much, since I'm building my entire future on it. Since I sucked at smoking pot the first time and that it, from my own experience, made people more stupid (which of course can have something to do with that many people that smoke weed are plain stupid to begin with), I wanted to try something else. Something that felt like me. I began looking at mushrooms. It seemed that people would get great self insights and experiences out from it, all while it grew in nature, just like marijuana. Also, a while after looking into it, some of my friends and acquaintances had done it (If you don't know, one of the most potent psychedelic mushrooms in the world grow in Sweden by autumn).
By the time I thought about doing it, last autumn was over, and there were no mushrooms left to collect. It was by then that I came back to try pot the other two times. However, my classmate, who is one of the smartest guys I know, just kept on about how rad the experience was and how he and his other pal he did it with would collect more mushrooms the next autumn (which is this year - now). A few months later I also found out that the other guys I knew that had done it got theirs from a guy that had sold them. I never contacted him though. Instead me and my classmate talked on and off about drug stuff, such as buying grow boxes and such, however, we would never come to do anything out of it. Instead, one day, late spring this year, he would come to me and say that he got some samples of something - the psychedelic research chemical 25I-NBOMe.
Before this happened, we had talked a lot about doing drugs, and what we would never do. We were smart guys, or so it seemed at that point. I would never do anything past hallucinogens, and he was a bit more extreme, never doing anything past Ecstasy or Cocaine. One thing he said to me was that he would NEVER take an RC, a promise which he would break rather soon. Even though this guy is quite experimental, and that I thought he would put almost anything in his body with just a little bit of convincing, I myself thought I'd never do anything like that.
The time went, and my friend got his samples. He told me that he had read everything about it online, and that it seemed to be nothing bad about NBOMe. I myself became quite interested, and managed to get four samples myself, two each of both 25I-NBOMe and a mix of 25I and 25C. He and his other junkie friends tripped on the chemicals, and it was great, according to him. They did it several times, and it was such a fun, special and cool experience. Once a few of them took two blotters, upon which things flipped, and the police got them. I don't know what happened to the other guys, but it was a hilarious story, and my friend wasn't one of those who took both. So he kept praising the two drugs on the different occasions we met and would talk about such stuff. I just waited for the right moment, as I was getting quite impatient to try myself.
So, this summer, and more exactly, the 12th of July 2013, I was attending a party with my old class. It was a fun and nice night, seeing and talking to everybody, since we just graduated from our equivalent to high School and were about to go to a college/university or start working. However, the day after, when I got home, was when things started. I live with my mother one week, and my father the other, it's been like that for about seven years now. There's not really any problem with it - they get along and live just 200 meters apart, so I like living like that. However, when I came home after this party, in the middle of the day, just a bit hungover, nobody was home. My mother travels every once in a while in her job, just for a few days, and now she had been gone for three or four days already, and wasn't coming home until sunday, tomorrow. My father, on the other hand, was out in our summerhouse, where he had been for the past few weeks of his vacation I didn't feel like going there, and I had no job during the summer, unlike most of my friends, so there was nothing to do. Me and my friends play computer games together a lot, and that day I was just sitting there, all alone. I started feeling bad, like that summer depression you get from boredom, but this was real. It wasn't the first time I was sitting alone at home that summer, but it was the first time NOBODY would come home, and nobody would talk to me, or play something, all at once. So it struck me, the small pieces of paper that were lying in a box in my room, wrapped in tin foil.
I took them up, and I thought about it for a while, perhaps even hours. They were just lying there in front of me, and I didn't do anything. I knew how to do it, and how to get most out of it. I brushed my gums with my toothbrush and sat down. Then I regretted myself. I put the box down again and kept on playing SimCity. After a while I took it up once again, the last time. My friend, who was currently somewhere else in the country, and I had been chatting with just a bit every hour during the day replied to me and wondered if I wanted to play. By that point I made up my mind. I replied to him and said: "We'll see if I'm available ^^" and so I put the tiny patch in my mouth.
The experience was odd, cool and freaky. I spat the blotter out after about 20-30 minutes, when things started to happen. I couldn't read on my screen, and rows of text started overlapping. I felt weird, like I was tired in all my body, yet the drug wouldn't let me close my eyes and relax, which might be because I had been drinking the day before. Instead I just tried to enjoy the ride, since things could go bad otherwise. I went out for a few minutes, as I read you should, but went back in after sitting on a bench for a short while, and seeing the grass grow in front of my eyes. Kids were running by laughing, and I smiled, but I didn't want people to see me like that, so I went back in. I found music one should listen to while tripping, and most of the time I spent in my bed, looking at stuff. At one point I called my experienced friend and tried to talk to him, he mostly laughed at me. As most of you guys out there now, on this drug, you get what I like to call momentarily retarded - your brain can only focus at one thing at a time. So we hung up. I spent the night going back and forth, writing stuff and laughing a bit, mostly enjoying music.
I got a text from my girlfriend, who was in another part of the country during the week, while being affected. She asked me if I had forgot about her, followed by sad smileyfaces, since I hadn't called or written anything to her all day, and the fact is that I had. I felt so bad that I got shot down and sank right through the ground. I knew I was going to see her tomorrow, on Sunday, which I think is why I really didn't think too much about talking to her, even though it struck me several times during the day to say something, which I then forgot to. Even though I'm not really sure how serious she was about it, it might've been that she forgot about that we were seeing each other tomorrow, I really felt like shit. The thing is that it's not like you're not aware of what's happening on this stuff, but rather the opposite, you're too aware. The drug made me feel pathetic over what I had done and I was overanalyzing every bit of the conversation. For every response she had, my brain was thinking how she must be sitting there all sad and disappointed in me, while I'm here, not even thinking about her on drugs. I felt mean, sad and unappreciative of what I had. I used my best efforts to think like I would otherwise, and talked through the conversation, reminding her that we would see each other tomorrow. Then I layed my phone off to charge, hoping that it wouldn't give off another sound that night. Just to have en excuse not to respond, since I didn't wanna do that while being affected by a drug and lie, I thought I'd go out, and perhaps clear my mind. I was still affected by the drug, but the peak had passed, so I grabbed a shirt and went out.
I left home about 10:00 PM in the night, without a phone, and went out for a walk all alone, which was a stupid move looking back at it. At start it was nice though, and I tried to feel calm and not think too much about the things that had happened this far. I was still seeing some stuff in the ground, such as emblems and flags, but I think it was just the afterglow. I got home about an hour later, just to find my neighbors sitting out talking and having smokes. I said hello and went by in. A friend of my mom, and my closest neighbor asked me what I had done out by now, and I said I had been out for a walk, since I have no job and nothing to do on the days. They offered me to stay out with them. I thought I was fine, so, feeling rather clear in my head, I stayed out with them, talking a bit. Now, I wasn't sober at all, I could tell by how my mind worked. I felt like I talked funny and that the right tone to talk in didn't come naturally, such as the difference in tone while stating or asking something. I had to think in detail about everything I would like to say and I couldn't talk fluidly. Suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, I could lose track. Also I couldn't go in because I wanted to make up for the mistakes in social communication I was doing, which instead of course made things worse. She asked me if I had been up in the apartment by the computer all day, and I started rumbling on about what I had done the night before, just to be able to say "no, I got home from a party a bit after lunch, so I haven't been sitting there for that long", since I didn't want her to think that I had done nothing what-so-ever during my free time not working. However, while trying to explain that I lost the track of words, and just stood there, frantically searching in my mind for whatever I was talking about. I stood there for about six seconds, staring into the ground and not doing anything, before she tried to help me with the words I was looking for. I felt embarrassed and thought that they maybe suspected something. My brain went berserk. Eventually though, despite me standing there frozen with nothing on my mind but that mistake, a few of them went in. Me and two more, one of them being the close neighbor, stayed. The only reason I was still out was to talk a bit and try to seem normal, again to try and save my mistakes. While it still felt unnatural I tried to get into some conversations, before I finally said that I felt sleepy and would go in and go to bed.
My adrenaline was pumping as I got in, and I tried go to sleep, but I couldn't. Instead I started doing dishes and my mind went through so many thoughts; Did they suspect anything? What will they think about me? Will I be known as a druggie all over town? Will my family reputation be ruined? Should I tell my mom, my dad, my girlfriend or talk to my neighbor about it? Should I ask her if she suspected anything, pretend I was tired, drunk or should I say that I'm sorry? For every thought I was dragged down more and more. The worst was what I almost said when I lost my track of words, something like "Oh, I think I'm still a little bit drunk" which of course, in my mind, would be a reasonable explanation to why I forgot what I was going to say - I was drinking the night before, remember? However, I managed to calm myself, after a while. Though just as I thought I had it all settled, and that it felt just a bit okay, I went by the mirror. I stopped, and saw my eyes - the pupils were huge. The questions started popping up again, and I just felt so small on earth, worrying about everything. I ended up in bed, watching a movie, not trying to think about it. The movie ended late at night and eventually I fell asleep.
The morning after I had no problems from what I can remember. I felt embarrassed and pathetic for taking the drug, talking to my girlfriend on it and all that other stuff that had happened the night before. However, I can't really remember any big changes regarding my physical or mental health. I think i started to see a small thin shadow line in my vision, which showed when I looked up and moved my eye, especially while looking into the sky, right the day after, but I'm not sure. Anyhow, I didn't really think about it, and just accepted the fact it was there, it was nothing serious, and I probably just expected it to go away. I did, however, feel depressed over all that had happened the night before, but as soon as my mom and girlfriend came home, I felt a lot better. Though, I felt bad in another way since I didn't know if I should say anything, in the end all things I was worried about the night before was eating me from the inside, just not as much as while I was on the drug. It ended up with me not saying a word, and one week passed. That weekend I was attending another party, on a peninsula in the village of another former class mate. I drank a bit of alcohol, not that much, but I didn't really feel anything new from it during the night, nor the following morning. So I just went home, like usual.
About one and a half week later I went to my sister in a city a bit north of where I live, since we were attending a music festival in Germany. We would get there by buss via a company, like they do every year, and it was about a 16 hour trip. Also it was my first time. Other than sitting in a bus for that long is quite demanding, it went alright. I forgot my pillow, and for about four days I spent my time drinking beer, watching bands, talking and sleeping on a hard air mattress with earplugs and without a pillow. Every time I woke up, looking up at a sunlit tent roof, I saw that shadowy thing moving with my vision, and each day I hoped I would wake up not to see it. Other than that I didn't really feel anything different. I knew I was having a slight sight problem, so when I looked at the trees in daylight, a bit drunk, I felt something was weird, but I just thought it had to do with my vision getting worse, and of course me being intoxicated.
And so we went home, by bus. The trip was equally long and even more arduous, full of high sound and bad sleep. We got home in the morning, at about 06:00 AM. I sat up for a bit, watching stuff that I had missed on the computer, before I went to sleep in my sister and her common-law husband's guest room. When I woke up, not that many hours later, I felt like something was different. I was laying there, staring into the bookshelf, full of books in all kinds of colors. While focusing at one spot, I could see the colors of the other books pulse in my vision, something I know believe is visual snow so intense and dense that it looks just like pulsing. At that point I suddenly started remembering about that shadow line, and that it had to have something to do with that. I thought about it for a while, and recalled reading something about afterimages, which I at that time thought the black shadow flying around in my vision was. Now I know it's not that, but that was all I had ever read and found about side-effects, and the word seemed to fit the shadow following my eye movement. I also remembered reading that it could happen to a few people taking such drugs. I also noticed like static on black shirts at night, and that I had big problems with reading in a mixed light setting. So, I started looking things up, searching for what I was seeing, reading forums and in the end I found out about it - HPPD, which is the condition I've now diagnosed myself with.
Today, about three months after I took the drug to begin with, things have started to get worse. Over time, symptoms that wasn't there to begin with have appeared. For those out there wondering, I'm currently experiencing:
Visual snow - Not seen at all times, only when focusing at one spot or looking at a solid color. Outside it's usually not even noticeable.
Floaters - Mostly when tired or looking into the sky like regular people.
The shadow lines - Which my eye doctor seem to think is the vitreous moving around or reshaping. It might be that it's always been there, just that my drug use made my eye lose the ability to ignore it.
Big halos - Mostly while it's night out. Though I can see it around regular lights, and the sun. I do see bigger auras around lights than I used to.
Light sensitivity - The sun light is extremely strong and regularly not bright lights, such as a white wall, will mid day hurt my eyes for a few seconds. Lights leave negative afterimages much sooner and just looking through a window when it's bright outside can do the same.
Starbursts - Not really sure if I have an extreme case or not, but I get it from everything. I see starbursts from the television, bursting straight down from the screen, obviously more when I'm tired, since everybody can see them slightly by squinting. Just having a light shine at a regular object, such as a pen, can make me see starbursts from the pen itself.
Ghosting - If I squint or if I'm tired I can see it on regular objects. If I look at a reflection in a mirror I can see it in some cases, and If I look through glass or in the reflection of a window, I see it all the time, and some times even more than double. Also, light is always ghosting, especially tiny lights, or lights seen from a distance. The further away, the worse ghosting. This might also be why I see it on screens. If I for example watch just above a word on screen, it will eventually appear a copy of it in the empty space right above it.
Trails - Discovered this a few nights ago. I've never seen it before, but when I was really tired, and waved my phone back and forth in front of me while looking at something else, I saw the screen leaving trails for about half a second. Last night, waving my phone in front of my eyes would instead leave a ghost image of the screen following my movement.
Size distortion and moving objects - Different depending on time and state. It's been worse this weekend, probably because I haven't seen my girlfriend like I usually do, but instead spent all my time by the computer. Words sway around a bit while reading. Other than that, If I look at pictures or patterns they might be moving and changing a bit, but I'm not sure, this might also be the visual snow spooking around.
Since I figured out about what I was suffering, kinda a few days after I got home, I've completely stopped with alcohol and I will never touch drugs again, even though it sometimes feels like everything is over. My main issue right now is to go out and exercise, since that appears to be of great help, but I don't like going to the gym anymore. Also, I should stop eating candy and crisps, since that could help out, though I haven't noticed any difference from stopping, and it's really hard because it makes me feel good for just a moment! I'm, however, still healthy and normal weight. Other than that I try, as often as I can, to ignore it, even though it's hard. I eat home cooked food almost every meal each day, and when I don't I just eat sandwiches. Even though I don't like salad I try to eat it from time to time, when the opportunity is given, and I've tried some vitamins, which I haven't noticed any difference from. I'm not really sure if sitting by the computer and playing games as much as I do is a good thing, since it's hard on the eyes in general and I can have worse symptoms after going away from the screen, but playing takes my mind off of things for a while. Even though I read that you shouldn't read too much about it, I've found some peace in finding out about how other people are having it and that some people have recovered, even though I haven't found anybody that share as many visual symptoms as I that have recovered and wrote about it. At least I'm currently not having any DP or DR and I just hope to get better.
This was my story, thank you for reading about it, It's been a relief!
