Meeting Molly
“Shouldn’t I feel something by now?” I thought to myself 15 minutes after I swallowed the two capsules filled with what looked like crystals or maybe rocks. I probably should have taken a closer look at what I had just put inside my body, but I seemed to be addicted to risk lately.
My husband had left me. I was forced to leave the town I had made my home for four years and move to Atlanta–where my boss/neighbor sexually harassed me on a regular basis. And in addition to failing at my marriage, I had also failed at killing myself just three weeks earlier, a level of failure I cannot properly put into words. It’s one of the few things that’s hard to mess up. And yet, here I was, still very much alive, still very much broken.
Too exhausted to try again and too numb from everything happening in my life, I stopped being the cautious, scared, little girl I was–even though I was 31. And I started saying yes to things that frightened me. I put myself in situations that I had found terrifying, even appalling, just four months prior.
So when a man with the most beautiful blue eyes I had ever seen, asked me to fly back into town and “roll” with him I said yes, only moderately aware of what that actually meant.
I knew what “ecstasy” was. I was a teenager in the late 90s and early 2000s and I remembered the girls who would show up late to class–if they showed up at all– with pacifiers around their neck and brightly colored clothes. They were weird and the dance parties they talked about attending on the weekends were equally weird and sketchy to the 15-year-old Mormon girl I was at the time.
But I wasn’t entirely all that naive. I had been a pothead for years and my mother basically raised me on Xanax. But that is where I drew the line.
I knew it made people want to dance. I heard it made sex feel incredible (there will be an entire essay on that later). And I was told it made people feel a level of happiness unobtainable in everyday life.
But what was happiness, anyway? I had certainly never felt it before. And I wasn’t even convinced that I was going to feel it ever, especially not by ingesting a couple of pills handed to me by a guy wearing gold glitter on his face, no matter how beautiful he may have been.
But all the life had been drained from my soul over the last few months. Feeling anything other than despair seemed unrealistic. So I sat there on a friend’s porch on a warm summer night at the end of July, unsure of what it was exactly I was waiting for and unconvinced that it was going to work at all, seeing as nothing had been working for me lately.
And then it hit me. I was rolling.
My heart started racing. I started talking more than usual — and I already talk a lot. Friends who I hadn’t seen since the divorce suddenly became my best friends, as I divulged every detail of the past few months to them. And they listened, with love and attentiveness. Then a warm sensation started filling my entire body.
You know that feeling you get when you take a shot of whiskey in the middle of winter and suddenly your whole body is warm and tingly? Amplify that feeling by about 10,000 times. Only on top of that, I couldn’t sit still. I needed to up. I needed to move around. I needed to be touched.
I feel as though it is important to note that while “Molly” or Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) has psychedelic properties, it is not a psychedelic strictly speaking. It is for this reason that best-selling author Michael Pollan chose to leave it out of his book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.
As the last part of its name implies, it is an amphetamine, an “upper,” that’s why it’s so popular in the dance music scene. You can dance for hours without even realizing it. However, it does have psychedelic properties. The user feels a sense of euphoria and ease. This is why it is been dubbed “breakthrough” therapy by the FDA in the treatment of PTSD. It helps users talk about traumas they may otherwise be afraid to approach. With Molly, your walls come down and you can see past the haze of depression and sorrow. You can confront your demons, embrace them, and move on.
When I found Molly, visited hell numerous times during my 31 years. But for a handful of blissful hours, I felt like I understood what people meant when they spoke of happiness. I felt like I could talk about my divorce. I felt like I could talk to people again. Depression, anxiety, and worthlessness were everyday emotions for me. Happiness was just some myth that Hollywood sold people.
But there it was, like liquid sunshine filling my entire body. Could this be it? Is this what happiness felt like?
I would be lying if I said I remembered every moment of that night, though I have selfies as evidence that it happened. But I felt, at peace, at home, and brave. I smiled for the first time in months.
They say that no roll will ever compare to your first. I vehemently disagree. “Set and Setting” are two fundamental concepts in the psychedelic world (we will get into this in a later essay). And as incredible as this experience was, it was not the right setting for me to really experience everything this substance had to offer.
This night was merely a preview of what was to come. I had tasted the forbidden fruit, but I had not yet devoured the whole apple. That was to come two months later.
But this roll was beautiful. I had a flicker of happiness that night that was unlike anything I had experienced during my three decades on earth. It gave me the hope I needed to get through what would be some of the most tumultuous months of my life and it opened the door to a completely new existence.
I wasn’t going to be scared anymore. I was going to say “yes” to anything and everything–a resolve that would both get me into trouble and help me begin to find myself.
Molly, like alcohol, does not come without its fair share of negative after-effects. The comedown can drain you of all emotions and leave you empty for days after. BUT, when you take it during a time of great despair, or in my case, after a suicide attempt, the comedown is nothing like the hell you had been experiencing every single day. I felt nothing but afterglow in the days and weeks after this experience. But that afterglow would not follow every experience I had with it.
This will not be the final chapter on MDMA. In addition to, what will forever be the happiest night of my entire life, there was a dark period.
All substances when used incorrectly can be detrimental. Of all the psychedelics that can be abused, Molly is high on the list. And for many months, at two different points in my life, depression led me to use Molly like many people use alcohol. But again, that is a story for another time.
