Foundations

by Miranda Jud
Illustration by Kerstin Stillman

I remember the idea first being proposed. 

“We should do shrooms.”

 My heart raced and I felt like I had just been given something that I had been waiting a long time for, even though I didn’t know I’d been waiting at all. 

In the summer of 2016, I was 17 and happy to have completed my junior year of high school. A friend group where I actually felt loved, appreciated, and accepted had blossomed and it was a wonderful feeling to be surrounded by people I could truly be myself around. Something still didn’t feel complete about me, though. It felt like restlessness at first, and I just brushed it off as early-onset senioritis, but it felt deeper than that. It was like super glue was holding my foundation together when it should have been cement. I needed something to really help solidify me.

Kerstin Stillman for Fools Magazine

For some reason, I never felt nervous about taking them, which was somewhat unsettling to me. Drugs are bad and shouldn’t be taken so lightly, right? That didn’t feel so true anymore. I felt calm and excited and maybe a little guilty, but not enough to keep me from doing it or regretting the decision. And so, one summer’s day, my two friends Rylan and Bailey and I went down to the creek in our small hometown and took the shrooms.

About thirty minutes after taking them, Bailey’s body broke out in a rash from the mushrooms, but she said she felt fine. We examined her body, looking at the little pink splotches that were popping up on her. At first, they just seemed a little off. Her skin was a little greener than skin should be and the splotches were pretty pink. Then they started to wiggle around a little bit, and we all giggled and pointed to our favorites as they really started to get funky. 

I looked down at my feet and the rocks were now moving around like an optical illusion. Rocks are so cool. Always changing, withering away to become something new. Hiding things inside of them that might not ever be seen if they’re not split open. I dug my toes into them and watched as a swirl of space dust erupted from the planets my toes had just thrown out of orbit with a single wiggle. 

I smiled. 

My gaze shifted to my legs and I laughed. Swirls of kaleidoscope patterns were layered on top of my skin. I touched it and it was like feeling myself for the first time. My skin was so smooth and nice. The best part was that it was part of my body. I was fucking art. Beautiful, living, breathing, wonderful art and I was here sitting in this stream with two people who I loved! 

I laughed and laughed and laughed because I was so happy. The kind of laughing that makes spit fly out of your mouth and makes your jaw begin to ache and your stomach hurt, but every time the giggles start to die down they explode out of you all over again. The kind of laughs that happen only when you’re truly, genuinely enjoying something for everything that it is. I was making myself feel that way, and it was so relieving. Laughing felt like a way to release everything inside of me.

Bailey put her head in my lap and I started stroking her hair. I couldn’t look at her face anymore because things were starting to get really weird. Her eyes were becoming disproportionate, the patterns on her face moving a little too much. It wasn’t a bad thing. It just wasn’t for me, ya know?

“Who’s supposed to take care of me?” she asked. 

“I’ll take care of you,” I said. And I meant it. 

Eventually, Rylan made her way to deeper waters and started swimming. She splashed and laughed and played and it made my heart so full to see her like that. Bailey went to a different rock to lay down. I glanced over at her and had to do a double take because, stick with me here, she kind of looked like a lizard. Her skin was still pretty green and the way she was laying on the rock just looked so lizard-like. It reminded me of that Planet Earth episode about the marine iguanas that sit on the jagged rocks and eat scum off the ocean floor. Bailey was like a hybrid version of those. Of course, I knew it was just Bailey and there’s no way she was turning into a lizard. I didn’t see an actual lizard. It was more like when you see something out of the corner of your eye that’s just impossible, but for a split second, you’re a little confused and have to remind yourself of what it actually was. It was that feeling, but just a bit more complex and harder to talk yourself out of.

I got up from my rock and walked back to land. I’ve always been an Earth person. Water was too impulsive, Air just never felt that reliable, and Fire had a habit of consuming too much to ever make me feel safe around it. Earth, however, made me feel stable and strong. 

Everything seemed better being surrounded by shrubs and trees and life again. I sat in the green, soft grass to help truly ground myself. I brushed my fingers through it and felt the cool soil beneath me. It felt amazing, like hugging a friend you hadn’t seen in years but still loved just the same. I thought about all of the organisms and worms and other little critters that lived their entire lives in the dirt, thanking them. I tried my best to radiate love into the ground for them all to feel. 

I wandered over to the tall grass and shrubs that were growing on the edge of the clearing. My kaleidoscope hands reached out and touched leaves. Friends! Some of the best friends I’ll ever have.

Soft, spiky, hard, crunchy, velvet, rough, all wonderful and unique in their own ways. I talked to them. I laid down next to them and told them about my worries and whispered my fears to them and I knew that they wouldn’t tell anyone else, not even the worms and bacteria and ground critters below them. 

“I have to stop eating animals, don’t I?” I asked. 

You don’t have to do anything. 

I talked to them about how I was realizing at that moment that my body was not me. My conscious being and my body lived together, but they weren’t each other. My body was amazing and I needed to start treating it like so. It was where I slept and lived every day. I spent all of my time inside it. It brought me to new places and made me feel safe and protected. Its physical presence was something I could rely on at all times. It provided the hands I used to hold these leaves and the mouth I used to talk to them. If I wanted it to do a good job of housing my consciousness then I needed to start taking care of it. One of the first steps from that point was to stop ingesting other conscious being’s bodies to fuel my own. That act of selfishness was killing every part of me.

When I thought about me, I meant the real essence of who and what I am. The thing that makes up my little quirks and wonders. The reason why I would sometimes get so overwhelmed with feelings for and from others that the only thing to do was seclude myself. It was what made me always try to do the right thing instead of the easy one. To see good in people and me before deciding we’re all useless. The part of me that I’m not sure how it came into existence, but I know it’s stronger and more durable than cells and proteins. It’s connected with everything around, including things I’ve never come into contact with. Whether I envision it as a glowing, mystical mist that inhabits my body, or a little orb that floats, I know that our consciousness, our souls, are way too complex to be simplified into the form of human bodies. 

I looked up at the filtered sunlight that wavered and was tinged with a bit of purple through the trees, my psychedelic fingers playing with a dainty leaf above me.

I felt like my foundation was beginning to be held together by love, which made me feel stronger than a brick house held together by concrete.

“My body’s worth it,” I whispered. “I love myself.”

As you should. 

“I love you.”

As you should. The grass seemed a little softer.