How I Stopped Numbing — A Wandering Spore's Story
A composite example of a Member Story written in the format the Microdose Movement uses. Demonstrates the tone and structure for real submissions.
Note: This is an example seed story, written to demonstrate the format and tone we use for Member Stories. The experience described is composite — drawn from patterns common in microdosing community accounts — not a single individual. Real submitted stories will replace these as the community grows. If you have your own story to share, the submission process is here.
Where I started
I had been on Lexapro for almost six years when I decided I had to try something else. The medication was working in the sense that the version of me that had been crying every morning for a year before the prescription was no longer crying every morning. The depression was, by any clinical measure, controlled. What was not controlled was the texture of my actual life. I could not feel my food. I could not feel a hug from my partner. I could not cry at the funeral of someone I had loved for thirty years. I could function, and I was grateful for the functioning, and I was also dying inside in a different way than I had been dying before.
I was 38, working in marketing, in what looked from the outside like a fine life. The thing nobody could see was that the version of me that had been alive at 25 — the one who had favorite songs and got excited about books and laughed at things — had been gone for so long I was starting to forget she had existed.
When I told my prescribing doctor I wanted to come off the SSRI, she was supportive but cautious. We tapered over four months. The first month was rough. By the third month I was sleeping again. By the fourth month I was off entirely, and the depression I had been afraid of did not come back. What came back instead was a version of me that felt like a stranger.
How I came to the practice
I had heard about microdosing for years, the way most people in my circle had heard about it: a podcast here, a friend there, a New York Times article that I read with curiosity but did not act on. The thing that finally made me try it was a conversation at a friend’s birthday party. Another woman my age, who I had known casually for years, mentioned in passing that she had been microdosing for about a year and that it had helped her come off her own SSRI. I asked her about it for the next two hours. She did not pitch me anything. She just told me what her practice had looked like and what had changed for her. The next day I started reading.
I picked the Fadiman protocol because everything I read suggested it was the gentlest place to start. I sourced mushrooms from someone in my friend’s network who I trusted. I started at 0.1 grams. I told my partner what I was doing, and asked him to keep an eye on me, and made a deal with myself that I would stop at the first sign that anything was getting worse instead of better.
What the practice was actually like
The first dose was a non-event. I expected something — a feeling, a shift, a noticing — and got nothing. I almost stopped right there because I was sure I had been sold a placebo. I took the second dose three days later anyway because I had committed to the four-week trial.
The third dose was when I noticed something. I was making lunch and the sound of the chopping board hitting the counter became, for the first time in I don’t know how many years, a real sound. Not a sound I was processing through layers of distance. Just a sound, in the kitchen, made by my own hands. I started crying over the cutting board. Not because I was sad. Because I had not heard a sound that fully present in years, and the difference between that and the way I had been moving through my life was so stark it broke something open.
The next few weeks were like that. Small moments where the world became more vivid in a way I could not have predicted. The first time I tasted food and noticed the taste. The first time I looked at my partner’s face and saw it instead of looked at it. The first time I heard a song that I used to love and felt the way it had made me feel when I was 22 — not a memory of the feeling but the actual feeling, in my body, present tense.
Around week three, the harder material started showing up. Things I had been numbing out for years began surfacing in unstructured time. Old grief I had not let myself process. Anger at people I had decided long ago I was not allowed to be angry at. A specific memory from when I was twelve that I had not thought about in two decades. None of it was unbearable. All of it was significant. I started journaling for the first time in my life because I needed somewhere for the material to go.
The hard parts
Two things were hard.
The first was that I had not realized how much of my emotional flatness on the SSRI had been functioning as a kind of emotional armor. When the armor came off, I had to feel things I had been avoiding for years. There were a few weeks where I cried more than I had in the previous decade combined, and where I had to actively pace myself because the surfacing was happening faster than I could integrate. I almost stopped the practice during this stretch. I am glad I did not, but I understand why some people do.
The second was that microdosing made me a more honest person, and being more honest meant changing some things in my life that I had been pretending were fine. I had a conversation with my best friend about a pattern in our friendship that I had been ignoring for years. She did not take it well. We did not talk for two months. We are now in a better place than we have ever been, but the months between were genuinely hard, and the practice did not protect me from any of it. The practice made me the kind of person who could not look away from it anymore.
What changed
After about four months I noticed something I did not expect. I was forgetting to take my doses. Not because I was avoiding the practice. Because the version of me that the practice had been pulling out was becoming the default version, and I no longer needed the dose to remind me she was there.
The specific things that changed:
- I started crying again. Not constantly. Just appropriately. At things that were sad, at things that were beautiful, at the end of a movie I had been waiting two years to see. I had not cried at a movie in ten years.
- I started having opinions about food. Real opinions. Not “this is fine” but “this is the best meal I’ve had in months” or “this is mediocre and I want to go somewhere better next time.” It sounds trivial. It was not trivial.
- My relationship with my partner changed. We had been together for eight years and I had been about 60% present for the second half of it. I am now closer to 90% present, which has changed the texture of every conversation we have.
- I started writing again. I had been a writer in college and had not finished a creative thing for myself in fifteen years. The first piece I wrote during the practice was bad. The second was less bad. The fifth was something I was actually proud of.
- The thing I am most surprised by is that my anxiety, which I had assumed was a permanent feature of my personality, has decreased significantly. I think this is because I am no longer carrying around as much suppressed material that needed energy to keep down.
Where I am with the practice now
I do not microdose regularly anymore. I went through a 4-month structured phase, then a few months of less frequent dosing, and now I take a microdose maybe once every six or eight weeks when I notice a pattern returning that I want to soften. The first time I tried to dose for the first time in two months, I noticed that the version of me the dose was producing was the same version that was now showing up most days without a dose. That was the moment I knew I had reached a kind of baseline I had been working toward without naming.
The practices I built alongside the microdosing have stayed. The journaling, the morning walk, the willingness to have hard conversations instead of avoiding them, the body check-ins. Those did not need the dose. They needed the dose to get started, but once they were in place they stood on their own.
I am not “healed” in the absolute sense. There are still hard things I am working on. There is still material I have not fully processed. But the version of me that is doing the working and the processing is a real, present, feeling person, and that was the thing I had given up on getting back when I was 38 and on Lexapro and could not taste my own food.
What I would tell someone who is where I used to be
Two things.
One: the first dose probably will not feel like anything. That is normal. The practice is slow and the early signals are subtle. Do not increase your dose because nothing happened on day one. Almost everyone makes that mistake and almost no one needs to.
Two: the medicine is not the practice. The practice is what you do with what surfaces. Build your integration first — the journaling, the time alone, the trusted person you can talk to — and then add the dose. People who skip the integration get the dose without the change. People who build the practice and add the dose get the change. It is not the chemistry. It is the chemistry plus the work.
I am 41 now. I am not the version of me I was at 38 and I am not the version of me I was at 22. I am a third version, the one who was on the other side of the door I did not know was there. The capsule was the door. The work was the walk through it.
— Anonymous
This story is a composite example, written to demonstrate the format the Microdose Movement uses for Member Stories. Real submitted stories will replace these as the community grows. If you would like to share your own, the submission form is here.
The Microdose Movement is an educational community, not a medical provider. Nothing in this story is medical advice. Individual experiences vary widely, and what worked for one person may not work for another.