My journey with MDMA

From a spinning wall of blurred thoughts and pain as my mind fought to keep control to a world of immeasurable bliss. This journey changed my life completely.

The downward spiral

The first 40 minutes after I started feeling "something" were one of the hardest experiences in my life. It was a whirlwind of heavily blurred thoughts swinging around me. It felt as if I was falling through a spinning multicoloured well of stranger and stranger feelings. I remember thinking to myself “Oh you‘re so stupid why-oh- why do you need this? Nothing is amiss in your life, why on earth would you do such a stupid thing in your late 40’s?” . Even that extremely ashkenazi thought flashed in just a jiffy. I simply couldn’t grasp for anything. Nothing made sense. In spite of the powerful air conditioning I was covered in sweat. Perched on the low sofa-like piece of furniture. Through the track playing at that moment I could hear distantly D. talking to me asking me if I was OK. I remember slightly nodding towards him and asking him to please not engage with me. Then a moment later, as the track became more and more intense and the music seemed to be floating away from me and throwing me into further unknown depths, I managed to somehow ask T. if he was sure that the dose he gave me wasn’t too high. I could barely utter the words as I was lying down with my jittering half-closed eyes. Through the murk of echoing sounds I could faintly hear his reply - “you’ll be fine, I gave the same dose to my fiancée and she’s less than half your size, you’ll be ok, you’re ok, don’t worry”. Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to believe him. The effort was too taxing.

A scary whirlwind of blurry rapid and undefined thoughts - How I felt on the first 40 minutes after the MDMA got into effect

The fall through my endless well of blurred thoughts became darker and darker as flashes and images of the massacre at the Nova music festival started flooding and overwhelming me. I hadn’t realised it up until that moment but from all of the horrid things that had occurred on the 7th of October - this has impacted me the most. As a meticulous planner I somehow convinced myself that had I been living in one of the Gaza Envelope communities - my family and I would have surely survived the massacre as I would have surely built a secured-well-stacked-impenetrable-shelter and would probably have been armed as well. The Nova massacre was a different level of horror for me as nearly all of those who survived had to run through open fields. Death was arbitrary. I think those thoughts swarmed in also because I knew many of them were under the influence of party drugs.

This was becoming a very “bad trip”.

The hardest thing about this ongoing fall-through was the fact that those swirling thoughts and feelings were extremely fast and changing. My mind was completely overwhelmed. I started to get really scared, then, with extreme effort, I managed to tell myself - “Itai, you have to grab onto something solid, you have to somehow stop this fall, you don’t know where it’ll take you and for how long”. Since I couldn’t tell right from wrong, illusion from reality, sense from nonsense - I tried to find an anchor. Something that I would know 100% to be true and right. Something solid. What am I most certain of? The love I have for my children. As soon as I thought it their faces emerged inside the ever-darkening thought-pit and things started to gradually slow down. From this I moved on to think about my wife, then, (quite sillily) I moved on to thinking about the study in my apartment, the pictures on the walls, all the books on the shelves (and the ones piling on the floor…). It somehow calmed me down. Considerably.

Then, at once, out of nowhere - it all stopped. I actually heard it as a sound, playing loudly in my brain: “Eeeeweeezhhhhh” and I found myself sitting on the sofa instead of lying on it. I opened my eyes and uttered “wow”.

D. was standing, bare foot, with a blanket on his shoulders, T. was sitting across from me. They both looked at me. Then T. made a “heart” shape with both his hands, then pointed at me and said very seriously, in English - “You are number one”.

I nearly cried.

I was flooded with an immense feeling of bliss. A 180° turn from that scary 40 minute trip through my very own pit of swirling despair.

I looked at both T. and D. and I said “I really don’t understand why you guys want to be my friends. What do you find in me? What could I possibly contribute to your lives?”.

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But wait. Let me give you some background before I continue with what happened next

The light was ebbing as we entered the high-ceiling loft at the very heart of Jaffa. It was the evening of the 14th of May of this year. Probably Israel’s saddest and harshest Independence day.