©️ By Sophie Lewis | The Grooming Files | Shadowborn Series
Before I ever thought of healing, I was just trying to get through the day. Not with purpose. Not with mindfulness. Just survival. My body was functioning, but my soul had long since left the room.
I wasn’t searching for spirituality. I wasn’t looking for depth. I was chasing escape.
Back then, anything that promised to lift the weight, even for an hour, was welcome. I didn’t want to feel better. I just didn’t want to feel anything. Sad, numb, burnt out, and circling the same internal pit with no language for what I was really carrying.
I didn’t find psychedelics through some divine synchronicity. They came the same way most things did in that chapter of my life, through someone with a bag, a text, a weekend, and no plan.
DMT: The First Knock
It started with DMT. We bought a gram off someone. No idea what we were doing. Built a makeshift bong. Burnt half of it trying to get a high. Nothing happened. We laughed. Wrote it off. Thought we’d been ripped off.
That same night, another friend messaged us. Microdots. 4-AcO-DMT. I had no idea what that was either, but at that point, the words didn’t matter. We said yes.
I took it. Waited. Nothing. Went to bed.
Then the universe split open.
I don’t even remember the transition. I just remember being somewhere else. Colours, patterns, emotions flooding through me like I’d cracked through the veil of my own reality. And I wasn’t scared. I was fascinated. For the first time in what felt like forever, I was feeling something. It didn’t feel like a trip. It felt like a visitation. I saw myself. The girl I’d left behind. And I wanted more.
I didn’t know then that not all trips take you upward.
Some drag you underground.
Ego Death
The next time, we learned how to smoke DMT properly. The first breakthrough was stunning. The visuals were intense. The room melted. My body dissolved. I felt light, floaty, almost transcendent.
So I did it again.
That second breakthrough changed everything.
I didn’t come back the same.
I saw Jesus. I’m not religious. But that’s what I saw, or what I thought I saw. Some presence. Something cosmic. I died. Not metaphorically. Not poetically. I died. Or I thought I did.
I pissed myself. I cried. I vomited. I shook. I lost every sense of time, body, place, and identity.
There was no language for what was happening. There still isn’t. People call it ego death. All I knew is I was being unravelled from the inside out.
It didn’t feel enlightening. It felt like being torn apart.
And when I came back, I was quieter. Not because I was peaceful, but because I didn’t know if I’d made it back whole.
The Fracture
In the days that followed, I felt disconnected. Like my soul hadn’t caught up with my body. I floated. I dissociated. I’d sit in rooms and not feel real. I’d talk and not hear myself. I was untethered.
But the chase was still in me.
We got more 4-AcO. I took it again but this time, I was around the wrong person. The energy was off. My gut knew. Psychedelics don’t lie. They don’t let you pretend.
That trip was the worst I’ve ever had. To this day.
It wasn’t just a bad trip. It was psychotic. I spiralled. I thought Walt Disney had sent me on a mission to save the world. I believed I’d lived through thousands of years. I lost all touch with reality. Nothing around me felt safe. I was paranoid. Delirious. Unhinged.
It lasted hours, but felt like lifetimes. I was stuck in some eternal loop, and every time I thought it was ending, it twisted into something worse.
I came out shattered. No insight. No growth. Just broken.
I didn’t touch psychedelics again for a long time after that.
The Turning
But something started to shift, slowly, underneath it all.
The drugs weren’t an escape anymore. They’d stopped being fun. They’d stopped being chaotic distractions. They were mirrors. Brutal ones.
I began to see the patterns. The people I surrounded myself with. The energy I absorbed. The grief I kept swallowing. The parts of me I was still hiding from.
And for the first time, I wasn’t chasing highs. I was chasing truth.
Mushrooms: The Return to Earth
The next trip was different. Mushrooms. And this time, I wasn’t alone.
I took them with someone I trust more than anyone in the world. And in that trust, I found a softness I didn’t know I needed.
That trip was gentle. Kind. Honest.
It didn’t knock me down. It held me. It didn’t blast open portals. It opened my heart.
I cried in a way I hadn’t before, not from confusion or collapse, but from relief. I breathed deeper. I spoke things I’d never dared say. I met myself again. And I didn’t run.
That was the first trip that truly healed. Because I was finally ready to feel it.
What They Gave Me
Psychedelics didn’t fix me. They didn’t hand me peace. They didn’t erase my trauma.
They stripped me raw. They dismantled the illusions I built to survive. They dragged the silence into the light.
They showed me:
- the shame I didn’t name
- the rage I swallowed
- the child inside me still waiting to be saved
- the fear I carried like skin
They showed me my shadow and made me look her in the eyes.
And after the storms… came stillness. Not because everything was okay. But because I had finally stopped running.
Final Truth
Psychedelics didn’t save me. But they introduced me to the version of myself that could.
They humbled me. They burned me. They brought me to the edge.
And eventually, they showed me how to walk back. Not as who I was. But as who I’d always been underneath the noise.
This isn’t an advert. This isn’t advice. This is just my truth.
Sometimes you trip for fun. Sometimes you trip for healing. And sometimes, the trip breaks you open so wide that you finally remember who you were before the world told you to hide.
🌌 Soph x
The Grooming Files 
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