Roxane Gay & Everand Originals: My Year of Psychedelics: Lessons on Better Living

By Gabrielle Bellot and Roxane Gay

The third installment in the series from Everand and Roxane Gay, the beloved bestselling author of Hunger, Bad Feminist, and Opinions. In this fascinating and literally trippy memoir, acclaimed essayist and columnist Gabrielle Bellot shares the story of how magic mushrooms, ayahuasca, and other psychedelics transformed her life for the better.

How does a quiet, cautious trans girl, once even nervous about getting tipsy, find herself cooking a pot of ayahuasca — a powerful mind-altering brew from the Amazon — for nearly ten hours?

If you’ve ever tried psychedelics or are simply curious to know what they really feel like, you’ll be riveted by Gabrielle Bellot’s charmingly honest and immersive memoir about discovering — and being utterly transformed by — mind-altering plants and fungi.

Happily and newly married but plagued by anxiety and professional ennui, Bellot tried magic mushrooms on a whim. The unexpectedly transcendent experience so affected her that she embarked on a personal quest to learn all she could about psychedelics. Little did she know that her research and experiments with psychedelic drug ingestion would have the power of rebirth, helping her shed debilitating self-consciousness, view life and death in new ways, and come to terms with grief, as well as wounds left over from growing up queer in a fiercely traditional Caribbean nation.

“I hadn’t imagined that my life, as a whole, was about to change and, with it, some of my basic ways of conceptualizing and interacting with the world,” she writes. “I was about to sail away on a stream of fairy wine into uncertainty itself — and the ‘I’ I’d been before would never fully return.”

Over the course of her year-long psychedelic journey, Bellot is amazed by the “new, stronger, more wonder-filled” self that emerges. With the sharp senses of a truly gifted writer, she describes what it feels like to try psilocybin mushrooms, mescaline, cannabis, and ayahuasca (which she makes from scratch in her Dutch oven). Her visions and the mind-opening serenity she experiences are almost palpable. For those who are hesitant to give psychedelics a go, Bellot’s trips are the next best thing. More than that, she gives a detailed and fascinating mini history of mind-altering drugs and those who use them, from our species’ earliest representatives to the Aztecs to Terence McKenna to today’s consumers looking for a natural fix to what ails them. To that end, Bellot also reflects on the complicated nature of the current-day psychedelic renaissance, focusing both on the great potential and grave pitfalls of the movement.

My Year of Psychedelics is a call for open-heartedness, open-mindedness, and, above all, the courage to face your fears in a world that could sorely use more of all of these.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Everand Originals
• Release date: Mar 26, 2024
• ISBN: 9781094456393

Gabrielle Bellot

Gabrielle Bellot is a staff writer for Literary Hub. In the past, she has been a Head Instructor at Catapult, as well as a Contributing Editor at Catapult's literary magazine, where she wrote a column on culture, books, and gender called "Wonder Woman." Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Guernica, The Cut, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review Daily, Tin House, and many other places, and she has also contributed to a number of anthologies, including The World As We Knew It: Dispatches from a Changing Planet (2022), Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings from the Me Too Movement (2019), and Can We All Be Feminists? (2018). One of her essays for her Catapult column was selected as a Notable essay in Best American Essays (2021), and another of her essays from the same column appears in Macmillan's AP English Language textbook (2023). She has also been a guest on Tin House's podcast about Ursula Le Guin, Crafting with Ursula. Bellot holds both an MFA and a PhD in English from Florida State University, and she has been the recipient of fellowships from Florida State University and Yale. She was a reader at Vulture Fest's Feminist as F*ck panel in 2023, organized by Roxane Gay and Amber Tamblyn, alongside Amber, R. O. Kwon, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, and Kirsten Vangsness. She was raised in the Commonwealth of Dominica and now lives in Queens in New York City.

Book preview

My Year of Psychedelics

Lessons on Better Living

By Gabrielle Bellot

EVERAND ORIGINALS

Copyright © 2024 by Gabrielle Bellot

Published by Everand Originals, an imprint of Scribd, Inc.

All rights reserved

Cover concept by Catherine Casalino

Cover design by Cate Willis

ISBN: 9781094456393

First ebook edition: March 2024

Scribd, Inc.

San Francisco, California

Everand.com

For more, visit www.everand.com and follow @everand_us on Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram.

Introduction

By Roxane Gay

I am a control freak, so I have always been wary of experimenting with drugs. They should absolutely be legalized, but they aren’t for me. The idea of surrendering to a drug is, I suppose, entrancing, but it is also terrifying. See, this one time, I took an edible. It was a couple weeks after a surgery, and I ran out of the very excellent pain medication I was prescribed. I remembered that I had an edible that a friend of a friend gave me a year earlier. There I was, alone in my apartment, and I thought that was the perfect time to enjoy a little cannabis and forget about the throbbing ache around my incision sites. I took one of the tiny squares and sat on my couch, watching TV, but didn’t really feel anything, so I took some more. I still didn’t feel much, but I was kind of tired and felt a little out of it, so I went to bed. That was, in hindsight, a mistake. Before long, the room was spinning in one direction, and the bed was spinning in the opposite direction. I worried I would fall on the floor, so I tied myself to the bed with a sheet. It was one of the worst nights of my life.

After two calls to 911 — the second of which, I was told, was mere minutes after the first — I ended up in the emergency room. Firefighters rescued me, and I kept telling them that I waited until marijuana was legal in California to try the gummies. They were hot and kind, so the whole experience was extra mortifying. After two nights in the hospital, I was finally released, and I was still high. It became a fun story to tell at parties and a cautionary tale for myself — a reminder that mind-altering substances are not for everyone.

This is a long way of explaining what drew me to Gabrielle Bellot’s My Year of Psychedelics — the courage she possesses, allowing herself to surrender to the unknown. Gabrielle is a staff writer for Literary Hub. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Shondaland, Guernica, Tin House, The Paris Review Daily, The Cut, and many other places. Her work explores LGBTQ issues, the Caribbean and what it means to be part of a diaspora, mental health, and living in the world as a trans woman of color.

In the essay’s opening, Gabrielle details the process for making ayahuasca, a plant-based psychedelic. But then she takes us back to where her exploration of psychedelics began — taking mushrooms for the first time. That was, she says, the beginning of a metamorphosis. As Gabrielle experiments further, she finds that psychedelics help her manage depression and the constant hum of anxiety that has long plagued her.

One of the most extraordinary things about this essay is how Gabrielle conveys the surreal effects of psychedelics in ways that are completely immersive. More than once, the prose made me feel like I was on a beautiful trip too. Alongside her personal history, Gabrielle also crafts a cultural history of psychedelics. For example, I learned that the use of psychedelics can be traced back to between 7,000 and 9,000 years ago, which is to say that there is a long, long history of people testing the limits of the human mind. This is the work of a writer with voracious curiosity, and you will not regret following her on a journey through her mind.

Part I

FOR NINE AND A HALF HOURS, the contents of my blue Dutch oven have been bubbling like some witch’s brew, the kitchen softly suffused with the aroma of something like a forest after rain. When I peer into the pot one last time, I can’t see the water at first; all I can see, after the fog leaves my glasses, are dark leaves and strips of bark, the leaves shifting as steam rises, the bark’s edges flecked with foam. As I stir, I find the elusive elixir beneath the dense canopy of plant matter; once clear, the liquid has become a deep, loamy brown. I turn off the flame, breathe in that curious sylvan scent again, and smile.

The dark liquid is ayahuasca, which I’ve decided to prepare from scratch. I stare into the pot for a few moments, suddenly taken over by a sense of how charged this moment is. Just two years ago, I couldn’t have imagined myself in a scene like this, taking in the petrichoral odor of a psychedelic concoction from the Amazon, which, I hope, will take me on a dreamlike, mystical quest; honestly, I couldn’t have even told you what ayahuasca was back then. Now, though, it feels like something I’ve been building up to for months, a quiet culmination.

Questions flit through me, unbidden. Who is the person doing this? Is this really me? Who even am I anymore?

The last one is the doozie, the one I’ve been thinking about for a while. Making ayahuasca seems so out of character for me — more accurately, for an earlier version of me — that it almost feels like I’m watching it happen from a distance, like when you see someone in a dream who you know isn’t you but also sort of is you. And yet, I also know that this is me because the story of who I am has changed. I’ve become remarkably more comfortable with ideas and experiences I once would have eschewed. And I like this metamorphosis of me, but these questions still come every so often when I find myself doing something I never would have just a few years ago.

I start to filter the liquid, which, with so many leaves and shreds of bark in the pot, feels like a Herculean task. Despite how much stuff is in the Dutch oven and how powerful the brew can be for its takers, it’s surprisingly simple to make. While there are many recipes for ayahuasca across South America, I decided to follow the most common version, which is composed of just three ingredients: water; the shredded bark of a vine, Banisteriopsis caapi; and the leaves of the chacruna plant, which contain the psychedelic substance DMT. (The secret fourth ingredient appears to be a plethora of patience.)

What makes this unpretentious recipe extraordinary is that the two plants work together synergistically. Although the DMT in chacruna is largely responsible for the dreamlike visions ayahuasca grants its drinkers, you can’t achieve this effect just by chewing the leaves or making tea with them. This is because ingested DMT is normally broken down too quickly by our bodies for us to be able to absorb it — unless you have an MAO inhibitor, which slows that breakdown, allowing your body to absorb a sufficient amount of DMT for a noticeable experience. Fittingly, the caapi vine contains just such an inhibitor. Mix them together, as shamans of the Amazon discovered centuries ago, and you get magic, an elegant alchemy of the jungle. But the vine — which is often simply called ayahuasca vine — does more than just contribute an ingredient that allows the chacruna to work; by itself, it produces a sensation akin to tipsiness, and many indigenous peoples consider it, not the chacruna, the primary visionary teacher in the admixture.

Preparing ayahuasca had been a long time in the making for me. For many months, I’d been curious about trying it, but — in large part because it’s federally illegal to drink the brew in America, except for a few Latin American–influenced religious organizations who have received permission to use it as a ceremonial sacrament — I couldn’t find any reliable information on