#i dont have high hopes since i couldnt identify anyone but its better than nothing

[crabs-nonsense]

Accidentally gave myself exposure therapy! Results? Police report.

[jakeperalta]

Hi. So I noticed something interesting about Taylor's albums last night and kinda my ranking. So I knew Taylor since her debut album when I heard Teardrops but I didnt fully get into her until about when I was 12 and Fearless came out. Up until 1989, all the stuff she released was when I was in high school, and 1989 was released right after I graduated. This could be a reason why i dont usually listen to her old albums anymore and just pick my fav songs from the album..idk. The thing is, I always felt like I related to Taylor cuz she was the weird girl in high school outsider and she always wrote about boys and breakups, but as time went on..I couldnt really relate but I still had a crush I guess so kinda. But then she switched to pop, and the music was just vibes and kinda about her journey so I could relate it to her mostly, instead of myself..and I haven't liked anyone in forever. So 1989 was about finding herself..then Rep was about her reputation.. and Lover was also her and Joe. Then she released Folklore and I was hoping for stuff to relate to...Lover was a very hard sad period in my life but it made me feel better in a way..but now I hoped for stuff to relate to which is why I loved Taylor in the first place. Folklore wasnt that, but I still loved the stories and I guess creating my own to make it fit somewhat. However besides Evermore and Long Story Short, I cant do that at all with Evermore..and it's kinda back to breakup stuff that I dont relate to at all so idk. I guess the point is, I figured out why I dont really revisit her old music cuz it reminds me of specific times in my life..why I seemed to enjoy her pop albums more at the time..cuz i had nothing as difficult going on in my life..and why it took me so long to love Folklore. Evermore is complicated..I like it, but I guess it doesnt have a lot of favorites for me ..its easy to just play but I guess would have more skips or for a certain mood. It reminds me of Red in that way. It makes a lot more sense to me to skip sad songs than any of her pop stuff..so Rep has no skips for me lol but I guess that's just me. Now I'm kinda in this weird phase where I only like certain sad songs or I'm always looking for stuff that has meaning to me, but I also enjoy pop music I guess. Realizing this, now I dont really know what I would want next from Taylor..more pop or more songwriting..cuz I loved Folklore now but not Evermore as much. Some people say Evermore is poppier and she was able to combine pop with this kind of songwriting..but idk why cuz it's more country to me. I dont see how she could have this kinda lyrics or style if she ever went back to pop, cuz I kinda thought it was just cuz of the pandemic, but who knows.I guess I just want lyrics that are more relatable or can be about anything..not a fan of some specific lyrics unless it's a story. An example of this and music I like every song is Hayley William's newest album Flowers for Vases and anything by Best Coast and Soccer Mommy. This is an example of slow sad, alternative music I wanted or was expecting Folklore to be. Sorry this is so all over the place..I guess it's just my thoughts and how it changed over time, but also what her career will be like going forward but I'll always love her no matter what.

yeah i think it’s totally natural that we relate to music differently depending where we’re at in life and come to associate certain albums with specific time periods, whether positively or negatively. i feel similarly about 1989 and identifying it more with her. i think with more upbeat pop music we automatically focus less on the lyrics anyway and then i tend to associate the songs a lot more with her than identifying them with myself the way i do some of her stuff - for me that was a pretty bad time so i just sort of got absorbed into her whole story about like being in new york, finding herself etc. it’s nice to have more fun happy albums as a distraction in bad times but also nice to feel like she’s putting into words how you feel (which she does so well!). i think the style of writing in folklore and especially evermore doesn’t really do that in the same way as her earlier stuff. for me currently i guess i’m in more of a phase where i don’t feel the need to relate as much which is why i’m enjoying folklore and evermore a lot, but in the past and inevitably again in the future i’ll be listening to taylor really wanting to get that sort of connection from it and will probably end up going back to other albums (depending what it is i want to relate to).

it’s so hard to predict what she’ll do next! i do agree with you that evermore leans more country than pop and i can definitely see her doing more pop but i don’t know how that would necessarily mesh with this recent writing style, whereas country does probably work better because it’s more songwriting based. overall i’m always a fan of slower/more stripped back music from any artist (which is why for me rep has some songs i absolutely love but also more skips than others!) but at the same time it would be nice to get more upbeat stuff again!

[isaacathom]

to top it off, why did Jun take Seren

the issue is why he would do that. the only way it works is if the group in the base were woefully uninformed and didnt know how many people had come. after all, as far as the grunts know, there were only two people - Seren and Elliot. and if elliot ran off, then its just Seren. especially since the team knows that the organisation will NOT arrive until they’re sure most of the team is off premises, as part of The Scheme. so if Jun wholeheartedly believes that its likely to take an hour or so for everyone to get out, and therefore MORE than an hour for help to arrive for Seren (this also assuming Elliot is a total fucking coward, which he is), he wouldnt be able to leave her behind. but he also cant adminster quick help because, yknow, he’s gotta fucking flee. if hes caught, its all over for him and his family. it ruins everything. he hates being in the Team, but the least he can do is not be caught doing that, so he can keep providing for his family, yknow.

so then, whats he to do? he doesnt want to leave her there, in case it takes ages OR if they dont even find her (still assuming Elliot is a coward, which the Team either already knew in general or Jun is assuming based on his prior behaviour), that’s something that will weigh on him. if he turns on the news in a few days time and finds out a body was discovered in the Team base or that this girl has gone missing, it will fucking shatter him. he’s fairly confident shes not THAT badly injured, but its less that he thinks she’ll die there and more that he’s concerned she’ll wake up alone and get lost trying to get home, lost to the sandy dunes. thats terrifying. thats terrifying for a man whose moral code is to help everyone he can (which makes him being in the Team an ethical nightmare for him and he honestly hates it with all his being)

so, he takes Seren. it was his only choice, based on what he knew. had he knows that Elliot would change his mind less than half an hour later and return, he wouldve probably just fixed her position and then left her there. but he didnt. it probably turned out for the best on the whole, since, if nothing else, it lead to her having a loving family again, which she wouldve been hard pressed to find otherwise. especially with Seren promptly falling out with Elliot once she comes to. lose that entire support network. just her, on her own. so even if Jun has any regrets about taking her, she allays them frequently.

that works. then he has to like, actually leave. he’s the last one out of the building, since he’s helping seal some doors. and he’s the one who radios in with something that sounds rather innocuous. ‘yea [CEO], i got home safe after tonight’ done. [CEO] sends in the org. the clean up crew is in. but he also has to actually get home. bearing in mind the base he was working out is out in the north western desert, and he lives in like, the centre east. what sorta flying pokemon does he need to have for something like that. fuck. uh.... thats actually a good question. like its gotta be big enough to carry two people (of rooouuuughly equal mass. roughly. he probably weighs a little more but in terms of general size Seren IS taller than him). and in a stable way. im thinking.... salamence or a togekiss? togekiss arent super small, i dont see why it couldnt carry them back east. a salamence definitely could but WOULD a doctor have a salamence. at least togekiss makes thematic sense. Jun is basically the fairy/psychic specialist in the Team, lmao. you could also have pelipper but thatd also be kinda weird. i like togekiss.

thatd be a long fucking flight home, though. i mean, fuck. theyd probably need to stop on the way. itd look pretty weird too, if anyone saw. the implication is noone saw them - if they had, the investigation into serens disappearance wouldnt have stalled. they probably stuck to the north, which is fairly rural and kept low. stop a few times, warm everyone up, check to make sure the girl is ok and maybe do the basic first aid now. though the idea is he actually does that just before he calls in. then its just checking shes alright from there.

he probably doesnt get home till like 5, which is after Elliot gets home as well. possibly even longer, since the idea of the east of the region being p rural comes from the mountains being Big Ol Fucks. and theres only three routes through them - the first is to go over them, which requires going really high, which not everyone is capable of doing (for a variety of reasons). the second is to go through them, like, through the caves, which isnt an option for Jun. and the third is to go around. if Jun comes from the north, he can POSSIBLY go around from the north end where there are some lower routes. so like. late ass morning. buddy better hope he doesnt have work that day. gets home late, scaring the absolute fuck out of Bronwyn, who is sleeping restlessly because she knows Jun is ‘at work’ and its later than normal. so he arrives home and she jolts out of bed and edges downstairs (trying not to wake Lyndelle, which is actually probably successful) and then sees her husband coming in the back door with a teenage girl in his arms and its like ‘honey what the actual fuck’

thatd be awkward. ‘listen honey i can explain but first i should make her comfortable so she can rest’ ‘...... alright, let me help’ *a few charged minutes later as they close the door to the spare bedroom* ‘alright Jun what the fuck is going on. why are you home so late’ ‘Bron i wouldve thought that was kiiiinda obvious’ ‘Jun’ ‘ok, so the girl and an older man raided the base, and some grunts roughed them up. the man fled, and the grunts knocked her out. i didnt wanna leave her behind in case the man didnt come back, sooo.....’ ‘jun if they find out we have her youre fucked’ ‘......fuck’ ‘i wish you would think these things through’ ‘listen Bron, we’ll just look after her for a day or two, just make sure she’s alright. see if anything pops up in the news. we’ll work from there’ ‘you mean we’ll send her home, right?’ ‘probably? i dont know. it depends what happens.’ ‘You’re a worry. were you seen?’ ‘i dont think so.’ ‘alright.’ and then idk, they probably go to bed. Jun’s guilty. Bronwyns kinda pissed. Lyndelle, at this blissful stage, has absolutely no idea whats happening. she doesnt find out until she gets home from school the next day and sees Seren through the open door and immediately gets spooked. wouldnt you be? fuck. though she probably gets a slight tip off when she wakes up that morning and is like ‘wheres dad?’ ‘still in bed, dear - he had to stay late at work’ ‘oh, ok’ bearing in mind even at this early stage she VAGUELY knows Jun is in the Team. of course then she hears all about the hot news at school and its like ‘hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm right’. so shes vaguely prepared for ominous shit at home but NOT for a girl her age sitting quietly in her spare bedroom reading the paper. i mean, the fucks up with that, yknow.

i had like 3 breaks in the time it took to write this but i guess the tl;dr Jun was unaware there were other people inside the base and believed Elliot had completely fled, and thus felt obligated to help Seren. WITH the end goal of helping her get better in a few days and then sending her back home with some sort of note that wouldnt be identifiable but would explain the story. of course we know it doesnt go that way and they basically end up adopting her as Rhia Stanton, but, yknow, its the thought that counts

[viralhottopics]

How dropping acid saved my life

When writer Ayelet Waldman fell into depression she started microdosing with LSD. She tells Rachel Cooke about her extraordinary experiment with acid

Some time ago for reasons that will become apparent I am not allowed to say when, exactly the American writer Ayelet Waldman scored some LSD. She did this, not on a street corner or via the dark web, but middle-class style, through an acquaintance of an acquaintance, for which reason the drug arrived at her home in Berkeley, California, in a stamp-encrusted brown paper package whose sender (an elderly professor, she believed) identified himself only as Lewis Carroll, a fellow resident of her town. Mr Carroll had, however, troubled to write her a brief note. Our lives may be no more than dewdrops on a summer morning, it said. But surely, it is better that we sparkle while we are here. The bottle he enclosed contained 50 drops of vintage quality LSD, of which he advised her to take two at a time. Waldman was delighted. Not to put too fine a point on it, she believed this drug might save her life.

For as long as she can remember, Waldman has been held hostage by her moods. When she is up, she is up; when she is down, she is down. These highs and lows she has managed over the years with the help of therapy and a number of drugs, with which she has had varying degrees of success. At the time of the parcels arrival, though, she had entered a new and much more scary phase.

I was so profoundly depressed, she says. It wasnt the kind of depression where you fall into bed. Ive been through that before, and while its grim, its manageable. This was more of a mixed state, a kind of activated depression, and thats a dangerous place to be. I was doing everything I could to ruin my own life. I was afraid that if I stayed on that track, I would force my husband to leave me, and that I would probably attempt suicide and being a very capable person, I dont think a failed attempt was on the cards.

It was while she was in this state of mind that she stumbled on The Psychedelic Explorers Guide, by the psychologist and writer James Fadiman, who since 2010 has been collecting reports from individuals who have experimented with regular microdosing of LSD and psilocybin, a naturally occurring chemical found in a variety of mushrooms. Fadimans book is certainly not the result of a scientific research project; there has never been an officially sanctioned study of microdosing.

Here comes happiness: Ayelet Waldman at home. Photograph: Barry J Holmes for the Observer

But the people whose accounts it gathered together spoke repeatedly of experiencing, thanks to LSD, increased focus and better mood. They reported rarely losing their tempers, and becoming more fun to be with. None, moreover, had suffered any side effects. To put it simply, they went to bed feeling they had enjoyed that most elusive of things: a really good day. As Waldman read on, she grew envious. How she needed to have one of those! Was this her glimmer of hope? She thought it might be.

Waldman contacted Fadiman, and received a memo entitled To a Potential Self-Study Psychedelic Researcher. The protocol was simple. In order to participate in his international self-study group on the effects of sub-perceptual doses of LSD, she should take a microdose of the drug every third day. The suggested dose was a minuscule 10 micrograms, one 10th or less of what a person would have to take in order to experience an altered state of consciousness (ie to trip).

Meanwhile, she should lead life as normal, pausing only to record her moods, productivity and physical symptoms. Did this sound to be blunt preposterous? It did. Waldman is a middle-aged mother of four who, in addition to writing novels, lectures on the criminal justice system (she is a Harvard-educated former lawyer). As someone who is law-abiding and swotty, nothing in the world irritates her more than hippies, slackers, free spirits. Even people who wont stay on the right hand side of escalators drive her nuts. Ken Kesey she is not. But she was suffering. She had nothing to lose. Why shouldnt she try it, just for a month?

Having found a supplier, then, she did indeed begin taking the drug, an experience she has now recorded in her own book A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life. Its publication is certain to cause controversy. In fact, the madness has already begun. When we speak via Skype, a month or so before it arrives in bookshops, she tells me that only a few days earlier an excitable reporter got in touch to inform her that his editor had given him permission to drop acid with Ayelet Waldman. (Her response to his question about when they might schedule this journalistic endeavour was: Like, never.)

Loved up: Waldman and husband Michael Chabon. Photograph: Albert L Ortega/WireImage

Attitudes to drugs in America are irrespective of those states that have legalised cannabis far from liberal. Trump has appointed to the Department of Justice a war-on-drugs advocate [the Alabama senator, Jeff Sessions] who is so retrograde in his thinking, he believes the US suffers from an under-incarceration problem, she says. Its for this reason that she wont reveal when her experiment ended: there is a three-year statute of limitations on drugs charges. Do I think a white, middle-class lady will be high on his list of targets? No. But in this crazy new world we live in, you cant be too careful.

Its reception will also doubtless be muddied by the fact that she is its author. In America, Waldman is well known as an acclaimed writer in her own right and as the wife of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon, to whom she has been married since 1993. When she writes about herself, moreover and this is something she does a great deal in A Really Good Day people have a tendency to respond with unnerving fury.

Most famously, this was the case in 2005, when the New York Times published her essay Motherlove, in which she declared that she loved her husband more than her children (If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good mother. I am in fact a bad mother.) In the days that followed, ABCs daytime show The View hosted an unaccountably vitriolic debate about Waldman, her neighbours could be heard tearing her to shreds in Starbucks, and her inbox filled with emails from strangers threatening to report her to social services, the better that her children might be taken away.

Waldman is clever and funny and open-hearted. But as she readily admits, even her more sympathetic readers may sometimes have cause to wonder, in the case of A Really Good Day, which aspects of her behaviour her compulsion to tell the world things that others might prefer to keep private among them are simply the result of her personality, and which can be attributed to her illness. It is hard to distinguish between them, she says, almost wonderingly.

Still, she is probably better placed, now, to cope with any onslaught. Waldman is no longer using LSD her experiment really did last for only a month but its effects have, in some ways, been lasting. I miss its anti-depressant quality, and I miss the way it made me focus. It was like Ritalin [a drug commonly prescribed in the US to children with ADHD] without the side effects, which is frankly incredible. But that month got me out of a dark place. Within the first couple of doses, it was like the computer of my brain had been restarted. I was still moody. I had some really good days, but there were also crappy days, and days when it was just the normal shit. Somehow, though, the bad days were not hellish days, and so I had the capacity to work on issues I just couldnt before. Sure, I was hoping for joy. What I got instead was enough distance from the pain I was in to work on the things that were causing it.

Expand your mind: 1960s LSD advocate Dr Timothy Leary, who advised us to turn on, tune in, drop out. Photograph: AP

That work continues. Im still not on an even keel. Im still struggling with my moods. But Im committed to that. Im doing a new kind of therapy that is working quite well, even if not quite so well as it might be if I was still microdosing. If someone sends her a mean tweet in the coming weeks, she is unlikely to respond as venomously as she might once have done, or even at all.

Given its benign effect on her, why didnt she just find herself a new supplier, and continue taking it? There were, she says, two reasons. The first was her complete inability to purchase illegal drugs: towards the end of her book, she describes how, having made contact by text with a dealer, she panics, having convinced herself that Lucy is a police informant. The second was her determination to write a book about her experience: for that to be safe, she had to no longer be using.

If I could have overcome those things, there is no doubt in my mind that I would have carried on. Of course, it might not have kept working; Ive been on medication before that seemed to be working, and then wasnt. But if it was to be made legal, Id be the first in the queue, and I periodically remind myself that, if I get desperate again, I do have the option.

Her book is well-researched and, in the matter of LSD itself, careful and no-nonsense. The drug, a variation on the ergotamine molecule (ergot is the fungus responsible for the disease known in the Middle Ages as St Anthonys Fire) which was first synthesised in Basel in 1938 by Dr Albert Hofmann, has, she argues, an undeservedly bad reputation. The scare stories it trails of young men and women whose LSD hallucinations lead them to jump off high buildings have little basis in reality. Rather, they are largely the result of conservative Americas response to the 1960s counterculture, to Timothy Learys suggestion that people turn on, tune in, drop out. Twenty million people have used it in the US, and millions more around the world, with no ill effects at all.

Its complicated, but when it comes to the drugs possible use in the treatment of mental illness, what you need to know is that LSD stimulates the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor, which in turn leads to the stimulation both of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), something a pharmacologist described to her as like Miracle-Gro for the brain It stimulates growth, connections, and activity, and of glutamate, the neurotransmitter most responsible for brain functions, such as cognition, learning and memory. (Hence its supposed new-found popularity in Silicon Valley, though Waldman thinks that, in reality, there are more magazine articles about tech dudes using LSD than there are, well, tech dudes using LSD: If there were some mass secret movement, it would have been a lot easier for to get hold of my drugs.)

She believes that during her experiment her neuroplasticity was enhanced, and that this didnt only enable her to work for hours at a time, to achieve a real sense of flow at her desk, but that it also made her happier and less impulsive. What little research has been done backs her up a study at Imperial College London showed that even a single dose of LSD produced robust psychological effects though scientists still dont fully understand the relationship between what happens in the brain, and the psyche.

Why isnt more research carried out? The simple truth is that LSD still carries with it a lot of leftover political baggage. During the writing of her book, the few researchers sanctioned by the FDA (Food & Drug Administration) who are out there were reluctant to allow Waldman to quote them, fearing that to associate themselves with a personal experiment would tarnish their hard-won credibility.

So far, so good. However, when her book is on more personal territory, as it frequently is, Waldman is vastly less cautious, and for the reader especially, perhaps, the British reader this can be, well, excruciating. I know! she says, when I tell her this. Can you imagine what it would be like for me if I lived in London? Chabon, a feminist with whom she shares the childcare, has the power of veto over everything she writes. But because hes a writer, too, this seems not to be something he often invokes. In A Really Good Day, nothing is out of bounds, from their agonising couples therapy (My husbands eyes filled I collapsed in his arms, crying so hard I soaked his shirt), to their sex life (I know you love me, I said, as we made love), to their periodic use of MDMA, aka ecstasy, as a way of opening up their lines of connection. What we did was talk, she writes, of the first time they tried it, in a hotel room theyd booked specifically for the purpose. For six hours, we talked about our feelings for each other, why we love each other, how we loved each other.

Waldman reveals that her moods can be triggered by everything from her writerly insecurities, to the dog, to the sound of her husband eating nuts (she suffers from misophonia, or selective sound sensitivity syndrome): I handed him a handful of almonds, and walked out of the kitchen I heard a crunch, the smack of lips; I felt a wave of anger. She is also fed up that her husband earns more than her, and that she has to share his writing studio, which has an uncomfortable couch: Though hes welcomed me in, I feel like a girlfriend whos been given a drawer in the bachelor pad bathroom. Poor Michael Chabon. The reader begins to feel he is some kind of saint.

Well, he is somewhat saintly, Waldman says. He makes my friends crazy. He gives great gifts. He has impeccable taste in clothes and jewellery. He is a know-it-all, but then, he does sort of know everything. Hes misanthropic, in that we [the family] are all he has space for; he doesnt have any close friends, which I think he would benefit from. I was about to say that hes far better than I deserve, but thats the pathology speaking, because I am a very good wife for him.

Isnt he ever mean to her? Yeah, sure he is. He encouraged her to embark on LSD experiment because he was desperate, too.

Before we hang up, I have to ask: does she ever worry her extraordinarily intense relationship with Chabon on Twitter she has been known to post pictures of her husband, along with a line informing her 15,800 followers just how much she loves him might be another symptom of her illness? For the first time in our conversation, she is hesitant. The gale of her voice drops to a light breeze.

Yeah, I have thought about this. I have said to him: If I were to get healthy, would I still love you, and would you still love me? There is a way that Ive confused needing with loving. I dont want to sound like a Hallmark card, but love is [supposed to be] unselfish, and in my most internal, whirling dark places, I think I need him so badly because he takes care of me, protects me, makes me feel safe. One of the things that saved our marriage in that [dark] period was when I brutally tried to disentangle those things.

The upshot is that she thinks, now, perhaps its OK to need him. After the LSD, when I was having this intense new therapy, I took a drive one night in northern California, where the countryside is very beautiful. I had this thought: maybe I dont love him after all. It was terrifying, and I was crying. But then the phone rang, and it was him. How did she feel then? His voice filled me like a glass of water.

People have been curious, even excited: an extract from A Really Good Day

A fewdays ago, I began tentatively to tell people about this experiment. To my surprise, I encountered few negative reactions. Every once in a while a listener might arch an eyebrow or smile uncomfortably, as if trying to figure out whether her discomfort meant that she wasnt hip enough, or whether I really was nuts. But those have been in the decided minority. Most people have been curious, even excited.

Those with histories of mood disorders were intrigued to hear that my spirits have lifted, that though I sometimes feel the familiar clutch of anxiety in my chest, I am generally able to use mindfulness techniques to make it dissolve. When I told them that I have not gained weight and that my libido has not withered away, they got really excited. The side effects of SSRIs are so ubiquitous and unpleasant that the idea of a medication protocol with fewer of them is thrilling.

Friends who incline to the spiritual were disappointed when they heard that Ive experienced no connection to the divine, but reassured when I mention the pleasure Ive taken in the natural world, the tree outside my window, the smell of the jasmine beside the city sidewalks. Risk takers and hedonists were disappointed that I was unable to provide details of hallucinations. No kaleidoscopic colours, they asked wistfully, no feeling that the floor was shifting beneath your feet? I live in California. The last thing I want to feel is the floor shifting beneath my feet. They urged me to try a real dose. It would change my life, they said, as though my problem is that my life has been too devoid of weirdness. Besides, my life is changing.

Tonight, however, was a different story. These two writer friends are about 20 years older than my husband and me, which puts them firmly in the boomer generation. They were in their 20s in the 1960s. Theyve travelled the world, rejected a life of secure conformity in favour of the risks and rewards of art. What better people to confide in? I thought.

Well, I said, Ive been writing, but not working on a novel. Ive been writing about microdosing with LSD.

What does that mean, the woman of the pair asked? Are you writing some kind of nonfiction article on people who use LSD?

I took a breath and then explained.

Her face froze. If she had been wearing pearls, she would have clutched them. She looked horrified, even disgusted, as if Id told her that Id taken up murdering baby seals. Her husbands reaction was only slightly less disturbing. He smiled uncomfortably and changed the subject. I immediately agreed, yes, the antipasto was delicious, and, no, I didnt want any more.

Their reaction launched a series of cascading anxieties. Will I be condemned for doing this? Will people reject me as a nutcase, a crank, a deluded acid freak? Will I lose whatever credibility I have in the world? Will parents not let their children come over to our house any more, under the misapprehension that I keep drugs in my home?

As soon as dinner was over, I tried the technique for dissipating anxiety that my cognitive behavioural therapist recommends. I took a few deep breaths, exhaling for half again as long as I inhaled. My chest and throat unclenched. The anxiety ebbed. I was calm again. I was OK.

Also, I had some perspective. This couple were young in the 1960s, when Timothy Leary was spreading the gospel of psychedelic recklessness. For all I know, they had complicated histories with the drug that influenced how they responded to me. In all likelihood, their discomfort had far more to do with them than with me.

A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life by Ayelet Waldman is published by Corsair at 13.99. To order a copy, go to bookshop.theguardian.com

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