shutting down my dream non-profit i started at 16, and taking shrooms.
(T.W: Heavy discussions of suicide, assault, self harm, abuse, shrooms, mental health issues, and generally sad life stuff. I write to provide a written journey for others, but if you relate to me, seek help. Shrooms are illegal. That’s why this post is a joke.)
If you’re new here, this is a quick catch up for you. I’ve lost most things that have defined me: I left Washington and my one of a kind tiny house. I shut down Astra (my dream non-profit I very publicly started when I was 16) a few days ago, and I realize I hate living in Vermont (where I moved to in order to be with my boyfriend who’s starting a math PhD program).
In this shifting turmoil, showing me who I am and what I’ve chosen, I’ve realized something that stops me cold.
While working with vulnerable populations that keep falling through social systems, I see myself becoming lost the way they have. I myself, someone on the autism spectrum with a history of child abuse and suicidal behavior, could really easily become addicted to terrible drugs. I could throw my life away, and be content with a job that goes nowhere.
A year after my assault, and a few months before I started Faura, the natural disaster mitigation company I started in early 2023— I was legitimately convinced I was going to die.
Not in the sense of, “there is an outside force coming to get me”.
More in, “there is a chronic suicidality embedded into my being that I will never escape”.
I ran around my street running from something in the pouring Oregon fall rain at 3am, only to realize I was running from myself. The fear I felt about something coming to get me was my own internal fear over the conviction that I would end my life.
I was legitmately convinced I was alive in a simulation and no one else was real. My life did nothing and therefore it had no repercussions if it ended. End the level. Nothing would change. You aren’t real or alive. This world isn’t real. You hate it here. Pull the plug.
Most people assume that when you attempt suicide, you are attempting to relieve yourself of the pain caused by an external factor. It’s a suicide caused by self-mercy, not self-hatred.
Instead of doing it to avoid pain, sometimes you do it to purposefully hurt yourself. There was a rage within me directed towards myself that shakes me to my core.
And with it, came a realization that I will cut, starve, burn, slam, and kill myself. I can’t protect myself because I don’t care about myself.
You realize when dealing with that level of inner pain that what separates you from the chronically drugged out people on the streets is your self-control for trying stupid shit to get rid of the pain.
That level of self-hate you can have tends to drown out self-preservation.
The worst part about drugs is you think they are the best thing that could ever happen to you — especially if you believe you have a life worth nothing. This is the good that you have access to. Enjoy it.
I kept on thinking of that ironic headline: Amanda Southworth — young computer prodigy known for chronic suicidality who created mental health and mental illness management apps for those underserved by the mental health system. Dead at 21 because of a Fentanyl overdose in Oregon. Homeless and missing in California. Addicted to heroin and stealing food in Washington.
If you’ve experienced pain that crippling, you see how someone could get there too.
The terrible fucking fall of 2022 — I wouldn’t tell anyone about the assault I suffered in fall 2021. The little I did hang out with people, I remember saying that I just wanted to get high until I died. They stopped wanting to hang out.
In a chronic suicide support group, I saw someone ask others what they would do before they killed themselves. Someone said, “Take DMT-5. You’re either going to hate the experience and die anyway or forever be changed enough to live.”
That thought stuck in my head. Psychedelics seem like a miracle for those with PTSD. Might as well fuck around and find out.
7 months later in the summer of 2023, I’m an Orca. More accurately, I’m tripping on shrooms in Oakland with Valkyrie to build what becomes Faura.
Summer 2024: now. I’m in Vermont. I bought shrooms online, and took my first half-dose yesterday.
This past weekend, I killed the one thing I survived for: Astra.
I feel so much guilt about pausing Astra: I couldn’t stop giving to others at the detriment of myself. It was not an immediate decision, but rather a years long drifting until I felt the world had not treated me particularly kindly, and I wanted to no longer give my life to protect it. It was an emotional revolt stemming from years of burn-out, topped off by being assaulted by someone who was trying to help me with figuring out how to monetize Astra.
There was a deep well of love from me to the world, and then an emotional Deepwater Horizon.
An email was sent to everyone involved long-term about the reason, and I shared it on my close friends story, calling it “deeply embarassing for me”.
It is. The whole reason people loved me was because I took terrible things and made good things from them. The terrible things kept stacking up, and I failed to turn those lemons into lemonade. I just let the lemons pile until I couldn’t move.
It feels more embarrassing knowing that I don’t want it to go.
If I truly loved it, why couldn't I make it work? Why couldn’t I do what I did the first time around, and push through the shit to make a future I want to see?
I have never particularly felt the world was kind, or easy to move into. And yet, now it was my heart’s first answer when I wondered where my motivation went.
So — I let it go by putting the org into hiatus. Willingly, to fix myself and become a better leader. But, that doesn’t stop me from thinking that I failed in some fundamental way.
The people I met when I started Astra raised millions, became titans of industries, became actresses in the most famous shows of our generation, touched millions of lives.
I was going to completely change the way non-profits served people, and then I just wanted to get high until I died.
A documentary I was in won an Emmy this year. It excited me for a day, before I watched it and felt a deep sense of dread. Whenever anyone brings it up, I ignore it.
In the documentary, I thought I was at the end of the pain: separated from my torment and delving into my work. I was vibrant, and radiating with the kind of joy that you can only have if you don’t know what it will cost. That Amanda was everything to me, and I let her get pummeled.
I was with Noah in Lake Placid this past weekend when I wrote the email announcing the hiatus.
Everyone told me it was the right decision, and they were proud of me.
Everyone was relieved, except for me.
I took the role of the predator again, not through desire but habit. I failed someway, and I have to atone for it. I imagined cutting. In the sauna, I thought about grabbing the burning wood stove with my bare hands for repentance.
Then, a softer thought: “I was just a kid”.
I saw in my minds eye me at 17 - the one in that Emmy award winning documentary. The Amanda I didn’t protect. I sent the email announcing the shutdown and cried in Noah’s arms.
Before I started self medicating and running from an invisible murderer: I would have brutal dissociative panic attacks in San Francisco when I lived there in spring 2022.
I was joining a new startup, tasked with living in both Oregon and SF, working on the most important contract of my life that I thought would have solved all of my problems, and ignoring my assault by throwing myself at anyone wanted me to prove I had never been tainted in the first place.
There was an Amanda who got into a terrible car accident and was taken advantage of by someone close to her while she was drugged for severe pain.
I didn’t know her.
When I started my plan of ignoring everything in SF, I started blacking out and crumbling to the ground crying in mental anguish, physically untethered from my body. I felt as through the emotional pain I experienced was so great that I was in hell — there was no other possible explanation.
I would ask people around me after I got out of them: “Am I in hell? Please tell me if I’m in hell.”
I’ll never forget the look of pity on people’s faces. The look when people truly realize how fucking fucked you are. You’re not only not ok — you’re so fucking detached from reality that you’re begging people to tell you if you’re in divine punishment.
I hadn’t had a panic attack like that since SF, until I was crashing back to hell in Lake Placid, thinking about Astra. The end of my world. The only good world I’ve been to in a long time.
I was going to be a young drop-out computer prodigy who changed people’s lives.
Now, I’m just me.
The only thing worse than being nothing at all, is being someone who could have been something if they got out of their own way. My brain called for self-harm and starvation, but I knew I already had the greatest punishment I could conceive of: having Astra fail.
I lost my childhood dream that I started at 16 of helping millions of people have better lives through tech, that I carved out in a home where my greatest desire was to end it all. I worked on it for 6+ years, and I still think about that idea every day.
When you get punched at 8 years old by the people who are supposed to protect you, you want to think there’s something waiting on the other side.
When you start releasing apps at 13, you can see the other side.
The reward for it all was Astra — that all of that bullshit could have been wrapped up in a neat bow and benefitted someone, because there was no benefit to me.
The reward is gone. The rest of it is still there. There’s nothing on the other side.
I got home and took the shrooms. You probably would have, too.
On shrooms: Purple Yam ice cream is delicious. Everything electronic feels artificial.
I thought about Astra without guilt: seeing it as just a step in a step. Everyone fails, everyone fucks up. It’s not the end of my world, but the beginning of what it could be. By being beholden to my guilt about it, I would never move forward.
At other points, thinking about Astra made me feel worse. I didn’t feel alive: it felt as though the pacemaker of my purpose had flatlined. A silence in my heart so loud, you know what precluded it was deafening.
I oscillated between the two: I will never feel fear again. The rhythm of my heart has died. The worst is over. I will never get that much momentum again. I will be fine, I’ve been through worse. This is a loss worth than death.
I snuggled Pumpkin, and played with my cats. Then, a mechanical cat toy that flaps around like a live fish stopped working during our play session, its’ battery pack malfunctioning.
It unzipped, and revealed its’ mechanical flesh to me. I looked at its’ innards, and realized I’m not much different. Someone will unzip me too, find me unsightly when I malfunction. Things fail for a reason. Every failure is diagnosable.
The most religious things are engine rebuilds. You don’t see the guts of a car, just the shape. But the engine — fuck.
The engine of some cars is more perfectly designed than humans, in some way. The vessels, the way it opens and gives perfect symmetry and organization to a chaotic, messy process.
I concede to the miracles of cars. The ability to take elderly parts of the ground, ignite, and force them to propel us forward. 1 mile, 100 miles, thousands of miles. All through carefully timed explosions. And they are everywhere.
There is a violence at the heart of motion and we can harness it to our desires. If that’s not divine, I don’t know what is.
Everything that’s broken can be undone until you find the source of brokeness. There is the emotionality of broken things, and then the mechanics of them.
I am emotionally broken. But the fixing is purely mechanical.
Much like the battery pack of a TJ Maxx flopping fish cat toy: there is something deeply wrong within my brain. I will deconstruct it until I find it. I will source the shame and the fear within me, and I will pluck it out. Somewhere in this cavernous brain: there is are mechanical defects. I will hold them in my hands and then let go.
Maybe then, I’ll be ready to dream again.
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(p.s: i do not condemn, nor condone the use of using shrooms to fix your issues.
considering I’m deeply involved with the mental health field, yet too broke to afford therapy, this is an informed decision i made for myself. especially if you are like me and you have a history of psychosis in your family, do NOT engage with shrooms! it was a risk I took, but my health history is not yours.
do your own research outside of my posts when making mental health choices. )
