Back in high school my friend asked if I wanted to do acid. I asked him what it was like. He said “well, it’s… Big.” “Big? What the hell does that mean?” I asked. “I don’t know how to explain it, it’s just… Big,” he responded. I did acid with this friend and a few days later another friend asked what it was like. I said “well, uuuuh, it was…. Big.” I have read all the books by the writers who have experimented with acid. I have tried myself to explain it to people. Just as our reality is impossible to explain, all other forms of it are twice as hard. It lives in a place where words don’t exist. It’s that word at the tip of your tongue that you can’t quite get out. You can see it your head and feel in your blood, but you can never quite get the message across. Maybe this is why women want so badly to tell their birth story. Only through telling this story over and over can we process this truly mind-altering, life-changing, reality-shifting experience. Mind-altering in that we cannot relate the same to people afterwards. We cannot go back. This experiment with a new reality changes us. We cannot escape the images and sensations. We cannot make you understand. It’s too… Big.
Abby Theuring, MSW
