On July 4th, 2024, I took 75mg of MDMA with my Uncle, brother, and mom. I was experiencing a range of emotions before diving in. I won't lie, one of those was nervousness. It was my first time taking MDMA. I rarely drink, have smoked marijauna a few times, and had one previous mushrooms experience under my belt ([you can read my reflection on that wonderful trip here](https://www.aidanhelfant.com/reflections-on-my-first-mushroom-trip-ever/)). This was a new drug and with different people than last time. Alongside this, we had somehow convinced (I won't lie there was a dice of peer pressure) our mother to take it with us. Her only previous drug experience was alcohol and a bit of weed. We wanted her to take it with us because we felt she could benefit from loosening up sometimes and break from her routine. We all felt we had to ensure she was okay during the trip. Of course, I was also fired up, excited, ectastic! I had heard stories of MDMAs power to heighten your emotional connection with those you took it with and was looking forward to a special trip with three of my favorite people in the world. After taking the pills, we talked about some intentions for the trip ahead. Personally, I wanted to deepen my feeling of love for everyone in the room. I already had a strong connection with my brother and mom, but because I've been going to college in the U.S. for so long, I haven't been able to see my Uncle—who lives in the Netherlands—as much as I would like to. This trip was my doorway to deepening that relationship. Secondly, I wanted to magnify my touch over my emotions and body. Sometimes, I can be quite brain-bound. I logic and intellectualize my way through conversations or emotional occurrences. I don't always listen to my body and emotions to know when I'm truly hungry, need to be moved, or am tired. I was hoping to learn from my brother on this second point in particular. He's an aspiring actor and has always been good at reading other people's emotions, especially my mother's, in a way that puts me in awe. Finally, I just wanted to have some fun. My brother and uncle are quite funny, and mom is funny in the way that watching a stand-up comedian go up for the first time is funny. MDMA also makes stuff way more amusing. It was going to be a good night. Anyway, let's get to what you are really excited about—the trip. About 25 minutes after taking half a pill, I began to feel an incredible sense of control over my body. Muscles I normally would have little to no feeling in, like my calves, bottoms of my feet, and hamstrings, felt like extra fingers. The soft music we had in the background began to reverberate and resonate profoundly inside my ears. I can't describe it, all music sounded like an incredible Bach performance. **Then, as cliche as it sounds, I felt love, so much love.** The first person I felt it for was my Uncle. I gave him the king of bonders—a massage. The whole shabang—back, head, arms, and feet. Honestly, that massage could have cost a hundred dollars at a spa. Ladies and gentlemen, my future business idea was given to me by the power of MDMA. He was so grateful, continually saying thank you, and oh my god, this feels so good. Even though I was giving him a massage, it felt like he was giving me one as well. Physical sensations were so deep they went both ways. After the massage, I remembered to check how my mom was doing. She looked like a chemistry teacher in a literature class—literally because she is a chemistry teacher and figuratively because she was not having it. She told us she felt sick, paranoid, and weird. She kept saying, "She knew this would happen." It was incredible the degree to which I could feel her reluctance. Getting up from my chair, I walked over and embraced her in a massive Aidan bear hug. It was one of the best hugs I have ever had. I could feel every part of my body as we touched. In that moment, I saw the scene with a completely different emotional clarity. I realized she was just a mother who was trying, trying to stay in touch with her two sons venturing out into the world, doing new things, and making new memories. But it was tiring. She's older and knows herself better. She loves her routine. She's not as adventurous. Doing stuff like this, isn't her. We had pushed her too far outside of her comfort zone. She didn't have to do all that for us to love her. **We would love her, as she is, for her.** My brother decided to walk her back to her hotel so she could go to sleep. Before she left, we tried to instill a good vibe. We made all these jokes about him being Frodo's leading mom on some great adventure to Mount Doom. My mom left grateful we weren't mad at her for bringing the vibe down. When she walked out of sight with my brother, I remember feeling intense gratitude. Mom was safe, with my brother—someone who seemed to know how to read people's emotions. He could read my mom better than I could. He could ground her better than I could. I could have been jealous. But how could I have been? A peacock doesn't look at an eagle or an eagle at a peacock and think, man, that eagle is better at everything than me. They're just different. They can both be beautiful in their own ways. It's lovely he has that connection with her. Once my brother left, my Uncle and I had a heart-to-heart in the kitchen table. He asked for my life story, at 20. And I gave it to him. For those who have never heard in rough sum it's a story of video game addiction, body image issues, and a distaste for school learning, turning into making learning in real life and, healthy living, and content creation into the most fun game imaginable. It's strange, I've told variations of what I see as my story many times. Obviously, it changes each time because no life story fits into a simple narrative. But this time felt, different… There's something about MDMA that makes conversations more meaningful and more emotional. I felt so connected to my Uncle. It seemed like he wasn't just hearing my story, but listening to it. I could tell he was reflecting on his own life. Despite being almost three decades apart, it seemed we were old friends. After this convo, I went to the bathroom (the first time of what felt like a million mind you). While sitting, I affirmed I would never let myself abuse these substances. Their power was scary. While many of these mind-altering substances aren't physiologically addictive, I could see getting psychologically attached to them if I wasn't careful. I gave myself a few rules at that moment. I would never do them more than once a month (and ideally would wait more than six months). I would never do them unless I felt like I had truly integrated the last trips experience. And I would use them predominantly for self-growth, not escape, but perhaps, in the right crowd, for a bit of fun. When I came down, my uncle told me he wanted to go outside and smoke a joint—apparently, it heightens the effect and keeps the high going. Going outside, I closed the door behind me. Apparently, I wasn't supposed to do that because now, we were locked out. Here we were, high and MDMAed out of our minds, stuck outside of our own house, wondering what to do. For a few minutes, we laughed about our situation. Then, my uncle got the grand idea of having me jump the hedge and open the front door. Heroically, I made my way over the hedge and ran around the house. Coincidently, my brother came around the curb at the exact same time. He must have finished bringing my mom home. It had already been an hour. Woah… Time. I asked to make sure Mom was okay and told him the situation. We were both higher than a kite, so communication was rough. Let me bring you through a MDMA conversation so you understand. Aidan: Martijn, I, locked out of house. Jumped Hedge. We knock door. Skye: Ya, ya, sounds good... What? What did you say? Aidan: Huh? Skye: Hedge. Aidan: Ya, I jumped the hedge? Skye: Why? Aidan: ... Skye: ... Aidan: That's a good question. Just imagine that happening, throughout the entire night. It took us like five minutes to understand each other. Then we made an epic plan to enter the house and knock on the door. Valiantly, we walked to the front door only to find out my uncle had already gotten inside somehow. He led us back to the kitchen, where we embraced in what I can only now call "The Hug Of Eternity." We must have hugged for two minutes with the combined love of a squadron of baby elephants. We sat down and listened to music for a few minutes, relishing our heightened sensations. One of the songs we heard from my playlist was Machine Learning by J. Maya. It's a song about Maya learning to become more extroverted and charismatic by adopting "rules" for socializing like smiling more, asking others questions, never stepping too far out of line, etc. But through adopting these rules, she became like a robot, unable to be authentic in her interactions. I resonated with the song because I came from a small rural town and had learned to improve my social skills in much the same way when I first went off to college. So, I thought my brother would resonate with it, too. He did. Listening to the song on MDMA made the experience that much better. I sang the lyrics the whole way and was amazed at how emotionally powerful it compared to normal. After listening to more music, my uncle told my brother he loved seeing his new showreel on YouTube. He's an aspiring actor and recently finished his second showreel—a video showcasing various clips of someone's acting for hiring use. This led to my brother pouring his heart out over how passionate he was about acting and getting to go to acting school next year. Acting is the one thing he has stuck to *with fervor* for more than a year. He felt like he had finally found his calling. Seeing his eyes light up as he talked about what he loved was mesmerizing. Martijn and I happily listened as he told us his fears and stories. So much love. I went to the kitchen to make us some tea (something which we did seemingly infinite times throughout the night, MDMA makes you so thirsty). Once behind the kitchen bar, I realized my brother was standing on the other side and found the situation too perfect not to act like I was some cocktail-making bartending professional. I grabbed a napkin and a glass and started faking as if I was cleaning it. My brother and I laughed for minutes. Man, the laughter on MDMA. We sat down to watch a short film my brother recommended from Love Death Robots called Pop Squad. If you don't want spoilers, go watch it right now. It's 20 minutes long and incredible. Pop Squad is set in a dystopian future where the government controls overpopulation by banning childbirth. Overpopulation is controlled because humans have discovered how to live forever by regularly injecting special serums into themselves and thus babies would add too many people to the world. The protagonist, a law enforcement officer tasked with eliminating illegal children, begins to question the morality of his actions after encountering a mother and child. He is awestruck by their profound love for each other despite the mom knowing the danger of having a kid. He asks her why she does it and she responds that having kids, while risky, allows her to see things anew again. She has lived for hundreds of years and no longer has the same spark for life that a child has. Struck by the truth of her words, he spares the children only to be confronted by another pop squad member outside the house who realizes what he has done. They both shoot each other, and the protagonist dies, but with a light in his eyes and a love for life in his last moments. The thing I found remarkable about watching this short film is how profoundly I felt the emotions of the characters. Off MDMA, I'm more in tune with my emotions than the average person, but as I said earlier, I tend to intellectualize or logic away my emotions. I don't feel them as strongly as I would like. The MDMA made me feel each of the emotions of the characters intensely. I almost cried When the mother described why she decided to have the child despite the consequences. After watching Pop Squad, we saw one more movie, Inside, and while it was fantastic, the MDMA was starting to wear off, and I was mostly just a little high, so it wasn't too notable. The entire trip lasted from 7:30 p.m. to 2:00 a.m.—around 6 and a half hours from taking the pills to them wearing off. # Here are some of the takeaways I had from the experience. ## Your Body Holds A Profound Amount Of Wisdom. We all hold a ton of emotions in our bodies. If we could only tap into them, we could sense the profound wisdom it's trying to give us. Wisdom like what and when we should eat, if we should exercise, what we are feeling in a certain moment. Before the trip, I was decently in tune with my body, but as I said, I tend to intellectualize and logic my emotions away. The MDMA gave me an incredible attunement to the emotions held in my body and those of others. After this trip, I'm hoping to be able to hold onto some degree of that ability. One of the things I'm doing to help with this is muscle relaxation breathing. This is an exercise my brother led the group through right after we took the pills. It involves breathing deeply into your diaphragm, releasing the breath, and untightening the tensest muscle in the body as you do so. Then repeat. I hope I can do this exercise more throughout my days to remind myself to listen to my body. ## People Are Asking To Be Seen Everyone wants to be deeply seen by other people. But often throughout our days, we are so caught up in our own thoughts, feelings, and experiences, we don't see other people as they really are. Little microexpressions, comments, and bodily movements signaling someone's thoughts and feelings are invisible to us. While on the MDMA trip, these little things became infinitely more visible, and in effect, so did their emotions. It was like the window to an entire emotion world was being cleaned up and letting me in for the first time. I could see Mom's effort to connect with her family by doing something she wasn't comfortable with. I could see Skye's excitement in diving into his acting and fear that it might not work out. I could see my uncles hope to stay young by doing fun things like MDMA with his nephews as he went further into his middle years and also his want to navigate his relationship with alcohol. Outside of this trip, I want to be more attuned to people's emotions. I want to read their expressions and ask how they are feeling, **to see them.** Isn't that what we all want at the end of the day? I have no doubt I will one day do MDMA again, perhaps with my brother, or my father, or some friends or a girlfriend that I want to deepen a connection with. But I want to return to what I affirmed in the bathroom at the beginning of the trip. I won't get psychologically addicted to these substances. They're more powerful than I ever imagined. I'm not going to do them for the next couple of months, at least, if not the rest of the year. Doing so would spoil the intense meaning I took away from this trip. And I got more loving to do in real life first.