My name is Dely Sandor (not my real name) and I am a 29-year-old male from the United States. I look like a regular overweight Mexican guy who grew up only having white friends. I don’t really express my Mexican culture as much as other Chicanos. While I consider myself fluent in Spanish, my Spanish has gotten really rusty in the past decade. Both of my parents are from Mexico and met in the United States. My parents separated/divorced before I entered the 5th grade. I have one younger sister who has really been there for me the past couple of years.

Growing up I was a very shy, quiet, and obedient child. I enjoyed learning from a young age and would ask my mom lots of questions. I have a mind that loves exploring and knowing why things work the way they do. I was raised catholic but consider myself an agnostic atheist. My favorite subjects growing up were math and science. The five topics I love discussing or I guess you can say my favorite five things are: LSD, “my running club”, Bassnectar, sex, and thrill-seeking adventures. If you hang out around me, I am definitely going to steer a conversation in that direction. As a young child, I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. I graduated from a university close to home with a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics after changing my degree from chemistry early in my college career. I have a small interest in going back to school to gain a graduate degree in neuroscience.

“The five topics I love discussing or I guess you can say my favorite five things are: LSD, “my running club”, Bassnectar, sex, and thrill seeking adventures.”

Honesty is something that I really value and I respect people who are blunt and honest. I love knowing where I stand with someone. Whether we are talking about a platonic, romantic, or professional relationship. I prefer to live in a society where people are more honest with themselves and others. I feel like the more information we have to work with, the better it is for everyone. Being honest with yourself is a skill that is also important. I am constantly checking myself to see if my values align with my actions and who I want to be as a person. I definitely carry a lot of guilt and shame.

I’d say that my personality is an acquired taste that might be hard to palette for some people, but you always find yourself coming back for more. I feel like I’m pretty good at making friends and enjoy the experience of meeting someone new. I can hard carry a conversation with anyone if I need to. I prefer not to be the center of attention and would describe myself as an extrovert stuck in the body of an introvert. Pushing my limits and trying out new experiences is what I live for. For some reason, I give off a slightly feminine vibe and I’ve been asked many times if I am gay. I guess I am just very comfortable with my masculinity. I would have been the perfect cast in the role of Damian in Mean Girls. I think I am a sensitive person and while I like to say that I’m good at letting things go, I tend to focus too much on things that I do wrong. I spend too much time in my head and I’m my own worst critic. I feel like as I have gotten older and gained more life experiences that I have learned more about myself. I have taken more risks than the person I was 15 years ago would have ever imagined. I try to live my life without regrets and tend to trust my instincts too much. I’m a pretty independent person and don’t mind doing things by myself.

My faults and areas I want to improve: I get bored easily. I have trouble asking for help. I have some perfectionist tendencies. I procrastinate a lot. I am always late to things. I am overweight and have a negative body image. I have trouble maintaining relationships. I hate small talk. I love peer-pressuring people. I love pushing people’s boundaries. I enjoy pushing people’s buttons. I laugh nervously when people are upset at me. I tend to word vomit a lot when under the influence. The conversations I start sometimes make people uncomfortable. I have trouble conveying my thoughts into words, especially in real-time. I have a hard time speaking eloquently. My vocabulary is that of a fifth grader. I struggle with depression.

My depression hit an all-time low, about a year and a half ago (Summer 2018). I had been having a hard time finding a job after leaving the teaching profession. I finally got noticed by a company, but was rejected early on in the hiring process. I was very devastated even though my only investment in the interview process were a couple of math problems they had asked me to solve through email. The weeks after that rejection were very hard and I still don’t understand why my mental health spiraled so badly.

During this period of my life, I was crying almost daily. I was not showering or brushing my teeth. I rarely left the house. All I did was lay in bed and stare at my popcorn ceiling. On days I could get out of my bed I would pass the time by playing Hearthstone and Overwatch or by consuming content on Twitch and Reddit. I’d still leave my room from time to time to converse with my sister, mom, or stepdad but I wanted nothing to do with this life anymore. At the beginning of September 2018, I told my mom that I was seriously considering suicide and to not be surprise if she woke up to a dead son one day. I think my mom never really fully processed what I said that day.

“At the beginning of September 2018, I told my mom that I was seriously considering suicide and to not be surprise if she woke up to a dead son one day.”

As the days and weeks went by I started to get desperate because the suicidal thoughts in my head were getting louder and I was getting weaker. I started self-medicating with cannabis just to be able to enjoy doing things and food. Around this time I had started reading a lot of different stories on Reddit on how people were using psychedelics to help them with their depression. Specifically, something called microdosing. I had just spent a lot of money trying to fix a completely unrelated health problem so I didn’t really have the funds to see a doctor to treat my depression. Since LSD is pretty inexpensive I decided to start experimenting on myself in November 2018. By this point in my life, I have had a handful of psychedelic experiences in my life and I swear that I couldn’t “feel” my depression for a couple of days after having those types of experiences. The scientist in me was intrigued and what exactly did I have to lose? I mean I wanted to kill myself. Surely a little bit of LSD couldn’t be worse than a rope around my neck or a bullet through my head.

Since that initial experiment, I have gained a lot of insight into my depression and eventually started using LSD to manage my depression. There have been some ups and some downs, but no suicide attempts. I would like to say that my depression has completely disappeared, but I think I have more serious medical problems that are at the root of my depression. However, in the past couple of months, I feel like I (like many others) have discovered something that could potentially be beneficial to the entire world. But we, the psychedelic community, have to tread very carefully. These drugs are in fact illegal and many people remain uninformed. I feel like psychedelics and perhaps other drugs have healing properties, but we can never know unless we allow these types of drugs to be researched. I hope that this online journal inspires other people to share their struggles with mental illness and their experiences with psychedelics.