The first story my boyfriend told me was of his ego death at the age of seventeen along the Pacific Coast Highway. It was 2015 when his ego died, and his parents were getting a divorce. His mother thought sunny California and his aunt’s waterfront La Jolla home would coax him into accepting the dismantling of their marriage.
Before elaborating on this experience, though, he asked whether I was spiritually open-minded. It was a first date, and intimate questions seemed appropriate, if not expected. In a different situation—on other first dates I conditionally accepted because I had no other plans or whilst being cornered by an intoxicated man in line for the club bathroom—I would have found the question strange and performative, some prideful showing of intellectual superiority.
“I don’t like discussing it with people who already have their judgments cast,” he said. “You know, boundaries or whatever.”
After defending my open mind to him over a second round of drinks, I realized that having this perceptive and enlightened man as my boyfriend could make me perceptive and enlightened, too. I wanted to wear him around like another limb, to soak up his stoicism and confidence like the fetuses who absorb their twins in the womb.
We made it official the next month, and I began spending my weekends with his perspective and enlightened friend group. Only one of my new friends had succeeded in dissolving their ego; the others looked to my boyfriend as a spiritual prodigy. They shut their eyes and forced coy smiles onto their faces when he waxed poetic about self-surrender and the fidelity of certain Jungian theories. For all their perceptiveness, no one discovered I was a fake—that I had little interest in the worldview they embraced.
Humbly, I didn’t need to lie to get a boyfriend. I was attractive and bright, made a decent salary, and had fashionable friends to go to dinner with. I had the right green lights turned on to be with anyone I wanted. There were dozens of men with lives I could have seamlessly slid into without disruption. I did, however, need to lie to get my boyfriend.
It helped that I knew the kind of girlfriend he wanted: a Clementine á la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind–thinker with one of those great big, misunderstood heads on her shoulders. I understood I was not this girl, that I was lacking the neurological chip, and learned indifference that bred these archetypes. To describe myself as free-spirited and vivacious and to fundamentally emulate this role felt absurd, but for him, I was willing to try.
I wonder now if the self-destructive behaviors that began during this period—the regurgitation of meals and the inconsistent taking of the prescribed medications meant to stop my eggs from fertilizing and my brain from convincing me to end it all—were aftershocks of living a clandestine life. The reverberation of guilt-ridden thoughts alone was enough to make anyone defective; though, at the time, it never occurred to me to feel bad about lying to my boyfriend. I loved my boyfriend intensely. The love outweighed the guilt.
I confessed this intense love to my therapist—notably before my boyfriend—during our first weeks of serious dating. She reminded me that this intensity also applied to my ex-boyfriend, who had broken up with me via text message after seven years together. I reiterated that I no longer loved my ex-boyfriend intensely; I had mistaken adolescent infatuation with love in the way only a teenager can. What I failed to mention to my therapist was that I still monitored my ex’s online activity and resisted the urge to engage in dramatic acts like shattering mirrors with my knuckles or tiptoeing on the ledge of rooftops when he posted photos with his new girlfriend. Being with my boyfriend was so mentally all-consuming, so preoccupying, that those behaviors did go dark, at least for a little while. He was a natural teacher—my boyfriend— and I had so much to learn.
His first lesson was presented to me in the backseat of an Uber leaving my company’s holiday party. He explained that I was none of the things I had learned to identify with, that the small victories in my life meant less than zero. It didn’t matter that I qualified for certain credit cards or that a program book listed the phrase summa cum laude beside my name. Those accolades I held close in the name of self-preservation—like the loss of my virginity to my school’s quarterback or the winning of Pennsylvania’s high school essay contest—could not protect me from the eventual collapse of the self that I could not, according to my boyfriend, outrun.
“Wouldn’t it be brilliant to dissolve that facade and meet the real you buried deep inside?” my boyfriend asked. There was a televangelist tint to his question. The correct answer—and I always answered correctly—was: “Absolutely.”
That first Christmas together, my boyfriend flew home to Boston, and I—instead of spending the holiday alone in my apartment—caught a ride with a coworker en route to Pittsburgh to my father’s hoarder house in western Pennsylvania. I searched through piles of trash in my bedroom for mementos from childhood, which might affirm who I was before my ego got in the way. This was an exercise taken from the memoir of an esoteric psychologist my boyfriend revered. The psychologist suggested that reviewing collections of journals spanning multiple years was a reliable way to track one’s identity progression. Finding chronologically sorted and preserved keepsakes from grade school in a home overtaken by broken clothing hangers, piss-stained pet beds, empty cans of soda, and trash-picked wooden furniture proved challenging. The only item of significance I found was a composition book from 2010, which I used to track the calories I consumed every day over three months. I paged through the journal, awaiting some stroke of genius to appear between caloric entries for Fiber One Bars and ranch dressing, but found nothing of the sort.
It was hard enough being home. In addition, my boyfriend asked that I give him space while he was in Boston; being around his toothy, New England family of lacrosse players and Republicans was mentally taxing, and his endurance required an uninterrupted focus on mindfulness practices and the meticulous dosing of drugs. I was a distraction, a needy child not yet weaned from the reassurance and attention pacifier.
Despite his warning, I left a voicemail on the morning of Christmas Eve, begging my boyfriend to pick up the phone. I sobbed and rambled once he did about the state of my father’s health and general well-being, the depressing landscape of deserted strip malls and halfway houses that made up my hometown, and the mental reversion to my high school self who was pitiful and insecure and in desperate need of a change of scenery. He listened to my ranting, then, before hanging up, said calmly that he would call back at an appropriate time.
While waiting for my boyfriend’s call, I prepared, ate, and vomited up my father and I’s pathetic lunch of turkey sandwiches, instant mashed potatoes, and syrupy canned fruit. On the back of a napkin, I wrote that I was going grocery shopping. The part of me that wrote this still believed that my father cared about my comings and goings from the house. Then, I drove a mile in his truck to stare at the house where my ex’s family still lived. I figured that this endeavor would leave me feeling degraded enough to distract me from my growing impatience for a call from my boyfriend that would not come. Yet after ten minutes of waiting for the duplex, with its sagging porch and mildew-stained siding, to evoke nostalgia or despair, I felt nothing.
The phone call went undiscussed until the spring. My boyfriend had secured some psilocybin mushrooms, and we were microdosing them on the floor of our furnitureless apartment on Washington Avenue that we moved into days before. He hoped this experience with psychedelics would induce some spiritual awakening within me.
“The issue with you,” he said, “is that you allow your surroundings and the outside world to define you. There’s a reason you acted like you did during Christmas. Do you think that’s fair to say?”
I said that he had a point.
“I also think that’s a fair assumption,” he confirmed. My boyfriend was a fan of rhetorical questions; of having his thoughts reflected to him.
The mushrooms had a little transcendental impact on me. I woke in the middle of the night anticipating some cognitive change and was disappointed to realize that I was the same conventional–and transcendentally inadequate–person I had been a few hours before.
Sometime after the mushrooms, during a string of weeks when I stayed in bed for no reason other than that the thought of summer coming was exhausting, my boyfriend suggested I was undergoing what the mystics called the dark night of the soul. It would be terrifying, yet in the end, I would grow to see this period of crisis as the first step in my soul’s rebirth.
Unlike the mystics, I did not spend my dark night of the soul meditating and pondering the meaning of my life. I was not calm in the face of destruction. I cried about the drug addicts nesting under Girard Station. I asked my therapist—who my boyfriend recommended I stop seeing and whose sessions I had begun concealing as corporate happy hours—if all women hate their mothers for the same reason. I let the lining of my throat turn raw from the stomach acids I purged at least once a day. I took nude photographs of myself and attached them to unsent emails to my ex-boyfriend. I stayed quiet when my boyfriend told me that I was no longer physically stimulating. I was calm when he forced my body into lewd and humiliating sexual positions and when he disappeared on the weekends and neglected to tell me where he was going. I said nothing when he questioned whether I was earnest in my desire to, for lack of better words, turn on, tune in, and drop out.
It was only fair then that at the end of the season, I found myself soundless, lying in a clearing in the woods with a square of LSD on my tongue in lieu of allowing my boyfriend to end our relationship. I was eager and agreeable. I would do anything he asked of me. His friends had joined us in the woods and were rolling in the grass, begging higher powers to cast away the demons of false identity burrowed in their guts. My boyfriend massaged his fingers into my temples as the drugs soaked into my bloodstream. He told me to let go.
I would wake to a foreign thrumming in my body and my boyfriend’s voice saying I did an outstanding job. “You were perfect,” he will say. “Do you feel any lighter?”
I will nod and agree and smile through dry lips. I will confirm that I did feel lighter; I will look at my boyfriend with trusting eyes and lie: “I feel like the real me.” I will bask in his raw arousal for an authentic me that does not exist. I will talk of transcendence, self-perception, and the paralyzing beauty of death. I will let my plastic hormones run wild. I will feign subservience as my boyfriend pumps my body with psychedelics. I will love him until he no longer allows me, until the afternoon when the synapses firing in his head put two and two together and decide we are no longer compatible.
I will tell my therapist that a person I once loved intensely was perceptive and enlightened, and I was, too. I had the right green lights turned on to be anyone I wanted.