TL;DR: MXE is a mind bending substance far more potent than I initially knew. The following is an account of 1 1/2 years of my life with this drug.

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I did not move from the couch. I honestly had never felt anything like this before. I was in a parallel universe. All rules I used to assemble my reality with had stopped applying. I was slave to the seemingly random processes in my brain, unable to reach coherence. It seems that my mind, facing what seemed like its destruction was now fighting for survival. I wanted to get out of this and back to the real world. After what seemed like an eternity and a half I started to get flashes of something to hold on to. Objects I knew, chairs, furniture, couches, my own bodyparts, ah yes, reality. It was coming back. It was still very hard keeping it together, but I was filled with an immense joy of having survived this. I was exuberant with joy. I had never felt this happy to be alive. I believe this must be something close to those “being reborn” experiences some people talk about. Well, being convinced that you have died and come back is not pleasant at all.

Over time, say, the next two or three months, I began to feel the barriers and walls I had erected in my mind crumbling. I started to become slightly more relaxed in social situations, I started to feel more confident voicing my opinion at work, I started to become more inquisitive when I believed a company was trying to screw me over (rather than just taking it, like I used to all my life), I started walking the streets with slightly more confidence and I started to admit to myself that some people in my past were actually right about a heck of a lot of stuff they said, which I completely rejected back then. I also started to slowly but surely begin to understand the value of forgiveness. A concept I entirely rejected for most of my life. Thanks, jesus-army for riddling that word with religious connotations. Anyhow, these were babysteps.

What came next? Tripping by myself was the next step. This would allow me to try a few more things. For example writing while on MXE: Nope. No chance. You are far too uncoordinated and it will take you 5 minutes to type even goddamn word. I also tried having Skype chats with friends who subsequently pissed themselves laughing at my inability to get any sentences strung together properly. So writing, or, effectively comunicating, was off the table.

So what to do by myself? Music. Music is a divine experience on MXE. Simply lay back with a quality pair of cans, blast the music and let go into your little MXE fueled fantasy and thought-world.

If we were to go by a scale of novice, intermediate, advanced and veteran. By now I guess I was an intermediate MXE user. Unfortunately, as with everything in life it couldn’t all just be fun and games.

Certain resistances were starting to show at this point. Residual effects did not last as long as they used to. The come-ups became quicker and the craving to do MXE every night was increased. Films started to seem almost boring without being on MXE. Even though you would rarely remember the plot afterwards.

I was ready to push the envelope a bit further: Increased doses and interactions.

I asked myself, how does MXE work together with other substances? Well, you may find yourself surprised when I reveal my number one favourite drug while being on MXE. Let’s go through all the other ones first:

Valium: can reduce some of the anxious sides that come with MXE and it helps you get to sleep. Good stuff, always have some of this handy.

Alcohol is a terrible interaction and does not work at all. Neither drinking it before or after taking MXE is any fun at all and you will end up with the hangover of a lifetime: just don’t.

LSD: No effect. LSD seems to eradicate any of MXE’s potential. I only tried LSD first then MXE, not the other way round. If I ever do, I will report back, but further on in this article you will see why this may never happen/won’t be worth it.

Tramadol: A total winner. Tramadol taken at the same time as a line of MXE is insufflated will be paralysingly relaxing. You will become extremely passive and you just melt into everything full of warmth and happiness. Stupidly, Tramadol causes respiratory depression, slows down your heart beat and lowers your blood pressure. MXE does the opposite. This is actually a very dangerous combination and should not be done too often. I did it twice. Lovely as it was, the risks here are too high to keep repeating this.

Ritalin: Not much to report. You just become a bit more tweaked out than usual, not really great quite frankly. Lots of cold sweat and edginess.

So, here goes: The best interaction I ever found is good old weed. For whichever reason, smoking a spliff post-plateauing on MXE will induce the most insane all-body orgasm euphoria you will ever feel. To this day I have known nothing like it.

We are now at a point in the story where MXE is about to be made illegal and I am pretty much becoming an advanced user of the drug. At the time I thought to myself: “Well, shit, if I do about 100mg a week, then I will need at least 5.2g a year, meaning 25g would only last me 5 years, fuck!” So I went and bought a huge quantity of it before it went out of sale. In fact, I contacted the support staff at the website selling it, thinking that they’d be desperate to push their stock before the blanket ban, so I might be able to snag some for little money. I bought 50g at a ridiculously low price. Nice! Jack, you genious, you’re sorted for the rest of all times!

MXE has now become a regular part of my life and I have tested it in many situations and shown to a few people. The reactions being almost unanimously bad or unimpressed. Only Jill happens to love it. Go figure. I had also tried taking it at a gig in a pub once. Did not work at all. Trying to be social in a crowd where you can’t hear a single word and have no idea what’s going on trying to look normal is damn near impossible and a complete waste of what could be a nice trip.

Oh and to get this point over with as well: I tried sex on it two or three times. You tend to last forever and often will not cum at all. If you do, an MXE-gasm is a fairly reduced version of an actual orgasm and therefore the experience is actually much more rewarding for the closeness you will feel to the other human being while on MXE rather than the sexual reward of having sex or an orgasm.

A word of advice about MXE and other people: Tripping together with someone you can really trust is a very special experience. With someone of the gender you are attracted to you will almost inevitably end up naked, cuddling under a duvet. You will melt into one another, stopping to perceive where you ‘stop’ and the other ‘starts’. It is an utterly otherworldly feeling and something I would recommend to anyone. This has been described as an “MXE Puddle” in internet circles of groups doing MXE. I’d be more than interested in experiencing one of those at some point.

Some words on m-holes: I had fallen into a few more m-holes by now. Man those things are just incredible. Once you understand to let go and simply accept the fact that you are in it, you will find yourself exploring worlds like you never did before. You can relive childhood memories, you can make any actor of any movie say anything you want, you can simply create your entire reality. It is one of the most incredible experiences I have ever had in my life. This happened about 8 or maybe 9 times during my entire 1 1/2 years of MXE usage.

So how did it end? Well, before all of this started, on the surface, I was a completely different person. I used to be reserved, anxious, alone, worried, emotionally repressed inconfident, twisted, stubborn, difficult and insanely hard on myself and others. People still liked me because I was emulating them but as a consequence I was of course never myself. Now I am more open hearted, warm, generous and above all I have stopped wasting all my energy worrying and being locked up in my head and instead decided for myself to experience this world and this life as hard as I can. I have MXE to thank for that in many ways.

So maybe like a sherpa, a guide along a difficult path, it was now time for us to part ways. MXE had served its purpose and it could no longer bring me the epiphanies and wonders I expected from it. The problems I was working through were the ones I had created myself. I had defeated many of my own anxieties and I began understanding and living life in a way I had never done before. The other problems however, those caused by others, those caused by external influences no drugs can fix. The ball is in my court to go and deal with those now.

We are reaching the part of the story where I am a veteran user. I use this stuff every second day. It is truly becoming rather excessive. I will easily finish 100mg in one night. No “M-Holes” anymore. No tangential thoughts anymore. The only thing that happened in the place of m-holes now were blackouts. I would just forget a large chunk of time and then emerge from that after a while. I would not find any solutions to any problems anymore. I would just feel funny for a while and then struggle to get to sleep. Then I would wake up and not really feel that great. I was tired again in the mornings.

To make a completely unscientific guess, it sounds as though the human brain is very, very good at figuring out ways to re-establish reality. My brain had caught up to this substance invading it so regularly. It had learned how to reroute thoughts away from the places that MXE affected. My senses on MXE stayed more focused and the hallucinations had disappeared, showing my brain’s unwillingness to lose reality. So the dosages I would have to take were so high that I would just black out. This was simply not pleasant anymore.

Cold Turkey time. I first gave my huge stash to a friend of mine. He kept it for me for a while. I stayed off it for three weeks. This was easier than I had expected. No big withdrawal symptoms!

I was really just a bit lost for things to do on a Friday night. Life started seeming a bit dull now that I didn’t have a drug to default to, to get fucked up with in the evenings. I figured, having been off the stuff for a while, let’s see whether the resistance had worn off. I tried it again one Friday night: Same reduced effects. Fuck. It was beginning to dawn on me that the era of MXE may actually be over. This really, really fucking sucked and I did not want to let go.

I did it a bunch more times and then, ironically while on MXE, decided it was time to part ways. I was either going to become completely addicted to a substance that does nothing for me, or I would get rid of it and somehow try to continue life without it. I chose the latter.

What followed were the same relatively easy 3-4 weeks of not really feeling any big differences at all. It seemed this stuff was easier to let go than I expected.

And then, after about a month I fell into a depression deeper and darker than the filaments between galaxies. I started to hate and despise everything. Getting up in the morning was a drag. Playing games was no fun anymore, watching movies was no fun anymore, talking to people, seeing people, socialising all sucked now and work was just hell on earth. I felt sick and defeated. For a whole two months I was pretty much on auto-pilot, desperately seeking a replacement for what MXE used to be. I tried stupid stuff, like snorting ritalin, taking loads of valium, smoking weed. Nothing helped. It seemed that I had, like Icarus, attempted to soar too close to the sun in denial of my inevitable fall. The depression ended during a particular moment which I shall tell in another story. Suffice it to say that I not only recovered but that life, ever since, has become more and more worth living every day.

The ending of this story is the beginning of another.

MXE is back.