Three Years of Creative Block: How Psilocybin Broke It

I had my first significant gallery show at twenty-six. The work sold. I was reviewed well. And then, over the following two years, something closed. Not dramatically — no obvious crisis. But the work became effortful, and then impossible, and then I was a painter who didn't paint.

The session at 1.5 grams was not dramatically altered — I could have moved around, could have conversed. I chose to stay still and let whatever came come. What came was this: the recognition that I had, somewhere between the first show and the present, started making work for the people looking at it rather than from the thing inside me that had things to say.

This sounds obvious. I'm sure a therapist could have said this to me. But experiencing it rather than thinking it is different. In the session I felt the difference between the two as a physical sensation — the constriction of the external-oriented work, and the expansiveness of the internal-oriented work.

I painted the next morning. Not well — the work is still finding its way back. But the door opened, and so far it has stayed open.