Brave Enough Letters for the quietly courageous
I lay on the bed as psilocybin—the psychoactive ingredient in Magic Mushrooms—rushed through my bloodstream. I was blindfolded but could still hear the coqui frogs in the rainforest outside, hidden under the cover of night.
It was my first time experimenting with the so-called plant medicine. I’d been introduced to it through the same online figures who introduced me to meditation. I saw it as an extension of the same act: an intentional exploration of the subconscious in the pursuit of self-awareness.
And there was plenty to uncover.
The visions began with skyscrapers. They towered above me before massive tsunamis crashed over their peaks, pouring down onto me in the street below. I thrashed and drowned in the torrents, sinking into the earth as if buried alive.
Then: a catacomb. Skeletons and coffins surrounded me. I winced as centipedes, spiders, and roaches crawled across my body before two hands wrapped around from behind, eager to pull me deeper into the earth.
I struggled to free myself, terrified and desperate to escape their grasp. But despite my frenzy, I couldn’t weaken their grip an inch. Exhausted and beaten, I surrendered, and entered the darkness.
I knew that I—who or whatever that is—had died.
Eons of time passed, dark and still. Then, a plant. Small green veins wriggled through the soil up to the surface, then opened its leaves to the light above.
Life went on.
And I knew that I—in some deeper, mysterious sense of the word—still lived.
Then, the cycle repeated as I faced another terror. Each time, the same: resistance, surrender, death, life.
After two hours, the pattern was unmistakable: resisting what I feared created the suffering. Surrender ended it.
My entire life had been one long version of that cycle.
What I experienced in those two hours wasn’t foreign—it was a concentrated form of the logic I’d lived under since childhood: fear something, resist it, suffer because of it. Especially when it came to death.
I was raised to see life as survival and death as the ultimate enemy. My father spent twenty years warning me about the collapse. You could outrun death if you were smart enough, alert enough, ready enough. And if you weren’t, you lost the game and died.
Then COVID hit, and for the first time, the outside world matched the inner world I’d grown up in.
Seven days before that mushroom trip, I’d abandoned most of my belongings and fled my college dorm as lockdowns began. I returned to Hawai`i and took refuge on a friend’s property, hurrying to convert it into an off-grid operation. Part of me felt prepared. Another part felt like I was reenacting a script I’d spent years trying to escape.
My father was certain COVID would fulfill every apocalyptic prophecy he’d preached for twenty years. He begged me to join him in his van in Arizona. When I refused, he took it as betrayal in the moment of his vindication.
His message was clear: if you stay there, you will die.
I was terrified he might be right. Between fence-mending and shotgun practice, I wrestled with his threats of disownment and whether I was choosing the wrong future. The old panic rushed back.
Then my friend told me he had mushrooms.
The trip revealed what I couldn’t see on my own: resisting death doesn’t protect you. It imprisons you.
But the pattern didn’t end there.
Even after I stopped believing my father’s conspiracies, I still lived by his logic. Instead of hoarding rations, I hoarded money. Financial freedom became my lifeboat—my escape hatch. Not from poverty, but from death. I believed that if I had enough saved, maybe I’d be safe. Maybe I could outrun it.
I built up years’ worth of living expenses. I had financial freedom. But I wasn’t free.
I was still preparing for death, not life.
And I’ve watched many people do the same. We save and save, plan and plan, optimize for safety. We work hard to arrive at a place where nothing can hurt us, only to find that we’ve also shut out what makes life worth living.
That’s what endless preparation gets you: a defended life with nothing inside it.
My wife introduced me to something different.
She brought me into Orthodox Christianity—a tradition I didn’t choose so much as stumble into. Weekly liturgies. Prayers for the dead. Memorial services for people I’d never met.
Her mother is a grief counselor who faces death every single day. She’s spent over a decade helping people die peacefully, comforting the families left behind. She doesn’t run from death. She walks toward it.
And slowly, I’ve started learning to do the same.
At memorial services, I stand with dozens of people and sing for someone most of us never knew. We pray for a peaceful end to our own lives. We face what I was taught to escape.
These practices aren’t grim. They’re tender, even healing.
My shoulders loosen. My breath slows. My heart softens.
And it reminds me: death isn’t something to outrun. It’s the truth that gives everything else its weight. The fact of it clarifies our lives in a way nothing else can.
We do our best to love, to be good people while we’re here. Then we die. It’s not something to deny or dramatize, just the truth that frames everything else.
Befriending death is still new to me. Some days I slip back into old patterns. Other days something loosens: the vigilance, the urgency, the need to outrun what can’t be outrun.
I still prepare. I still save and plan. Maybe some part of me always will. But I’m learning to let death sit beside me, rather than loom above. Its presence sharpens things. It makes life feel less like a problem to solve and more like something to pay attention to.
I don’t have answers. I’m just learning to look directly at the thing I spend most of my life avoiding.
What might death be trying to teach you?
With love, Ryan