The Toad Saved My Life

Before

For five years I was running on fumes.

That’s the truest way I can say it. Not a dramatic five years — a grey one. The kind where the days stopped having edges. I’d wake up already tired. I’d move through the hours like I was underwater, watching my own hands do ordinary things — make the coffee, answer the message, nod in the right places — while the real me sat somewhere far behind my eyes, drifting a little further out to sea every week.

Grief did that. It didn’t arrive like a wave that breaks and pulls back. It moved in. It rearranged the furniture and never left. And when it got too heavy to carry sober, the drink carried some of it for me. Just enough to get to sleep. Then just enough to get to lunch. I told everyone I was fine. I got very, very good at fine.

But there were nights. Quiet ones, with the lights off. And in that dark the exhausted mind starts lying to you — it dresses the worst thing up as rest, as relief, as a way to finally put the weight down. I came closer to the edge of that than I ever told a single living person. More than once. I’m not going to dress it up now either, because the whole reason this exists is the people sitting in that exact dark tonight, believing the same lie, certain no one can see them.

I know how invisible you become in there. I know how the world keeps moving like you’re already gone.

I had no idea I was three months away from the thing that would crack the whole world open.

The man who saw me

It was a field. Music, strangers, somewhere I’d gone mostly to disappear in a crowd.

And one man looked at me — really looked — and saw straight through the fine. He didn’t try to fix me. He didn’t hand me advice or a phone number for someone to talk to. He just held my eye for a second too long and let me know, without a word, that he could see the thing I’d been hiding for years. That alone undid something in me. To be seen when you’ve spent five years making sure no one looks.

He gave me a card. A retreat. Costa Rica. Come for five days, he said. Come and heal.

Then he was gone back into the noise, and I was standing there holding a small piece of card like it was burning my hand.

The three months

That card sat on my side for three months.

In daylight I thought it was ridiculous. A jungle. Strangers. Some ceremony. Not for someone like me. I almost threw it away more times than I can count. But at 3am, when the lying was loudest, I’d find myself holding it again. Turning it over. A door I wasn’t ready to walk through, sitting quietly in the corner of the room — waiting for the night I finally was.

Booking it felt less like a decision and more like the last move of someone who had run all the way out of other ideas.

The toad

I remember the dread on the mat. Bone-deep. Every part of me screaming to get up and leave. The facilitator was calm, the light was low, and I was more afraid than I had ever been — because some part of me knew this was real, and that there was no turning back once it began.

Then the toad. 5-MeO-DMT.

And the world I’d been drowning in for five years simply — let go.

There was a roar, and then there was no me to hear it. No name. No grief. No body on a mat in a jungle. I dissolved. I became everything and nothing at once, and for a heartbeat I was terrified, the way you’d be terrified watching yourself disappear. And then the terror turned, the way fear turns into falling and falling turns into flying.

I wasn’t alone in there. I felt them before I understood them — presences, vast and ancient and impossibly kind. Sacred beings, watching over the unraveling of me, holding me the way I hadn’t let anyone hold me in years. There was a light, and the light was love, and the love was not a feeling — it was the actual fabric of the thing, the material the whole universe is cut from. I had spent five years certain I was worthless and unseen, and in that place I understood, all at once and beyond all argument, that I had never been either.

I have never felt so alive. Not before, not since. More alive in that dissolving than I had ever felt with a heartbeat and a name.

And every dark night, every drink, every quiet calculation at the edge — it all came into perspective at once. Not erased. Not forgiven. Understood. Seen for what it was, from somewhere high enough to finally see the whole shape of it.

The return

Then I came back. Into my body. Into the room. Into a face wet with tears I didn’t remember crying.

I came back with new eyes. I mean that literally — the jungle looked drenched in colour, the air felt like a gift, my own hands looked like a miracle I’d been ignoring my whole life. The weight I’d carried for five years was simply not there anymore. Not lifted. Gone.

I understand now. I understand something I genuinely cannot put into words — and I’ve stopped trying to. Some things you don’t explain. You just carry them differently for the rest of your life.

The mission

The toad saved my life. I’ll say it plainly, because it’s mine to say: I would not be here without those five days, and I will not pretend otherwise to sound measured.

And a life that was handed back to you is not a thing you keep quietly. From the moment I came home, the mission was obvious. There are people right now in the exact dark I was in — running on fumes, drifting out to sea, certain no one sees them, half-believing the lie. Most of them will never get a stranger in a field with a card.

So I’ll be the field. I’ll be the card.

That’s the whole point of Tiny Little Treasures — to reach the ones who feel helpless and let them know there’s a door. To tell the truth about these medicines honestly, with the risks and the law named, no hype, no selling anyone a miracle. To put real stories where frightened people can find them at 3am. To keep a lifeline visible on every page. And one day, to pay for that door to open for people who could never afford to walk through it themselves.

I want to save as many people as I possibly can on the way through this life. That’s it. That’s the mission. Everything else — the website, the films, the design, the rules — is just the machinery built to carry that one thing.