My name is Azariah, and this is part of my story.

I was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness. From my earliest memories, I struggled with the distance between the love people preached and the fear and judgment I sometimes experienced. I had recurring nightmares about people in the Kingdom Hall turning into demons - everyone except the children and our mother. She never turned like the rest of them. In those dreams, she would give us the vital extra seconds we needed to escape, saving my sister’s life and my own.

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When I was ten, we were told our parents were separating. I remember the pain of being a child trying to understand what that meant for our family - for my sister and me, for our home, for the life we had known. I loved both of my parents. I didn’t know how to make sense of losing the life where we were all together.

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Writing this now, I’m realizing how hard it is to go back there. I’ve told parts of this story, but I’ve never really returned to those moments and let myself feel them again. As I try to put them into words, I’m remembering that I was only ten. I was living through something I couldn’t fix, and I couldn’t yet understand everything that was happening around me.

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Our parents had both grown up in the religion and married young - my mother at eighteen, my father at twenty-five. Their relationship had become toxic, and my mother left. I can understand more of that now. Back then, they were my mom and dad, and our family was coming apart.

My sister and I began going back and forth between them. My mother remained the person whose love had always felt unconditional. But on my father’s side, I heard her blamed for breaking up the family. “Satan must have gotten to her,” they would say. “You shouldn’t be with your mother.”

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It hurt to hear them speak that way about her. I loved these people too. They were my family, and I was being asked to distrust the mother whose love I had always known. I didn’t have the words then to explain how wrong that felt. I just knew that loving my mother shouldn’t have been something I had to defend.

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As I experienced more of the world outside the religion, I made friends who weren’t Jehovah’s Witnesses. I found goodness in people I had been taught to see as outsiders. I learned that there were thousands of religions, each with people who believed they knew the truth.

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Who could say they knew the one true God or the only right way? How could I trust a God I had never seen, especially when so much pain had been caused in his name?

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Still, at twelve, I decided to give it everything I had. If Jehovah was real, I wanted to do everything in my power to dedicate my life to him.

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For a year, I prayed every morning and every night. I went door to door and began pioneering as a child. I offered Jehovah my future: I would get baptized, become a full-time pioneer, and travel the world spreading his name and his message.

 

I had one request - some sign that he was there.

 

It didn’t have to be anything extraordinary.

 

A bird outside my window. A shooting star when I looked up at the right moment. Anything I could recognize as an answer.

 

But after a year, I still felt nothing.

 

I got baptized anyway.

 

I was still hoping. I remember being lowered into the pool. The water felt overchlorinated, and the moment felt fake to me. I came out with my eyes burning. Around me, people were smiling and clapping, but through my eyes, everything looked plastic. The applause felt disconnected from what was happening inside me.

 

At the very moment I was supposed to be confirming my faith, I felt I had made a mistake. I knew I had to find God another way.

 

After that, I stopped attending the Kingdom Hall and stopped going to my father’s house. But the elders kept trying to reach me - calling my mother’s phone and coming to our door.

 

I avoided talking to them because I was afraid I would lose my temper and get disfellowshipped. Now that I was baptized, I understood that could mean losing contact with my father’s side of the family - the people I had grown up with and loved.

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Eventually, after we hadn’t answered the door, they entered our home uninvited. My mother confronted them, upset that they had come inside without permission. I finally came out and agreed to talk.

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A meeting was arranged at the Kingdom Hall. I went before the elders and my father. Somehow, they had heard that I was smoking marijuana, which I had begun experimenting with after stepping away from the religion. They asked whether I was repentant and willing to return.

 

I said, “Absolutely not.” 

 

 

At that time, what I felt they and the God they represented had done to my family seemed unforgivable. I told them I would no longer be part of the organization.

 

I was thirteen. I understood that my decision could mean losing contact with my father’s side of the family. Once again, I felt blamed and condemned, just as my mother had been.

 

They disfellowshipped me.

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I walked out of those doors feeling freer than I ever had. But I was also a hurt boy. I went straight to downtown Olympia, Washington, and began my party-boy phase far too young.

 

Later, after the disfellowshipping, I spoke with my grandmother. She cried and asked why I had gotten baptized. If I hadn’t, she said, they would still be able to talk to me.

 

I asked her to listen to what she was saying. I would still be living outside the religion, making the same choices, and not dedicating my life to Jehovah. But because I had gone through that ceremony, we could no longer speak. I couldn’t understand how that made sense.

 

That wasn’t the last time I would ever speak to her, but it was the last time for years. I didn’t speak with that side of my family again until I was eighteen.

 

Looking back now, I forgive my family. I believe they were doing what they thought was right, following what they had always known. I can hold that forgiveness alongside the pain I felt as a child.

 

My dreams have stayed with me throughout my life. In them, I’ve been dragons and interdimensional beings. I’ve seen universes I couldn’t begin to describe.

 

One dream felt like an entire lifetime. I was older. I met a woman who became my wife, and we had a child. In that dream, they were my family.

 

One morning, I went to work and never came back.

 

Instead, I woke up as fifteen-year-old Azi again - heartbroken and confused. The life I remembered was a dream, but waking up didn’t erase how much I loved them or how deeply I felt their absence.

 

That dream, and that family, will be with me for all my days.

 

My experiences changed my view forever, but they also became the beginning of a much longer and more difficult chapter. From thirteen to thirty-two, my life became a preview of how far I could fall and how much I would have to learn to find my way back. I battled addiction and learned many of life’s hardest lessons in the most painful ways possible. I made choices that cost me relationships, stability, time, and opportunities. I totaled almost too many cars to count, each one becoming part of a larger pattern I didn’t yet know how to break.

 

There were years when I was surviving from one consequence to the next, trying to outrun pain I didn’t know how to face. Addiction became both an escape and a prison. I kept learning, but often only after the lesson had become unavoidable. Looking back, I can see how much of my life was shaped by searching - for God, for freedom, for belonging, and eventually for a way to become honest with myself.

 

I questioned organized religion, but I never stopped searching for something deeper.

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Years later, I had experiences that challenged how I understood myself and the world.

 

I had just returned from Northern Nights music festival, where I’d been partying all weekend. I had met beautiful people, made new friends, and had conversations about DMT, healing, and experiences that were difficult to explain.

 

That first night back, I was at my mother’s house in West Marin, where my belongings were waiting because I was moving north. I stood on the porch smoking a cigarette, remembering the weekend and the people I had met.

 

Everything felt just right. Where I was, what I was doing, the people in my life - all of it.

 

Then my whole body started vibrating.

 

The best way I can describe it is that every cell, every atom, every fiber of my being felt like it was humming with energy. It was almost orgasmic - overwhelming, beautiful, and unlike anything I had ever experienced. It felt like love. It also frightened me.

 

I experienced it as a download, or a frequency exchange. The message I got was “Jesus Christ.” Given my history with Christianity, that was a deeply jarring thing to experience.

 

Don’t freak out and stop reading like I did.

 

I had maintained a sense of spirituality, but Christianity remained tangled up with the hurt and anger of my childhood.

 

At first, I shrugged it off as the whole weekend catching up with me at once - a freebie. That was the explanation my ego gave me, even though, deep down, I felt my soul knew it was something else.

 

The next day, I loaded my belongings and drove north.

 

After about eight hours on the road, I arrived late at night with groceries and everything I was moving. A bear had broken into the place where I was staying and torn it apart. Other workers were there, but the mess hadn’t been cleaned up. They were asleep on the couch.

 

I was angry. I woke them up, then went back outside to unload my truck.

 

While I was undoing a strap on a dresser, it happened again.

 

It was around the same time of night. I had been sober all day, and this time I hadn’t been standing there reflecting on the weekend or thinking about being on the right path. I remember looking up at the stars, wondering what was going on, and putting my trust in a power greater than myself.

 

Then the same overwhelming vibration returned.

 

Again, my whole body seemed to hum with energy.  It felt healing, loving, almost nirvanic. It was the most incredible feeling I had ever experienced, and it was also terrifying.

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Each of those experiences lasted about fifteen minutes. The message I experienced the second night was: “Go deeper. Keep going.”

 

Because of the conversations I’d had at the festival, I interpreted that as a reason to explore DMT. That was the choice I made at the time.

 

During the experience that followed, I encountered what felt to me like source.

 

What I saw was a perfect geometric diamond, yet it was also a beating heart - alive with extraordinary color and light. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

 

Within that vision, something dark seemed to constrict it. In that darkness, I saw what I understood as the suffering and cruelty of the world.

 

Then, with one movement of my hand, I experienced myself sweeping that darkness away.

 

The heart seemed able to beat fully again.

 

With that beat came a shockwave of brilliant light. In that moment, it felt as though I was witnessing - or participating in - the creation of a universe. Perhaps another universe, perhaps our own. That is how it felt inside the experience.

 

In the days that followed, I went back three more times, every other night. And the experiences I had are ones I am willing to share with anyone who truly wants to know.

 

I’m still exploring what all of this means. I’m describing what I experienced and how I understood it, with room for questions and for my understanding to change. I want Make It Nice to be a place where others can share experiences they find difficult to explain - spiritual, psychedelic, or otherwise - with curiosity, care, and freedom to disagree. A place to talk about the wonder, the fear, and how we carry these experiences into everyday life. You don’t need to share my beliefs to belong in the conversation. You’re welcome to bring your own story. “Make it nice” is a mantra I’ve adopted in daily life, and for anyone who doesn’t have a mantra yet, it is a simple, powerful one that you can adopt until you find your own.

Make it nice.