There's a particular kind of tiredness that doesn't come from working too hard. It comes from being someone you're not, for too many hours a day, for too many years in a row. If you've ever walked into your apartment after a perfectly ordinary dinner with friends and lain face-down on the floor for twenty minutes before you could even take your shoes off — you know what I mean.

I spend a lot of my time talking to people who come to plant medicine for exactly this reason. Not because they're chasing visions. Not because they want a mystical experience to put on Instagram. Because they've been performing a version of themselves since they were about seven years old, and they can't carry it anymore. Ayahuasca, psilocybin, and the other master plants have a strange way of asking the question nobody in your life has ever asked you directly: who are you when you stop pretending?

The Second Job Nobody Pays You For

Masking is the term psychologists use for it, and it originally came out of autism research — the exhausting work of studying other humans like you're prepping for an exam, memorizing their jokes, their cadences, how long they hold eye contact. But the behaviour isn't limited to autistic folks. Anyone who grew up being told, in a thousand small ways, that the real version of them was unacceptable learns to put on a costume. Addicts do it. Trauma survivors do it. Queer kids in small towns do it. Depressed high-functioning professionals do it so well their own partners don't notice.

Here's the thing about masking: it works. That's the trap. You get good at it. You walk into the room, you perform competence, you perform warmth, you perform interest in the weather, and nobody suspects a thing. You hold it together in public so completely that when you fall apart in private, there's no witness and no language for it. Just a sense that something is terribly wrong and it must be your fault, because look how fine everyone thinks you are.

The burnout creeps in slow. First it's bone-deep tiredness after easy days. Then it's dreading things you used to enjoy. Then you're cancelling plans because the thought of performing for another three hours makes you want to cry. You tell yourself you're lazy. You tell yourself to try harder. Which is darkly funny, because trying harder is the whole problem.

Why So Many People in Ceremony Are Really Here for This

I've sat in enough circles now to notice a pattern. The people who come to ayahuasca or psilocybin retreats often arrive with a presenting problem — depression, a stuck relationship, a drinking habit they can't quit, grief that won't move. But if you talk to them on day three, after the plant has done some work, a different story usually comes out. Underneath the stated reason is almost always the same quieter one: I don't know who I actually am. I've been performing for so long I can't find the person underneath.

Plant medicine doesn't fix that in a single night. Nothing does. But what the medicine seems to do, when it's held well, is temporarily switch off the part of the brain that runs the performance. The internal monitor goes quiet. The constant self-editing stops. And in that gap, people meet pieces of themselves they haven't spoken to in decades — the kid who loved weird things, the body that wanted to move, the grief that was never allowed, the anger that got swallowed because anger wasn't safe.

That's often described as healing, and it is. But it's more accurate to call it a return. You're not becoming someone new. You're being introduced, sometimes for the first time since childhood, to who you already were underneath the costume.

The Overlap With Addiction

I want to say something specifically about addiction here, because masking and addiction live in the same house. If you've spent twenty years performing a version of yourself that isn't you, you need something to take the edge off at the end of the day. For a lot of people, that something is alcohol. For others, it's weed, or benzos, or food, or compulsive work, or scrolling until 2 a.m. The substance isn't really the problem. The substance is the thing making an impossible life tolerable.

This is part of why plant medicines — particularly ibogaine for opioid dependence, ayahuasca for alcohol and stimulant use, and psilocybin for a wider spectrum of compulsive behaviours — have shown such interesting results in early research. They don't just interrupt the chemistry of craving. They go to the root. They ask the person why they built the cage in the first place, and they often answer with surprising clarity. The addiction, it turns out, wasn't the enemy. It was a strategy for surviving a life that didn't have room for the real you.

• Ibogaine — primarily researched for opioid dependence; famously intense, requires strict medical screening, often done in dedicated clinics in Mexico and Costa Rica.
• Ayahuasca — long used in Amazonian traditions and increasingly studied for depression, trauma, and substance use; works best in a ceremonial container with experienced facilitators.
• Psilocybin — the subject of some of the most promising current clinical trials for depression and alcohol use disorder; retreats are now legal and available in a handful of jurisdictions.
• San Pedro / huachuma — gentler and more heart-centred than ayahuasca, often chosen by people who want depth without the full ego-dissolution of other medicines.

None of this is a shortcut. The medicine is one piece. The integration — the slow, unglamorous work of actually changing your life afterwards — is where the healing lives.

What Dropping the Mask Actually Looks Like

Whether or not you ever sit in ceremony, the real work after any kind of psychedelic healing (or any kind of serious self-honesty, for that matter) is the same: you start letting the real version of yourself exist in the world, in small ways, and you notice that the world mostly doesn't punish you for it.

You stop forcing eye contact that feels like staring at the sun. You stop laughing at jokes you don't find funny. You stop apologizing for needing quiet — because needing quiet isn't a character flaw, it's just information about your nervous system. You stop treating your preferences like confessions. A few friendships might fall away, and that's data too; the ones built on your performance couldn't survive without it. The real ones get better. People can feel the difference between someone performing warmth and someone being awkwardly, genuinely present.

The biggest change is internal. Imagine carrying a heavy backpack everywhere for twenty years and finally setting it down. Your shoulders come down. Your jaw unclenches. You have energy left at the end of the day — energy you can spend on things you actually enjoy, instead of recovering from things you endured.

If You're Considering a Retreat

If any of this is landing uncomfortably close to home, and you're starting to wonder whether a plant medicine retreat might be part of your way out, here's what I'd want you to know as someone who's spent years in and around this world:

1. Choose the facilitators, not the location. A beautiful jungle lodge with mediocre facilitators is a worse experience than a modest centre run by people who actually know what they're doing. Ask who's holding the ceremony, how long they've been trained, and what their lineage or qualifications are.
2. Screen honestly for medical and psychiatric contraindications. Serious SSRIs, lithium, certain cardiac conditions, personal or family history of psychosis — these matter. A reputable retreat will screen you carefully. If they don't, that's your answer.
3. Budget for integration, not just the retreat. The weeks and months after are where the actual change happens. A retreat without an integration plan is a holiday with hallucinations.
4. Go in with a question, not a demand. People who approach the medicine with "fix me" tend to have harder times than those who approach with "show me what I need to see." The plant doesn't take orders.
5. Trust your gut on the vibe. If a retreat's marketing feels sales-y, if the facilitator talks more about themselves than the medicine, if the pricing is opaque — walk away. There are good places out there. You can afford to be picky.

The mask feels like protection, but it's actually a cage. It keeps you safe from rejection, sure. It also keeps you from rest, from genuine connection, and from the relief of just being a person instead of a project. You don't have to drop it all at once. Nobody does. Start small. Let one unguarded thing be true in one safe place. Notice how it feels. Notice that the people worth keeping don't flinch.

For readers who are curious about taking the next step, a range of carefully screened ayahuasca, psilocybin, and ibogaine retreats focused on this kind of deeper self-reclamation can be browsed on our marketplace here. Whatever you decide, know this: the goal was never to be normal. Normal was the obstacle. The person underneath the performance is almost always worth meeting.