I was lost in a party of drink and drugs
At 26, Daniella Moyles ditched her carrer as a model and radio host and took off to travel the world. In this candid extract from her new memoir, she charts her wild missteps on that journey to inner peace
THE Burning Man festival takes place over 10 days every September in Black Rock City in northwestern Nevada. For 50 weeks a year this piece of land is nothing more than an arid lake basin until upwards of 70,000 like-minded people arrive to create a temporary community built on 10 simple shared principles. It is a concentrated bubble of the very best and most beautiful parts of the human spirit. Every one of your guards will drop here and you will be sincerely cheered for who you are beneath life’s pressures and constraints.
Compliments and genuine praise flow freely, small talk doesn’t exist and you will experience a primal human connection that you didn’t even know you were desperately missing. Wild and wonderful conversations, eye contact and genuine smiles with strangers and absolutely nothing filtered through phones or screens.
It’s truly mind-blowing how good this is for your soul. Learning how much emptiness resides in our everyday interactions and how I could change that is the most valuable gift I brought home…
Burning Man is a fervently respectful adult playground, the likes of which I’d challenge anyone to find the world over. You cannot and will not fail here. You will only grow in so many more ways than you ever thought you could…
I encourage you to put it on your bucket list. It will change your approach to life.
These are some extracts from a piece I wrote after attending my first burn, nearly a year to the day before my mental health was turned on its head, and reflecting on these words, the festival was clearly a welcome respite from the accumulation of stress in my life at the time.
In hindsight, I think it did put the brakes on the steady dip of my brewing meltdown for a little while because it was an overwhelmingly enlightening experience, one I floated on for quite some time after – most likely because it was also the first time I tried psychedelic drugs. I had just turned 28 and up until that point the most experimental I’d ever got was a few drags on a bad joint. Weed just did not agree with me. It made me anxious and paranoid every time, inducing the kind of high I was willing to be over and putting me in a state that was a far cry from the slightly sedated, giggly sensation I’d anticipated.
It had been hammered into me from a young age at home and in school that drugs are bad and if you take them, you will die. So based on that information and the supporting handful of disappointing dabbles over my teenage years, I’d decided that drugs and me just did not match. I’d always been certain that I would be a member of the unlucky 1% who tries ecstasy for the first time and ends up on the news as a tragic fatality.
But the older I got and the more autonomy I gained over my thinking, the more bored I became with that story and the fear-mongering that always shrouded any further conversation on the topic. I was curious about the undeniable popularity of recreational drugs – it made sense to me that everyone must be doing them for a reason.
Arriving at Burning Man, my mindset was primed and the setting was perfect. My first experience with psychedelic drugs was an astoundingly positive one, an explosive introduction to an inner world I’d never known. I spent 10 days in nirvana, at ease within the cosmos, flowing with the booming music and lunacy, surrounded by a constant dance of fire and lights.
Every trip was more sublime than I could have ever imagined, unlocking boundless new levels of love, gratitude and joy I didn’t know I was capable of, a freedom and escapism beyond anything I thought possible. Cut to a year later and I desperately wanted a repeat of the same, a return to the source of my greatest high to collect a quick bypass to a chemically induced expansive sense of place, purpose and meaning that would linger with the same rippling effects it had had the last time around.
Somewhere in my own muddled logic, it made perfect sense for me to turn my back on prescription pills and run straight into the warm, open arms of some illegal class As. Of course, my mindset was entirely different on this occasion, filled mostly with fear, worry and a constant hum of uneasiness, and my experience this time around reflected that.
Thankfully, I had the wherewithal to abstain from psychedelics, all too aware of their ability to hurtle you into a seemingly eternal state of pain, shame and torture indistinguishable from psychosis when the balance of your inner chemistry is awry. Instead, I ingested cocktails of synthetic dopamineenhancing stimulants in search of the insightful beauty and happiness I had found there before.
But of course it didn’t happen like that. I couldn’t tap into even a fraction of the wondrous, almost sacred realities I’d entered into in this same landscape just a year earlier. In fact, it was like the drugs didn’t work at all. The highs were short-lived and messy, my serotonin levels so depleted on arrival that I was in a deficit after the first dab, but for 10 days straight I kept taking more and more.
The relief of being in a foreign place, away from every trigger and stressor, was almost exhilarating
‘It will change your approach to life’ ‘I injested cocktails of stimulants’
enough to fool me into thinking I felt some semblance of happiness over the first number of days. But then the comedown would hit me, and hard. So for the last half of the festival I was just doing my best to keep it at bay, knowing it would impose its full expression of sheer terror on me in the near future.
Leaving the festival, I was exhausted and despondent, the little voice inside my head chattering relentlessly in catastrophic riddles, and as the hours ticked by I began literally writhing in my own skin.
Over the following days, I fell into a depression so acute that for a split second while sitting alone in a car in San Francisco, I considered running out in front of traffic to make it all stop.
What the f*** was I doing? I’d left home determined to mend and heal, to do the travel thing where you find yourself amid the chaos of life. It had been less than three weeks and I’d already made everything so much worse, and of course I had, because I was still an idiot.
Travel in and of itself will not help you figure anything out: all growth and insight is earned, and I was just not ready to put that work in yet. What travel did give me, whether I liked it or not, was time, an essential tool to start the process.
And now, faced with nothing but time to consider the state I had got myself into, I booked a flight from San Francisco to Anchorage, Alaska, in search of a nature high instead of a chemical one. But that wouldn’t be anywhere near the end of my self-medicating.
For the next several months I’d turn to drugs as a source of relief over and over and over, until eventually I found a reason to stop.
But one of the most difficult things to overcome after leaving home was untangling my sense of self from that
incredibly intense and utterly codependent year-long relationship I’d been in up until the day I’d walked onto the plane. I had always approached my romantic relationships with a guarded, withdrawn and almost masculine energy – until this one.
For the first time, I thought I had allowed myself to crack open a window to a more gentle and feminine part of myself.
In my utter obsession I had tried to lean into the relationship, to nurture it in a way I wished I had been capable of before, and still it hadn’t worked.
In fact, it had mostly contributed to the downward spiral of my mental health, yet I’d clung to it with all my might until the bitter end. It had broken my heart at a time when I was already broken, and only in my desperation to get well did I finally feel I had to forget it, for fear I would otherwise forget myself.
In that headspace, trying to cultivate the emotional maturity necessary to forgive and move forward without holding onto anger, resentment, envy or any other horrible feeling that can linger from a break-up took months of reflection and self-talk, motivated through the many regressions by any ease in my sense of heartbreak. Alaska is where I would begin to accept that if I couldn’t yet let it go, I at least had to let it be.
I hit Los Angeles to stay with another friend from home. I’ve always loved LA, but anyone who’s been there can confirm it is the perfect vortex of distraction and anonymity, a superficial city of endless opportunity, a place where nobody demands a shred of authenticity beyond whatever beautiful, together shell you choose to present – and there’s a nice stretch of beach. Ideal.
On the evenings we’d go out for dinner, I would require a bottle of wine to cope with the sensory demands of a busy restaurant, but to consider a further outing into the night, the support of some personality-propping drugs was needed without exception. I was still dealing with a constant simmer of daily anxiety and these substances were the only thing that allowed me to function in social settings without having to curl up into a ball in the corner.
On my last night in the city we really went for it. I had to be up in the early hours of the morning to board an expensive last-minute flight I’d booked to Costa Rica, but that didn’t stop me from swallowing a small parcel of MDMA and dissolving another few rocks in my vodka and cranberry for good measure. It was just an added bonus when I befriended the very generous owner of a few grams of cocaine.
The night passed by quickly and all that remains from it now is some vague flashing memories of me, a girl from Kildare, twerking definitely very well in an LA drag club and then sitting on my friend’s
‘My friend informed me that I’d get arrested’
balcony as the sun came up, screaming, ‘Do you know how much I love you?’ down at the phone at my brother and a selection of others I’d decided to annoy during their workday thanks to the time difference.
In the middle of one such forced conversation, it suddenly dawned on me that I’d a flight to catch, and as I began to wrap it up with a couple more declarations of love and an explanation that I had to get to the airport, my wise old friend on the other end of the phone informed me that I was ‘so high you’ll 100% get arrested if you go to the airport right now’. He also demanded I give the phone to the friend I was staying with and proceeded to make him promise that he would not let me leave for the airport in the condition I was in.
Now I’ve never been arrested for the use of narcotics in the United States, but I’m sure it would be a costly and incredibly distressing experience, so I’m very grateful to have been stopped in my delirious tracks that morning.
I couldn’t even regret missing that overpriced flight when the alternative was calling my family for a six-figure bail. But waking up on my friend’s couch later that day as night began to creep across the skyline outside his window, I was beyond disoriented. It took a few minutes for the previous night and the decisions I’d made as a result of it to reassemble in my head, and when they did I was awash with self-loathing and an uncontrollable case of the shakes.
I tried to sleep it off and promised myself I would make amends and get back on track the following morning. But I’d slept for the entire day, so of course sleep would elude me for the night.
Instead, I spent it mostly twitching myself in and out of a twilight state, sweating profusely and trying to decide if I was actually having a heart attack or not. I think it’s safe to say that at this point I’d probably lost sight of why I’d started to experiment with drugs in the first place – there was no profound beauty to be found here, no insightful exploration of an inner world.
I’d left home over two months ago and, outside of my week-long stay in Alaska, I hadn’t spent any time alone or outside of my comfort zone. I’d been safely hopping from friend to friend and high to high.
The thoughts came loud and fast. Maybe I was supposed to miss that flight to Costa Rica. Maybe I couldn’t do it. Maybe the world really was a scary and dangerous place, and maybe I would just stay in LA with my friend and all the comforts of home a little longer.
In fact, maybe I should book a flight home.
In the dark of a fear-filled night, as soon as that thought broke through into conscious consideration, I rescheduled my flight from LA to Costa Rica for the next possible departure on a backpacker’s budget and told myself this was the real beginning.
I could do this.
I would do this.