April 2025. A glorious sunny day in London, the kind they hadn’t seen in months. Joe was lying on the lawn in Mark and Ben’s garden, a week after they had announced their engagement. Beside him, with her head resting gently on his chest, was his fiancée, Serena, lost in thoughtful silence.

“Can you still feel it?” Joe asked.

“A little,” she replied, “but I haven’t had any visuals for a few hours”.

Five hours earlier, at exactly 10 a.m., they had all taken a tab of LSD together, along with Mark, Ben and Sadir, another of their psychonaut friends. The group had naturally split in two. On one side was Joe, dancing half-naked in the living room in front of the speakers. On the other were everyone else, sitting in the garden, quietly taking in the ever-changing and colorful beauty of the world around them.

It was a familiar pattern during their trips. On LSD – but also on mushrooms, 2C-B and every other psychedelic – Joe would suddenly become a different person, like a werewolf under a full moon. Within half an hour, he was in another dimension. He bounced from one side of the room to the other. He filled notebooks and his laptop with bizarre notes. He collected random objects and arranged them into what he called “altars”, though to anyone sober they looked like nothing more than a bizarre pile of unrelated things. He was like a child absorbed in his toys – which wouldn’t have been a problem, except that no one else in the group wanted to play that way with him.

“I’ve still got visuals,” Joe continued excitedly. “Look how red this leaf is. It almost looks like the head of a boa constrictor.”

“Nice,” she said, without even making the effort to look at the leaf. “But I need some silence now…”

Hearing the unmistakable note of frustration in her voice, Joe placed the leaf gently on Serena’s chest, pressed his index finger to his lips, and fell silent.

He wasn’t used to that kind of silence – or rather, he wasn’t used to silence at all, since it was almost impossible for him to experience it. His mind was always crowded with sounds, thoughts, worries, ideas, background noise. But the silence in that garden felt different. Joe noticed it immediately, first with curiosity, then with growing irritation. Every sound carried exactly the same weight, as if a sound engineer had levelled every channel to the same volume, forcing him to pay attention to each one at the same time, in exactly the same way, with exactly the same intensity.

Joe widened his eyes and shook his head, as though trying to reset the levels and restore them to normal, but nothing changed. So he began listing every sound he could hear. The rustling of the leaves in the tall trees that bordered the Central Line tracks was just as loud as the train wheels grinding along the rails. The music coming from the neighbour on the left was no quieter than the voices from a television in the house on the right. The birdsong blended seamlessly with the voices of Ben, Mark and Sadir chatting ten metres away in the garden. Even Serena’s breathing seemed indistinguishable from the distant roar of an aeroplane crossing the evening sky, leaving a pink streak against the fading blue.

“This must be what it feels like to have ADHD,” Joe thought, lingering for a few more seconds in that unbearable cacophony, as though determined to complete a mental experiment. “It must be the LSD,” he reassured himself, convinced that this was nothing more than a temporary effect of the acid.

Out of nowhere, the voices of a group of children burst into the air from the neighbours’ garden. They were playing some game or other – it didn’t matter what. For Joe, it was the final straw.

“Sorry, but I can’t do this,” he said to Serena. “This silence is deafening. I need to listen to some music.”

She said nothing, lost somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. Joe slipped a hand into his pocket, pulled out his earbuds and hurriedly put them in. He unlocked his phone, connected them via Bluetooth, and pressed play on one of his latest obsessions: Break Apart by Bonobo.

“It’s hard to take all this pain, it’s hard to take all this hate…“

Rhye’s voice, beautiful and melancholy, soothed Joe’s heart like a mother gently stroking her newborn. A sudden wave of peace spread through his body, flowing from his head to his feet. The memory of that deafening cacophony dissolved completely. In its place came the steady harp arpeggio, the sublime syncopated drums, the harmony of strings and synthesiser – the quiet genius of Bonobo.

Joe was obsessed with that song. It wasn’t unusual for him to put it on repeat and listen to it five, six, even ten times in a row.

“Do you ever listen to anything else?” Serena would tease him whenever he was cooking, hearing the same handful of songs playing on loop, day after day, for weeks on end.

“But I like it. What can I do?”

There was so much Joe didn’t know back then. He didn’t know, for example, that listening to the same song obsessively was a common ADHD trait. In fact, he had never even suspected he might have ADHD – one of his partners actually had ADHD and he felt they had nothing in common; nor did he realise that so many of his other quirks belonged to the same pattern: his obsession with calendar reminders, his relentless hyperactivity whether sober or high, his all-or-nothing mindset, his emotional dysregulation.

Really, Joe didn’t know much back then. He saw those peculiarities as simply parts of his personality, or as side effects of psychedelics, never recognising the thread that tied them all together. That deafening silence wasn’t caused by the LSD at all. It was instead his undiagnosed ADHD, briefly emerging from beneath the iron mask of anxiety he had unknowingly worn every day of his life.

“You are my favourite, you are my favourite, but we are phasing, but we are phasing…” Rhye kept singing.

Joe could never have imagined that one day those words would mean something entirely different. A year later, Break Apart would become the soundtrack to his breakup with Serena. And that same year, by the most convoluted and unexpected of paths, he would finally receive a diagnosis he hadn’t realised he had been waiting 37 years for.

“Complex ADHD, with anxiety and depression,” the psychiatrist’s report read.

Lying on the grass, with Rhye’s voice now singing the same lyrics for the third time in a row, Joe knew none of this. He had no idea that the very psychedelics he worshipped were slowly chipping away at the mask he had worn over his ADHD since childhood. It was such a perfect fit that it had allowed him to function in society and achieve objectively remarkable things: a PhD, a successful career in the charity sector, three published books (and soon a fourth one), a home of their own, and much more besides.

Trip after trip, his inner child kept pushing through the fraying costume of the adult who had spent his life chasing someone else’s dream: stability, the monotony  of identical days, and perhaps, one day, even a family.

“One day, maybe, one day…”

The sun was almost gone now. Joe was so absorbed by the song that he began singing along, his voice strained with emotion.

“Instead of something to break apart, instead, it’s just broke apart!“

His chest rose and fell with the music, abruptly lifting Serena’s head until she stirred awake. She mumbled something, but Joe didn’t hear her, completely lost in the song. She began to get up. Catching the movement from the corner of his eye, Joe pulled one earbud out.

“Where are you going?”

“Somewhere quieter…” she said, brushing the grass from her legs without looking at him.

“I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to…” he replied, slipping into the familiar tone of a child being told off – the same tone that, throughout his childhood and adolescence, had been wounded 20,000 times more deeply than it seemed to wound all the other “normal” and neurotypical children.

Serena walked back towards the others. Joe watched her go.

“I should have heard your fear, shame on me,” Rhye kept singing.

A year later, lying on another patch of grass with the same song playing in his ears, those words had become reality. Serena was no longer lying beside him. By April 2026, Joe found himself alone, with an ADHD diagnosis in one hand and nothing in the other. Looking back on that afternoon, on that deafening silence, he finally connected the dots.

“I thought it was the LSD,” he murmured to himself.

“It had been my ADHD all along.”

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© Giovanni Gaetani, 2026. All rights reserved.