“We were all on our way to a friend’s birthday cabin trip. Me and my partner, we fell asleep in the back seat. To get comfortable, I took my seatbelt off. When I woke up, the car was upside down. Everyone else was okay, luckily.”
Within hours, she would be diagnosed with a complete ASIA A T5 spinal cord injury, paralysed from the chest down. Kacia Julius was 31 years old when her life changed on November 9th 2024.
“I knew right away I wanted to document this journey. I didn’t know where it was going to lead me.”
What it led to was one of the most compelling and unique recovery stories on the internet today, inspiring and piquing the interest of millions.
But Kacia’s warmth, honesty and dry wit wouldn’t be the only thing making her journey stand out. “I think my foundation for this experiment is to intuitively do like few days on, few days off. Or maybe a few days on, a couple days off or one day off. As needed.”
Kacia isn’t talking about physio. She’s talking about magic mushrooms.
“When you have an injury like this, your mindset is everything. So why not at least try something that would help with how you feel about this new life, and where you’re going to take it?”
On March 22nd, Kacia posted a video to her Instagram captioned: “What happens to a paralyzed body after taking a microdose of mushrooms.” It captured millions.
Twenty minutes after taking the mushrooms, we see her legs shake vigorously as she uses her hands to support the influx of movement — and it feels like witnessing a miracle. She describes the process as an “experiment of the self,” prompting viewers to follow her journey and stay updated on her recovery. That’s exactly what they did.
Microdosing, typically understood as an almost imperceptible practice, looks a little different in Kacia’s case.
“You’re like, okay, my legs are moving. Now my stomach will contract and if I’m in my chair it will literally shoot me back like this.” Kacia explains while enacting an intense full-body jolt. “It’s like, whoa, I’m going on a ride right now. I gotta hold on, I gotta brace myself. There’ll be a lot of shaking, and you’ll just see an insane amount of muscle activation in your legs. That first time was pretty fun.”
A 2023 review published in Neurotrauma Reports analysed self-reported accounts from people with spinal cord injuries across online forums, to gain a deeper understanding of their psychedelic experiences. The review found consistent outcomes across participants: intense leg spasms, muscle contractions in the torso and abdomen, temperature dysregulation, among other physical responses. These reactions were not reported in people without spinal cord injuries taking the same substances.
While this review is postured as an awareness paper, the goal of the research is to signal to clinicians that this phenomenon is already happening, and that understanding it further, could be pivotal.
“I was definitely just seeking out the physical health aspect. The mental health side ended up being like the bonus. The unexpected bonus.”
Microdosing as we know it today tends to centre around mental health. Commonly known for slowing rumination, mitigating anxiety and regulating emotions, it may not have been Kacia’s initial reason to pick up the mushrooms, but the mental health benefits revealed themselves anyway.
“The thought patterns were perpetuating a horrible relationship with this injury, with myself. Once I started microdosing and I started to see that, things have shifted so much, so drastically.” She continues: “I was struggling, dealing with really bad programming and bad seated beliefs from the internet and through doom scrolling. So when I was faced with that, it allowed me to reprogram that. Now, I can tell you, my whole life just feels so much better.”
She does not downplay the severity of what happened to her, it simply does not define her world. Kacia’s recovery is proof that positivity and honesty don’t need to be opposites, and that dark times do not require a dark world to exist in.
“Being online and seeing me online, you might think — oh wow, she’s just like a positive person. I really do believe in just spreading mostly positive messaging because I know what it’s like to be on the darker side of the internet, and getting negative programming. But I also want to speak the truth, and show that there was a period where things were just negative. I hope to shift the content I create to share that side of things, but also have fun.”
Kacia is candid that the optimism people might see on screen was not where she started, nor is it always where she is.
“There’s this feeling of restlessness and impatience that I struggle with. I’m sure everyone in a wheelchair with this injury gets that. I wouldn’t say microdosing eliminates that, but it allowed things to come up in a vulnerable way that allowed me to process and deal with them.”
While it can only be inferred, what Kacia is describing has a name in neuroscience: The Default Mode Network. The DMN is described as the part of the brain that activates in stillness and idle thought. In people navigating trauma, it can also become the home of rumination. It acts like a loop that feeds on itself, and is very hard to step off of voluntarily.
In studies that look at psilocybin as a treatment option for veterans with PTSD and end-of-life-distress in terminal cancer patients, psilocybin has shown a particular ability to slow that system down. The findings show enhanced brain flexibility as a result, making it easier for people to process trauma, and even adapt to it in a healthier, more accepting way.
“I don’t want people to think that microdosing is going to change my life and I’m just going to be happy. You are going to be presented with clarity and emotions, that you then have to handle on your own.”
The integration of psilocybin in Kacia’s recovery journey is not the sole catalyst behind her progress, but one tool among many. “One thing for sure is to, if you can, find your community. Find someone else, at least one person that has the same injury as you. Someone that’s like years out or maybe someone that’s also fresh. I think that is hugely relaxing.”
“There’s something that’s steady in that,” she continues, “because otherwise, you’re going to be constantly comparing yourself to everyone else that doesn’t have this, and you’re going to feel like the other.”
It is a harsh but important truth. During the most difficult chapters of our lives, the natural instinct might be to isolate, the desire to turn inward and disappear. But if we know anything, it’s that community, and more specifically connection, is a form of medicine all on its own.
That connection aspect, for Kacia, exists in more ways than one.
“I met my partner like 4 months before the accident, and so we were very new, very in love.” Her partner Falak was with her the night of the accident. They have not left each other’s side since. “I genuinely feel so lucky. He’ll say that he feels lucky too, because not many partnerships make it through these accidents. And it’s so unfortunate. I hear that so much and it just makes me really sad.”
Among the many things that draw people to Kacia’s videos, her love story stands beautifully on its own. It is real-time proof of something most people wonder about in their hardest moments, that being what tests love can truly endure.
“They lived that spiral with me. They stuck around. And we’ve come out of it together, and now I feel like we’re in a very comfortable place. And we can speak on how to navigate that now.”
But even as community and connection have strengthened Kacia’s path toward recovery, she acknowledges the most important relationship worth nurturing after a life-altering event: the relationship with oneself.
“As a contrary to all that, get solitude if you don’t have that. I realized I didn’t have that because I was sleeping in like my mom’s living room and I was just always having people come through. I didn’t realize that I needed to ask for more privacy. I needed to advocate for myself. When I did, I got way more clarity. I was like, I’m going to start microdosing. All that came through because I finally asked for what I wanted.”
Kacia puts it simply: “You always have yourself. You return to yourself in a sense. You just realize — I am sick of the darkness of this. I need to find a way to have fun and lighten up. Find something that turns your brain off, turns that hyperprocessing part off, and gets your body moving. Just move.”
It felt like the only question left to ask was: where do you see yourself in five years?
“I just want to help other people with this injury. Help coaching people through it. I was interested in coaching before the injury, like I was hoping to become a health coach” she says. With a life that is ultimately different, but fueled by community, humour, and purpose, Kacia’s journey is just getting started. “I hope to just have a really cool community to hang out with. Build a commune. Grow a garden. An accessible one. The revolution will hopefully happen. That’s my plan.”