You Will Never Be the Same

Michael Raship appeared to fit in perfectly in the sheltered world of college freshmen who entered Harvard in 1979. He got along with everyone; he won the admiration of his classmates for left-brain abilities that placed him among the top scorers in the country on math competitions. Yet as he and his fellow Harvard students shared their tastes in rock music and their dreams for the future, Michael helplessly watched the gap between his real self and the face he presented to the world widen and deepen into a sundering gulf.

You Will Never Be the Same is a journey of self-discovery, told with gentle humor and raw honesty, weaving together such diverse themes as the forging of lifelong friendships, the struggle against social anxiety, the first steps in coming out as gay, and the seductive, potentially transformative powers of psychedelic drugs, set in a time period when the nascent gay rights movement was a tentative newcomer on college campuses and the late sixties still loomed large in the collective consciousness as a bygone era of revolution and liberation. The memoir will resonate with any reader who ever found themselves leading a life that looked so right on the outside while simultaneously feeling so wrong on the inside.