Like you, I've been lucky. I've been in quite a few situations observed by the Grim Reaper, and mostly avoided them with complete inability to appreciate the risks. And yet all of them were formative experiences that took some time to come to terms with afterwards.

You did the right thing. You tried to accept a culture on its own terms. It responded and changed you forever. Take that - it's yours.

Whether you still like rocks or not is beside the point - what you have is an understanding of a system. This knowledge, imo, is the most valuable - not the facts as such, but how they interrelate to each other into a microcosmic world view.  I am very much dedicated to the holographic idea that microcosms illustrate and inform macrocosms.

You can't be me, I'm taken