I have to be real with you, my loyal readers. Poetry is lovely, friendships are beautiful, love conquers all, but the thing that really got me through my depression was a micro-acid trip on a Brooklyn rooftop this past August.
I was initially reluctant to share this — there absolutely still is taboo surrounding psychedelics, or drug use, generally. Then, a couple of things happened in succession. Jared sent me this essay recounting the efficacy of MDMA on ending self-loathing, and my old friend, Alex, of the Deep Fix, wrote about the instrumental role ayahuasca played in his recovery from addiction.
Alex references “Rolland Griffith’s landmark study out of Johns Hopkins University,” which I first encountered in the oft-cited How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan’s accounting of the history of psychedelic research and emerging new science. If you’re looking for academic resources on this subject, Pollan’s books, How to Change Your Mind and The Power of Plants, are accessible approaches to the research. It’s worth noting Pollack and his ilk may have distracted, whether intentionally or not, from the work that indigenous peoples have been doing for time eternal (thank you, Alex); and that the work of cis white men has been effective in opening up minds and taking psychedelics mainstream, contributing to the rise of today’s Psychedelic Renaissance.
Sasha’s disclaimers, “don’t try this at home”; “I do not advocate for anything illegal”; et al. are readily applicable here. Replace the word “addicted” with “depressed,” and Alex’s disclaimers echo the caveat I’d like to share:
There are many Roads to Recovery, and I like to think of myself as a non-judgmental advocate for numerous paths and modalities. Our addicted world needs all the help we can muster. And no one solution fits all.
But this solution fit me, and I think it could help many more.
my depression
The curious thing about my experience with depression was that, even in my darkest days, I never experienced self-loathing, a feeling that seems more prevalent that publicly acknowledged. I did, however, find myself at the edge of giving up, wavering on the border of self-harm; I did experience, almost daily, black holes of despair that seemed to subsume me — something I describe in a poem (in many, many poems, really) entitled, When I sing along with you:
in the mornings we stumble into forgotten wells of grief opened wide and in our homecoming return to them before we say goodnight
I did wonder what the point of this, of anything, was. And, as I wrote about in the inaugural essay of this newsletter, I did have friends, family, my partner insist, implore, exclaim in the face of my stubborn “anxiety disorder,” that my life was “good",” that I (we) “had everything” — only for these proclamations to rebound blithely away. I tried gratitude journaling, making lists of things that made me happy, meditation, nature, music, eating healthy, eating whatever the fuck I wanted, online shopping, minimalism, resting, exercising, junk television (hi, Bravo). None of it worked.
my trip
In August, as a part of our nomadic expedition, we stayed in New York for a month. On one of our first weekends in town, we met up with friends for a show at the Brooklyn Mirage. As the festivities were about to begin, I promptly took a third of a dose of LSD. I can’t say that much thought went into the decision to trip — it felt appropriate for the event, for the venue, for the season, and I believed that it would bring a levity I felt desperate for.
Since my first encounter in 2017, I’ve known that I metabolize the drug (most drugs?) astonishingly quickly, but even I was surprised when I started feeling myself come up while we waited for our taco truck tacos twenty-minutes later. My heart was beating faster and faster; I felt jittery, and cold — and weirdly ravenous.
We met our friends outdoors at a nearby bar and I devoured my tacos. I didn’t (couldn’t?) engage in conversation. When I eventually came up for air, I felt the devilish paranoia sneaking up on me — I wondered if others could tell that I was already tripping; I wondered if it was a bad idea to do acid while I was in a “bad place” — it occurred to me that the conditions were probably perfect for my first bad trip.
Then I remembered the urgings of my first “shaman” — to let go, loosen your grip, give up control. Although my shaman wasn’t exactly official, his words had wisdom to them — in How to Change Your Mind:
A happy brain is a supple and flexible brain, he believes; depression, anxiety, obsession, and the cravings of addiction are how it feels to have a brain that has become excessively rigid or fixed in its pathways and linkages—a brain with more order than is good for it. On the spectrum he lays out (in his entropic brain article) ranging from excessive order to excessive entropy, depression, addiction, and disorders of obsession all fall on the too-much-order end. (Psychosis is on the entropy end of the spectrum, which is why it probably doesn’t respond to psychedelic therapy.)
And so I did. I felt myself, inside of myself, let go of…myself — of my fears, my knowledge, my expectations — my identity. I felt myself — the me as a known entity — melt into the universe. I felt the atoms within me begin to undulate at the same frequency as the buildings and the construction cranes and the fences and the trees and the sky around me; I felt my atoms become indistinguishable from their atoms.
And I felt a serenity in my unbecoming, my unbeing. Alex writes eloquently about this phenomenon in the context of ayahuasca and addiction. Like many, Pollan defines this experience as the “ego-death” and describes it as “spiritual” (emphasis mine):
For me, “spiritual” is a good name for some of the powerful mental phenomena that arise when the voice of the ego is muted or silenced…
[…] It appears that when activity in the default mode network falls off precipitously, the ego temporarily vanishes, and the usual boundaries we experience between self and world, subject and object, all melt away.
My best friend, Nancy, likes to talk about feelings as living in your corporeal body, and distinguishing when a feeling lives in your head, or your chest, or your stomach. When discussing something heavy, she has a habit, discomfiting when you first encounter it, of closing her eyes and taking a pause in the conversation, to focus on feeling what her body feels.
There was one moment in which I felt, finally, in my body, through and through, that everything would be okay. I remember standing on the rooftop, wearing my rainbow slides and fanny pack, feeling like everything around me was a beautiful mirage, looking at Tom in the afterglow of the setting sun and suddenly feeling overwhelmed with the purest happiness. In that moment, I was reminded of a passage from Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf:
Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.”
I could finally hear — or rather, feel — what the people who cared about me had been trying to tell me all this time. With my ego turned off, I was able to remove the filter through which I was perceiving my experiences, my life, myself — or maybe I was able to remove my previous consciousness entirely, if only for a day. Without the well-trafficked grooves of my previous consciousness, I was able to create new pathways and, ultimately, new patterns of thought, that led to an altogether new ending in my narrative.
In reading his book later that summer, I was both excited and disappointed to find that Pollan had already come to the same conclusion:
I’m struck by the fact there was nothing supernatural about my heightened perceptions that afternoon, nothing that I needed an idea of magic or a divinity to explain. No, all it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in plain sight—another form of consciousness “parted from [us],” as William James put it, “by the filmiest of screens.”
[…] Maybe to be in a garden and feel awe, or wonder, in the presence of an astonishing mystery, is nothing more than a recovery of a misplaced perspective, perhaps the child’s-eye view; maybe we regain it by means of a neurochemical change that disables the filters (of convention, of ego) that prevent us in ordinary hours from seeing what is, like those lovely leaves, staring us in the face.
The afternoon and evening were interspersed with giggling fits. At one point, my friend, Victoria, and I noticed a man wearing a shirt with two cats holding each other as they launched into space and we couldn’t stop laughing for the next two hours. I couldn’t really tell you what was so funny now. I guess you had to be there.
(It wasn’t this shirt, but this is close. We’re still on the search, so please send any leads my way.)
my inner child
A new friend, Meredith, suggested that I “feed” my inner child. I honestly thought I was already doing that, with my cereal for dinner and Real Housewives on binge mode. And yet, on the days I felt empty, none of it filled me up. Over coffee one day, she said, “I think you’re doing the things that you, as an adult, think your inner child needs — but they’re not what your inner child actually needs.”
In recounting this conversation to Tom, I realized that my inner child — or me, as a child — was a complete mystery to me. Growing up, the interests my parents encouraged were never my interests. Instead, they insisted that I invest all of my out-of-school time in good-for-me interests — piano, art, calligraphy, ballet, swimming, and um, the Chinese language (cue tiny violins). The only memory I have of doing exactly what I wanted, when I wanted, was when I discovered that I could record myself practicing the piano and play it on repeat while I sat reading novels.
But I also remembered that at recess — the only unstructured time I had to myself — I was “hyper,” silly, ridiculous, “flirtatious” (according to some middle school bozos), weird (but never as weird as Nancy). I was me. Uninhibited. Ego-less — or maybe just unaware of my own ego. Basically — I think my inner child just wants to trip.
I have a friend who has done DMT therapy; another who’s been on MDMA therapy. Ketamine clinics are opening and mindbloom guides you through a personalized ketamine program. I’m not sure exactly what my approach will be yet — I hope to sit in an ayahuasca ceremony in South America in the new year; I don’t think psychedelic-assisted therapy appeals to me — but I do know that my inner child is happiest when she’s tripping — and I plan to look for opportunities to recreate the trip, with or without psychedelics.
my angel numbers
A month after this moment in August, I took another micro-dose in New England. Somewhere along our hike, I lost my sunglasses, a beloved gift from Tom and a style that was discontinued shortly after its release. I was crestfallen, and so disappointed at my own carelessness.
This weekend, as I was checking out at a thrift store in Santa Monica, the cashier asked for my birthday and exclaimed that 2022 was my year of angel numbers — 02, 02, 2022. She asked if I knew what 2’s portended. I laughed and admitted that I had no idea. I’m not sure I believe in angel numbers or astrology or, sadly, much of the otherworldly at all (although I do love a good seance). It was at that moment that I looked down and saw the exact sunglasses that I had lost in New Hampshire, months ago.
It’s enough to make a person believe, in something — at least my inner child thinks so.
had a similar experience on my nomadic journey :) you write so beautifully about taboo topics, we need more of this!
on the nose as always thank you for sharing lil