I had my first drink when I was 21. I didn’t want to break the law.
I lost my Virginity at 22. I was trying to save myself for Jesus. Err, for my future bride because Jesus?
I half-took my first hit from a weed pen at 26. I didn’t know you’re supposed to get vapor in your lungs. That’s insane.
I partook in a weed brownie with some friends at 28. I laid down on a sofa, became convinced my heart was going to stop beating, and was promptly taken to the hospital to sweat out my first ever panic attack.
To summarize, at no point in my life would I have considered myself someone inclined towards substances more adventurous than Advil. And yet this past year, at age 35, I’ve received three ketamine assisted therapy sessions. It’s been incredible.
*I feel it’s important to say: I’m not a Doctor or an expert on Ketamine. Some people find it highly addictive and it’s a powerful substance. I’m speaking only to my experience, which was through a licensed and approved clinic with a doctor I had done work with for years prior.
Let’s start with the weed brownie. After that (first) hospital visit, I began to have recurring and worsening anxiety attacks. Something felt as if it had been knocked loose. I went into a loop of fearing my own fear. The panic attacks became so frequent that I began contemplating jumping off the 50th floor of my downtown apartment in Brooklyn.
I didn’t want to die. I just wanted to turn off the noise and the fear in my body.
At the time, I was - in title - CEO of my family’s business but in a daily power struggle with my father over the way the company should be run. I was finishing a full time MFA program that required we read two books a week, read over 30 pages of our peers work and give notes, while then of course submitting our own new writing. I had also started an expansion of the family business as its own new company in a new state. And on top of all that, one of my best friends and I decided to start an e-commerce company together.
I broke up with my girlfriend, who I lived with, for many reasons I’ve only come to see recently, but mostly because I felt she needed something from me that I wasn’t able to give myself. And that if I continued to try and give this finite resource to her that was already lacking in me, I myself would be trapped in emptiness and despair. It was that same exact feeling of being on that couch after the brownie and thinking my pulse was just. Going. To. Stop.
It would take years for me to realize that resource I couldn’t give to her or myself was love.
My instinct was to think it all out. I created the following mental model of what I focused on the most and where all the noise was coming from. The larger the box, the more I assumed the stressor was. I know it’s blurry but I’m ok with it taking work for someone to stop and read vs. moving along with the essay, since it’s about the most personal thing I’ve published:
I had completely forgot I made this until a couple weeks ago when I stumbled upon it cleaning out files on my laptop. I no longer relate to so much of what I see on there, which is wonderful, but I do remember thinking at the time the problem was in there somewhere. If I could just whiteboard everything out of my head and properly see it all, I could rearrange it and piece my mind back together again.
Looking back at it, it's quite a thing to see “Self-Criticism” tucked away in a corner under “Misc.”
The modeling didn’t work and eventually came the morning I knew I had to make serious changes. I was sweating through my sheets at 4am and terrified to look out my apt window. That was the first time I could feel myself pulled to leap down onto Flatbush ave for relief.
That morning, I went on Zocdoc and found the first available appointment for anxiety. It took me to midtown where I met a nurse practitioner who I lied to and said that it had been months since I had suicidal ideation for fear I’d be locked up somewhere if I said it was that morning. To this day, that one moment of even half-admitting where my head was at and that I needed help was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And that which I’m most proud of myself for.
I was given a prescription for Ativan and an appointment with a therapist who would then prescribe Lexapro. I used both for the next two years. My panic attacks disappeared but I was left with a foggy, loose grip on my self. Further, my fear of fear remained and I couldn’t fathom the idea of this state of being was actually the end point of my recovery.
I moved out of NYC to Atlanta where I met a new therapist who believed that my SSRI’s should only be seen as tools to do inner work. She gave me hope that I might not need lifetime prescriptions that at best seemed to only be treating symptoms.
I resigned as CEO of my family business. I offered up the majority of my shares of the expansion company to my two partners and reduced myself from 90% owner to 30%. Both my family and my partners were incredibly supportive and understanding.
I slowed down. I began to realize that many of my choices were motivated by a constantly activated threat detection. Appeasement often ran the show. The more I could do for others, the more I could control people’s perspective of me, and the safer I would be. This of course led to constant anxiety since I at least subconsciously believed everything had a best possible reaction and I needed to choose it so there could be control. Worse, I thought this made me a selfless empath. Only recently have I been able to acknowledge that’s not even something to aspire to.
I started to open up and share with friends and family about the state of my mind and my nervous system. I worked to reflect on past failed friendships and romances that I had before tried to forget. I noticed common threads: Fears of communication, of being honest, of admitting I had needs. I discovered a core insecurity, ‘Why would someone love me if I needed something from them?’
Further I went unil I realized what I was most afraid of: That I was bad. Someone unworthy of love and unable to be satisfied. In dark corners of my mind I believed that I was bound to only ever disappoint and hurt a long term partner.
But I learned in therapy how to listen to the things I said to myself and to find meaningful work therein. I had an inner critic talking all day, every day. I learned “I” wasn’t the same as my thoughts. I started to see the value in liking myself. And then in loving myself. Confidence grew and I decided I wanted to taper off my meds.
The first time I tried to get off Lexapro, I was driving my friend and I through Arches National Park and had to pull over because of a panic attack- triggered by the sudden fixation that I wasn’t on meds anymore.
I got back on the SSRI’s for a couple more months before trying again. This time I decided to completely change my surroundings. I moved in with my sister and her four kids in Melbourne, FL for the summer.
I didn’t have one panic attack. There was a constant chaos of movement: neediness, love, affection, messiness, laughing, fighting, playing. Even in the one moment where the youngest of my nieces almost broke my mental capacity, it wasn’t panic that took over, just a beautiful agony of fatigue. There was no energy left to chew on my own mind.
I took the kids to cold stone creamery to celebrate successfully starting their dad’s golf cart with a bobby pin after they had lost the keys on the beach. As I re-read that last sentence, I realize it’s truly the perfect encapsulation of how that summer felt. Sweating in the humidity, feeling the constant swing of deep sighs and a sense of belonging.
It had been a long day. We were holding up a line of a dozen people as every one of the kids painfully took their time deciding on their flavors and toppings. In the moment, it caused me severe anxiety to feel as if we were taking up too much space and time at the cost of others. Now I feel more like I’m remembering a scene from Curb Your Enthusiasm. But this had been indicative of me my whole life. I optimized for every encounter that required a queue. I learned to be incredibly efficient in the airport security line. Because if I wasn’t, a sense of dread always approached.
When we were finally at the register, my niece began to cry that I had gotten her chocolate shavings when she had wanted chocolate sprinkles. I felt every eye on me in the shop, pure spotlight effect. I was sunburnt, sweaty, sore from playing with four kids all day. I just wanted to be in bed and my niece was doubling down on sprinkles.
The same me that wouldn’t get on the NYC subway without my Ativan prescription looked at my niece, at everyone in the cramped cold stone, and of all things, laughter found me.
Tension fell apart as we left the store. I ate her chocolate shavings, she had my sprinkles. That night I remember feeling hope that I was getting better.
I know this is a lot of background to give before arriving to my Ketamine treatment in an essay ABOUT said Ketamine. It’s important to me because I know that many people who are turning to Ketamine-assisted therapy have been dealing with treatment-resistant anxiety and depression. That’s not me. I had begun to see real change in my life through the work I did with an integrative psychiatrist without the use of psychedelics.
My Dr. later became licensed to administer Ketamine and we both agreed I would be a good candidate to accept treatment as a tool to continue to heal. I wasn’t looking or hoping for a cure. I was mostly scared of Ketamine and/or mdma, psilocybin, etc…
Leading up to my first appointment, we scheduled multiple sessions to discuss how the drug works and what my goals were. We also talked at length about my anxiety towards being under the influence of the medicine. I couldn’t shake the fear that somehow the Ketamine would kill me or create some type of horrible mental breakdown or manic episode I wouldn’t recover from (though I had no rational reason to expect this.)
The morning of my appointment, the clinic had lost power due to a storm and my Dr. was willing to pivot and meet me where I was staying. We made the room as cozy and calm as possible. My Dr. had a small bluetooth speaker with a specific curated playlist for my trip (highly recommend). We took our time meditating and creating the right headspace before beginning.
She handed me tablets that would slowly dissolve in my mouth over the next 15 minutes. I sat upright on the couch and swished the growing amount of saliva back and forth between my cheeks. The taste was bitter, but tolerable. There’s this feeling of wanting to just get to the end of the 15 minutes so you can spit out everything and lay back and relax and let go. But there’s also something nice about gently entering the trip over time vs. the immediacy of the intramuscular injection session I would later have.
After 15 minutes, I spat it all out, put on a sleep mask, laid back and started to detach from any sense of purpose. Most profoundly - fear entirely left my body. My anxiety was gone. I was blissed out, wandering from thought to thought with curiosity and wonder. My Dr. was by my side but stayed out of the experience. She was there to reassure me and take any notes of anything I wanted help remembering but for the most part I didn’t even think of her presence.
A week after the session my therapist prompted me to do the following sketch as an opportunity to focus on and remember what I experienced (I confess, I am not naturally gifted in this arena):
There’s been a lot to unpack in the above image/from the trip. I saw all sorts of things. I encountered several other versions of me that I multiplied by expanding them like an accordion, back and forth from thousands of me to only a few. I fell off a waterfall but with joy. The water was every present moment. I was in the earth’s core, I was in a time machine, and at one point I even saw endless doors in front of me, each with a different romantic partner.
The closest door to me showed my girflriend Kat. I looked at the other realities with curiosity but not longing. I asked if Kat was the right one. And I repeated back to myself with immense warmth and comfort “If you want her to be.”
When I looked at the other endless options of love affairs, the only sadness I could feel was that if I walked away from my current door I was also walking away from beautiful moments that for some reason I could feel had already happened even though it was clear they were in the future. Inside jokes yet to be made, travel adventures yet to be taken, and moments of intimacy that were just our own, unique and special and sacred. I could feel by going to another door, I was destroying all that was yet to happen.
Most significantly I had a vision where I was lying down on a table and feeling this powerful surge of love and goodness emanating from my chest with a bright blue/green glow. I kept repeating to myself that “everything I need is inside myself.”
Feeling more confident and safe I plunged further within, asking about my shame and guilt of not being enough. This was something I’d felt more and more at the core of my anxieties throughout my work with my therapist. It was normal that I’d grade myself daily, hourly, by my productivity, perceived value, efficiency and amount of love I’d shown for others.
I felt the weight of all my doing. I wanted to release myself from the belief that anything good I had brought into the world was only the consequence of a coping mechanism that dealt with my lack of self-worth.
I asked myself, why couldn’t I just BE love. And immediately back to myself, with that same warmth and conviction from before, “I’ve been love all along.”
And so went a massive frame switch in my mind. At my core, perhaps I was not a bad person, unworthy of love and bent towards disappointing and hurting others. Rather, the deeper I go into who I am, the more love and goodness awaits. Maybe it’s actually always been there and in abundance.
Appeasement was a survival strategy from childhood trauma, ok sure yes, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been love to myself and to so many others throughout my life. There actually doesn’t need to be a narrative of, “I was broken and now I’m healed”. Or “I was bad, but now I’m good”. The only way in which in any of that was real was because I believed it.
I was love when I went to that nurse practitioner and I was love when I left my job and I was love when I ordered the wrong ice cream.
I had previously reached a pragmatic awareness about my limiting beliefs and thinking I had a “bad self”. I grew up southern baptist and was caught in an addictive loop of guilt/shame of my sins but then euphoria of confessing and being forgiven/showered with a feeling of unconditional love, usually while Hillsong played in the background. When I left my faith, I philosophically abandoned the idea that I was bad but what I came to learn was that I never quite emotionally transitioned.
If I can stress only one thing about my ketamine therapy, it’s that this was the first time I FELT I wasn’t bad. This was monumental for me.
Then came the inner work I did after the appointment. This seems to me as powerful and important as the trip itself. For about a week, I was more naturally in tune with how reactionary my thoughts and actions were. To use a trite but helpful reference, it felt a little like being Neo in the Matrix when he starts to believe.
The slowed down bullets instead were my once imperceivable mental patterns reacting to regular life, say - My girlfriend asks if I want to watch a Korean drama but I want to play a video game and now I see my coping mechanisms start to activate to deal with even very minimally unpleasant emotions.
But now I was aware in a new way. With ease I was asking myself, why am I feeling activated? Why are my shoulders tight? Why am I feeling fear? Then I’d patiently listen to this scared neurotic self,
If I choose my thing over her thing, she will be upset, maybe not now but it will build into resentment and an eventual fight. She may say it’s totally fine but I can’t trust that because I’ve been hurt before. And if we fight then I’ll feel unsafe and like something bad will happen, we may break up or be stuck in a loveless relationship forever, for always! I should react immediately to take care of her wants and watch the kdrama. Further maybe I don’t even deserve to play video games in the first place. Maybe what I want should always come last, if at all. If I want to play games I need to do so many more things on my list of things to do, always do and do and do…
God, what a relief to stand outside it all and just say with love, “it’s ok.”
In many ways, this was similar to work I had been learning from my growing interest in IFS therapy. Post-ketamine though, I felt supercharged in this ability to engage my perceptions of self, others and how to more effectively deactivate unhealthy patterned behaviors.
I now believe it is crucial to see the time immediately after treatment to be ripe with opportunity and to not over-fixate on the importance of the trip itself. I’m not even sure how many more sessions I’ll have. I’ve found it valuable, but I’m also quite thankful that I don’t feel as if I need more of it or like I’m longing for its effects.
More than anything, I’m proud of myself for doing something so far out of my comfort zone. Because of it, I found more love for myself. There’s been so much revealed to me that I’m drawn to continue to heal, for myself and for those that I care about.
It’s been six years since that first anxiety attack and over four years since I’ve had suicidal ideation. It’s been three years since I’ve taken an Ativan and two years since Lexapro. I’ve moved to Los Angeles, met the love of my life and radically transformed my relationship with work, with doing, and with myself. I found a love for teaching and re-discovered my passion for entrepreneurship and community.
Ketamine didn’t do all that, I did. But I’ll be damned if ketamine hasn’t profoundly helped. So go ahead and add me to the growing list of those who are advocating for its uses and benefits. I’m cautiously optimistic about what more we will learn and the lives that will be changed for the better.
But mostly, I’m just a man relieved to finally believe theres a deep and abundant source of love within him that can be accessed in response to the uncertainty and anxieties of life. Hell, always has been.
This is so beautifully vulnerable. Your bravery and self reflection is essential to growth and a true inspiration. Thank you for sharing and painting such a picture while doing so. Life is undeniably beautiful when you search for meaning, do the healing work, and find love in yourself!
I love the drawing and your description of how you unraveled your past narrative of having a "bad self". Congrats on finally publishing!