At twenty-four years old, I finally tried psychedelic therapy. I did ketamine infusions. It was a deeply impactful experience that shifted many of the narratives I tell myself about who I am and what I’m here for.

I did six infusions in one month. I spent nearly all of my savings to do this.

Already I feel it has had a bigger impact on my mental health than anything else I’ve done in my life.

I’m sharing my experience because people have asked me to. People are in pain and they want to heal and I think this can help steer them in the right direction.

Different modalities of psychedelic therapy are already available and others will soon be too. From my limited understanding, ketamine is currently the most accessible one due to legalities. Therefore, most people’s experience with this therapy will begin with ketamine.

Before I committed to my infusions, I was skeptical. All I knew about the medicine was that it was commonly referred to as a horse tranquilizer and that in combination with other drugs, it was the reason for a terrible night out in Tulum my brother once had.

That’s about as far as the general public’s knowledge of ketamine goes and the literature that exists on it is not very accessible.

In this piece I will explain why I did it, what the infusions were like, how they impacted me, and what I am doing after my infusions to continue the healing process.

My goal is not to convince anyone to try this. Ketamine is not for everyone. But I’m also by no means objective in my relaying this experience. My opinion is firmly positioned in favor of psychedelic therapy and its integration into our current therapeutic practices.

There are many different forms of ketamine. From my research and what I gathered about my specific situation, intravenous was the way to go, meaning I had an IV set up directly into my bloodstream that remained there for the duration of the infusion.

Other options exist, like lozenges, intramuscular injections, nasal sprays, etc.

It’s also important to note the difference between what I did and ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP).

KAP means there is a psychotherapist in the room that you can talk to during your ketamine-induced state. More often than not the dose will be lower for these sessions because the higher your dose the higher you go, and the goal with KAP is to experience psychotherapy with your guard lowered (i.e. you want to be coherent and able to talk during it), not completely obliterated.

What I did was strictly an infusion. There was a paramedic in the room with me at all times. If I wanted to talk to them I could. But they were not psychotherapists. They were just there to make me feel safe and to keep an eye on my vitals.

One last thing:

My experience with ketamine is singular to my traumas and symptoms of anxiety and depression. Everyone’s experience is different.

Some people report having near-death experiences (which I will touch on later). Of those people, some describe it as positive and some as negative.

Your experience — should you decide you need this treatment — will vary depending on what form of ketamine you take, whether or not you have a psychotherapist in the room with you, and what sort of trauma you are trying to heal from.

In short:

I decided to do ketamine infusions because I had deep trauma from childhood that I needed to release and everything else I had tried up to that point hadn’t done that.

Context:

I have had three different therapists. Altogether I have completed just over two years of talk therapy.

My first therapist laid the foundation for me, but the tools she gave me were way beyond my maturity at the time.

My second therapist confronted me with hard truths I wasn’t facing and helped me understand a lot.

But by my third, I knew what I needed was less understanding and more feeling. He helped me achieve that to some extent, but after nine months with him I plateaued. I remained stuck in the intellectual aspect of my emotions.

I started doing meditation the same year I dropped out of college and moved to Texas to start my new life. At first I did five minutes, then ten, then twenty, and finally, I peaked at thirty.

Meditation helped me to slow down, be more present, and to reframe some of my thought patterns — all of this with varying degrees of success.

But again, my experience remained very intellectual. I wasn’t feeling or releasing my trauma. I was hiding behind the comfort of understanding it.

And the difference between the two is enormous. It’s the difference between spending an entire day to plan on doing things and spending that same day actually doing those things.

After that I wrote a book about my trauma. This was by far the closest I got to feeling and releasing it.

I coupled the publication of my book with an exercise from a different book. The exercised boiled down to answering this one question with brutal honesty:

If you were about to leave this planet, what would you say, and who would you say it to?

Quite simply:

My emotions are so painful to me that I choose to hurt others (or myself) rather than to feel them.

I shared my truth with family and friends and anyone with access to social media. Though this ultimately helped me take a load off my shoulders, it was the hardest thing I have ever had to do.

Through this process I uncovered a whole new layer. The layer I am talking to you about now:

Thinking about my trauma is not what heals me. Healing means releasing and the only way to release from trauma is to feel it.

The way out is through, right? I knew this from a young age, but it wasn’t until I learned it for myself that it finally clicked.

So there I was, at the top of the mountain I thought was the highest one, looking up at an even bigger one. I knew with enough time that I could start to climb that one, but first I needed to climb down the one I was currently standing on.

Ketamine started that process for me.

I had just learned that one of the women at my recovery meeting was a practicing psychotherapist. During a conversation she and I had, she told me about a clinic here in Austin that offers ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. I inquired about this and learned that altogether I would have to pay over $600 dollars per session, and that didn’t include the initial meeting and intake fees.

I couldn’t afford it.

Without much effort, though, I found Illumma, another clinic that offered ketamine infusions. They allow you to bring your own psychotherapist, but because they don’t provide you with one the process is cheaper — not cheap, cheaper.

The best part was that their intake process was free and during it, they told me that although they only offer a six-infusion plan, if I didn’t like my first infusion, I could get all of it refunded.

“It’s less about the money for us than it is about the commitment the money represents to our patients.”

That’s a damn good sales pitch if you ask me.

And it worked.

Five months prior to my first infusion I tried DMT for the first time.

Big mistake.

My experience was a nightmare. I became convinced that one of these two scenarios was true: I was either dead or fully paralyzed. The one thing I hadn’t lost was my inner monologue — the hardest to live with.

I never wanted to experience that again. But the more I read about ketamine the more I learned about near-death experiences and ego death. Most of the material I found stated that in order to have a breakthrough one had to fully dissociate from one’s body.

Basically, if I wanted this to work I was going to have to relive my own death.

I was nervous to say the least.

So I asked Cheryl, my therapist friend if she would sit with me during the first infusion.

Part of what made DMT a frightening trip for me was who I did it with and where I did it. I won’t go into details because that person remains a close friend of mine, but the takeaway is that I didn’t trust him enough.

Feeling safe is the most important aspect of any psychedelic experience and I felt far from it.

With a licensed therapist who was also in recovery, I felt about as safe as I possibly could.

Some other things I did to prepare:

I created a playlist of relaxing, classical music that I would listen to during the infusion. I chose Isaaac Albéniz and John Dowland. Those might not work for everyone, but they were recommended from a book specifically on psychedelic therapy, so it’s a safe bet if you’re unsure of what to listen to.

I cleared the rest of my day as well as the morning after the infusion so that I could recover peacefully. It was recommended that I do this because of the potential for hangover symptoms. I’m the type to beat myself up when I’m feeling ill, so this was especially important to note.

Be kind to yourself after the infusion.

I ate a light meal a couple of hours before the infusion and planned to have someone drop me off and pick me up.

Lastly, I tried to rid myself of expectations. I only told a few people that I was doing this and all of them expressed concern at how expensive it was. Their concern angered me because I was also worried that it wouldn’t be a good return on investment.

But underneath my insecurities was an unshakable truth:

No amount of money is too much for me to heal.

This idea reassured me.

I didn’t do DMT to heal. I did it to escape. I did it because I heard Joe Rogan talk about it and I thought it sounded fun. I didn’t prepare for it at all.

Whether or not ketamine healed me, I could rest easy knowing that that was my intention.

I cannot control an outcome. I can only prepare myself for one.

A lot of my trauma revolves around trust, or a lack thereof. If I ever trusted my parents, I cannot recall the time. To this day, I still don’t trust them. Trust was, perhaps, what I felt I needed this work to address the most.

When my paramedic, Gabi, introduced herself to me and talked openly about her experiences with ketamine infusions, I judged her for it. Words like addict and unstable ran through my head.

I was so afraid to trust her that I projected my insecurities onto her so I could put up my walls.

If she’s anything like me, I thought, how could I trust her when I can’t even trust myself?

Having Cheryl there helped me balance these emotions. I trusted her, so if she trusted Gabi I could trust Gabi.

Then I met my nurse, Lucy, and reminded both her and Gabi that Cheryl was to remain in the room with me at all times.

“That’s fine,” Lucy said. “But we do recommend that our patients go through this process alone. It can become a distraction when someone you know is there with you.”

Another wave of thoughts:

They want to isolate me.

They’re invalidating my decision to bring Cheryl — they’re just like my parents!

They said it was important to feel safe and supported and yet I feel they actively want to make it harder for me!

Lucy went on to ask me a set of questions about my depression and anxiety levels, ways in which I planned to integrate my experience, and what my intention for today’s infusion was.

“To surrender to the experience as best I can,” I said. But really my intention was set on family and childhood. I wanted to revisit some relationships and key moments from my youth.

Lucy left the room and Gabi said we were about to begin.

I put headphones on, played my music, and closed my eyes.

Before the medicine even entered my body my legs began to shake. Gabi put a blanket over me and kept her hand on my shoulder.

“You’re in a safe environment,” she said. “Everyone here wants what’s best for you.”

Her reassurance angered me. I worried about how far it would go and whether or not it would interrupt or alter my experience. I don’t need to be babied. I can handle this.

Admitting that I felt this way hurts. It represents fear getting in the way of love.

The behavior exists because I used it to survive my childhood. But my childhood is over. I need to let this go.

I took a deep breath and surrendered.

Twenty minutes in I still hadn’t felt any effect. I continued to breathe and let go of my expectations.

I could hear Gabi and Cheryl but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then, very gently, I began to sink into my chair and away from their voices. My perception of how far they were from me was distorted.

My thoughts became louder but more forgiving. Intrusive thoughts came and went. I gained a clarity I can’t put into words, like I was going to be OK no matter what happened to me.

Some notes taken by Cheryl:

“Blindfold is key for session two.”

“My thoughts are so hyperactive they remind me of a printing press.”

“Trust — it’s funny ’cause I know here is where I should feel safe and trust. But it’s like a wall I can’t break through because I don’t know how to trust.”

“Maybe they’re stealing my money and using water instead of ketamine.”

“I know I’m speaking right now but I can’t hear myself at all. This is what conversations are like for me. I’m so paranoid of what others are thinking that I often don’t recognize the words that come out of my mouth.”

“Radishes.”

“How do I trust what I can’t hear and don’t understand?”

When I finished feeding Cheryl notes I asked how much time was left.

“Ten minutes,” Gabi said.

“What happens if I pee myself before then?”

“You wouldn’t be the first.”

“It feels like fire down there.”

They laughed.

“Can you imagine one of those political cartoons but with ketamine infusions?” I said. “Like, this moment right now would be perfect for it. You’d have a man lying comatose on a chair and two women sitting on either side of him, laughing. One woman would say, ‘Can you believe it? We finally got them!’ And the other would say, ‘Drugs was all it took for us to convince men that emotions matter. Now look at where we have them!’”

In case I needed any more evidence of my inability to trust, even my sense of humor was a manifestation of it!

I had a different paramedic and nurse the second time around. I was worried about how that would affect my experience and whether or not it was going to change each time.

I sat in the waiting room and meditated on it. After the meditation and just before I went inside the infusion room, I opened a pack of affirmation cards next to a stack of books. I shuffled them and picked one at random as per the instructions on the box.

This was the card I drew:

I laughed at the word magic. Then I got called in.

I did 20 mg more this time. I also did what they call a dynamic dose (DD). Of my total of 90 mg, 10 mg were given to me in the first minute as a way to bypass the gradual build-up from the first session. The rest dripped in the IV and acted as a way to keep me where the first 10 mg took me.

When they explained it to me, I expected to be launched into the nether realms within the first sixty seconds. But the build-up remained the same. They told me after the session that because of my history with psychedelics it was possible I had developed a high tolerance to them.

My experience this time was less thoughts and more memories, though I’m not sure what the difference is between the two.

I revisited a time with my childhood friends Jason and John when we came upon a wedding on the beach. We found a sand castle and decided it would be fun to kick it down. I was asked to go first, and though I really wanted to, just to get a laugh out of my friends, I refused.

What if they want it for the wedding photos? What if by doing that I ruin their wedding? What if they yell at me for it?

That memory represented all of the missed opportunities of my life and how I often deprive myself of positive experiences out of fear of how others will react.

I already knew this to be true, but I guess since I moved to Austin I hadn’t reassessed it in myself. My move here brought with it so many opportunities I did take advantage of that I assumed the muscle continued to build without any effort from me.

My ex-girlfriend came next. I felt fear when she entered my mind because of the pain associated with our relationship. But I allowed it to have its space and boy did it need it.

The pain hit me like unexpected death does a family. I allowed every source of it to open up, like my relationship to her parents, her brother, and her cat. How much of a loss those also were and how I hadn’t dedicated much time to grieving them.

I sat in her car with her brother and talked with him about art and the creative process. I sat with her dad on their couch and watched a football game as we talked about writing and books. I felt her cat nibble on my knee and looked up to find her smile wider than it’d ever been before, overjoyed at how comfortable her cat felt around me. I walked through a grocery aisle with her mom and insisted that we buy boneless chicken for dinner while we simultaneously shared stories of our relationship to our own mothers.

I was accepted into her family in ways that I wasn’t accepted into my own and reminded that unconditional love does exist. But with that came the hard truth that because of the way things ended between my ex and I, not only will I never see her again, I’ll never see her family again either.

When a relationship ends or is lost, I often think it is the only one I will grieve. This isn’t true. Everyone in my life is connected to at least one other person.

Therefore:

I cannot end one relationship without ending another (or at the very least fracturing another).

I began to feel warm and stretchy, like silly putty. I floated from prone to seated.

As I neared the end of the infusion and moved on from the notion of loss, I was welcomed by the potential for life. I saw the mother of my unborn children and felt all of the love that is yet to come.

In a way, it felt like I was connecting to my primal need to mate and start a family. All of the ordinary issues of day-to-day life vanished and were replaced by this overwhelming clarity that there is something greater than myself worth living for.

My friend Megan came to mind. A sexual urge followed. Perhaps because of the order in which my thoughts occurred or because I was socialized to sexualize all women, my ego became convinced that she was this future mother I was seeing.

“You need to call her after the infusion,” my ego said. “Maybe she’s the answer to all of your emotional needs.”

Thankfully, when the infusion ended, I gained another kind of clarity and lost the urge to reach out to her. And on the way home I realized something else.

I don’t just sexualize some women — I sexualize all women. I do this because I never learned of any other way to relate to women.

On a deep, subconscious level, doing this allows me to protect myself from rejection and intimacy.

The medicine was working.

I arrived at Illumma fifteen minutes early. I shuffled the affirmation cards and drew forgiveness.

After I read it and put the deck away, Gabi came out and asked if I was ready. I followed her into the infusion room, glad she was my infusionist again. She told me she requested to be with me that day.

At the start of the infusion I felt an impulse to tell Gabi that I was attracted to her, to ask her out for coffee. I was desperate for her and I to become romantically involved, like that would make all of my problems disappear.

Then the dynamic dose worked its magic.

Within two minutes I felt the medicine wrap me in its arms and lift the fog from my mind. The clarity returned and erased all of my ordinary concerns about life.

I saw my urge for what it was — that same tendency of mine to sexualize women when they validate me or show me any hint of approval. I wasn’t attracted to Gabi. I was drawn to the attention she showed me because I was taught at a young age that attention is a form of love.

That and a plethora of other realizations came to me all at once. That’s the best way I know how to describe the transition from sober to ketamine high — your ordinary thoughts battle your non-ordinary ones to the death, and if you let them, they win and allow you to live in that state of bliss for the rest of your infusion.

Once I was able to move past my need to please Gabi I relaxed into myself and all of the other emotions that came up.

Love was the bedrock for all of them.

Without my ego in the driver’s seat I allowed realities I would otherwise consider mutually exclusive to coexist.

Yes, I need to enforce boundaries with my mom for my well-being.

Yes, we also love each other deeply.

Yes, my ex and I are no longer together and we inflicted trauma on each other.

Yes, underneath it all we forgive and we love.

Yes, there is a lot of work I still need to do.

Yes, I can also be excited about my life.

Imagine someone you once held a very meaningful relationship with. It could be a friend or a romantic partner or a family member. Now think about why that relationship ended.

What does that make you feel?

I’ll give you an example:

I cheated on my ex-girlfriend. I lied to her about it for three months afterward. When I told her the truth, she eventually forgave me and decided it was worth the work to heal our relationship.

But that task was far from what we were qualified for and we failed. She broke up with me and we never spoke again. She unfriended me from all social networks and so did every friend, family member, and coworker of hers.

In my day-to-day it is hard to see past these hard truths. They are facts that govern our reality and the narratives we build.

If a mother emotionally abuses her child we assume that she does not love him.

If a man cheats on a woman we assume he does not love her.

If a person becomes addicted to self-destructive behaviors we assume they do not love themselves.

But we ignore where these behaviors come from — and the answer is always love.

If a mother emotionally abuses her child we can take that to mean that she never learned how to love unconditionally (likely because she was never shown it either).

If a man cheats on a woman he may be doing this because he doesn’t know how to deal with intense emotions the relationship brings up for him. But would a man who doesn’t love that woman even feel those emotions in the first place?

If a person becomes addicted to self-destructive behaviors there is a part of her (her ego) that does this to protect her from pain and trauma.

Before ketamine I knew all of this to be true, but I hadn’t felt it yet.

I hadn’t given myself permission to feel the love that exists when I forgive myself for being human.

When the eye mask came off at the end of the infusion I burst into a heavy sob. I excused myself to the recovery room and continued to cry there for another thirty minutes.

My ex was on my mind. Only this time it was because I felt closer to her in that moment than I ever did when we were together. I felt all of the love we ever shared at once.

And I knew that all of the pain that I caused her was also part of what made me human.

I don’t have to punish myself for it any longer.

This infusion was marred by a confrontation I had with a coworker only hours before.

For context:

I am Assistant General Manager at a restaurant. Most of the people that I lead are my age or younger (20–24). Most of them are only there to collect a paycheck.

When the confrontation ended I sent my coworker home and communicated what happened to my supervisor. I thought what he had done was grounds for termination at any job.

But my supervisor didn’t do a thing about it.

So I convinced myself that I was a victim of injustice and began to feel helpless as I left work and went to my infusion.

The emotion was aggravated when Gabi told me the dose for today’s infusion. A 10 mg bump to the overall dose with a 5 mg bump to the dynamic dose.

I wanted to go higher to increase my chances of dissociation — the goal of this therapy. The past three infusions had felt virtually identical as far as intensity. I knew I could handle a lot more.

Instead of being vocal about this I let trauma guide the way.

I was used to the adults in my life who acted like they knew what was best for me better than I did. Yet I had experienced a number of situations where after I stood up for what I thought was best and was wrong, I was scolded.

I said nothing, put on my eye mask and earphones, and closed my eyes.

The medicine entered my body. I focused on my breath. Anger and sadness began to surface around the thirty minute mark.

But because of the narrative I built around the situation I was in, I wasn’t able to surrender this time. I took the mask and earphones off, opened my eyes, and told Gabi I wasn’t feeling anything different.

“I want a higher dose next time. Every infusion feels the same and I’m frustrated by it.”

I went on to talk about my confrontation at work and how I’ve had to quit every job for the same reason. I can’t stand managers who do the bare minimum when the bare minimum makes their employees miserable.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m the problem and other times I feel like that’s just the way the service industry is. I feel so goddamn angry right now! How does one process anger? It’s not as straightforward to me as sadness.”

“I like to yell when I’m angry.”

“Do you feel that way often?”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “My relationship of seven years ended last month. And we have a daughter together.”

After she said that I felt my anger drop and my empathy rise. The caretaker in me was powered on. I had achieved what my ego wanted me to — I could now focus on someone else’s problems.

“Oh no,” I said. “I’m so sorry…”

I thought because of my inability to surrender that I had squashed the infusion. Everyone there told me not to beat myself up. They said that my body received the medicine so I would at least benefit from that.

Of course I didn’t want to trust that to be true because my default is to punish myself.

So I left Illumma and went to one of my recovery meetings to see if that would help. And boy did it open me up.

As the chair of the meeting ran through introductions I noticed that Cheryl and her girlfriend Ann weren’t there. The bell rang and everyone closed their eyes.

I heard the door open and close a few times and opened my eyes to see if it was Cheryl or Ann. The first couple of times it wasn’t. The last time it was.

Ann and I made eye contact. She came and sat on the cushion next to mine. As she did, she rubbed my knee and smiled. She was excited to see me.

I smiled back and closed my eyes.

The sadness I pushed away during my infusion came back tenfold. It was such a strong feeling that I started to cry and then removed myself from the room. I entered the shed across from me and only then was able to surrender.

I tucked myself into a pocket between the sink and the refrigerator and hugged myself in the fetal position. The hurt I felt brought me back to the place where it originated.

I was alone in my first bedroom wrapped around a pillow with my face buried into it, disoriented. The emotional pain I felt was excruciating. The few things I latched onto to ground myself were the sounds of my parents as they yelled at my sister and my sister yelled back at them; an abstract emptiness within that felt tangible because so often my parents tried to fill it with material possessions; and the pain I now know all of us underwent as a family unit.

My mother as she grieved a relationship she lost to infidelity and three children she lost to said grief.

My dad as he absorbed emotions he had no frame of reference for and let them ricochet off of him and onto those he claimed he loved most.

My sister as she became the scapegoat for my parents’ failed marriage, as she dove headfirst into heavy drugs and toxic relationships with abusive men.

My brother as he indirectly mediated the chaos as a substitute for learning to process his own emotions.

After twenty minutes I was able to come back to the pocket I was tucked between and stand up again. I splashed cold water on my face and returned to the meeting room.

This was what I shared that night:

“Hi I’m Nick. I uh…I wasn’t able to make it to the meeting last week. It’s the first one I’ve missed since I started coming. I noticed the absence. I’ve felt lonelier and more isolated in the last two weeks and have just had a harder time in general.”

I recounted the brief interaction between Ann and me.

“I had to excuse myself because that small gesture from Ann brought back a deep sadness I feel because my whole life no one’s ever been excited to see me. So anytime someone cares about me or shows me any indication that they love me, I feel hurt. And it’s made me realize that here that hurt exists because you’ve all made me feel like I belong. I always struggle to feel like I’m a part of a group, even if, in theory, I am. But you all make it easier for me. So thank you.”

After the meeting, Mona, one of the older women in the group, approached me and gave me a hug. She said, “You know, I’m sure a lot of people have been excited to see you. How could they not be? You’re such a handsome, genuine man. And sometimes it may feel like that’s not the case. But you know…when you hear that voice, all you have to do is say,” she came close to my ear and whispered, “No thanks. I’m very lovable.”

I took very few notes on this infusion. Most of it escapes my memory.

One thing stands out:

In my non-ordinary state of consciousness my depression is lifted. I get to experience what life would be like without it. I learn that I am what gets in the way of most opportunities that come to me — that I was once a pure creature worthy of almost anything.

I take it to mean that what I experience at any given time is not who I am and that I can always return to my pure self.

Oftentimes when I feel depressed I tend to convince myself that I won’t overcome it. The longer the depression lasts the more I become convinced of this because the person I was before it seems so far away from my current state that I don’t remember what it felt like to be him.

Ketamine reminded me of how much excitement and love exists in me. It picked me up by the shirt collar and held me up against the wall and said, “Look at all that makes life worth living for.”

What I get out of life directly correlates to how much I tolerate from life.

After the infusion I shuffled the affirmation cards and drew nature.

On my way home my brother texted to ask if I could walk the dog. He hadn’t texted this in months, so I embraced the opportunity to do what my card said and went out in nature with the dog.

I took her to a tall tree that sits near my apartment complex and let her run around while I sat with my back against the tree and breathed in the cold winter air.

I did this infusion earlier in the day than the rest of them. It was so early for me that I wasn’t able to eat or drink water beforehand. Part of my research mentioned fasting being good for your experience — which Illumma recommends against — so I was excited to see the difference, if there was any.

I drew the impermanence card this time.

Julio was my infusionist. Aside from Gabi, Julio was the only other infusionist I had.

The nurse came into the room and told me we were going to repeat the same dose from my last infusion. This time I didn’t hesitate to voice my discomfort.

“I want to go higher than that.”

Julio backed me up on it, said I could handle it.

“How much higher would you like to go?” the nurse asked.

“One-fifty,” I said.

The highest approved dose for one individual is 2mg/kg. 150 mg was 4 mg under my max.

The nurse approved and said we would do 150 mg with a 20 mg dynamic dose.

I thanked them both and prepared myself for complete dissociation. I closed my eyes and let the medicine work.

As my ego tried to clamp onto fears around the experience we were about to have, I thought of the word “whatever”.

Whatever, not as spoken from the mouth of a rebellious teenager, but rather a form of surrender and impermanence. That’s what this entire experience boiled down to.

The reason I’ve felt safe as the medicine enters my body is because it erases all of the what-ifs from my mind. Everything is as it should be in this moment and this moment is all that matters.

Ever since I dropped out of college I’ve put an immense amount of pressure on myself to work harder than everyone around me and to always appear like I have my shit together. I’ve been fighting the truth because of shame that exists around my decision to leave school.

And the truth — perhaps the most universal truth — is that nobody can be so put together that life doesn’t get in the way (COVID-19 would soon confirm this).

That’s what I’ve really tried to fight this whole time — life getting in the way.

Another thing I learned as my ego dissolved was that there is a part of me that is drawn to emotional work as a way to feel superior, to distance myself from the villainous people I’ve made my parents out to be and other individuals who don’t do any self-work at all.

Self-work is the thing that has helped me to heal and also a device I use to remain stuck.

When I try and I fail, I punish myself and dive deep into my intellect to try and understand my failure rather than to just feel it and continue to try.

My whole childhood revolved around punishment and fear of failure. It’s what my parents rewarded most. It’s trauma that remains unreleased.

I wish I could say that ketamine helped me release trauma — maybe it did and I lack the emotional awareness to see that — but it didn’t. Ketamine helped me see all that I have missed out on and will continue to miss out on if I don’t release my trauma. It allowed me to reframe everything I thought I already understood about my past and my present.

There is also plenty I cannot relate — plenty that no one who writes about their experience with psychedelics can relate — because we do not have the language to understand these experiences yet.

I could compare it to things we do understand and tell you that for most of my final infusion I moved through my emotional landscape and memories like a dolly track moves through a film set.

But I compare it to that because film has been a big part of my life. Others might compare the same experience to something that is nothing like what I described. And maybe that is also a lesson to be learned from this:

We experience the world as we are, not as it objectively is.

That’s the whole point of meditation and why people are so drawn to it. It is our attempt to reach a more objective outlook on the things we experience.

What I can say is that I experienced dissociation and this time was not afraid of it. DMT gave me the frame of reference to understand what I felt and to embrace it.

The best way I can describe what dissociation feels like is this:

Imagine you sit in a dark room and try to make out the edges and corners on the wall and ceiling. The room changes every five seconds. Some rooms you make out more details in than others, yet all of them are dark or grey and very plain.

In between some of these rooms you experience an emotion like sadness or fear and it drives you into another room, this one colored by that emotion.

After enough changes, your ego — the thing dissociation wants to rid you of — becomes frightened. It has less control over what you experience the more that you change rooms. So, in an effort to regain control, it tries to convince you that you are dying.

And it’s not entirely mistaken.

Except that it isn’t you that’s dying. You are perfectly safe and healthy in the comfort of your infusion room, being watched over by a professional paramedic. You WILL return to your ordinary life.

It’s your thinking mind that’s dying, the only way you know how to interpret experiences. You are moving as close to pure consciousness as you will ever experience (except maybe after real death).

This is also why it is impossible to describe what dissociation is like. We simply don’t operate the same once it happens, so when we return we can only attach what we experienced to past experiences — which is actually just our ego again.

My life felt like it was in shambles. I saw my job for the toxic mess that it was. I became anxious over a woman I had met a week ago. It triggered many of my emotional buttons and though I stopped old patterns from taking over, I didn’t know how to act out new ones.

I smoked my first cigar and had suicidal thoughts.

To live with myself had become so daunting that I thought maybe it would be better to not live at all. How was I to navigate life when I could barely navigate my existence?

I felt depressed.

My mental health charts showed that my depression and PTSD had increased by 4% and 5% respectively. Anxiety dropped 23%.

When I sat down and considered the numbers, I realized it wasn’t that they had increased — what happened was that ketamine helped me understand my emotions better. So when I filled out my charts the second time around, they were more accurate.

This was important to accept.

Ketamine — and psychedelic therapy in general — helped me heal, but the word heal can take many forms. And often the form it takes when real healing occurs is one of pain, because I need to feel what I ran away from for decades.

Once I accepted this I saw where my depression and suicidal thoughts came from and I gave them permission to be a part of me for as long as they needed to be.

Spoiler alert:

As soon as I did this the intensity went away.

I noticed actual changes to my behavior.

For starters, I realized none of my needs were being met by the woman I was seeing. I only continued to see her because it helped me avoid being alone. So I ended that relationship.

Next, I found a new job that promised a ton of improvement — like health insurance and paid-time off (which is unheard of in the service industry).

I cemented a new workout routine — aside from my bicycle commute I hadn’t exercised in two years.

The suicidal thoughts disappeared. My ability to witness distorted thoughts without falling prey to them became greater. I acted on them much less.

Some examples of this follow.

From my job (the toxic one):

When employees I supervised acted out, I didn’t take it personally. I saw the situation for what it was, not what I wanted it to be — this employee won’t suffer any consequences because my manager is too lazy to find a replacement, therefore if I engage with him or my manager about it, I will be the only one affected by it.

When employees refused to do their job and affected other employees and our service as a whole, I would normally allow my rage to take over. I’d try to “put the employee in his place” as a way to regain control I knew I had lost at this job.

Now I sat with the information and didn’t allow my coworkers to be the ones in control of my emotions. I saw my anger as the mechanism it was to push away sadness around the manager not doing his job and the ways that this reminded me of my parents when they neglected me.

From my life:

I had two bike accidents — one during my infusions and one after them.

When the first one happened I almost relapsed on marijuana. I broke down on the side of the hike and bike trail and cried as I drowned in self-pity. Then I went home and used my accident as an excuse to do nothing for the rest of the day.

The second accident brought with it four flat tires in one week. My bike began to fall apart but I didn’t. I learned how to fix flat tires, adjust and replace my brake pads, and I continued my workout routine as well as my writing and work routines.

Instead of immobilizing my injured limbs, I actively rehabilitated them with swim and sauna.

Not once did I lose my temper. I just assessed the objective reality and focused on that instead of the should’s and should not’s.

From my writing:

What before I saw as an obligation, an instrument to punish myself with, I now saw as an opportunity.

Writing — at the time of this publication — has stopped being the center of my universe. It is still one of my top priorities, but it does not come before my mental and physical health, which it used to.

Part of that is because I used to see everything I wrote as proof that I was worthy of this world.

Now I know I am worthy for no other reason than because I exist.

I don’t need to earn my own love.

A month and a half after my last infusion I went in for my first — and possibly last — ketamine booster infusion.

Because the effects ketamine has on depression can wear off in some patients, boosters now exist to combat this. The more you wait between your last infusion the more likely it is that your dose will be lowered for your booster. Otherwise there are no differences between a regular infusion and a booster.

For context:

March was the month that saw the U.S. begin their COVID-19 quarantine. Service industry jobs were at risk if not already extinct. A lot was up in the air for me, including this booster. It was four-hundred dollars I wasn’t sure I could afford.

But ultimately, because of the increased isolation and the wear that had on my mental health, I decided to take the risk.

As the global situation continues to worsen day-to-day, for those with financial means, there has never been a better time to start your infusions.

Most work has become remote. This means you don’t have to worry about taking days off to recover. You can do so in the comfort of your own home.

A global pandemic of this magnitude is unprecedented and will bring up a lot of our deepest fears and insecurities. This can be hard for some people to do when their ordinary life and their infusions happen simultaneously.

Scheduling a six-infusion plan and actually doing the emotional work is easier when the world comes to a stop and you are forced to spend most of your time alone.

Now back to the booster…

Julio was once more my infusionist.

Part of me felt shame because of how vulnerable I had been with everyone at the clinic, like rekindling a friendship with someone who knew my darkest secrets. Another part of me felt guilt. Did the staff really want to be here during this global pandemic? And was it irresponsible of me to spend money on self-care when so many others around me didn’t have money for basic needs like food?

The feelings were there but quiet enough that I wasn’t consumed by them. If we were about to go into an extended period of isolation, I needed my mental health as strong as it could be.

I put on my eye mask, earphones, and mouth guard. I played the same music from my last infusion (Peter Kater’s Migration).

Within five minutes I started to fade. I sank inward then lifted upward. I became a lot less concerned with my job security and a lot more concerned with my relationships to the people I love.

I sifted through these like cards in a discard pile.

My ex-girlfriend came up but I didn’t feel a strong need to revisit that. Other women I dated after her also surfaced but only momentarily — what really happened was that my need for connection came into my awareness. The feeling I subdue the most that dominates all of my decision-making was exposed.

I longed for it and hurt from a lack of it.

My mother came up next in the same way she had all of my past infusions. Sadness for the relationship we no longer have and for all of the pain she and I have both endured in our lifetime. Love for her inner child, for the pure being within her that hadn’t been tainted by trauma she would then pass on to me.

I began to question what that trauma looked like for her. I knew vaguely what her childhood had been like. I remembered some of my own childhood, her time as a young mother. But I hadn’t heard much about her relationship with my dad — not how they met or why they separated, but what their relationship was like when they were together.

I saw a bedroom and my parents having sex in it.

I knew from what my mother told me that I had been conceived at a time when trust between them had been broken. My dad had cheated on her multiple times and I was their final attempt to fix the relationship.

Rationally I can understand what that means, but until this moment I hadn’t experienced the trauma that came with that understanding.

My mother didn’t feel safe in the sex I visualized them having. My father wasn’t aware of what he felt — and if he was he’d developed a hard exterior that allowed him to ignore those feelings.

I’ve been there. I’ve had sex when I don’t want to. I’ve had sex with a partner I cheated on and lied to. I’ve been where I’m so afraid to confront my emotions that I completely disregard the damage that doing so can cause.

It was like I finally experienced my parents as they were when they were my age.

And the hard truth I had to accept was that I wasn’t all that different.

I was born into a relationship that was arguably worse than my worst relationship. There was no trust modeled for me, no love lost, there was really nothing left to even call a relationship.

And this was before I was even born, the root of my self-hatred.

At my core I feel that I was a mistake — that I was a burden to my parents. The two people in my life that I was supposed to feel most loved by were the least excited to see me because I was a reminder of a period in their life they hurt most from thinking about.

At the time of this writing I have been using a ketamine nasal spray for two months. It was prescribed by Illumma and acts as a micro-dose for everyday use.

I will continue to use this spray for at least another month.

Then I will reassess and consider tapering off of it. My goal with these forms of therapy is not to end up on medication — not even psychedelic medicine.

From my understanding, these treatments are supposed to help me heal so that I don’t have to be on medication, so that I don’t need a crutch to support myself from.

I am undecided on my second ketamine booster. I have scheduled one for the end of May — more than two months from today — but might consider doing without.

What interests me moving forward is to try other forms of psychedelic therapy, namely MDMA.

MDMA is currently in phase three of clinical trials. Legalization is expected to happen sometime in 2021.

Until then, I plan to focus on integration of my ketamine experiences. That means using what I learned about myself and my past to create a better present and to change my narrative about who I am and why I’m here.

It also means I will continue to meditate and exercise, to attend at least one recovery meeting weekly, and to continue regular talk therapy.

And to write, of course.

I believe everyone is in pain and most of us don’t have the access or even the awareness to want to heal.

It’s only a matter of years before we start to see psychedelic therapy as the new normal.

I hope this piece gets us one step closer to that new normal.

Because if it is inevitable that means we have a lot to look forward to.