“Anybody can come and tell you who you are because you don’t know where you come from.”
On my first ketamine session I came back to myself. I hadn’t done much investigation on the treatments themselves. I wanted to show up open minded and without expectations. I sought them out on a whim, because a friend of mine informed me that my primary care physician practiced ketamine treatments, because I was desperate to try anything that could help me change my mind about suicide being the ultimate hack to existence. A week or so before the treatment I spent a few hours reading about other people’s experiences. People expressed feeling an ego death of sort, they shared feeling uncomfortable being disassociated from their bodies. Many of them had done intravenous treatments where the ketamine drip can be adjusted according to one’s comfort level but that’s not what I was doing. My doctor practices intramuscular injections where within a few minutes of administration you’re quickly plummeted into a k hole.
I decided to stop reading because I had to learn to let go, that was kind of the entire purpose of this exercise: I was scared to try ketamine, I’d never experienced it before but I wasn’t more fearful than constantly concluding that offing myself was the ultimate cheat to what felt like the cruel joke of a game called life. So I showed up with my blanket and my stuffed owl, and my photos and my candle. The photos were mostly of me as a kid, prepubescent me; the last time I can truly remember feeling like myself. And the candle had been made by an ex who had caused me great pain but who I still, to this day, have an immense amount of love for, even though I’m pretty sure they’re not a fan of me. It was important for me to burn their candle, to exist in this weird space I’d found myself in: filled with love for someone who caused me sadness, filled with compassion and empathy for someone who deep down inside made me incredibly angry.
My doctor injected me on his medical table and we chatted about how, only a few days prior, I had ran into this ex and how it had really rattled me. I guess my speech started to slow down because he said “I think something is starting to happen” to which I responded “Yup!” He wished me a happy trip as I put my eye mask and earphones on; into my first k hole I went. The music in my ears took me away and I remember thinking “Wow, I don’t think I’ve been connected to my body for years” as I drifted into the warm darkness. I’d been afraid I’d find something dark and scary in my k hole; isn’t that what lurks underneath a terrible person like myself? Turns out it’s not scary in there, turns out there was always an immense amount of good that resided in me.
In my first k hole I heard a voice reminding me it had always been there, it has always been within me, even when I couldn’t hear it. In that first hole I felt waves of happiness that were in sync with the heart opening ambient music I’d put on. In the presence of such happiness I felt myself let go, trusting the voice that seemed to cradle me, the voice that spoke both my dead and current name. Eventually I saw myself as an eagle soaring over difficulties, confident in the strength of my wingspan to help me navigate the winds. As an eagle I flew above the difficult people of my life and from above I understood that those people below wanted to be up high where I was. It all made sense, they wanted to be where I was but couldn’t so they were mad, I felt compassion for them from the safe distances of the sky. As I flew above, the voice continued to speak: it reminded me I always knew who I was, even if it made other people uncomfortable.
“So much for an ego death” I thought as I reintegrated my first session in therapy the next week. I’m glad I hadn’t invested much into other people’s experiences because if anything I felt like that first session brought me back to myself, helped me reconnect to a voice I can only assume was my soul. Turns out it wasn’t scary for me to become disassociated from my body, I’d been disassociated from it for decades; a quaint form of survival from being incredibly dysphoric. I felt my depression and suicidality dissipate after that first session. For the next two weeks I felt a new sense of connection with myself but on the third week I crashed. I had spaced out my first and second treatment a month apart from each other. In that moment I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t become addicted to whatever potential euphoria I might feel during the session. In hindsight this was absolutely a result of listening to others’ concerns about my journey: I don’t think one person in my life fully supported this journey. Everyone expressed concern until my therapist came around, then everyone supported me, which mortified my therapist when I informed her.
I got concerned when I began feeling waves of depression on week three but my doctor assured me, like anything else in life, healing from a CPTSD flare up (which is what I’d been experiencing on and off for years) is not linear. I kept going to therapy and kept trying to practice self-compassion for the state I was in until I could make it to my next treatment. In that time my cannabis consumption increased: I was smoking anywhere from one to three and a half grams of weed a day. I decided that this time I’d show up to my treatment with an intention: I’d try and figure out why I’d been using cannabis all these years and why, when my life seemingly fell apart or my anxiety flared up, I went back to using even if I’d managed to stop for consecutive months. I reread Gabor Matte’s In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts as a precursor and tried to remember my doctors compassionate advice that using cannabis has clearly served some sort of purpose throughout this last decade even if I was convinced it was no longer serving me.
“My life mission is to acknowledge the tensions and feel that they can exist together.”
On that second session we increased the dosage ever so slightly. My doctor practices informed consent so it was always up to me at what frequency I did the treatments and what dosage I thought was appropriate. I had brought my copy of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts and I clutched it as I began to descend into my hole. I decided to always listen to the same heart opening playlist to create a sort of continuity even though I knew the trips would shift as I integrated them in therapy. While I entered my second k hole I literally saw myself lowering into a dark abyss until I reached a bottom. I saw myself floating right above the ground cloaked in a golden-hour light as a voice began to say: “Everybody is good, all people are good people.” The voice repeated this message over and over again as I basked in the sun’s glow. My ex’s face stood above me like an apparition that wouldn’t go away and I felt myself getting angrier and angrier. What the fuck did this voice want from me, it spoke words that I already knew, that I felt had gotten me in trouble in the first place. Of course all people are good people, isn’t that why I’d always try to put myself in other’s shoes, isn’t that why I always chose compassion and empathy over anger?
Furthermore, what the fuck did all people being good people have to do with my inability to walk away from my cannabis use? I had come there with an intention and I was absolutely not exploring that in this semi state of consciousness. Another thing people had expressed doing before their treatments were setting intentions and meditating on where they wanted to go but here I was, apparently in the safe space of the good of my self-conscious, being haunted by the ghost of my ex when I’d wanted to interrogate my substance misuse. It felt like a cruel joke but thankfully an hour or so of disassociation only feels like five minutes. When I got up and my doctor asked me how it was I told him it was hard, that I had absolutely not gone where I intended to and that, in fact, the place I ended up made me angry beyond words. Still, I wasn’t mad about the experience just pissed off I couldn’t control it.
I had scheduled my third appointment only two weeks apart from the second one after having learnt my lesson the first time around: listen to your gut, this is your journey. I spent the next two weeks sitting on my couch in my anger. I talked about it with my therapist and discussed how uncomfortable I was feeling angry, how incapable I have felt owning up to my anger or even expressing it. It was hard enough expressing anger when I identified as a woman but as a now passable man it had felt impossible to do so. I was so aware of how unsafe many of my women friends felt around angry men, I could not allow myself to ever express anger as someone who was now read as male. And then it hit me, using weed allowed me to bypass anger and move straight to “compassion” and “empathy,” more desirable emotions especially when they are being expressed and enacted by men. I had rarely allowed myself to express any form of anger, it was deemed undesirable and as a person who grew up to be incredibly androgynous I couldn’t express anything more undesirable than the way I naturally looked. I was confusing enough for others as it was, forget being both confusing and angry.
I kept smoking weed but I had touched my anger and could now feel it in my body. It felt uncomfortable but I was determined to learn how to become comfortable in discomfort. So, I stayed seated on my couch, my head buried in books or rewatching E.R., or distracted by cute animal videos on YouTube. As long as I was on my couch seated in my anger I was doing my due diligence. Somewhere along the line my YouTube algorithm fed me some funny Jennifer Lawrence videos and I decided to take a break from E.R. to go down a J Law hole; cue the Hunger Game’s. I watched the four staring Jennifer Lawrence before my next session and enjoyed them very much, they gave me the same escape I’d get from watching the Harry Potter movies but a bit more bloody and a bit more adult. You might be wondering where the heck I’m going with this Hunger Games sidebar but this is the beauty of your deep subconscious, it acts in mysterious ways that little cognitive me can’t control and that is its magic.
“People tell me you are too Jewish, not enough Arab, not enough white, not exactly Lebanese, too often with Israelis. So what are you exactly? Pick a side!”
On my third session my doctor asked me if I had any intentions and I curtly told him “Absolutely not, I learnt my lesson the last time!” He chuckled and expressed that he found it always best to show up open and without expectations, to let the medicine do its work, that letting go was the whole point. As I entered my third k hole I found myself disoriented and confused about what day of the week it was, about how I had gotten to the clinic. Days of the week stopped making sense, they seemed created by man and so did my job and all of a sudden it occurred to me that I was afraid to let go of everything I believed in, that if I let go I might never come back, but in a moment of bravery I chose to let go. Immediately I was transported to my own version of the Hunger Games, I was Katniss Everdeen. As the music took over I saw a toxic black sludge come in waves as I dodged it and other predatory obstacles. I intermittently chuckled (to myself or out loud, I’ll never know) at the absurdity of where I found myself.
That third session seemed quite insignificant at the time, simply a result of my binge watching a fantasy movie series but in hindsight I think it represented the various obstacles of my life and how, even though I couldn’t see myself as having succeeded in the treacherous game of life, I’d nonetheless survived. It is after the third session that I started experimenting with the idea of finding ways to express my anger. My dreams shifted from the usual hauntings of me being invisible or ignored, laughed at and ridiculed by various people to me at the least being met by whoever’s gaze. Perhaps I couldn’t get the words out and perhaps they couldn’t hear me but in my dreams our eyes would meet and I knew I existed. It’s after the third session that I realized I found more camaraderie doing volunteer work at the center by my house catering to homeless and precarious populations than I did spending time with my “friends.” It’s after the third session that I really managed to sit with the deep shame that being born incredibly androgynous in a dichotomous world made me feel. It’s after the third session that I started believing perhaps I wasn’t a problem and perhaps I really needed to stop associating with people who believed in framing anyone as a problem.
“People like to define you so they know which box to put you in but my art was never about picking a side. It’s about embracing to be complex and messy and screaming but with love.”
On my fourth session I was placed in a different room for my trip. Instead of laying on a regular doctors table I’d be lying on a smallish leather couch in the clinic’s psychologist office. As per usual I took my socks off, and draped my blanket over me. I stopped bringing my stuffed owl after the first session but I kept burning my ex’s candle, it felt important to me to not let go of the dual realities we often times inhabit. After the Hunger Games trip came the party trip where I descended into laughter and ecstasy and for a minute I thought to myself “Oh, you’re in danger now, sir! You like this way too much!” I saw myself on a basketball court running and screaming. Behind me was a crowd I never saw but I could hear and feel energetically. I don’t remember actually playing basketball but I remember feeling like being on the court was important. Then, out of nowhere, I started doing butterfly swim strokes while standing still. None of it made sense but I was having the time of my life and because I felt so happy and light I couldn’t trust it. I thought to myself “Something has to be incredibly wrong, I cannot feel this good. Maybe I’ve aspirated my own vomit” (the latter absolutely brought on by the copious seasons of E.R. I’d binge watched the last few months.) I managed to come back to my body enough to peak out from underneath my eye mask and, sure enough, I had not vomited nor had I aspirated; I was still sprawled out on the couch.
Throughout this session I peeked out from underneath the mask at least twice, perhaps thrice. At one point I remember having some sort of profound realization and thinking to myself “You must remember this!” only to completely forget. I also concluded I was healed and didn’t need to do anymore treatments even though my gut had told me I’d need six. When I came to I told my doctor how sure I was, in the trip, that I had been healed but that my need to keep peeking out from underneath my eye mask signalled to me I hadn’t yet learnt to trust myself. The lesson of this trip seemed more obvious than the Katniss one: even when I’m feeling great I have a hard time buying into it, believing it, being present for it. I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop. That’s no way to live, terrified that you don’t deserve to feel good going through life. And when I say feel good I don’t mean that everything has to always go your way. What I mean is that there’s a certain amount of self-love I hope we can all cultivate so we can learn to trust that we can see ourselves through turbulent times. I didn’t have that.
Just like I sought out the ketamine treatments because I felt I’d reached a point where I had nothing left to lose, that if I didn’t seek something bigger than me to help me through life I’d end up ending it all sooner than later I realized, after that fourth session, that I had nothing to lose expressing, what felt like, undesirable emotions. In the integration sessions I’d been practicing with my therapist, and in our regular weekly sessions, I’d come to realize that one of my survival mechanisms was prioritizing everyone else’s feelings above my own. I’d learned to understand myself as being too sensitive when in reality I could have easily made the argument that other people were “too” sensitive themselves. However, I didn’t want to start playing the game whereby I must dismiss someone else’s feelings to create space for my own, so instead I tried on creating space for my feelings, period. Again, I figured I had nothing to lose and I figured I had held space for my friends’ emotions, if they were my real friends they’d hold space for mine.
I quickly found out who my real friends were by doing this communication exercise. I was careful with my language but direct, I didn’t mince words but I wasn’t rude. I made myself vulnerable and my real friends heard me, took the time to respond with care, and the people who, deep down inside, I knew weren’t my real friends made themselves known; I bid them farewell. Armed with a new found confidence in my ability to carry myself through hard times, with a confidence not only to be able to express my feelings but to have a right to do so, I showed up to my fifth appointment wondering if this would be my last. My doctor did his usual check in asking me if I’d had any suicidality or depressive symptoms, how I was feeling in my body and how therapy had been going. I told him I’d been exercising more and that I was pretty sure I had thus put on a bit more muscle weight, so he weighed me and confirmed. I also told him I’d be interested in increasing the dosage which he agreed to: we jumped from 0.7ml to 1.1ml, a pretty significant increase.
“The point of life is to become nothing but love and to be able to see God’s spirit inside everyone even if they vote for your enemy.”
That fifth session was the most mystical one to date. Its entirety focused on a very spiritual place within me I always knew existed but I was terrified of inhabiting. I should probably mention that I was raised Catholic, I was baptized, did my first communion and confirmation but to this day, and as I write this, I have to remind myself that Catholicism is a form of Christianity; I’m clearly not very religious. The only time I enjoyed going to church was with my grand-mother who attended mass at the old folks home and that’s the only reason I wanted to attend: I had a fond appreciation for elders, they’re full of wisdom. So when I started drifting off into my music on this fifth descent and I was met with the “truth” that we are all children of “God,” that I am the son of God, I got a bit scared. When the voice kept repeating “You were chosen by God, you are the chosen one” I got even more terrified that in my k hole I’d touched on this egomaniacal part of myself that was buried underneath. However, as soon as I started fearing the worse the voice reminded me that my fear of being an egomaniac was confirmation that I was not and that, in fact, we are all chosen by God.
This treatment lasted longer than the other ones, closer to an hour and a half. When my doctor asked me how it was I told him it was really religious and that I didn’t know what to make of it. “Very God centered” I uttered as I rubbed my eyes, still out of it. In my hole I remember finding calmness when I realized that “God” was but a metaphor for this deep feeling I’ve always had that there has to be something bigger to life than myself. In fact, it’s why I had started volunteering: in sitting with my depression and anger I’d realized that living everyday simply for myself brought me no joy. There has to be something bigger to life than the rat race we’re forced to partake in as people who live in a capitalist society. There has to be more to the selfish neoliberal life we’ve become so accustomed to we callously celebrate dehumanizing and dismissing others as a form of uplifting ourselves. That night I spoke with a close friend who’d been experiencing her own difficult people, miles away, in a different country. She is a deeply spiritual person who often invokes the God she believes in and so I felt comfortable telling her about my discovery that we are all children of God and that the metaphor is incredibly useful as an antidote to dehumanization: if you and I are both children of God than we are equal, and it ends there.
After my fifth session I started reciting the Catholic prayer “Our Father,” something I actually feel comfortable doing and something that makes me feel close to my grand-mother who passed a few years ago. Christianity has perhaps become a really disturbing religion in practice but in theory aren’t all religions the same? Don’t they all serve to remind us to constantly move with love, to see the sameness in our humanity? That fifth session was also deeply rooted in my background as an anthropology student. I remember realizing we are all really smart hominoids that have been played by our own damn cognitive selves. As a species we think we are so smart because we have cognitive abilities, that have most likely only gotten “better” thanks to our bipedalism and our discovery of fire, which allowed us to cook foods thus giving our gut a break from digestion and our brain energy to grow. But are we really that smart or have we simply made our lives more complicated and the lives of some almost impossible because in an industrial world, where some have a gross abundance while others have none, we’ve become numb to the reality that we are all human, we are all children of the metaphor that is God?
“Being unlikable is your authentic self; we are mirrors for each other.”
After that fifth session it became obvious why I used cannabis for all those years: I was afraid of stepping into my own light, I was afraid of being deserving of self-confidence, of self-love. For years I had admired everyone else’s right to be self-assured while remaining resolute in refusing myself that dignified right. I’d come to realize cannabis had served its purpose as training wheels in keeping me going all these years but that they were no longer serving me, if anything they were slowing me down. My dear friend cannabis was actually keeping me small, she was keeping me from myself. It feels pretty revolutionary to say goodbye to an old friend that I acknowledge served me for a decade plus but to ask it to go away so I can create space for a friendship I’ve craved since I was a child: a friendship with myself. After my fifth session I told my doctor that I didn’t know why but that my intuition lead me to believe a sixth session was necessary, to which he responded “I don’t know why either but my intuition is in line with yours.”
That sixth session was the first time I’d shown up completely sober for my treatments, something I was incredibly proud of, something I hadn’t thought I would have been able to accomplish. As I got myself comfortable to go into my last k hole I acknowledged the apprehension I felt that perhaps, for the first time in over two decades, I had reached a baseline of wellness I couldn’t describe with words but that I felt deep down in my gut. That last session turned out to be the most relaxing one even though I maintained a pretty high dosage of 1.1ml. I barely saw any visuals, if anything I felt an incredible calm wash over me as I lay on the table. At one point I adopted a supinated arm position as both arms lay by my side. In my past sessions I had often held onto dear life as my arms crossed over my abdomen and my hands gripped onto my blanket. In this sixth session I felt incredibly connected to myself, like my body and soul or spirit, or whatever you want to name the nameless, had fused together as one. There weren’t any euphoric highs or frustrating lows, I was just incredibly still.
As is usually par for the course I saw things I still can’t make much sense of such as the many difficult people in my life, most who identify as women, with long dark hair followed by my previously mentioned spiritually connected friend and her big curly hair. Jennifer Lawrence also made a repeat appearance and for some reason she felt incredibly important to both me and my friend, and so I did chuckle in that last session but mostly because of the absurdity of our subconscious. But I’ve learnt to let go of trying to decipher everything as it appears and rather I’ve grown comfortable showing up for the ride, comfortable in my discomfort. As I couldn’t explain why I felt I needed to go on this ketamine assisted journey, I don’t know why the first thing I did when I came to was text my friend “Don’t ask me why but Jennifer Lawrence is really important to us and your hair makes me feel safe around you.” The last four months have felt like more than a year, and I would have to say the last two months have been the most connected I’ve been to myself since I was a prepubescent child allowed to exist in my androgyny. I’ve always been a little weird circle in a square world and for the first time in three decades I think that’s a fucking beautiful thing and I genuinely wish everyone in this life understands the beauty and liberation of accepting that (even if only metaphorically) we are all children of God.
