My Ketamine Journey

For most of my life I walked a tightrope of despair, crushed into a crumpled-paper version of myself by a weighty depression from which I could not break free. I was a nexus of misery, exuding negativity, staggering through a life half-lived with no sense of direction, guided by an all-or-nothing black-and-white worldview rife with unignorable evidence of my inadequacies. I was a disappointment to others, but no critic was more liberal with condemnation than I was with myself. I swirled endlessly in a toilet-like whirlpool certain of the inevitability of my own self-destruction. Whether I set the cornerstones of my prison myself is immaterial, for somewhere among the line it became my subconscious impulse to reinforce the walls, making escape ever more unlikely. Eventually, in an improbable place, I found a cure to my disease, lasting relief, and a new lease on life.

My body is in a strip-mall with an IV in my arm, but my mind is light years away. I am adrift in some cosmic place that stretches out to infinity in more dimensions than I can imagine. Reality shatters, cracks spreading across all axes of the matrix and existence itself rains down on me in an infinity of atomically-sharp crystalline razor shards, leaving nothing behind. This account inadequately expresses the esoteric topographies and alien sense of self involved in the experience, but I found myself in a void in which I now realize much healing occurred.

Ketamine had flooded into my sponge-like brain and burst open long-dormant neural pathways. This is the moment of my rebirth. I do not realize it yet, but I am a baby bird, thrust out of the nest, and it is time to discover my wings. I find myself finally unshackled, Harrison Bergeron during that brief, bittersweet moment at the end, but this persists. I am too nascent a larva to understand the ramifications of newfound freedom. That will come later as I undertake the difficult path of self-discovery, but after the first infusion I am spent and will sleep for thirty hours. Upon waking, the only way to describe the experience is to say that it felt like software updates had been installed in my brain. This was my first ketamine treatment, and within a matter of weeks, the creation of new neural pathways, as well as the maps and metaphors revealed in the psychedelic experiences will change my life forever.

Depression had robbed me of decades, resigning my life to one incomplete, eked out in shadows of perceived inadequacy with all hope blotted out by the certainty that things can never change. I was frozen, unable to see the tendrils of sadness and shackles of low self-worth as anything but intrinsic forces, hardwired into me as surely as my nervous system. This is the insidious parasitism of depression, which winds itself through the soul and whispers “I am a part of you” as it seeks out misery to feed its sick appetites. This cancerous tulpa becomes the master of one’s emotions, relegating whatever sense of self remains peeking through the blinds to the role of passenger, too helpless or uncaring to steer away from the terrible inevitabilities of toxic cycles repeating.

One mechanism of depression is that it limits one’s perception. Any concept can be seen as a multifaceted object, its positives and negatives becoming evident as it is rotated and we achieve understanding. Depression has a way of obscuring all but the worst sides of anything, resulting in a deficient understanding, underpinned by a lack of awareness of one’s limitations. A world filled with only the ugliest faces of everything is a dreary place, indeed.

I now see each day as a matrix of opportunities to improve things rather than a predetermined series of steps leading to the same entrenched, despairing mindset and outcomes. Through mechanisms I am just now starting to understand, my life went from watching time slip by as a slideshow to a vibrantly interactive choose-your-own-adventure game. As I shed my old life like a snakeskin, I frantically researched explanations for what I was experiencing. I read about psychology, magick, physics, and psychedelics. I pored over the Bible, suddenly aware of how much of my cultural programming originates in its pages, and investigated the fine structure constant, which elegantly underpins reality, hinting at either the presence of a programmer or perhaps merely the randomness of a chaotic system that from time to time resolves into conditions conducive to the incubation of life.

Searching for answers led me to realize that my worldview was predicated on a delicate interplay between emotion, reason, and faith. It was this final piece that had long stymied me. I had long equated “faith” with “religion” or “spirituality,” not realizing the breadth of the spectrum it exists on. Eventually, I came to realize that, during my years of depression, I was brimming with faith, but it was misplaced. The disease had made me a fanatic, zealously devoted to the concept that things could never get better. This, naturally, informed my emotional state at every turn, but also warped my ability to reason, by basing my every decision on the flawed logic that sadness and negativity were the only possible outcomes. This was the mechanism of the self-defeating cycles that kept me locked in stasis, preventing any progress towards a better life.

The ketamine washed all of this out of me over a twelve day period during which I received six hour-long IV infusions. It was not my idea to seek treatment. I was too far gone, still reeling from a failed suicide attempt that had offered me no profound insights about the meaning of life, only an embarrassing impatient stint on a psych-ward and a badly broken ankle that would require surgery to fix. My path was that of inevitable self-destruction, but my mother had seen a story about the antidepressant potential of ketamine and, in her desperation, asked me to try the somewhat radical treatments. This would wind up being the second time my mother would give me life.

When asked how long it took for the ketamine to make me feel better, I do not hesitate to answer: “immediately.” I felt changed after the first session, but feeling better and being better are two different things, and it would take several years before life would settle down. I cannot express what it was like to find myself suddenly unfettered, miraculously free of the moods, thoughts, and inclinations that had enshrouded me for years, except to say that I felt as light as a feather, and capable for the first time ever.

Freedom in such a context can be a bear to grapple with, and transmogrifying from a world of “it doesn’t matter” to one of “what if?” was overwhelming. I was having the most indescribable experience of my life, but even had I been able to find the guidance I was looking for, I did not have the vocabulary or knowledge to express my needs. This resulted in a long, but necessary, process of cobbling together my own homebrew way of dealing with a world that depression had prevented me from ever seeing clearly. Along the way, I fortunately discovered the works of Dr. John Lilly, an extraordinary psychonaut whose seminal work “Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer” helped me make some sense out of what was happening. I credit his books with providing me models with which to work out new methods to engage with reality.

I admit that many of the conclusions I arrived at would be laughable to someone who had grown up unstunted by mental illness. These were my first baby-steps on my path to self-actualization, and lessons that most people take for granted had never fully gelled in my mind. The catalyst for this change was the reemergence of long-buried emotions that I had not had access to in years. For the first time since childhood I felt real enthusiasm and curiosity, fueled by legitimate hope. This was a far cry from the inevitably negative attitudes I had enshrouded myself with for so long.

The first concrete example of change came one day when I wandered into an unfamiliar bookstore. A flyer by the register advertised a writing group that met monthly. The old me would have wanted to attend such an event, but would have found excuses not to. The new me simply decided to go, and two weeks later I found myself among people who would validate me in ways I didn’t realize I needed. My inner critic had been so vocal for so long that it had drowned out any encouragement or positivity for decades. For the first time in years I felt nourished, but it was more than that, as, up to this point, I had been emotionally incapable of digesting anything other than negativity.

Feeling good for the first time in memory, I saw how depression had turned off my capacity for happiness, resulting in the dreadful state of anhedonia that defined my worldview for years. The switch was back on, but it was my responsibility to maintain the system. This required a great deal of personal accounting, and the acknowledgment of various toxic elements in my life. So began the gradual process of shedding. People and preconceived notions that dragged me down had no place in my new world, and, again, each time I let go of something I felt lighter and more airy.

Along the way I found a quote by Alfred Korzybski, the creator of General Semantics, who said “If all people learned to think in the non-Aristotelian manner of quantum mechanics, the world would change so radically that most of what we call ‘stupidity’ and even a great deal of what we call ‘insanity’ might disappear.” I have come to believe that this is true, and the way I see it, each choice we make is like our own personal Schroedinger’s cat, existing in a superposition of infinite possibilities until we open the box by making a decision. By doing this we collapse the waveform and create a new reality for ourselves. If our choices are motivated by self-loathing and despair, the outcomes become predictably sour. However, if we are guided by the desire to truly better ourselves and the world, we will tend to arrive at more positive results.

Beyond any shadow of doubt, ketamine saved my life and granted me opportunities I could not, in the throes of my illness, even conceive of. As I have progressed along this journey, I have seen the medicine that cured me misused, mischaracterized, and further stigmatized. The media has focused on several sensational deaths while giving very little attention to ketamine’s therapeutic potential. It is rarely acknowledged that ketamine is on The World Health Organization’s list of “essential medications,” that Navy SEAL medics carry it in their kit, or that it is routinely administered to children in emergency rooms.

It is rare that a medication as dynamic and versatile as ketamine is so safe, but like anything powerful, it can be a double-edged sword. Most ketamine tragedies seem to result from lack of respect, either for oneself or for the person it is being administered to, but most insidiously, for the substance itself. Ketamine facilitates a focused and intentional ability to rewrite one’s source-code, editing the registry in one’s brain to optimize the system. However, this aspect of the experience can be addictive, as the truths a person can reveal to themselves can invite constant returning to that mental-space to continue the perceived work that one is doing on themselves.

When people become lost in this process, it is not unlike endlessly tuning a race car in a garage, eking out more horsepower and better fuel efficiency, but neglecting to ever go to the track. Programming improvements into the system, while simultaneously uncovering deep truths about oneself and the universe can be profoundly fulfilling, but these changes must be offered an opportunity to exert themselves on the world. Otherwise the process is merely masturbatory. A balance must be found, but that is true in many cases.

It has been almost five years since I‘ve had a ketamine infusion. The life I lived when I walked into that strip mall was a drab, black and white affair. The impulse to die boomed in my head like the thunderous voice of a god. I was not just hopeless, I was cut off from the idea of hope. Now, all that seems like someone else’s bad dream. There has been a technicolor inversion, and that is all well and good, but where does that leave me?

I find myself refreshed and newly awakened in a world of horrors. Humanity has unleashed a dystopian nightmare upon itself that is resolving into, until recently, unimaginable levels of discord. Whether wittingly or not, divisions have been driven into the hearts and minds of the populace, and each week reveals more and more of the insidiousness of the processes driving the strife, and yet, things only seem to get worse.

I do not think it is too far a stretch to say that the collective unconscious is terribly mentally ill at the moment. Whether that means an unseen meeting of the minds in the astral plane, or merely the endless expressiveness of the ever-present internet is immaterial, the wedges are driven and people, as a whole, have lost sight of each-other. There is an epidemic of loneliness during a time of unprecedented connectivity. We were given the tools to build a utopia, and we have created a hellscape of division and hatred. The worst of our animalistic impulses and fears have gotten the better of us, and it is all by design.

We have been played, and while what has been done cannot be undone easily, if enough people reset their way of thinking, positive change can be affected quickly. For me ketamine, and that glimpse of the center of the universe was the ignition of a process, but it is by no means the only way, and even its powerful psychedelic lessons are meaningless if they are not carried into one’s daily life and expressed through some sort of betterment. These vectors of goodness are plentiful, but can be hard to see when one is wrapped up and despairing, even in small ways. Now is the time for us to change.