This Is My Brain On Drugs
It happened like they always said. I did drugs and then I dropped out of university.
I couldn’t be happier!
(Grab a snack and strap in, it’s a long post. There’s also strong language and some potential triggers re: suicide)
Last year, the fall semester was challenging. I hated one of my profs because they’re lazy. I didn’t pay thousands of dollars so me and a bunch of 20 year olds can teach ourselves about unclear course material while the prof ignores questions and requests for feedback. Or snidely tell us to be better students and figure it out. I could also do without condescending ‘life advice’ from someone who doesn’t know me but is about my age. (The courses are online, so no way for anyone to know we aren’t all 20.)
But I digress…
Another course was going really well until I had an ‘MS’ moment during an exam. I was tired, and my brain completely shut down. I couldn’t recall information that I’d had a great grasp on, and I lost the use of my left hand. That made typing the timed short answer exam portion almost impossible with one hand. Basically my brain flat-lined. I could almost hear the cardiac arrest sound. I passed the exam, but barely. For acceptance into the graduate program I wanted, I need a perfect GPA. That test pulled me down from an A+ to a still good mark, but…
Given my new and permanent limitations, the only thing I can do with this degree is try to get into more school. Trust me, it was a looooooooong shot anyway. (That’s realism based on research, not negative self-talk.)
The new semester started and one week in, I had meltdowns on 3 of the 7 days.
This semester, most of the electronic textbooks and other required readings are displayed so small I can’t read anything without a ton of effort and frustration. That uses up brain bandwidth that I need for actually absorbing the material. My wonderful husband is still footing the bill. It’s been 8 months of hoop jumping, appeals, rage, and depression for the privilege of going to school. (From the government, there were no problems with the university or the staff, all amazing.)
Fun fact: the world isn’t that accessible to people with disabilities.
It’s a ton of lip service or ‘accommodations’ tossed out by able-bodied folks that aren’t actually that helpful or accommodating but once again I digress…
Before my semester last year, I started researching other treatments for refractory depression and PTSD than the mainstream. Surely if we can put men on the moon, we can do better with mental health? SSRIs don’t work that well for me, same as MAOIs, TCAs, and all the rest.
I’ve been in therapy most of my life. I’ve been on every antidepressant. Most of which have terrible side effects which make me extra depressed. Obviously, I haven’t been scared to do the work on my mental health. (Have you read my blog?) But my whole life, I’ve felt like I’d go so far and then hit some kind of mental or emotional roadblock. Or I feel good for awhile and think I finally solved my mental health struggles, but it never takes much to knock me into a backslide, a dark place, and old patterns. (See every damn blog post on this site, like this one.)
I do take an antidepressant daily and it’s the best one for me, but my dose is maxed. Up until 2022 it worked fine. I was surviving and doing okay.
Now for those who don’t know me, I’ve always been a pretty straight arrow. No criminal record and I’ve never been arrested. I didn’t drink until my late twenties. I don’t party. Nowadays I do have the occasional glass of wine or a scotch or bourbon but I don’t get drunk. I didn’t ever do drugs. Even taking Tylenol was a rare occurrence.
Cannabis is indeed a gateway drug and I’m totally okay with it.
I went and got a prescription for CBD oil a few years ago on a friend’s recommendation. It managed my ever-present anxiety beautifully. So much so, I stopped needing to take it every day after about a year. Then two years ago, I got accidentally stoned by eating a brownie with an extra ingredient. It freaked me out in the moment because I hadn’t been expecting it, but I had a splendid 5 hour nap. (Once the ‘stoned’ train has left the station, there’s little to be done until it pulls back in.) It was the best sleep I’ve likely ever had, since I struggle with falling asleep and if I’m extra stressed, I struggle to stay asleep too.
Why waste time sleeping when you can be awake and anxious all night, your brain like a methed-out hamster on a wheel?
So I got a prescription for THC oil too and started taking a small amount before bed. Much less than I assume was in the brownie. The advantage of oil from a licensed producer is exact potency and dosing, so the effects are very predictable and consistent. I don’t want to be lit, I just want to fall sleep without lying in bed for three or four hours first. I’ve been sleeping like a baby ever since. So THC helps me sleep and CBD fixed my anxiety better than any prescription ever did, and I’d tried all the options.
I blame the 80s ‘war on drugs’ for depriving me of decades of good sleep.
So that brings us to the fall of 2022, when everything started coming to a head. I’m not constantly anxious anymore, but man I’m miserable. I had a couple of incidents occur during the year that put me in a terrible head space and once I was in an emotional tailspin, I couldn’t stop it or get out of it. Then I had no hope for my future, I hated how I’m viewed by and treated by society as a visibly disabled person, I hated how the world has changed since 2020, I hate how hard everything is, I hated that my confidence is gone because I don’t know how to do life with no self esteem. I’m also in pain most of the time, and that gets really tiring.
It went on for many months, no matter what I tried or did. I have an incredibly supportive husband, the most wonderful man really, but I even started to feel disconnected from him. Life is never going to get better. Over the course of 2022, I became ever more withdrawn and self-isolated. I felt unsafe outside of the house unless my husband was with me, I just didn’t have it in me to interact with other people, and I was just one more negative or upsetting event from completely losing it.
The last three years (43 years?) used all my resilience and my grit, and left me with nothing.
I reached the lowest point I’ve ever been at and I couldn’t keep existing in such despair, just couldn’t do it. I started to think my husband would be very upset if I died, but he’d eventually move on and see that life was better without a wife who was emotionally labile, disabled, unhappy, didn’t want to do anything, needed help most of the time, and was only a financial drain without any contribution. Being a great husband plus if he was a widower? How delicious! He’d have lots of options for a new mate. I hadn’t planned to ever be a burden, and he hadn’t planned on marrying one. Eventually he’d see it was for the best, for everyone.
So one day late last year, I looked at the full bottle of a new medication prescribed by my neurologist that I’d tried only for a couple days but stopped because it was disrupting my sleep. It seemed to be a bit of an upper for me, an unintended side effect. I could work with that, but not while I was in school because I needed my sleep to study and write papers and take exams. I planned to restart them once the semester ended in the hope that the sleep disrupting effects would go away after a few weeks. Then I could continue them even while I was in school.
That day, I did the math and determined that yes, I had enough medicine for a fatal overdose.
I researched how it would kill me, because I didn’t want any more suffering. The only thing I wanted was just peace, and then nothing.
I had the how, now I needed the where so my husband wouldn’t come home from work and find my body. I just wanted the despair, the suffering to be over but I didn’t want to spread it anymore than I had to. Then I had to figure out the timing, because I couldn’t leave the dogs unattended for too long, but I needed to be gone long enough that there wasn’t a hope in hell of being found in time to have a chance of being saved and I certainly didn’t want any of my colleagues to have to respond.
You see how when medical personnel decide to end it, we don’t f*ck around or leave things to chance?
I don’t know exactly what it was after my husband came home from work that brought me up short, but I realized I was about to do something awful and permanent, and I needed to do whatever it took to stop myself. I knew it was depression, I knew my brain was f*king around and my feelings weren’t real but they were also so painfully real. (If you’ve ever been at this point, you know what I’m saying.) I needed the pain to stop, but I couldn’t permanently hurt my husband like that.
I reached out to a wonderful, long-term friend. She works for clinics that are doing studies and using a variety of substances and medications in therapy for trauma, PTSD, anxiety, refractory depression, etc. I’ve been following the ketamine research pretty closely the last couple of years, as it’s a drug we use in EMS for pain and I’ve seen it abused at parties, so the idea of using it for refractory depression was really interesting to me. I was really curious about how it made these mental health improvements, what mechanism of action occurred to improve serious, long-standing brain issues. I’m a nerd like that.
Several months into my research, psilocybin also caught my interest.
Psilocybin is the psychedelic chemical in magic mushrooms and I read about microdosing, in which you take a very small amount of psilocybin every few days. The amount is small enough that you don’t feel any effects except maybe more energy and focus. I was reading really positive things about the effects of magic mushrooms, including increased neuroplasticity, but I had no interest in psychedelics. After spending so many years disassociating from bad situations and so many years being gaslighted, I don’t want my sense of reality distorted in any way. I think I’d respond very badly, which is why I’ve never been interested in any type of experimentation with alterants. The only reason I take THC now at bedtime is because I took it accidentally and had a good result. I wouldn’t knowingly have ingested a magic brownie. (But I’m sure glad I did.)
So it wasn’t long after I reached out for help, that I took a supervised dose of powdered psilocybin because I was that desperate to get out of the dark hole my mind had become. Having tried everything I could think of for years to manage my depression and PTSD, if I didn’t do something to get it under control for the long-term, I knew I was not long from ending my suffering regardless of my loved ones.
I was willing to have my sense of reality distorted for a few hours in a safe space with experienced pros if it meant my day to day reality became less dark.
For months, I’d hated being alive. Waking up was hell because I resented that I’d woken up at all. My only ‘positive’ thought was that at least I was one day closer to the day I’d die of natural causes.
The dose was more than a microdose, but much less than the ‘normal’ dose that people take to have a fun trip. I’m a bit of a lightweight, maybe because I spent most of my life abstaining from substances, even OTC medications? Anyway, it wasn’t much but I did not enjoy the experience.
Colours got really bright, and I could tell I was on something but the dose wasn’t high enough that it messed with my sense of reality.
It did, however, make me very sick.
I think for the 5ish hours I was on psilocybin, I must have spent three of them making hurried (and assisted) trips to the washroom. I hate waves of ‘I’m going to be sick’ but there were plenty of those. Every time one wave receded, it wasn’t long before another one came crashing into me.
Many say trauma is stored in the body and some say psilocybin helps you purge it. Apparently I’ve stored a lot of trauma in my GI tract then?
And crying. Oh my gawd, the crying. Am I purging out of my eyeballs?
And I couldn’t control my body temperature so when I wasn’t freezing, I was sweating.
I swear, in 5 hours, I lost so much fluid I was dehydrated for days but I let go of so much. (Not just bodily fluids.)
Eventually, colours weren’t so bright anymore and the trip was over. For the rest of the day and that night, I felt like a wrung out sponge. I felt physically and emotionally battered, and I told my husband I couldn’t believe people took psilocybin for funzies, because it was anything but. He suggested that maybe I hadn’t taken enough, hardy har har. I suggested he do something anatomically impossible. Take more? My poor body would explode. Those who use psilocybin at higher doses for fun are much tougher than I.
I didn’t quite know how to piece together everything that had happened in my brain that day but I was told that over the next several days, I’d have more flashes of insight and epiphanies like I had in between trips to the bathroom to be sick.
Sometimes even while being sick, so I guess at least it was productive.
Over the next few days, I felt lighter. Not only was the soul-crushing depression gone, but so was the dysthymia. My entire life, a persistent ‘mild’ depression was ever present. It occasionally let me think it had moved on, in brief moments of giddy happiness but it always came back, like some joy-sucking spectre.
I’ve been waiting for it to reappear, because it always has, but so far so good. I’ve been micro-micro dosing every three days since. I say micro-micro because the starting dose, as minute as it was, still hit me like a brick and brought waves of sickness with it, albeit for a short time. I felt psychoactive effects, not bad or intense, but definitely there. It made my brain feel sparkly, I don’t know how else to describe it. The whole point of microdosing is that you don’t feel psychoactive effects, so the dose was reduced.
I still don’t like the microdosing. It bothers my digestive system and it makes me feel sedated for a few hours after I take it. Folks who microdose often talk about how they get a boost in energy and focus, but I don’t. I’ll keep taking it though, because it is having an effect. I feel incredibly free.
I feel reborn.
There’s no other way to put it. It’s like I’ve been carrying invisible burdens since I was young, and doing the ‘large’ (sarcasm) dose of psilocybin let me finally put them down. There are many past experiences that aren’t painful anymore. I learned some things from them, they absolutely shaped me as a person, but I don’t need to carry them anymore. They served whatever purpose they needed to serve, and somehow I’ve finally released them.
Issues I’ve tried to manage or fix in therapy for years were suddenly irrelevant.
I’m not ignoring anything or again cramming everything into the ball of rage and pain in the pit of my stomach. It’s just processed. It’s like fast-tracked therapy, without the mental or emotional roadblocks or resistance.
I could have saved myself a ton of time if I’d done mushrooms years ago, but I wasn’t desperate enough. Plus, I don’t think doing mushrooms at a house party with a bunch of wingnuts would have any benefit. I needed a competent facilitator.
There were some amazing questions for me to mull over. They said something about letting go of emotional trauma and anger and I laughed, “I don’t know how to life if I’m not running on anger.” They nodded and said, “That’s fair. But just consider what might happen if you were empty of anger and the other painful feelings that you use as fuel.”
I said, “I’d be empty.”
“What could you fill that empty space with instead, then?”
I’m pretty sure they expected me to say love or happiness or some other ‘hippy dippy’ shit. Not there yet! I needed the anger and the hurt for fuel, and as armour. I couldn’t be hurt anymore, I wouldn’t survive it.
A month later, that little brain seed started to root.
My entire life, I’ve had challenges with attachment. Attachments I should feel, I don’t. In my late teens and early twenties, I mostly formed harmful attachments. I didn’t have a clue what healthy attachment was. In my thirties and forties, I didn’t form many attachments (except my husband, of course) because I actively avoided it. Too risky.
It got me thinking. Have I let him love me all the way? Have I let myself love him all the way?
We’ve always had a good marriage, but we’ve become even closer the last few years, ridiculously so. Navigating what we’ve both gone through the last few years (other devastating and stressful things that we needed to handle, not just my disability and the end of life as we knew it) has given us a level of intimacy that I’ve certainly never had with anyone, and I don’t think he has either. But have I really gone all in, or did I unconsciously keep some barriers?
I’d kept some deep, painful secrets, not on purpose, but because none of it seemed particularly relevant in our life.
But what if it was?
My husband is now the only person in the world other than myself who knows my entire story and all the characters. He seems to still love me anyway.
2022 was hard. I might even say, the hardest year of my life and the hardest on our marriage because there was distance between us as I unravelled. He never wavered, but I was a miserable mess. I was pushing him away and regretting that I ever married him because he was so good, so perfect for me, that if he wasn’t in my life I could have ended my mental suffering already.
Damn him and his unending devotion.
Only after I took the psilocybin did I really understand some things. It’s one thing to know something cognitively thanks to therapy. To really feel it, to really understand it, is a whole different thing. That’s been an intense struggle the last few years.
I suddenly understand things told to me for years, or the expectations of others, or beliefs that I held when viewing the world from a place of trauma and self-protection, are really all bullshit. The choices we make when we have very few choices and even less resources, choices we make or who we become to survive…
That’s not who we truly are. You can’t judge someone’s personality or temperament based on what they do when they’re living in fear, and to think otherwise is moronic.
I feel washed clean and now I’m a blank slate.
Now I can look at the world without programming I was subjected to by other people and bad experiences and start fresh. Who would I be without all the self-protection adaptations? Who might I have become without all the mental noise and interference?
I left university because it was hard, and it’s extra hard now with my limitations. My new limitations make everything in life hard, and I can’t control that. I can control being in university, though. I’m sick of white-knuckling my way through life. I can do hard things. I’ve proved that over and over and over and now I don’t want to do hard things anymore unless I absolutely have to. I paid my dues. and I put the work in. At the end of the day it didn’t really matter. I still ended up disabled and broken the last three years, trying to process a bunch of things that no one should have to. Much of my life, I spent stressed and trying to live up to others’ expectations or atone for whatever they think I’m guilty of, and it didn’t make me a better person.
It just broke my brain and ruined my life.
I had it in my head for the longest time that the more you suffer, the worthier you are and now I know that’s garbage too. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be comfortable, safe, and happy. Being the opposite doesn’t make you virtuous.
There hasn’t been a lot of joy or happiness or fun or celebration in my life, and I’d like to change that. As I told my husband when I told him I was dropping university, there’s been a lot of milestones and rites of passage that were either flat out denied to me or taken from me, or ruined by some asshole and I intend to take them back if i can, and if I can’t then I’ll crowd my mind with good memories and experiences.
I want ease and softness, and my life not to be governed by appointments and testing and treatments and physio and required reading and term papers. I just have this sense of peace and something warm and positive.
Is that happiness?
It’s hard to tell because previously anytime I felt anything good there was always an underlying dread of what was going to come along and ruin it. (Or who.)
I thought most of my life that my brain was just incapable of being happy and producing the required chemicals, but maybe I’m wrong.
The last few years, I think I’ve been working towards these moments.
I mean, I wanted to feel this peaceful my entire life but the last few years have been really hard and intense while I was working through so much. Three steps forward, then two back. I had no choice but to evolve. I worked at figuring out who I was as a disabled woman. Who was I if I wasn’t everyone’s rock? If I wasn’t a hiker, a dancer, a fitness enthusiast?
Maybe the question should have been, who am I without all the garbage that had burrowed deeply into my brain, without all the fear and anger and hurt holding me locked in misery?
I spent the last several days since dropping out of school doing absolutely nothing productive except a dance lesson. It’s time to go back to that because I enjoyed it, and my instructor and I get along like a house on fire. It’ll be good for my brain wiring, too. I took a lot of lessons for many years, and danced at a high level. Some neuro pathways are there somewhere, we’ll either unearth them or do some relearning and rewiring and have a fun time doing it. That’s what I’ll be doing with my refunded tuition when it arrives.
I’ve read two fiction books, listened to a podcast, slept a lot, binge-watched Netflix while cuddling a dog, and I’m really happy when my husband gets home from work. Not a to-do list, an obligation, or appointment in sight.
It’s been glorious.
Now, I want to see things and do things and experience things and feel things without any hold back or timidity. There’s always been a hold back for me. I don’t let many people get close. Sometimes I’ve been afraid of trying new things, and I’ve never liked unfamiliar people or situations.
But what if, in the next 40 years of my life, I lived full throttle?
Some links:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/02698811211073759
