Ketamine Therapy, Session 4

A startling jolt of clarity and lightness

Sometime this summer, I asked myself an important question. When was the last time I’d felt pure, unbridled happiness? The sad part was that I had no immediate answer, so I thought about it for a couple of weeks until it dawned on me while in a music-induced nostalgia hole that it was very clearly the summer of 2008. Let me paint the picture: I’d finished high school early, and the upcoming period of time that should have been my senior year was up in the air. I had a small business called Frolic Hairwear, which had a modest following and capitalized on a Gossip Girl-fueled headband trend. My summer plans included a summer art program at CCA in Oakland, CA and my first ever trip to Europe with my dad and siblings, during which I’d visit Central Saint Martin’s in London for the in-person college interview I’d begged for over email. When I arrived in California and settled into the campus apartment I’d be staying in for the month, I felt strangely at home. For the first time, I’d found people who made me feel like I belonged. They were on my wavelength in a way none of the people I knew in Ohio were.  Diverse, open-minded, curious, creative but still just kids. It’s the same feeling one gets when showing up at college, but with the extra dose of vulnerability that comes with still being firmly planted in adolescence. I met the person who would become my life-long best friend that month. I even felt some semblance of romantic love for the first time. These were people that I chose, and who chose me. We spent our time together making things, exploring the Bay Area and talking about our plans for the future. I’d been dead-set on a fashion design degree, but towards the end of the month, my painting teacher pulled me aside after class and told me that she thought that there was more for me. That should I want to talk about considering something else, she was there for me. Something special happened that month in California, which expanded my mind and made me realize the endless potential of my life ahead. The family trip that followed solidified my fate. I felt like the world was mine and I’d find any possible way to drink it all in. Ambition and naiveté were a combination that became a drug to me.

It was December of that same year that my dad died and my world was turned upside down. My stubbornness and self-righteousness led me to follow through with all of the plans, even though I probably could’ve used a pause. His death punctuated a period of time where it felt easy to dream big, and became the catalyst for a period of time when it became necessary to my survival. In the past few months I’ve been grappling with how to get the feeling of summer ‘08 back. That excitedness for the future, the expansiveness that came with it, the untainted purity. I even went so far as to rekindle a friendship with the boy from that month, who I refer to jokingly as the first boy I ever loved. We talked wistfully about that summer and caught up on years of lost time. It felt intimate and safe but it also really rattled me because it became apparent that I’d blocked out so much of that period of time because it was painful to remember a version of myself I’d lost track of.

All week I’ve been thinking about the imagery I saw on Monday and the strong color and texture associations. The integrator had warned me that with expansion I’d also start to feel contraction — and boy, did I. Tuesday presented me with feelings of rigidness and anxiety around everyday situations that I haven’t felt since the beginning of treatment. They say that this type of intravenous ketamine treatment can significantly enhance your brain’s neuroplasticity for 1-4 days following, and that one must be careful about habits and thoughts because there’s potential for change. These feelings were in opposition of everything I’m trying to correct about my brain’s chemistry and it freaked me out to know how quickly the switch can still flip. It’s just a contraction. It’s just a contraction. With expansion comes contraction. Yesterday morning, yet another rainy New York City Friday, I prepared for my fourth session with anticipation because I felt like I really needed another dose of expansion to help me reset. Just before leaving home for my appointment, I recalled the Philip Glass ballet the friend I’d had breakfast with was telling me about and thought about the sort of hypnosis I feel when I listen to Philip Glass. I looked up the show, which was a 3-day engagement by the Lyon Opera Ballet at the New York City Center performing Lucinda Child’s 1979 collaboration featuring music by Glass and video visuals by artist Sol Lewitt. Without a second thought, I booked a single ticket for the performance later that night. What would happen if I took my freshly plasticized brain to soak up something visceral? I wanted to find out.

The room I was put in at the clinic was jarring, to say the least. Instead of the shade of pink I’ve begun to feel comforted by, the walls were covered in some sort of algorithmic wallpaper scene in shades of blue, teal and pinks. It depicted willow-y cherry blossom trees, but they were growing out of sparkly blue water and instead of flowers, there were naked female bodies dripping from them in various sexualized positions. Below them were pink lily pads with the same naked women lounging on them. It looked like a scene that someone who’s never done psychedelic drugs imagines visualizing on them. Before long, my integrator came in and I was pleased and surprised that I’d been assigned the same man I’d seen last time. He greeted me by my full name Caroline Weaver and we both laughed at the irony of my last name. Because he’d helped me tangle such a complicated web for myself last time he asked me to talk about what I’d since learned from the themes we’d discussed. We arrived at the same place we started on Monday — trying to understand my need to be in control and how it relates to the grip my depression has on me. Right before the nurse came in to administer the drug, he posed a profound question: “If you let go of control, what’s left?”. I was stumped, and once my eye mask and headphones were on and he was guiding me through a breathing exercise, unprompted and without any thought I said: “I trust the process”. He paused and asked me to repeat what I’d just said. “I trust the process”.

What I saw going into the “journey” was in stark contrast to my previous sessions. Instead of feeling like I was sinking into something deep, dark and warm, I felt an immediate levity. Despite my eyes being closed and covered with a black-out mask, what I saw was bright and light. The colors were yellows and greens and as my consciousness drifted away, I thought about something I’d heard recently — the idea of thinking about your life as if it is a single day. If my life is a day, I’m currently in the early afternoon. In the brightness of the yellows and greens, I though about the possibilities of the afternoon. The feeling I felt was that of skimming water. The way it prickles your flesh. The surface of water as the boundary between above and below. But instead of my mind taking me below, it took me above. For the first time, I really understood the motion sickness piece of this as I felt my body spin upwards, like that flying glass elevator in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, it kept going up and up and up. It took the shape of a glass egg, with me inside of it. A startlingly vivid  flashback from my real life came to me as I tried to relate to the egg. Just a few weeks ago, I was at the deli near my office paying for a single hard boiled egg. I put the egg on the counter and it started rolling around in a wiggly and irregular way, as eggs do. I tried to stop it, and the woman at the checkout counter giggled and said “you can’t stop the egg”. I picked it up and put it in the pocket of my pants and she said “that’s better”.

As the egg kept spinning, the giggle of the checkout lady played in my mind until a sudden swell of music began to morph the egg into a balloon — expanding around me as it continued to float. The view was aerial, but nothing below was recognizable. I had this profound sense of being very small in the expansiveness. This, too, was the opposite of my previous experiences where I’d felt like I was sinking, swaddled by something comfortable, with everything feeling so so close.

What’s amazing to me in hindsight is not only how visual this journey was but how much of it I’m able to remember. Satisfied with this brightness, this levity, I felt myself coming out of it. Just as I was wiggling my fingers and toes, the balloon started to sink deep into something blue, like the ocean. Instead of continuing to sink, though, it bounced back and emerged again into the lightness. Everything looked and felt luminous and white as the balloon turned into a paper lantern, still floating. Several times, I felt myself coming back to full consciousness but something kept pulling me back in. Suddenly, I thought something loudly and coherently: When I let go, I don’t fall, I float. I repeated this over and over again until I did actually wake up hard, fast and to the the sound of The Power is Here Now. It was an entirely different playlist, but that song somehow showed up for me again, in a moment that felt nothing short of revelatory.

When I opened my eyes, there was a strange urgency. I wasn’t bothered by the light in the room because the place I’d just been was so bright. I found myself alone in the room, so I pushed the red button on my chair because I felt desperation to write it all down. At last, someone came to take the IV out and I scribbled notes and keywords in my journal as fast as I could. When I left go, I don’t fall, I float. The nurse who checked on me could tell I needed a minute and waited to send the integrator in. When he finally arrived I had a fountain of information to share. It was all so clear and the imagery made so much sense. Where was the confusion I’d felt before? Answers to his questions came easily. When he asked me again: “When you let go of control, what’s left” and I said with clarity: I don’t need to know. I told him about this idea of being in the afternoon of my life — I said that I feel like I wasted the morning, but you have to live through the morning to get to the afternoon, and the afternoon is a calm and beautiful place. Not the beginning or the end. Maybe this is a different way to understand the liminal space I’ve felt trapped in. I’m in the middle of two places, but it’s not because I’m trapped there, it’s because the middle is itself a place that has something to offer me.

As I was going through each key point from my notes — the yellows and greens, the egg, the floating — I brought up the feeling of smallness against the vastness of the world, the expansion of the balloon and the word “effervescent” which kept coming up. Something dawned on me as I talked through it. That feeling of summer ‘08, this is it. Bubbling over with desire to explore and learn and find out what’s out there. The sheer anticipation of it all. Excitement for the future of my life. But this time, without the need for control. I am safe, I can let go.

I wrote in my journal until I felt ready to leave. It was still raining and I’d decided I would indeed go to the ballet, but first I had a couple of hours to spend. After these sessions, I find that my decision making abilities are kind of funny. It’s as if I’ve been boiled down to my most basic, childlike self. Instinctively, I did the exact thing 13 year-old Caroline would have done if she had free time in the midtown 50s — I went to Bergdorf Goodman. For an hour or so I rode the escalator to every floor and just looked at the beautiful clothes. When I felt the hungry, I went to my favorite midtown pre-show spot, Trattoria Dell’Arte, which is delightfully outdated, like it’s playing a role in a 1985 romcom. The haze of the drugs had me feeling curious and contemplative, and not at all self-conscious about things like what the rain was doing to my hair, or going to the ballet alone and a little high on ketamine. When the curtain rose, I knew I’d made the right choice. The music was trance-like, loopy and patterned in a way that had me thinking it was reprogramming my brain as if it was a computer. On a sheer screen in front of the stage, black and white videos of the dancers played, in different scales but with the exact same choreography that was happening on the actual stage. It was breathtaking — apparitions dancing in harmony with their live counterparts. Their miniature forms danced in my mind as I fell asleep last night.

It’s clear to me now that I needed to get to the deepest dark in order to see the light. As the integrator reminded me after my first session: life grows from darkness. If the first half of my treatment was a journey through the confusing and deep darkness, will my second half continue to bring me lightness and clarity? Suddenly, a fear has emerged that I could be derailed if my last two sessions take me somewhere else. A tiny part of me thinks what if I just quit while I’m ahead and work with this? But that’s not the lesson I’m supposed to be learning here. With expansion comes contraction and what this treatment is helping me realize is that there’s no limit to expansion, and the contractions that come with it are sure as hell worth it.