On a Saturday morning, I slide on my dirty old Crocs, grab my journal and take my coffee up the spiral staircase in my kitchen. My favorite part of these mornings is the moment I open the door to see the lush, green secret garden I’ve spent eleven years cultivating. Still, after all those years, I feel the same sense of wonder, especially at this time of day, when the city is still just waking up and the glow of the morning sun is yellow and creates flickering shadows all over the deck. There are large powder-coated planters around the perimeter, which hold river birches, tall cypress and a couple dozen native plants, which bloom throughout the year. In wooden planters and terracotta pots, I plant vegetables, herbs and perennial flowers, which I obsessively select, swap out as the seasons change and water by hand every morning. Throughout the years, I’ve experimented with a hedge of corn, tried out four varieties of dwarf melon, grown hundreds of peppers for pickling and learned that the best part of growing mint is when it gets really big and starts to flower, attracting more bees than anything I’ve never seen. From underneath the skylight at the kitchen counter, I hear the bird calls of species that you’d not expect to find on an East Village roof – colorful things like cardinals and blue jays. It’s a perfect oasis because my wild strawberries are safe from the snacking pests of a normal growing environment, and the sun is direct enough to grow just about anything I want. When I wonder how I got so lucky, I’m reminded of the hours I’ve spent reading about gardening, the rigor of hauling bags of soil up the five flights of stairs and the years of patience and care. Nature is miraculous, especially when it’s been tricked into thriving on a Manhattan rooftop.

This is my dream home, and I’m selling it. More specifically: it’s a two bedroom top floor apartment that was built in 1853 and still has its original fireplaces (two of them!) and wide-plank pine floor. It’s the kind of apartment that you see and think “I can’t believe places like this exist outside of movies”, or at least that’s what I thought when I saw it for the first time. Actually, the first time I saw it was during a middle-of-the-night Zillow rabbit hole, when I was deep in the fantasy of my future. Having grown up in an old house, I saw the listing and couldn’t believe that such a place could be real: a very old apartment with just enough modern updates. The next morning, impulsively, I called the listed broker and scheduled an appointment. “No, I don’t want to see other apartments, just this one” I told her. She had no idea that I was only twenty four years old and hadn’t thought about buying an apartment until just the day before. And on that icy February day, when I opened the door, I knew that this was where I wanted to live. It was better than the photos, and I could imagine every facet of my imagined life here. This is where I should probably tell you that I know it sounds insane that as a 24 year-old, I bought a 2-bedroom Manhattan apartment on impulse. It was insane, and I was afforded this privilege by complicated circumstances. As a beneficiary of a life insurance policy following the death of my father when I was a teenager, I have been able to purchase a home. It’s a fact that still feels uncomfortable: money that doesn’t feel like mine, a trade-off for the most horrific tragedy of my life. I get to live in this beautiful home, but I’m also missing my father. Like I said, it’s complicated.

In this apartment, I’ve lived with two very different boyfriends – one who insisted on installing a meat smoker on the roof and another who became obsessed with writing a musical about my cat. I’ve stuffed the 1920s doctor’s hutch in the dining room with craft supplies and still delight in the fact that the sink that’s built in actually works. Throughout the years, I’ve put money that I didn’t want to spend into replacing the air conditioners, repairing the roof, and replacing the marble floor in the shower because I didn’t know that you have to reseal it every six months. There’s a lot you don’t know about owning a home —especially an old one— when you’re twenty four, but this home surely broke me in and taught me the hard way. At least six friends have stayed here for a period of time when they first moved to the city, or were going through breakups. I’ve written three books, hosted countless parties on the roof, hatched ideas for two businesses and established a tradition I call Baked Potato Christmas in this apartment. There’s a sunlit, orgy-sized shower, and a kitchen with enough counter space that no one runs into each other. In the daytime, you don’t have to turn on a single light, because the natural light is plentiful. These are luxuries I will probably never have again in a New York City apartment, and when it dawned on me early last year that I can’t live here anymore I felt immediate relief, and also a deep sense of mourning. What I’m mourning is the life I thought I wanted: with a family, and a home life and a career that affords me the time to spend in the garden. I moved into my dream apartment at twenty four because I was desperate to feel at home — to jump ahead a few steps into the life that I imagined I would feel safe in. And now, eleven years later, my reality looks drastically different. I didn’t marry that boyfriend who wanted two kids and a house upstate. My job is more demanding than my garden, and I’m okay with that, because what I do now is more meaningful than I ever knew a career could be. This home belongs with someone who can be its proper steward — who can understand that in a city where there’s more “value” in tearing down than in maintaining, that it’s important to preserve these old homes, which tell the story of our city’s past. Every time I watch the show The Gilded Age, I think about what my home was like in relation to theirs, because it would have been here at that time, long established as a respectable working class residence.

The thing about the “future” is that our idea of what it looks like is ever-shifting. For most of my friends, it means out-growing homes as their families and bank accounts expand. For me, it means minimizing my home life to make more room for what’s happening outside, in my wider world. For my lush island in the sky, there will be new species of birds, butterflies and bees, attracted by whatever the next gardener will plant. Perhaps they’ll turn the guest room into a nursery and fill in the cracks in the floor. Maybe they’ll finally open up the mysterious storage area above the pocket doors that everyone asks about but which I’ve never investigated. They’ll find remnants of the lives lived here before — the dozens of us who have sought comfort in front of the fireplace, or observed the neighbors through the back windows. What I’ll miss the most are those mornings at the teak table underneath the shadows of the birch leaves. This is where I go to scheme, to reset and to take a moment to breathe in the life that’s around me — to remind myself that while I might have the luxury of hiding in this verdant cocoon, that I’m surrounded by an infinite landscape where I can still find the things I sought in this home.

As I get nearer to being ready to move into a new apartment, I must become more serious about selling this one — a matter which isn’t as easy as one might think. A home like this is not for the average person “on the market” — it’s for someone who has the same guttural reaction I did, and as the two owners before me did, too. There are five flights of stairs to walk up, a noisy avenue to confront every morning and the maintenance that comes with a home built in 1853. It’s a trade-off that’s absolutely worth it, for the right person. The apartment will be put back on the market after Labor Day, but until then, I’m taking matters into my own hands. Are you considering buying a home, or do you know someone who is? I will be hosting two casual open houses on both Saturday 8/29 and Saturday 9/5. Come by for a spritz or a cup of tea in the garden and I’ll tell you stories of my life in this one-of-a-kind place.

Photos by Lesley Unruh

Details:

Location: East Village, Manhattan

Price: $2,650,000

Specs: 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom with a 900 sq ft private roof deck

Building: Condo with 5 full-floor units

On June 2nd, 2015 I was working a normal day in my shop. It was the original location of CW Pencil Enterprise, in a tiiiiiiiny storefront on Forsyth Street on the Lower East Side. We’d only opened in mid-March, and in May we had a big article in the New York Times. Now, two weeks later, I’d hired a little more help and we’d survived the initial onslaught of orders and traffic. It was a brutal month — made more difficult by the fact that four days earlier I’d moved into a new apartment on the 5th floor of an 1850s townhouse.

In an old tenement building like the one where my shop was, the only easy and affordable A/C option is a window unit positioned above the door. On this particular day in June, ours was leaking badly onto the entrance. So, I left Caitlin, who was working with me that day and walked to Don Juan, the bodega on the corner of Broome Street. I bought a roll of paper towels and left the store to find that it’d suddenly started raining. Without thinking about it, I pranced across the jagged crossing. As was the case with most surrounding streets in 2015, this one was in great need of re-pavement and was home to a number of murky puddles. You know the ones. They contain a cloudy, smelly, festering cocktail of all of the things that leak in a city. So, picture me: prancing, not running across the street, only to catch the edge of my sandal on an uneven piece of pavement. I was just trying to get back quickly, without getting wet, but instead I ended up on the ground, my knee bloody and caked with tiny bits of gravel. I stood up, embarrassed, and hobbled across the street with my paper towels in hand. People asked if I was okay and I insisted I was. The only customer present when I got back to the shop happened to be a British EMT who pressured me to immediately go to urgent care, even though I insisted that it wasn’t that bad. When I got the courage to look at my wound I saw, with horror, exposed bone and a mess of torn pink flesh in a straight line underneath my kneecap. I didn’t have more than regular band-aids (note to shop owners: keep a proper first aid kit on hand!) so I taped a newly purchased paper towel around my knee with washi tape.

After an Uber ride and an hour spent at CityMD, my knee was clean and stitched up and I was mobile enough to walk to the pharmacy to fill a prescription for antibiotics. I was fine. Mostly, I was annoyed that I’d need to take a day off of work and cancel a couple of sessions with Mike, the handsome personal trainer I’d been training with for a couple of years. In my half unpacked apartment, I laid restlessly in anticipation of the second morning. I’d clean my wound and make the sensible choice to swap my bike for a taxi to work. Instead, I woke up in so much pain I couldn’t even touch my toe to the floor. In bed, helpless, I called my Fed, my largely unavailable finance boyfriend. He left work to carry me, still in my Sleepy Jones pajamas, down the five flights of stairs and around the corner to the same CityMD. They took one look at my knee and called an ambulance.

Something I didn’t know about ambulances is that they ask you which hospital you want to go to. Which one? How was I to know? I was young enough to still be on my mom’s federal employee health insurance and could go to any of them. “We’ll take you to the nice one”, they said. The “nice one” was an ER that’s now called Northwell Health Greenwich Village Hospital on 7th Ave. I was rapidly admitted and hooked up to an IV for antibiotics and morphine — a drug I only knew from a lyric in a Pink song. The pain was, to this day, the worst I’ve ever felt. At once deep and throbbing, like a broken bone, but also sharp like a million needles. Like many tattoo guns, at the same time. I felt it in my whole body. I was there for a full day but I don’t remember much, except that Fed had to go back to work and that the nursing staff frequently checked on me while on the phone with the infectious disease department — they were waiting to see if it got worse. Through a morphine haze, I ordered dinner from a local restaurant, which I couldn’t believe was even an option in the ER. Salmon with quinoa. Remember when we were all eating lots of quinoa? At some point I crudely posted this photo on Instagram to alert my friends that I was out of commission:

Late that night, I was abruptly taken uptown to the real hospital. At Lenox Hill on the Upper East Side I was deposited in a nice, private corner room (thanks, federal health insurance). So much of what followed is blurry, probably because I was on so many drugs and under such stress but I remember being woken up again in the wee hours of morning by a really mean surgeon and being told that they were going to operate immediately. No one told me what was going on, except that I had an infection in my knee. When I was conscious and back in my room the next morning, I don’t remember if anyone was there, but I do recall my brother Evan arriving later. He was newly out of college and unemployed. I told everyone else not to come. I was angry, and I was sure I couldn’t possibly be there much longer. For a few days, I was frequently checked on by various residents in the infectious disease department and I still had a continuous cocktail of morphine and antibiotics pumping through my veins. Fed came by after work every day, and Evan was tasked with helping out at the shop and dealing with my moving stuff. I just laid there, in the hospital, and answered work emails as much as I could handle, watched cable TV, and shopped online. So. Much. Online. Shopping. More than I’ve ever done in my life. A set of 6 yellow striped Kassatex beach towels, a Tiffany blue Kitchen-Aid mixer and a beautiful Aquazurra sailor top on deep discount were amongst the purchases I still own. I fantasized about my new life in my new apartment, and recklessly paid no mind to the balance I was racking up on my credit card. My hair was greasy, my body ached and I needed something to connect me to the world outside my solitary hospital room.

By day 4, I still had no idea what was happening in my knee. An ambiguous infection, with no end in sight. I continued to insist that no one visit me, and my friends and family respected that wish. The anger I felt about the whole ordeal felt uncharacteristic and poisonous — I couldn’t imagine anyone seeing me in such a state. In hindsight, this was the wrong decision. When the surgeon returned to tell me that they needed to operate again because the first surgery didn’t get rid of the infection, it all suddenly felt more real. Still, I didn’t know what the infection was, or what the potential outcomes might be. I’d stopped replying to emails to reschedule things because at that point I had no idea when I’d be back at work. The days that followed are hard to remember, but I do have a visceral memory of the day they came to take the drain out of my leg — the slithering of the plastic tube under my skin and the vile smell. Shortly after, a nurse came in to tell me that I was being discharged. It happened so quickly, and at no point did a doctor come to brief me. I was given some paper work, a pair of crutches, prescriptions for pain killers and antibiotics, a full leg brace, and an appointment for four weeks later. Within the hour, I was on the curb with my brother waiting for a taxi to take me home. Still, I didn’t know the details of what had happened.

So, I went back to work immediately because I didn’t really have a choice. In the shop, I kept my leg propped on an Ikea step stool on the other side of my desk, and the couple of part-time employees I hired in the NYT aftermath did everything that required standing up. The first week back I had rescheduled photo shoots with both Self magazine and Entrepreneur, which I had to endure carefully propped against a surface so as to not need the crutches. One of the photographers even asked if I could remove the brace for a few minutes to which I replied by sobbing. For that whole six weeks, I had a rule that I’d only leave the house once a day — I couldn’t manage the five flights of stairs more than that. My brother went home and Fed eventually moved in, only because I needed the help. Every day, I told the story to neighbors and customers, all of whom told me to sue the city (I didn’t). While I couldn’t go back to the gym just yet, but Trainer Mike sent me to his friend Dan, who was a very good physical therapist.

When four weeks, rolled around, I taxied back up to Lenox Hill and felt excited to get my normal leg back. I’d been in physical therapy for a couple of weeks already and was able to get around without crutches. I waited in the room and waited for the surgeon, who came in, said hi, made small talk and then paused. He started laughing. I looked at him and said “What’s so funny?” to which he replied: “You don’t know what happened to you, do you?”. Defensively, I said “No, because no one would tell me”. He apologized for not being there when I was discharged and rambled off a list of bacteria found in my knee. It was all of the things you’d fear and expect from a murky NYC puddle (including human feces) but then he went on to tell me that what eventually became apparent after the first surgery was that something on that long list had caused necrotizing fasciitis. As in, flesh-eating bacteria. The stuff that spreads aggressively and kills people (the mortality rate is 25%-35%). If the second surgery didn’t work — and he admitted they didn’t think it would — they’d planned on having the amputation talk with me.

The whole thing was funny to me, even only a month later. Of course I got flesh-eating bacteria from a New York City street. It’s just the kind of thing that would happen to me. While it was entirely negligent that I was never told what was wrong with me, I’d chalked it up as the best case scenario. I was already an angry patient — how would I have been if I was told that I would likely lose my leg? I was stunned, but grateful. Quickly, I resumed working out with Mike and stayed in physical therapy for as long as it took for my leg to feel normal (about 6 months). My recovery was hard-earned and I’m grateful to have had Mike and Dan to whip me into shape because otherwise I’d still have a wonky knee. At the time, I was still drinking and spent a lot of time in bars and boy, was this a good tale to tell to strangers over a few drinks! For a year or two, it seemed everyone who hung around the Lower East Side knew me as the girl who got flesh-eating bacteria from crossing the street, and I relished being part of the local lore.

All of this is to say: those puddles are as gross as you think they are. The biggest lesson I took from this order is that it really pays to take good care of your body. Would I have recovered so well if I didn’t lift weights, eat well, and seek treatment right away? Certainly not. Even after all of this, I still wear sandals almost every day in the summer and prance across the street when I’m in a hurry, because life is too short to be too careful and (hopefully) nec fasc doesn’t strike twice.

The story I’m here to tell you involves a coincidence. I usually start it by saying: “I’m not sure I believe in coincidences, but if I did…”. What I do believe it to be is a nearly statistically impossible event — one that set the tone for my adulthood, and still leaves me perplexed: 

It was December 2008 and I was about to be done with high school. I grew up in a leafy, brick-paved town with a population of about 14,000 called Marietta, Ohio. It’s a historic little place that’s older than the state itself and perfect for a quaint long weekend, or Hollywood depiction of a charming but still rural town. I was so desperate to get out that I’d hustled through my school credits so I could finish early and essentially skip senior year. All I had left was one final exam at the local college and I’d have 8 free months before starting art school. The first step in my carefully crafted master plan was simply to get to New York City. Because I was sure that just being a teen with good grades wasn’t enough, I’d channeled my undiagnosed anxiety into a blog called According to Caroline and a line of hair accessories called Frolic. This was Gossip Girl era, after all, and I was hell-bent on getting a head start by playing shop in the old auto body shop my dad let me use as a studio. By sleuthing around for the right names and addresses, I'd scored some magazine coverage for my colorful, kitschy headbands and received a few letters in return. Looking back, I’m impressed by how straight-forward it all seemed to me. I really believed that all I had to do was clench my teeth, put myself out waaaay out there and hope for the best.  With my grand exit approaching, I’d sent out a batch of unsolicited letters to places I'd hoped to talk into taking me as an intern. One such letter ended up on the desk of the managing editor at Interview magazine, who agreed to meet with me when I'd be in town for college interviews. 

And so, I went to New York with my mom for two short days of running around town. We stayed at the dingy but storied Washington Square Hotel, shopped Bleecker Street and went to the MoMa, where Pipilotti Rist’s atrium installation Pour Your Body Out permanently opened my mind. That Tuesday night, we flew back to Ohio and I decided to spend the night at my mom's house because it was too late to drive to my dad's, where I'd been living for a while. The very next morning, a Wednesday, I was about to leave the house when I learned that my dad had died. 

Maybe someday I'll write the story of that day and the ones that followed. After 15 years, I’ve become skilled at telling it in a way that acknowledges the suffering of all parties involved, while expressing the gravity of the trauma in a way that’s carefully nuanced to protect me as the teller, adapted for the comfort of the listener. Putting it into written words feels daunting, but I’m hopeful that one day I’ll feel ready to accept the challenge. For now, let's skip ahead to a few days later. It was the first day of viewings at the funeral home and I was doing my makeup in my mom's bathroom. I'll never forget what my face felt like — my eyes were so swollen and prickly from crying that it felt like a thousand tiny muscles were flickering like fiery embers. My skin was dry and scaly, and I'd lost at least a third of my eyelashes. As I sat there trying to figure out how to disguise the fact that I was not okay, my phone rang. It was the editor at Interview offering me an editorial internship, starting as soon as I could get there. All I remember is that I was so aware of my youth in that moment – I told her what had happened, and that I needed to ask my mom first. That week, I didn't just experience the worst trauma of my life, I also turned 18 and finished school. The timing of all of it was so strange. Suddenly, I didn’t need anyone’s permission, and while I was afraid of leaving my family in the ruins of our shared crisis, the thought of staying was scarier.

To my surprise, she didn’t try to stop me. I’m not sure if it was because she trusted that I knew what I needed for myself, or if she was just in shock — adjusting to the new parenting handbook that’d been so cruelly thrown at her. How were any of us to know how to navigate our new realities? I was tasked with the logistics of mine, and Craigslist was the only place I knew to find an apartment, so I scoured the New York City pages for spots in the downtown neighborhoods I was already familiar with. Exactly two apartments met my criteria, so I messaged them both and heard back from one. She was subletting a crooked little place on Avenue A at a price I could pay with the social security payouts I’d get as my dad's beneficiary. I can’t remember if I’d disclosed in my initial email that I was an unenrolled, unemployed teenager, but in hindsight, I realize it was bold to assume that anyone would sublet to me. The memory is still crystal clear: I was standing in the makeshift walk-in closet of my attic bedroom when she called. I’d installed the racks myself and painted the walls a putrid, bubbly pink — left sad and empty since I’d moved out. 

The woman on the other end of the phone spoke to me kindly as she described the apartment and the terms of living there. She was brief and professional and paused to tell me this:

“I'm afraid I can't show you the apartment because I just moved out of the city and no one's there right now” 

Obviously, I didn’t care. I was so desperate, I’d have agreed to live in a windowless basement closet if that’s what was offered to me. I told her I couldn’t see it anyway because I was in Ohio. She brightened up and said “Oh, I just moved back to Ohio!”. I knew that was my in — there’s a special type of trust instilled in all midwestern people towards each other, especially when out of context. When I asked where, she assured me it’s a town I’d never heard of. I said “Try me. I live in a small town, too”. When she replied with the name of my exact town, I melted to the floor and took a deep breath. “You moved to Marietta? I live in Marietta”. She shared an address with me as if to test this assertion, and that address belonged to the apartment above the funeral home on the adjacent corner. Five minutes later she was in my mom’s living room. 

Compounded with the shock of my dad’s death, I don’t think I fully understood how unlikely all of this was. I just took it as a sign that I was meant to go, and so did my mom. It’s how she justified it to herself and to others who thought she was crazy to let her grieving, tortured daughter leave. And she was right to trust me, to trust this big, obvious sign. Whether or not I was actually ready to go was besides the point. For the first time, I felt compelled to do something just for myself. My life depended on it. The thing about living in the wake of trauma is that your body is simultaneously able to feel extraordinary pain and absolute numbness at the same time. Leaving helped me feel like a person.

And so, I packed two huge suitcases and headed to the city first thing in the new year. Though the apartment was small, noisy and cluttered, I felt safe living there alone, as if I was under the protection of some sort of cosmically bestowed force. I wallowed around the city, in awe of my surroundings but drowning in grief I didn’t have a place to put. Hard as I tried to make social connections, the girls I worked with at both of my jobs were several years older and treated me as though I didn't deserve to be there. I found a cathartic escape in the concerts I went to alone several nights a week. I lied to everyone when they called to check in because I didn't want them to think I wasn't okay. The city was my best friend, and gave me everything I needed. I cried in movie theaters and read books in cafes. I walked and walked and walked as if I had somewhere to go. I learned how to dine out as a party of one, with confidence and pleasure. I discovered the difference between being lonely and being alone. I was grieving, I was lonely, but I wasn't alone.

The way my life changed that week in December 2008 has informed everything I’ve done since. Nothing feels impossible to me because I've been given no reason to believe otherwise. It's a dangerous but invigorating affliction. The pond of delusion I sometimes find myself dipping my toes into is jarring, but I’ve always been able to pull myself out. It’s as if I turned 18 and the game master of life decided it’d be funny to throw all the cards at me at once. By taking the cards I’ve been dealt and learning how to play them, I’m constantly trying to find the limit of possibility, if only to stave off the delusion. The path I’ve taken is a windy one and I often wonder: had I not begun my adulthood with such an extreme trauma, and such a rare gift, would I have the courage to trust what I know: that anything is possible?

I find comfort in the fact that a small slice of this belief comes from the catalyst himself. My dad lived his life as if it was glowing neon — with vigor and optimism and determination, carved from nothing and populated with incredible stories that he was an expert at telling. The only problem is that none of them were written down, and what a goddamn shame that is. My wish for us all is this: that we really, truly believe that the stories that matter to us are worth preserving. Write them down, record voice memos, make videos. Someday, someone will appreciate these small fragments of your life in a way that’s more significant than you probably realize. 

Thumbnail photo: from summer ‘08 on the literal streets of Marietta, hilariously indicative of the time period in which it was taken.

The registration required a surprising amount of information and most importantly, a sponsor within the Macy’s/parade network. Our sponsor was a man I’d never met and knew little about, someone who we affectionately referred to as Farmer Rob. The other important requirement was to sign up for a training session, which would take place the following weekend in the parking lot of Citi Field. Matt, the boyfriend, is quite possibly the most trustworthy person I know, so I did all of this without asking any questions. My heart raced as I completed the online form, as though someone would realize they’d made a mistake before I could press SUBMIT. After all, I’m not a Macy’s employee, and don’t know any Macy’s employees. Are we utilizing a loophole? Will someone find out that we don’t belong there?

Another other thing about Matt is that he gathers people as he moves through life as though he is strategically catching Pokémon. His community is diverse and broad, and each person plays a specific role in his wacky world. I respect this immensely, but at the time I was baffled when he told me about Farmer Rob: a politician turned organic farmer who he met at a climate conference that took place in a virtual world. Farmer Rob’s avatar approached Matt’s. From there, they started talking on the phone often — about what? I never asked. Again, Matt loves talking on the phone. I’d overheard some of these conversations, and assumed they were with an intimately close friend. As it turns out, Matt had never actually met Farmer Rob in person. By the time I found this out, our parade applications had been accepted and I joked that we were being catfished. Farmer Rob, already a multi-hyphenate, was apparently also a veteran Balloon Captain, which is a highly esteemed and serious parade job, second only to Balloon Pilot. I insisted that we try to meet Farmer Rob before parade day, so we arranged a weekend to visit his farm in Connecticut in late October. 

In the meantime, Matt recruited three other friends for Farmer Rob’s balloon squad: my co-worker Max + their partner Jo, and a friend-of-a-friend, a lawyer turned Met Opera usher who we’ll refer to as Older Matt. On a sunny afternoon, we took the 7 out to a barren Citi Field to meet Older Matt for training. Allow me to set the scene: deep in the farthest corner of the parking lot were three inflated balloons, weighed down to the ground. There was a check-in desk, a table with coffee and pastries, and probably 200 other handlers, chatting excitedly with each other. Most memorably, there was a young man who regaled the crowd with stories of balloon disasters past, speculation about new balloons, retired balloons and the history of the whole thing. It seemed that he’d waited all year to step confidently into the role of Thanksgiving Day Parade Expert, and held court with an admirable aplomb. This parade is not without scandal. In the past, there have been balloons that were blown off course, or began deflating themselves on the parade route, or misbehavior on the part of the handlers. You’d never know any of this from the broadcast, because most of the balloons have been used for many years prior, and the TV producers are equipped with old footage to swap in at a moment’s notice. (edit: today’s 2023 parade had an alarming number of balloons experiencing partial deflation! What’s the story? I guess we’ll find out). The real fans, though, know all the gossip, all of the speculation, and are willing to tell anyone who’ll listen. We felt like novices amongst the other handlers, and were sure to listen diligently as we were shown how to use the things that the ropes are attached to, which are called bones but kind of look like boomerangs. One group at a time, we took turns walking balloons in circles as we learned the pilot’s hand motions. I found it to be surprisingly technical – depending on the wind, especially when turning the balloon, the pilot can instruct the handlers to loosen or tighten the slack on their bones and also slow or speed up their walking pace. The big balloons have nearly 100 handlers, and a truck to anchor them to, but there are also smaller balloons that act as accents to larger parade features. These typically have less than 10 handlers, and are a little harder to control than the big boys. After everyone took a spin on each type of balloon, we were set free and told that we’d receive our balloon assignments soon. 

All of this coincided with the period of time when I was at the tail end of closing my shop and moving out of my storefront. I felt relief, but also exhaustion and so much emotional vulnerability. Perhaps the parade was just what I needed – a spectacular escape from the perils of my regular life. I embraced it, and thought of it as a celebration at the end of the road. Our Thanksgiving went from a low-key affair in the city to a day at the parade, followed by a feast at my apartment, attended by both of our moms, and at least a dozen friends and family. The thought of this hilariously hodge-podge day lingered in my mind for all of the month leading up to it, and gave me great reprieve from the grief I was feeling. My only real break during that span of time was the weekend we drove up to Farmer Rob’s farm in Connecticut. In a rental car, we arrived in the late afternoon on a Friday to his big plot of land, equipped with a silo, a house and a geodesic dome. With no one to be found, we parked the car and walked around until we saw the silhouette of a man in the distance. Farmer Rob: totally frazzled, but very much real and as described. After a very frantic hello he asked us if we could work on picking a row of green beans and told us he’d be back. Dressed in our regular city clothes, we squatted down in a row of bush beans and got to work as the sun went down. Just before dark, Rob came to find us and brought us back to the house where we’d have dinner with his farm hands and some friends he’d made that day at the Connecticut Garlic Festival. I’d never spent the night at a working farm before, but this was exactly how I’d imagined it’d be: wholesome and cozy, in a house full of exposed wood and warm lighting, a table full of homegrown food, prepared simply but with precision, conversation that’s gentle and doesn’t go too deep, listening intently with my knitting in my hands, picking bits of straw out of the wool because it, too, came from a farm. I felt silly for ever doubting the existence and substance of Farmer Rob. The next day, we woke early and drove to the Connecticut Garlic Festival to help Rob and scope out the produce and products for sale. It could have been a Gilmore Girls episode. We ate lots of garlicky food and left with several varieties of garlic, a whole bunch of fancy garlic powder and a pair handmade garlic people plushies. 

Soon after, we received our long-awaited balloon assignments. All of the communication for the parade happens in a very advanced app called Parade Ready. I’m old enough that when I applied for college acceptance letters came in the mail, but I’m assuming the feeling of logging in and waiting for the answer to load is similar to checking Parade Ready for your balloon assignment. When the page opened and said “Snow Crystal #2”, I think I cocked my head and let out a huh. What is even is “Snow Crystal #2”? A quick Google led me to a parade fandom site that informed me that the Snow Crystal Ornaments have been used intermittently since 1985 and are beloved accents to bigger features. They’ve accompanied celebrities like Joan Rivers and Gwen Stefani, but are used wherever a little pizzazz is needed. And according to their posted stats, they only require four handlers. Like a teen having just received a homeroom assignment, I frantically texted our fellow handlers. We’d all been assigned “Snow Crystal #2” with Farmer Rob as our captain. In the 2-ish weeks ahead of the parade, we patiently await our costumes packages to arrive, which included: color coordinated jumpsuits, matching hats, gloves and masks, a balloon-specific bib and weird pleather strap-on shoe covers.  

My celebratory shop closing came and went, as did my move-out. There was a week in between that was a period of stasis, and all I had to do was prepare for the day by planning my pie pick-ups, farmer’s market shopping and how I’d manage to fit everyone in my Manhattan apartment. Fortunately, – and I say this with kindness – I have a bossy mother who would rather just do it all herself. When the morning arrived, we woke up well before dawn and headed uptown by subway, fully dressed in our costumes. We felt like celebrities – anyone else who was around that early looked at us as if they knew exactly where we were headed. They might have pitied us for being fools for such a ridiculous, capitalist tradition, but I like to think they were full of envy for the weird and wonderful day we were about to have. When we emerged from the subway, we were immediately ushered into the Thanksgiving Parade portal, pouring out into a stream of other costumed adults. After showing security our credentials, we were set loose to find our balloons. This year particular year, the Snow Crystal Ornaments were walking just ahead of the Santa Claus float, which is the grand finale of the parade. As we walked towards the back of the lineup, we got a glimpse of the other balloons and their handlers, and a feature that caught my attention: the wardrobe carts. Full of notions, back-ups and people equipped for anything, they were ready for any costume emergency. What could go wrong with a jumpsuit and bib? We weren’t who these carts were for. As we checked in with our pilot and captain, we witnessed a seemingly endless cascade of characters exit a fleet of buses. They were the real parade stars: the people in actual costumes, assigned to accompany floats and perform for the crowd. Some sought help from the wardrobe fairies, but most pranced with ebullience to their assigned positions. My favorites were dancers in leotards with giant pies as skirts. I felt second-rate next in my too-big white jumpsuit, next to our little round balloon, but as our fingers got colder, and we waited longer, the dizzier we got on the energy of it all. Especially for us, since we’d start walking close to last, there was a lot of time to kill. When you’re a parade participant, almost nothing in the setup zone is off limits. You’re free to roam, check out all of the other balloons and floats, and socialize with the other participants, many of whom are parade veterans and love an opportunity to flaunt their experience. What delighted me most was how ridiculous everyone looked in their outfits. Grown adults dressed like packaged Halloween versions of popular children’s characters, padding around awkwardly like they’re all employees of a big, weird Christmas factory. 

Eventually, it was time to start walking, so we took our places and waited for our cue to go. As we approached the first stretch of the parade route the cheering of the spectators was immediately intoxicating. I’ve never performed for a large group of people, so this is not a feeling I’m familiar with. We marched in sync, and got used to holding our rope bones taut. Within the first 5 minutes, we heard spectators shout “SPIN!”. We looked at eachother with confusion until Captain Rob motioned for us to run in a circle, so we ran as fast as we could without tripping, boned held out in front of us as if we were each pushing a grocery cart. The crowd roared and we felt superior to the larger balloons because on the larger balloons you don’t get to do tricks. There are always more handlers than are needed, to swap out when someone gets tired, so we each took turns just walking. A couple of our team took this time to act as hype people. They ran along the railings and shouted “Santa is coming!”, to which the children in the crowd screamed with excitement. Considering how tightly organized this event is, there are few rules about what you can and can’t do while on the route itself besides the one big one, which is that you cannot use your phone! For three hours, you get to unplug, soak up the enthusiasm of thousands of others and play the role of costumed Christmas clown. It’s an absolute thrill. 

Most of the parade itself is a bit of a blur. We spun on command so many times that we were so dizzy all we could do was giggle. When we finally got to the end, to the front of Macy’s where we’d get our big TV moment, we were told by producers that they were running late and needed us to run though as quickly as possible during the commercial break. So, we ran to make way for Santa. The funniest thing that you don’t see on TV is that once the balloons get past Macy’s, they’re walked to designated spots on other streets for deflation. This is something that requires the help of all handlers – their full body weight on the balloons to push the stupid amount of helium out. No one really knows what they’re doing but lucky for us, our balloon was small and took little time to deflate. For handlers, the deflation is the grand finale. From there, you say goodbye to your team and head over to the costume drop-off station, where you’re made to remove your jumpsuit and bib to return to the wardrobe staff. Somehow, we missed this memo when we got dressed in the morning and didn’t plan appropriately. Afterward, we were left feeling naked in just HeatTech base layers and nothing else besides our phones and commemorative parade pins. A cold and awkward subway ride ensued – an anti-climactic way to come down from the high of the parade. 

When we got home, my mom and friends were already there and had begun the cooking. They’d caught quick glimpses of us on TV but were excited to hear us tell the tale of our epic day. The Thanksgiving I handled Snow Crystal #2 was my best ever, not just because of the parade, but because it was spent with a group of people I’d never expect to gather in the same room. A smattering of beloved friends and family from all corners of my life, crammed into my apartment, fully subscribed to the eclectic and casual Thanksgiving I insisted on hosting that year. At the time, I didn’t realize how meaningful and odd it was that this event – the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade – was the bridge between the life I’d just given up, and the one I was about to discover. It showed me that there’s potential for fun in everything, no matter your age, and that sometimes all it takes is just saying “yes”. 

Instead, the morning after my last night of drinking I woke up full of regret and unclear about where I’d left my bike. I didn't even have that much fun. If I thought about all of the days I felt hungover, how many of them were worth the pain? Almost none, but then, it's hard know when you don't remember most of them. I knew I drank more than most of my friends, but it didn't really matter to me because I was always able to get up in the morning and push through it. It began to feel like a sick game -- was I punishing myself just to prove I could survive it? Did I get high on the loss of control alcohol gave me? In many ways, I loved the person alcohol made me. She was bold and outgoing, but she was also unpredictable and dangerous. But most importantly: she felt the happiness she struggled to find in her sober self.

I’d “quit” several times for short periods of times, and once for a full year. Something always led me back and I was always able to talk myself into it being okay because I hadn’t yet accepted that I had a drinking problem. The period of time that sealed my fate was shortly before the pandemic when I found myself going to bars alone on my way home from work. It didn't matter if it was a weeknight. I'd sit there, read a book, and down a bottle of wine or two. I did this secretly and with regularity and it numbed me enough to help me forget just how depressed and lonely I was. I quit because I knew if I didn't it'd become a more serious problem. A drinking problem, disguised as an emotional crutch would turn into a serious addiction and it'd ruin my life. Even in the depths of it, I had enough sense to know this to be true, even if it took me 10 years to find my way out. Once I was really really ready, the actual quitting part was easy. The part that’s taken me the whole three years since is reprogramming the social and emotional part of it all. 

Several months after that Halloween, I decided I was ready to make a real go at dating again. Anyone who's ever tried to date sober knows that it requires a harrowing type of courage and creativity. Suddenly the non-committal drinks date is replaced with daytime coffee dates, because there's a surprising lack of nighttime places for non-drinkers to hang out. Maybe there are bars with decent NA options to go to. It’s a risky option, though, because my experience has been that almost men on dating apps don’t actually believe you when you say you don’t drink. A first date at a bar turns into an awkward test to see how they can handle you not drinking while they are. What I've learned is that the way a person reacts to this situation says a lot about their relationship with their own drinking habits. During peak winter 2020 pandemic, I was tired of saying "no, I really don't drink" and decided to bring in help. With the money I’d budgeted for a blowout 30th birthday party, I hired a professional matchmaker who had a storefront in my neighborhood. The way it worked was that she scoured her database and personal network to find matches for me. Once vetted, she pitched the men to me and I chose who I'd go out with. She'd make an introduction and then it was up to me to plan a date and report back afterward. The matchmaker did the work of telling them all the hard things up front so I didn't have to. These were also people who were mostly serious about dating in earnest, which eliminated the need to suss out intentions. It was efficient and it was fun, and the best part was that I didn't have to reject anyone myself -- it was done for me. Even though most of my matches missed the mark, I genuinely enjoyed every date because there were predetermined compatibilities with each one and no need for liquid courage because I was in control and the cards were already on the table. After 5 months, I ended up in a healthy relationship with someone who didn't care that I don't drink. 

Now, two years later, I find myself single again and feeling ready to date. I know that apps aren't for me anymore, and I feel comfortable enough in this version of myself to not need outside help. My hope is that in a post-pandemic landscape and a slightly older age bracket, it'll be easier because the men in the dating pool have also shed the skin of self-consciousness. The new problem comes from: how do you meet people organically if you've settled into a lifestyle where you don't "go out"? Can I chat up someone on a theater intermission? Or in line for a sandwich at a Mets game? Flirting outside of the context of places where one is expected to flirt is like diving off a cliff of social norms. We live in a time where we have the tools to build the background story of another person before before they have a chance to tell it themselves. Do people even ask out random strangers anymore? I love the old sitcom trope of asking out an attractive person in a public place and then realizing something really weird about them on the date. The element of surprise is something I fear we've lost, and that in turn, we're becoming a more critical of others because we have so much information at hand. How do we reckon this, especially in a social situation as precarious as dating?

I wish I could be the type of person for whom one or two glasses of wine can be enjoyed safely and with pleasure. People are always reminding me that maybe one day I'll feel okay to drink again and while I smile and reply graciously, I know I won’t. I've accepted myself as I am, and quite frankly: I like this version of myself, even if that means serious fomo on party holidays or vacations in Italy. There's a boring predictability to my social patterns, but I don't mind. My social anxiety instinctively kicks in when I do find myself at bars and parties, but slowly I’m liberating myself from the self-consciousness that comes with socializing without alcohol. Have you ever done karaoke sober? It's an adrenaline rush like no other. My Born to Run is performed with a fervor it sorely lacked when I needed a few drinks to find the confidence. 

Who I am as a non-drinker is the most vulnerable, pure version of myself. There's nothing to amplify my personality the way alcohol does. What you see is what you get, and I find that to be the most refreshing thing about the other non-drinkers I know. There's a steadiness to their being. While I sometimes miss the fun of seeing myself and my friends morph into chaotic caricatures while drinking, I've been there enough times to find that the novelty of a wild night out isn't something I crave anymore. My early twenties were full of dancing on tables, staggering around in too-high heels, making out with strangers and buying rounds of shots. It was fun as hell, but I fulfilled my rite of passage, said goodbye to all that and have moved on to the bliss that comes with knowing I'll wake up each morning and feel healthy and clear-headed. With certainly, I can admit that I'm less fun than I used to be but I'm also no longer a liability. 

Three years in, I am totally comfortable with the fact that not drinking has become a part of my identity. How could it not? Abstaining has completely changed my social life and how I relate to others. Occasionally, I shutter in horror when I catch myself mentioning that I don’t drink in a situation that doesn’t require that information. Are non-drinkers just as bad as vegans?

While we’re here, there are a few things I'd like to put out into the world for your consideration:

1. Can we please stop using the word "mocktail"? It's gross and outdated and makes me feel like a tween at a party of grown-ups. 

2. Normalize serving NA drinks in nice glassware. I want my Shirley Temple served as a spritz in a wine glass or my seltz with bitters in a highball, not a pint glass. 

3. Don't ask anyone why they don't drink unless they make it clear that they're cool with talking about it. It's no one's business. Someone once caught me in a bad moment when they asked me this and I replied "Why do you deliberately poison yourself?" You've been warned!

4. Do still invite your non-drinking friends out! Trust that they will say no if they don't want to. I, for one, still want to dance and meet new people and hang out at night, I just might sneak out if things get sloppy. 

Sometimes on a Saturday I'll go for a late night walk in my neighborhood, particularly abuzz with nightlife. One thing I love about living in the East Village is that it knows exactly what it is. The punk rock glory days might be long gone, but it's retained a certain amount of eclecticism beneath the facade of gentrification, which reached its peak long enough ago that it’s settled into a comfortable place somewhere between new and old, cool and uncool. Misfits smoking weed in Tompkins Square, packs of finance bro clones, gaggles of young women in outrageous outfits, NYU kids on their way to a party, neighborhood old guys regaling regulars at the end of the bar, offbeat adults with a begrudging disdain for fancier parts of Manhattan. They're all out, and I’m amongst them. Sometimes I wear my big red coat over my PJs, grab a fun beverage from the bodega and just soak in the energy of others. I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I feel something like envy towards the carefree party people I encounter, but that's not why I take these walks. I take them to see vignettes of the lives around me, and to get a hit of the thrill of the night, even from the sidelines. I especially love witnessing groups break out into song just because they feel inspired to, or couples arguing passionately on the sidewalk. I imagine that they'll wake up the next day and talk through the good and the bad over bagels. 

One of the things I often say I love most about New York City is that almost no day ends the way you think it will. Just leaving the apartment guarantees that something unexpected and surprising will happen, as long as your paying attention. It’s the fuel that keeps me going, all those little gifts I receive just by going out and soaking in my surroundings. Less happens to me these days, but I do have a greater capacity to pay attention. Everything I’m missing out on after dark is well worth the trade-off.

When I woke up, I felt no urgency to understand everything I’d witnessed because I knew so much of it had already floated past me. Nothing was particularly revelatory, it was just really pleasant and fun. I wrote down a few words and waited for the integrator —the one who’s guided my through my past few journeys— to come back. Still in the haze, I said something to him that I can’t stop thinking about: “I feel like I got what I needed because I let myself have it.” By letting go, I opened myself up to things I haven’t known for a long time. Safety without control. Beauty without the need to preserve it. Openness without fear. The acceptance that everything is ephemeral. Hold on too tight, and you’ll miss everything else around you.

This treatment and the experience of receiving it has been nothing short life-changing. I feel as though I’ve achieved the thing I’ve joked about in therapy for years: I got a new brain. Even though that’s not actually true, I have tweaked the chemistry of mine in a way that’s simply not possible with traditional pharmaceutical drugs. There are two moving parts to psychedelic treatment: the experience of the actual trip, and the after-effects of what the drugs do to your brain to increase neuroplasticity and generate new synapses. On a practical level, this treatment isn’t always a one-and-done deal. There’s maintenance involved — whether it be continuing the good habits I’ve formed in the past three weeks, or returning to the clinic every few months for a tune-up session. As more psychedelic drugs become legal to use as medicine in the coming years and the stigma surrounding them continues to lift, I’m curious to see how they become a part of my health care long-term and how they’ll help those around me. The tangles, the fog, the pollution of my depression have been stripped away and what’s left is my core — the 3rd grader who visited me in the second session. She has so much potential because she’s just getting started. She has the clarity to change her mind. Science has proven the neurological benefits, but the part that I’d like to understand better is how the brain is able to dredge up so many memories, visuals and feelings to create experiences that are so widely varied and layered. Even though there are scientific theories, it still seems abstract and mystical. Doing the work to understand what my mind chose to show me has been the hardest part of this. It requires a surprising amount to creativity, and the experience of learning how to interpret the messages has been an unexpected and gratifying bonus.

Last night, I left the clinic for the last time and walked to a restaurant where I’d be meeting a friend later. They’d just opened for the night, and I sat at the bar and ordered a Shirley Temple. With my journal and pen out, I’d intended to write through some of my feelings, but instead I just sat there and listened to things happen around me. Bar men heckling waiters. A woman approaching a man she’d met on a plane once. Some Japanese tourists sharing a gift with their bartender. The recognition of a Broadway actress by a man drinking alone. The conversation it sparked with the strangers next to him. The bustling of people in white shirts, the energy of a large, busy restaurant at the start of the night. There was so much humanity and so much connection. They say these drugs are supposed to strip away your ego, and the most profound way I’ve seen that manifest in myself is the simplicity with which I see other people and interact with them. It’s automatic and free of self-consciousness. There’s no longer a barrier between me and everyone else.

One of the gifts this treatment has given me is slowness, and in that slowness I’ve found myself savoring experiences and interactions in a different way. I’ve always been a voracious consumer of novel experiences and now I’m left wondering why I’ve let so many of them wash over me instead of fully absorbing them. My entire life has been a story that I’ve been writing for myself as a means of controlling the narrative — and I’ve been moving at lightning speed to get to the end. I’ve come to terms with the fact that this way of thinking hasn’t served me at all, and most importantly: what a ridiculous idea, to live with the end in mind instead of fully inhabiting the life I am actually living, here on earth. One of the secrets I keep from people in my New York world is that in college my degree show work was a novel that I wrote about my life, and the story started right after college graduation when I moved back to New York. In that novel, I opened a pencil shop. I don’t remember how that story ends, just as I don’t know how my actual one ends. I don’t have to know. I feel further from the end than ever before.

And now here I am, still vulnerable, still occasionally fighting intrusive thoughts, but with more clarity and more tools to forge the path ahead. There’s still more work to do, and I know it’s a lifelong process, but this is a new beginning. I’ve released myself from the prison of my mind — the liminal space, if you will. On the other side is a room with three walls, open to the expansion this treatment has give me. It’s only the early afternoon, and I’ve got the rest of the day to look forward to.

For anyone who’s curious about trying ketamine therapy, please feel free to get in touch with me if you have any questions I help you through. The clinic I went to is called Nushama, and I’d recommend it to anyone.

I made this Substack simply to have a way to share this experience with my friends and family, but an unexpected outcome has been that I really enjoy writing personal essays! I’m going to continue writing here, and I hope you’ll stick around <3

When you’re desperate to find a treatment that works, it’s easy to fall into a dangerous mode of wishful thinking. Like a rabid gambler, you think This is going to be the one. It’s going to finally happen and all of my problems will be solved. Add the mystery of psychedelics to it and you’ve created a monster. That’s me, the monster, entering this treatment rationally but secretly hoping that these magic drugs will deliver some sort of earth-shattering key to my future. My revelatory session on Friday made me feel close to the psychedelic jackpot and I went into my next session feeling better than I have all year — meditating in the afterglow of clarity.

When I arrived at the clinic for appointment #5 on Monday, I was delighted to find I’d once again been assigned the same integrator. It’s hard to not feel vulnerable when talking through something so confusing and personal while I’m still high as a kite, and the comfort of seeing a familiar face has made it easier as I’ve gotten deeper into this experience. We talked about the ephemeral nature of the imagery I’d seen in my last session and the contrast of that against the control I hold onto so tightly. He arrived at something I’ve known to be true for a long while: that I tend to live in extremes in every facet of my life. My range is wide because it’s had to be. I’ve had incredibly fortuitous things happen and I’ve experienced gut-wrenching tragedy. My personality, my taste in objects, my food preferences — I exist in a permanent trap of high-low, strung together by stories of coincidence and luck that are enough to make anyone jaded. Sure, some of it’s deliberate, because how dare I, Caroline Weaver choose something average. Why have I chosen this hill to die on? What does it say about me? Eventually, it was time to go in the hole, and with the intention of continuing on the same path of paper-y lightness, I was dosed and led into the “journey” with thoughts of ephemerality.

I can’t write the story of this particular experience because it’s too blurry. As I began disassociating, it became apparent that I wasn’t going back to the bright place — I was sinking, but this time it wasn’t slow and warm, it was so quick that I couldn’t grasp onto anything. Colors, textures, feelings, words. Nothing. There wasn’t even a common direction I felt I was moving in, just a rough push and pull, with the constant feeling that there was something behind me that I couldn’t see. All of it was very cold in the way that icy water chills your bones and makes your skin tingle. Deeper, deeper, deeper into a place in which I could draw no parallels. Nothing was familiar and no words haunted me. I was struck with a feeling of claustrophobia, and later the feeling of my skin being pulled off of my face. To be clear, none of this hurt me physically — what I felt was a mental facsimile of what those feeling are in real life, but at the time they felt ever so real. I wondered when it would end, but also hoped I would turn a corner and there would be an obvious lesson to discover. Instead, I was swallowed by something blue-ish, flesh-y and alien-like. Sounds became muffled and I remained in the bowels of the beast as it seemed that it, too, was being swallowed by something larger. That’s where I was when the warmth started coming back to my fingertips and I felt a nudge from the nurse.

By the time the integrator came in I was crying tears that felt pathetic and child-like because they came from a place of sheer confusion. He didn’t say anything at first, as I cried and tried to breathe deeply. I used what words I could find: push and pull, cold, swallowed. His reply was: “You gave up control, and you survived”. I gave up control and I was shaken to my core. I felt deeply uncomfortable, but still, I wasn’t afraid. I survived. For a moment, I experienced the other extreme. If my last session represented the lightness of the ephemeral, this one tested my ability to let surrender to what I don’t know.

The depression I’ve been living with for almost 20 years is something I’ve been wearing as a mask.  My achievements feel greater because I’ve achieved them with a handicap. All this time, I’ve been surviving in spite of this pollution I haven’t been able to clear from my psyche. I’ve treated this affliction as a badge of honor and in some fucked up way, I’ve found comfort in it. If the ketamine helps my unconscious mind write the instruction manual for my conscious one, it’s telling me that it’s time to take off the mask and settle into a place where there’s balance. There’s safety in balance, and it’s not the same safety I’m been seeking through control. Seeing both extremes of the K-hole helped me relinquish the control.

Now, nearing the end of my last week of treatment, this is where I’m left: feeling ready to let go of this part of myself. Despite this one bad trip, I still feel the clarity, the grounding, and the calm of having an open mind. I sleep through the night and don’t wake up with a crippling desire to stay in bed. I’ve released enough tension that I no longer burst into tears when I’ve been triggered. There’s been a relief I can’t describe. Every time I’m under the influence of psychedelics, there’s this feeling of a word I can’t grasp. It’s not a word that exists in my current vernacular, but I know the sounds and the feeling of it. I hear whispers of it in my everyday life, and I’m beginning to realize that there is no word. That this feeling of the word is something that belongs to me as a reminder that I don’t have to know. There’s no jackpot at the end and no prize for solving all the riddles of my mind. It’s just me and this brain I’m working so hard to heal.

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.

One of the questions they ask at the start of each appointment is “how are you getting home?” My answer, thus far, has been that I’d walk, but last week I decided to take the 6 train, which left me feeling over-stimulated and disorientated. I ended up getting off early and walking the rest of the way. Today, the 50 minute walk took 70, and my impulsive sandwich break didn’t help. Ketamine has a tendency to cause some form of motion sickness and though I haven’t had any major issues yet, my body still feels alien afterward because my equilibrium is off, I haven’t eaten properly all day and am in a haze similar to that after waking up from anesthesia. Feeling okay to leave the clinic is one thing, but feeling ready for the streets of New York is another — especially when the journey home is an ugly walk down the east side.

Following my appointment last Thursday I had a restful night of sleep before getting in the car and driving to Princeton for a wedding. After checking into the hotel, my best friend came to my room and I told her all about my exploration of the liminal space. What she helped me realize was that perhaps I’ve been in the liminal space all along. The liminal space between the childhood I experienced before this depression took an all-consuming grip, and the place that I’m working towards finding. Cue the head explosion emoji — this revelation has helped me a lot in the past couple of days to understand what I’m looking for.

The rest of the weekend was spent joyously. As hard as I’ve tried this year, it’s been excruciatingly difficult to clear away my own poisonous fog long enough to just simply share in the joy of others. When you’re 32 and everyone you know is getting married and/or making public proclamations of love and happiness, how do you digest it all when you’re so far away from any of that? How do you support the people you love in their big moments when a tiny sliver of you hates them for it because you’re so envious and so deep in the hole? You know it’s irrational but your ego doesn’t let you let go of it. You smile because you know you’re supposed to. You show up on time and offer your help and do all the right things. You might feel a brief glimmer of ecstasy when you’re dancing like a maniac in the way one only does at weddings, but at the end of the night you shut the door to your hotel room and sob over your blistered feet because you feel deliriously tired from the emotional exhaustion of faking it. You know this is no one’s problem but your own and it just feels so shameful and wrong. All of this is to say that this past weekend I felt none of this. I had the time of my life wearing an outfit that made me feel like I’d stepped out of Bridgerton. I dared my friends to do silly things and laughed and danced until my back was sweaty and cried tears of joy because the whole thing was just so damn beautiful. When I closed my hotel room door that night and struggled to unlace the corset of my dress, I felt tiredness for the simple reason that it was a long day.

Going into my appointment today was like showing up for an exam I knew I’d ace. I’ve begun to see the positive effects of this treatment in real time and have been putting in the work to get through the questions it’s bringing up. I was taken to Room 9 and left alone to settle in. Vitals, small talk, IV, intake questions — I know the drill. The doctor came to check in and asked about my last couple of “journeys”. When I told him about my experience last time of going deep and feeling close to something but never finding it, he asked me “are you sure you need to find it?”. What he said next really re-framed it for me: “You’re thinking, and your body is living. When we find the balance between thinking and living, that’s where we find grace.” Before leaving the room he used the magnetic levitation of a high-speed bullet train as an analogy and encouraged me to not think too much about it. Let my body find the balance and let go of control.

The integrator came into the room and spent few moments sussing me out. When he asked me what the catalyst for my depression was, I told him about being 13 and feeling a sudden grip of tightness, anxiety, perpetual sadness and fear. He asked me where I feel it physically, which is a question I was unprepared to answer. When we talk about mental health, we talk about our brain chemistry and the way it manifests in our bodies and affects our behavior. Never have I really thought about how it, the depression itself feels in my body. As I sat there in silence, he said that he noticed I kept pressing the palm of my hand to my forehead. He’s right — I feel it in all of the muscles of my face. In my head, which almost always feels heavy and and full of pressure. My yoga teachers are always telling me to relax my face. I felt like a child, unable to articulate the thing I was being asked to express. We talked about my dad and his death and how it propelled my depression deeper. With a surprising amount of clarity, I told him that I’ve always understood his death and haven’t had to grapple with the “why” of it. That as I get older and live longer with my own depression, the more comfortable I feel with the idea of suicide. That this is what scares me the very most. The comfort I find in having the option to opt out.  As the nurse dosed my bag, and the integrator led me in, he asked me to consider that maybe the weight of all of this comes from my need not only to heal myself but to heal my dad, too.

What I saw when the drugs hit was tactile in a way that I felt through all my senses. I could feel it physically, I could taste it, I could smell it. What I can’t do is describe it properly. I wasn’t seeing things, people or places, but rather textures that were dimensional and intricate but made out of fluid, moving things. Water, sand, clay, frogs — yes, frogs. Undulating clay-like flesh, deep rhythmic noises. The colors were dark and warm, so dark that at one point I though to myself this is the darkest dark I’ve ever seen. It just kept getting darker and darker until something shifted. The names of so many people I’ve loved —romantically, familiarly, platonically—appeared, but I couldn’t see their faces. Simultaneously, I thought of those who’ve died, and the two seemed intertwined. Love and death. Love and death. That’s what I kept thinking. The color red. I caught a flash of my own hands, nails always painted red. Red, the color of blood. Red, the color of fire, of passion. Red, my favorite color. For an indeterminable period of time I kept repeating it to myself: love and death. As I got deeper, the thing I realized I was missing in the equation was life. How does that fit in? Did I replace life with love? The textures I was seeing consumed me and distracted my mind. Tapestries, old and woven. Tangles of fibers. I remember confusing the words tangible and tangle and thinking that they seemed related. Fabric, carpets, all in warm colors and textures I could feel as if they were real. That’s all I remember before I let go. This place in the darkest dark was comfortable. Confusing, but comfortable. Slowly, I felt my fingers tingle and my conscious mind start to come back, and I knew I was easing out.

Too soon, a nurse nudged me to take my blood pressure. I wasn’t ready — I could still feel the drugs pulsing through my body. The sun shining through the window shade made me wince as I pulled off my mask and sat up to drink the tea that was left for me. Moments later, the integrator came in to the room waited patiently until I could speak coherently. I told him about love and death, the colors and textures, especially the textures. About my comfort in the dark place. I felt like I was getting closer to whatever it is I’m looking for. He used the word evocative to describe the experience I was recalling and told me that in this part of the process I might start to connect dots in moments I least expect it. Maybe I’ll be cooking dinner and suddenly I’ll understand why I feel so connected to the color red. We discussed possible metaphors to be found in the textures, the wovenness of it all. We compared the malleability of the clay to the neuroplasticity of my brain. With that, he said goodbye, only to reappear about 10 minutes later to say: “I was just looking at your chart and I can’t believe that your last name is Weaver!” He left me with the thought of weaving as a metaphor for my life. I’ve been weaving something all along and I don’t know what it is. I kept thinking of the old pictorial tapestries we snuck upstairs to look at during the wedding reception on Saturday. The stories they told were intricate and full of symbolism. How can I possibly understand the story of my own tapestry if it’s not woven yet?

When I got home I collapsed onto my couch and stayed there in silence for about 2 hours until a strange urge hit me. My friend had been telling me about where her astrocartography lines are and I wondered about mine. Since I can never remember my exact birth time, I searched for the puffy pink baby book on my bookcase, located my birth stats and plugged it all into Astro Seek. As it turn out, my moon is a hair away from New York City and my sun goes straight through Tokyo. I smiled because I could have guessed this and felt surprised that my instinct about both places was so spot-on. I’ve been in possession of this baby book for no less than 8 years, and today I flipped through it for the first time. Past all of the filled-out questionnaires there were short descriptions of my birthdays 1-4, in my mom’s words. It’s the story of the very beginning of my life, which seemed like a full-circle way to end a day spent trying to make sense of what that life has become in the years since. So many bits and pieces from today’s session have to do with small fragments of who I am. I’m drowning in metaphors for all of them, and am sure that they’re all part of the bigger picture — of where I’m headed. Out of the liminal space and into a place that’s expansive, safe and makes me feel as though I don’t need to figure it all out.

That’s what today’s integration coach said to me in a whisper as she closed the door to my treatment room after my session.

I’m sitting at home listening to the last song I heard during treatment #2. It’s one I recognized from a yoga class — called The Power is Here Now by Alexia Chellun. Every time I’ve heard it I’ve been moved to tears, and today, when I rather abruptly snapped out of the ”journey” and peeled my eye mask off, I scrambled to locate the iPod on the side table to make note of what it was called. It’s more of a lyrical mantra than a song, and one that falls into the category I call precious music, which are songs that I’m careful not to listen to too often, lest they lose their emotional power.

When I arrived at the clinic today, I felt at ease because I knew what I was showing up for. The effects of Monday’s session were still pulsing through my psyche and the most immediate feelings have been that of a newfound calmness and lack of urgency, which worked to my detriment yesterday because —for once— I didn’t really care that I was running late. Maybe it was the little things I kept noticing that kept me behind. The glow of the autumn sun on a patch of rogue sulfur cosmos on a median. Small sheets of pink and blue papers raining down on me in a subway stairwell. Boys laughing and eating chopped cheeses on the M train. I soaked it all in. The slowness is keeping me from getting much done, but part of the protocol for this treatment is keeping things light in between sessions, so I’m trying to do just that.

The room I was assigned for this second “journey” was also the same deliberate shade of pink, but this one was windowless and had an astral light feature moving around the ceiling and a diffuser pumping out lavender mist. In came nurse after nurse to get me set up and ask all of the necessary questions. When asked about my last session, I told them about the ways in which I was still conscious and was told my dose would be increased so that wouldn’t happen again.

A different integrator came in this time, and seemed to immediately respond to my energy. When I told her that for the past two nights since my last treatment I’ve needed a lot of sleep and she offered me something valuable: it’s not that the drugs are making me more tired, it’s just that the drugs are allowing me to let go of the fatigue I’ve been carrying with me. She’s right. I’ve been waking up feeling revived and not like it’s never enough. Just as the nurse shot the ketamine into the bag, the integrator had me put on my eye mask and asked me to imagine myself on a couch facing a stage. One by one, all of the versions of myself in my youth walk onto the stage. She asked me to choose the one that sticks out. It’s always the same. Always 3rd grade me, in a pair of khaki shorts, a yellow Gap t-shirt with a glittery gold star on it, embroidery floss macrame around her wrists and ankles. Her hair is messy and her legs are lanky. She’s probably on a sparkly purple bike that came from K-mart. The me when I first started feeling like a person, when I began the journey of trying to understand the world. The year I spent most of my recess time in the library or with the school principal Mr. Bloss, who used to sing the theme song of the show Caroline in the City as I approached his playground bench. As the integration coach continued through the exercise and asked me to interact with this version of myself in various ways, I let out tears that felt like they’d been welling inside me for the 24 years since. They soaked into the neoprene padding as I heard the door shut and the music start.

This time the music started in a less hokey way. I’d been told that there’d be a new playlist, and this one featured less prominently in my experience than the last one. Within seconds, the drugs took hold — penetrating deeply and quickly. I lost track of the syncing of the music and dove deep into a space that was dark and dimensional. It’s hard to explain, but everything looked clay-like as it morphed from one scene to another, my body moving along with it. I couldn’t tell if my eyes were open or closed. My consciousness was barely present, and only manifested itself at the beginning as I kept remembering snippets from my reality. Ariel and Louis are arriving today. How will they get in to my apartment? Did I text my aunt back? When am I going to remember to pay that late lab bill? As soon as these things appeared, the part of my mind that was high on drugs swatted them away. I tried to remember what it’s like to be on street level, on the ground, on my way to somewhere, and the strange thing was that I really couldn’t fathom it. I kept thinking to myself: What do you mean that we’re supposed to be on time and get everything done and also stay healthy, and maintain relationships and keep it all balanced. That balance felt imaginary, far-removed and impossible. Like a house of cards, where one small slip-up in conscious life makes it all comes tumbling down. I kept thinking about video games, and the video game that my mind on ketamine understood life on earth to be. It’s all about currency and leveling up. What if I choose not to play the game? Then what happens?

Somewhere along the way the conscious thoughts totally disappeared and I lost track of time. All I remember is that I kept wondering where I was. I was confused because I couldn’t possibly comprehend the liminal space I was in. I kept repeating that phrase to myself. Liminal space. What is liminal space? Liminal space — the transition space from from place to another. I was trapped in a liminal space. At one point, I even wondered if I was still alive. I didn’t really mind if I wasn’t — I wasn’t concerned about what I hadn’t done, or what others would remember me for or if I’d left my house clean. Now I understand why psychedelic treatment is used for terminally ill patients to help them cope with the reality of death. It takes the fear away and makes it feel like part of the progression. I had people pass through my mind who had died. My dad, a former customer I recently learned had passed, a person I knew from high school. I scrunched my fingers and dug my nails into my palms to feel my live body.

The confusion continued as I rode the wave. It was immersive, deep and physical. Before I knew it, it was over. I didn’t even ease out of it, it was like someone snapped their fingers and The Power is Here Now started playing to my conscious body, with all of my limbs in tact and in their correct proportions. I listened to the music until I felt someone come in the room and nudge me.

On the other side, I sat up and inhaled the lavender mist that was still pumping. When the integrator came back, and I tried to articulate the intensity, the darkness, the confusion, she smiled and told me that we’re getting somewhere. I felt frustrated because there’d been no profound revelation and certainly no way of making sense of anything I’d experienced. What’s more is that it felt all too brief. If I’d had more time, would I have figured it out? It’s almost like my brain had presented me with a puzzle to solve, but the time was up before I was even had the pieces in my hands. If the first session opened the door, than this second session threw me into the deep end without the skills to find my way out. She asked me what’s changed since I was that 3rd grader with the messy hair, and I cried so hard I couldn’t answer. I wiped my tears away and told her that I’ve been so tightly wound for so long that I don’t know how to let go and find my way back to myself. I guess this is where the unraveling starts.

On a whole, last week was a strange one. In the days prior, I’d acted in a moment of true insanity and purchased 3rd row floor seats for a Tuesday night John Mayer concert, even though I already had tickets for the Wednesday night show. Anyone who’s been in my state of desperation can certainly understand — when you’re in the dark, you’ll do anything to see the light, even if it’s just for a couple of hours. My relationship with music in general, but specifically that of John Mayer is a specific one. I often refer to it as “the most embarrassing thing about me” but in truth, I’m not at all embarrassed. In middle school, I took my mom’s copy of Room for Squares up to my attic bedroom to play on my Sony 3-piece stereo and never looked back. It’s not just music to me, it’s works of writing that I find deeply, sometimes painfully relatable. It’s a rare common thread throughout my life thus far — comforting me, and reminding me that to feel things is not enough, but to feel them deeply is when the healing happens. It’s funny to me that in the past several years, John Mayer has played in New York just at the moments I needed him. Once, it was right after a big breakup, earlier this year it was in the midst of my first bad wave and during a time when I really really realized I needed to end my relationship, and this time, it was at a moment when I felt like I was really in it while simultaneously being on the cusp of something that felt profound. On Tuesday, when I arrived at MSG to meet my friend Ed, also a superfan, and realized just how close our seats were — mere feet from the stage and directly facing the central microphone, I felt like not just John Mayer was close, but it all was — the things I’ve been longing for, material and mental. The end of the debilitating block I’ve been paralyzed by. For two hours I got to escape my own body and connect to something that wasn’t mine. And I got to do the whole thing all over again the night after. The reverberations of these experiences, which felt like therapy in their own rite stuck with me for days and in ways I’m only now realizing, helped prepare me for this next step on my journey. There’s one song in particular that I’ve had stuck in my head because it’s so deeply relatable. It’s a deep cut called War of My Life, part of which goes:

I'm in the war of my life
At the door of my life
Out of time and there's nowhere to run

I'm in the war of my life
At the core of my life
Got no choice but to fight 'til it's done

I made a playlist called “Caroline’s Essential John Mayer” and listened to it as I walked the 40 blocks north to the clinic yesterday. It was an afternoon to make a cashmere-craving New Yorker cry. In fact, I almost did. Dressed in sneakers, comfy clothes and a giant orange wool coat, I walked to a familiar beat and felt invigorated by possibility by the time I emerged from the gilt elevator on the 21st floor. Before these appointments you’re told not to eat for 4 hours and not to consume any liquids for 2, which is something I didn’t think about before choosing to walk a distance. Wound up and dehydrated, I was settled into a room. Even after all of the prep, I didn’t really understand what was going to happen. A nurse came in to take my vitals, followed by another one to get my IV hooked up. Then, the doctor came in to talk me through the whole experience. His emphasis on the safety of it all made me wonder about the mindset of most of the patients he encounters. I assured him that nothing was as scary as what was already happening in my mind, and that I had no concerns at all. Before shooting the drugs into my IV bag the “integration coach” came to see me. She’s the kind of person you’d encounter hosting a yoga retreat in the desert — woo-woo to a degree that’s only appreciated if you’re willing to go along with the bit. We talked about my intentions for my “journey” and something happened that I didn’t expect — I started to cry. Not because I was feeling a sudden burst of sadness, as one who is clinically depressed is used to, but because I couldn’t really make sense of my intentions because they were all buried so deep in the fog of my brain that I could no longer access them. As a decidedly “woo-woo” person, I also felt the pressure to understand all of this because of course I, a person who journals almost every day and spends a cumulative 5+ hours/week at a wellness center should know. I think I said something like “I want to get back to the core of who I am”, which is not untrue, but is also something that I don’t fully understand. Satisfied with this answer, she had me put my eye mask on and led me through a guided meditation before headphones were placed on my head and I was left alone in the room.

I wish I could remember exactly what I heard, because it came as a shock. The whole vibe of the clinic is confusing because it is undoubtedly “medical” but with a gentleness that’s decidedly not. The design choices feel as though they were made by someone who was paid a lot of money to understand the psychology of how patients experience a medical space. Apart from the conversation with the integration coach, there was little to remind me that in the end, this is psychedelic experience. What I do recall from the sound at the beginning of the recording was something like a man’s voice saying “imagine being surrounded by angels” and “there’s a love so great that you can’t understand it” before a big, emotional swell in the music led into a rather beautiful, all-encompassing church choir. None of this is what I expected and as I waited for the drugs to kick in and the music kept transitioning into other, equally perplexing types, I kept thinking of the experience of being in a science museum planetarium. Granted, I’ve not been to a planetarium since the early aughts, but what I remember feeling is an overwhelming sense of the universe. Being small and being surrounded by something so great you can’t possibly fathom it. It’s dark, and the soundtrack sounds both scientific and mystical at the same time. Synth-y and classical and designed as if it’s meant to make you feel safety and curiosity in the unknown. And BOOM, it hits. Similar to the psilocybin, all of a sudden I felt as though the music was inside by brain and like my entire body was a big, breathing membrane. It’s difficult to explain the physical experience of being on an ample dose of psychedelic drugs, but if I’m to try: it’s like your body is floating in the air. You’re aware of its physicality, but it’s also weightless. Your mind feels somewhere between life and death, or your conscious and subconscious. You don’t know where you are, but it also doesn’t matter. As I fell deeper and my psyche became completely synced with the music, I felt like I was floating down a river, and as I floated further and further, the fog surrounding me washed away as I picked up new tidbits of information. Those tidbits were quick blips of wisdom like: I already have all of the tools I need to have the life that I want. There is no reason for me to feel shame and guilt. Everything is within reach, I just have to reach for it. And most importantly: I am enough, as I am right now.

The mental visuals changed as the music did. The river turned into an endless hallway in what looked like a 17th century palace. Even though I was deep into an experience on a different plane, my consciousness was still even so slightly present. I kept thinking “I don’t want this to end” and was able to register the gentle breeze that occurred every time someone opened the door to check on me, which I was told would be every 10 minutes. That tiny bit of consciousness knew that I’d be under for about 60 minutes and though it felt like I was floating forever, I knew every time I felt the breeze that I was 10 minutes closer to being pushed back into the abyss of the real world, which felt much scarier than this the unexplainable astral plane of the ketamine journey. When it was over, the music came to a gentle stop and I was nudged back to reality.

One of my greatest takeaways, one that moved me to tears when then integration coach came back in the room, was the mysterious power of the music. How it it possible for my brain to sync with it in a way that guides a whole subconscious experience? What happens that allows the swells and changes to completely alter my state of mind? I realized that this isn’t just something that happens on a guided trip, but also in the conscious experience. That’s what happened earlier in the week when I felt so revived by watching John Mayer perform. It’s not at all about being a crazed fangirl, it’s that the music does something to reprogram my brain, even if temporarily. What I felt was an newly realized appreciation for the power of music and deep gratitude for the ability to understand and manipulate words to express myself, even if not musically.

What’s unbelievable to me is that this access into one’s mind is made possible by these drugs, which have been proven to be not only effective but also safe. And yet, this still isn’t a treatment that most know about or have access to. It’s not lost on me that because of the stigma of these drugs and how Western medicine is understood that the idea of losing control and giving in to the unconscious mind is something that is absolutely terrifying to many. Sometimes it’s absolute desperation that allows us to take enormous risks. So much of my life has been defined by the risks I’ve taken, and my willingness to chart my own path and I wonder if some of that is because I’ve been living with a complicated brain chemistry that has allowed me to devalue my life enough to not worry about the consequences of my actions.  At the end of my first ketamine journey, the integration coach reminded me that it takes courage to give in to an experience like this and surrender myself to the unknown.

This first session was by no means life-changing, but what it did do was open my mind and ground me in a sense of calm and safety. I’ve opened the door and can’t believe I still have 5 more sessions to figure out what’s on the other side. One thing I can’t help but wonder is: what would happen if we all allowed ourselves to open the door?

Recently, I was spending time with family and my aunt —my dad’s sister— asked me, after all these years: “do you think your dad was depressed?”. My answer was a resounding YES, because it was that moment — when he died — that I woke up and saw all of the signs of his depression, and likened them to mine. I knew with certainty that it was a disease that took him, not a flippant moment, or a bad circumstance, like those who don’t suffer often assume. In so many ways, it’s been easier for me to accept and process his death because my experience is not dissimilar to his.

In early 2009, barely 18 and done with high school early, I pulled a classic “run away to New York City” move and found myself a crooked little Craigslist apartment in Alphabet City. Everyone was a little nervous about me, a grieving teenager, living alone in the city, but the end of the bargain that I was expected to uphold was that I’d go to therapy and take medication. With a prescription for Zoloft and a standing appointment with a therapist on the Upper West Side, I left for my new life. The time I spent in the city that year feels like blur in hindsight. It was all I could manage just to get up and go to the jobs I had, and the rest of it was spent walking, because I didn’t want to be at home alone. Through the time that I moved to London and then back to New York, I’d tried several drugs and several therapists and mostly just felt as through I was going through the motions of treatment. Nothing really helped.

In the 10 years since I moved back to New York City, I’ve mostly been with the same therapist and psychiatrist and have been on and off of medication, with varying degrees of success. Additionally, I’ve taken up some other practices which are assumed to help ones mental health. Yoga, meditation, good sleep, no alcohol — all of it. When I tried the very last thing on my imaginary checklist of “mental health goals”—quitting coffee— I realized that the coffee, though depleting my adrenals and causing a little extra anxiety, actually caused a serotonin spike stronger than any meds my body had gotten used to. In the late winter of this year, I hit what felt closer to rock bottom than anything I’ve ever experienced. For me, this is what it looks like: full days lost, spent paralyzed on the sofa. Uncontrollable sobbing, so much so that the muscles in my face ache, my body feels dehydrated and my skin become raw and itchy. Nights spent awake worrying about everything, on my phone, googling “inpatient psychiatric hospitals NYC area”. Feelings of self doubt that are absolutely paralyzing. On the worst days, I think about all of the things I’d need to do to make things easier *just in case*. Things like editing my will, organizing a spreadsheet of accounts and login information and making plans for my cats.

On one such day in March, I found an email in my inbox from someone I knew, introducing her new business offering psychedelic trips for mental health treatment. She offered guided psilocybin trips from a special room in her Brooklyn apartment. The price was $700 and all she required to get started was a phone call. What she told me was everything I needed to hear — that when medication stops working, these things can help. That there are actual studies that show that the neuroreceptors in our brains do something really crazy when these drugs intervene. I’d seen bits and pieces of Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind and believed it all. Even though I’ve never touched psychedelic drugs recreationally, the idea of using them medicinally seemed absolutely reasonable to me. On an early spring Monday morning, I arrived at her apartment and was greeted with a big mug with tiny mushroom bits floating in it. She explained that she’d steeped them in a strong lemon tea to mimic the affects of stomach acid. This begins the breakdown of the mushrooms before they even hit the stomach, the result being that the drugs would hit quicker and more intensely. Once I was settled onto the mat on the floor of the room, classical music played, a weighted eye mask was put on me and I felt it almost immediately. All of the sudden, the music got louder and not just that — I felt like it was happening in my brain. My brain stripped away the consciousness I understood and slipped me in and out of memories I thought I’d lost. It wasn’t as if I was watching the events of my life from a bird’s eye view — I was in them. I could feel what I felt in that moment. I could smell the smells of my memories. Things like, the feeling of being on my dad’s boat on the Ohio River, or the smell of my mom’s house when you opened the door. It felt like a gift. On top of it, a small sliver of my consciousness was talking to me and it just kept saying “How could I ever want to give all of this up?”. Having everything stripped away like that made it resoundingly clear to me that in this life, there are humans and there’s the earth. Nothing else really matters.

With my brain reprogrammed and a newfound sense of optimistic nihilism instilled, I came back to Manhattan and walked until I ended up at Minetta Tavern, just as they opened for the night. I sat at the bar alone and had a black coffee and a burger, which tasted like the first burger I’d ever had. For days that’s what every little thing felt like: it was as if I was experiencing everything for the first time. Eventually the effects wore off and though I was able to revisit the feelings I felt about the experience, I didn’t feel impacted by it on the long term. I’d started dabbling in mushrooms for recreational use (great fun!) and experimented with a regular micro dosing regimen but it wasn’t right for me. I should’ve gone back for another trip when things got bad again, but I didn’t. I think I was afraid of comparing the second experience to the first one, which was so blissfully perfect.

In the months since, I’ve fallen into an even deeper depression, which has cause a blockage that’s made everything difficult. During this time I’ve soft-launched a big new business that I feel incapable to moving forward with, I’ve made some strange and risky decisions, I’ve broken up with the best boyfriend I’ve ever had. For lack of a better term, I’ve felt unquestionably unhinged. Sometimes, when things get bad, the only thing left to do is fuck it all up. How hard can starting over be when nothing is working as it is? As they say, all living things grow from darkness.

Recently, I told my primary care doctor about my interest in psychedelics, to which she was surprisingly open-minded. After my appointment, I received an email with information about a couple of ketamine clinics nearby. I’d heard of them, but didn’t really understand how it worked. I’d never taken ketamine recreationally and associated it with my time as a college student in London when it wasn’t technically illegal and was so popular even the front desk guy at our dorm sold it. Psychedelics in a clinical setting seemed like a light version of the experience I’d already had. What’s more is that it’s expensive and not covered by insurance. And besides, how is it even legal? If it is, why isn’t everyone doing it? I thought about it for a couple of months until a similarly desperate day when I filled out the inquiry form and almost immediately received a text to set up a phone call.

What was explained to me was that ketamine is FDA approved as an anesthetic. Using it as treatment for things like depression or PTSD is off-label, but not illegal as long as it’s administered by a doctor. These clinics are relatively new and are very much considered experimental. The research is there — research on these drugs was in full swing back in the 70s before recreational use triggered Nixon’s war on drugs. Only in the past 10-ish years have researchers re-opened the books on psychedelics as medicine and the studies that have been done have proven them to be startlingly effective. I’m not a medical researcher, so I’ll make no attempt to explain it to you, but there’s so much good reading about the subject.*

The clinic I chose is on a high floor of a beautiful Madison Ave office building. When the elevator opens, it’s as if you’ve entered some sort of medical utopia. Warm tones, low lighting, a calm and friendly person to greet you. It’s confusing, because you can’t help but wonder if you’ve arrived at some sort of mental health Oz. It’s almost like a portal into an alternate medical universe.

My experience with depression isn’t unusual or profound, but over the years the thing I’m most proud of is that I’ve gotten used to talking about it with the people around me  in a way that’s not alarmist or worrying, but rather helpful for both me and the people who want to keep me alive. I think often about a conversation I had when I met an internet friend IRL for lunch a couple of years ago. She said something along the lines of “All of a sudden it’s cool to talk about having anxiety, but what about depression?”. There’s so much that’s misunderstood about severe clinical depression by those who don’t experience it. I know no one who’s undergone this type of treatment, but it’s been met with curiosity by everyone I’ve spoken to about it. As someone who has a tendency to dive head first into experiences, recklessly, fearlessly, I’ve come to feel a responsibility for sharing what I learn from them. I’ve been storing them in my mind, and repeating them verbally for years, but this is one that I am certain needs to be shared in real time. The only way to remove stigma is by talking about it and sharing experiences to the contrary of what we’ve been made to believe.