We Don't Do the Same Drugs No More

In which I acquire a ketamine doula (--Doulas! They really got 'em for everything these days, man--), go on a trip, grieve and grieve and grieve, and meet my inner child(ren).

A few Tuesdays ago, in the middle of an afternoon which involved a run to Target for nighttime potty-training pullups (not for me) and a series of emails between myself and my literary agent about my book proposal and the potential comparative titles upon which we might sell my next book, I took some drugs. New drugs.

Since getting sick with Type 1 Diabetes and then becoming a mother, almost(!!!!) 4(!!!) years ago, I haven’t been nearly as much of a party girl as I used to be, in the halcyon days of my red-lipsticked winged-eyeliner nocturnal black cat twenties. But also, the stress and burnout of direct care work, against a backdrop of seemingly infinite human suffering, on both micro- and macro- levels? The sense that, as Ross Gay says, we are looking out at the roiling sea and the sky hurtling our way like so many buffalo, and the child holding our hand is saying it’s much worse than we think, and sooner?

(I’d recommend you don’t hit Play on this one unless you’re in both a physical and a mental space for a good little cry).

While my urges to Numb Out may be triggered by these things, they mostly tell me to do so on the couch, in my home, after our protracted songs-and-stories(-and-now-QUESTIONS, my God, the questions) bedtime routine.

But—just as in a clinic I firmly believe in whatever works, whatever gets you through, when it comes to an abortion or a birth or a miscarriage—I believe in helping my strange little brain to find its own pain management techniques. To protect its own joy, its own ability to see beauty and feel pleasure and the fact that it, and the body it inhabits, are safe.

I take 150 mg of sertraline every morning, to airlift my brain out of the deep canyon of despair it would otherwise inhabit, and to quiet the sudden dissonant chords of panic, struck at random in my little head as if a cat were running across an out-of-tune keyboard.

I take a thyroid medication that helps me to stay alive but also eases the sharp spikes of acute anxiety that can sometimes accompany that organ’s various forms of malfunctioning.

I take the generic form of Vyvanse, a stimulant, for my attention deficit disorder, when it’s not out of stock at every local pharmacy. I also take gummy multivitamins (serving size: 2, because candy) and Vitamin D in a (likely futile) effort to stave off the seasonal depression which deepens with every day the sunset inches closer to my lunch break.

And now: I take ketamine.

Or, at least, I took ketamine. One time.

I probably won’t be able to access this form of treatment again, because (as always): money.

Nevertheless, ketamine-assisted therapy, even in my brief and maybe only rendezvous with it, has changed me. So I’m writing a little love letter to it here. And more specifically, a letter to the woman who brought it into my life.

I came to KAT (as we true K-heads call it) through a friend, who is a local Nurse Practitioner and a psychedelics expert. She is one of those people who radiate warm, bright sunshine—even when she is exhausted or stressed or sad (and, crucially :honest about those feelings). Never saccharine or inauthentic, this friend is simply a joyful person to her core. As a born-and-raised hater and complainer I can’t exactly relate, but I relish the opportunity to stand in her light whenever possible.

This is the photo—from a site called “NewsBreak” that I’ve never seen before in my life—that came up in my search for an image of “sunlight” and “beautiful woman”. Which….you know what……..yeah.

Before she gave me my first dose of ketamine—in a bitter-tasting liquid form, to be swished back and forth within my cheeks for fifteen minutes in a protocol that was so unexpectedly reminiscent of taking my abortion pills buccally—my lovely friend produced a notepad and pen.

She said, “People often speak while they’re on their journeys, and afterwards they can’t remember what they’ve said. So I’ll be your scribe, and just write down any and everything you say, even if it doesn’t seem to make sense in the moment or it doesn’t sound like real words.”

Well. Reader. As a talker—a yapper, in the parlance of young people such as you and I—I got a little flush of pleasure and anticipation. High (prematurely) on my own supply, if you will. What would Ketamine-Hannah say??

Lately, as I wait to go on submission with my next nonfiction book proposal, I’ve been writing poetry (HAD is publishing my first ever poem-I’ve-shown-a-stranger next week) and fiction(! Fiction! It’s like non-fiction except it’s made of lies), which has always felt terrifying and vulnerable beyond all else. Here, I made this all up. Do you like it?

I’m still writing in my first genre—love letters—and publishing some abortion stuff, of course. And pitching personal essays, when I remember that I’m supposed to be doing that. But as I apply to writers’ residencies and sit still (for once) with my thoughts and with the stories I want to tell, fiction and poetry have been the shapes that my love has been taking. And those two genres are terrifying for me. Partly because of how some fiction writers in my life have spoken about nonfiction (the disdain, babes…the dismissiveness, the disrespect, etc.) in my presence (“I’m just joking”—their craft is fiction, after all.) And partly because I just have never gotten comfortable enough with being bad at something, in private and especially in public.

So the idea of leaving my body and mind—or, at least, accessing new and foreign parts of my body and mind— in order to loosen up the tight knots in the tangled and tarnished gold chain that is my anxious mind, the doubt and the fear of writing something that someone hates (spoiler: that’s just a little morsel unavoidably baked into the job that is writing anything at all). I was so excited for the stories my subconscious (my unconscious? my extraconscious?) might tell.

I was hoping for some words, phrases, images. Some dots I could connect. Some beautiful little piece of nonsense that could become poetic, could be folded into a beginning, a middle, an end. Something better than what sober-lucid-Hannah had been producing. The idea for this character germinated in my mind while I was high on ketamine, actually, I would laugh, and the standing-room-only audience at my extremely glamorous book talk would laugh, too.

So when I came out of my ~journey, I was devastated to see only one word written on her legal pad, nary a quotation mark in sight:

Smiling.

As in: at some point, I smiled. I was smiling. That’s it.

Of course, I was initially heartbroken by the absence of language. By the inability to translate the beauty and wonder I had just experienced—much of which I can’t quite remember now, except in abstract shades of feeling and color. I know I met some children, who were me, in there. I know there were some landscapes I traveled while I lay supine and smiling under the care of this beautiful friend. I know that while I was in there I didn’t want to ***.

But realizing that there is an adult version of myself who does, in fact, shut the **** up—and not out of fear of saying the wrong thing, or saying too much, or misspeaking, or harming / angering / confusing anyone, but out of pleasure and joy? That I can access a happiness that can’t be articulated? A peace that can’t be, and doesn’t need to be, described?

That the excess of grief and rage and worry will still be present, spilling over alongside the excess of love and affection and curiosity and wonder, but the spill doesn’t need a rushed explanation, an apology, or even to be pointed out at all?

This is me working all the time to be quiet. To say only what I really feel, no filler. To ask only the questions I have the right to ask (I hope). This is me still curious, still full of feelings and ideas and grievances and gossip and the strange little thoughts passing through my head. But after a summer of saying too much, I think it’s time for a shut-up-Hannah fall. A stillness and a more regular practice of silence. Just smiling, maybe. Or crying or reading or gazing etc. But with closed lips and a journal full of the love letters that never need to be mailed to, or read by, anyone else on earth.

So much of abortion care and reproductive / sexual health care is knowing when to keep one’s mouth shut. We keep so many secrets for patients, they could fill oceans. We offer only the words we think will be useful, at only the moments they can be used. But when it comes to my internal life, I’ve been at once too trusting and too fearful to shut up. So I’m going to experiment with not sharing every feeling immediately.

Thanks, ketamine, for introducing me to a self who behaves differently. What more can we ever ask for, than a mirror and a window?

Covering the exposed nerve that can feel like an identity, at times. That I feel too much, ask for too much, cry too much, laugh too much, say too much, am too much: this has been a long-held core self-belief. And a source of shame and grief in some moments, of stubborn clinging pride in others.

But every book, every piece of writing, every conversation, every relationship holds a different balance. Who is speaking, and who is quiet? Who is giving and who is taking? Every person is always, at every moment, shifting and evolving and changing. And what we do is who we are, not the other way around.

“Too much” is not who I am but—at times—what I’m doing.

So I’ll publish my essays and poetry and I’ll tweet my silly little tweets (and skeet my silly little BlueSkeets, though with slightly less juice, I fear) and pour my messy heart out here and elsewhere. I’ll try to sell Book No.2 and write new stories, maybe new books! (Please buy them if I do). And I’ll keep reaching out when the still small voice inside of me—whom I hope to be hearing a lot more from, and with whom I promise to be far less bratty, now that Brat Summer really is LONG gone in the darkening rearview mirror) says to reach out.

I’ll remember that what brought me to this was someone else offering to be my scribe. It was complete safety in her company. It was the trust that she would hold my weirdest freakiest ugliest words, that produced a state of being myself who has no need to say any words at all.

And I hope you experience the same.

We DO do the same drugs. And we also have matching tattoos. This little strawberry was part of a local artist’s flash fundraiser for Palestinians trying to escape or survive in Gaza, and! When I catch sight of it in a mirror or photo it will always, also, bring my thoughts directly to its beautiful counterpart on the body of my ketamine doula.

What new substances or behaviors are you experimenting with? What are you hearing when you quiet your mind down a little bit? What are you writing and making and saying when you’re choosing not to write/make/say everything?