Or, What I Learned In Ketamine Therapy

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Can I change?

I’ve been trapped by that question, in a loop I can’t break, most of my life.

I broke the loop once — my Senior Year of Catholic high-school, when I stood up during Mass and told a crowd of my classmates — and assorted nuns, deacon, and priest– that Jesus would want me to “Tell you all right now I’m gay.”

It was the most authentic moment of my life. It was stepping into a soul I’d buried in shame, releasing a lion I’d caged inside for years and only let out here or there — when playing the lead role in high school plays or leaning into piano forte emotions playing “Claire De Lune” on the piano. It was the me I’d scribed as a metaphor in a highly-plagiarized version of The Lord of the Rings I wrote in fifth grade, about a hobbit named Faren concealing a sinister, magical necklace that turned him invisible. It was coming out as something I knew was both perilous and powerful — being gay in the early aughts.

The reaction was the deepest silence I’ve ever heard, followed by half my peers slow-clapping, the other throwing stony glances, and afterwards the priest taking me aside to say he was thrilled that I had discovered something about myself…and couldn’t wait to teach me about the power of lifelong celibacy as a Gay Catholic.

I smiled and told that priest, “No thank you,” righteous with shaky confidence that I knew best, that Jesus himself called bullshit on the religious teachings of his day.

The night after my coming-out at school, I took my mom on a long walk. My mom had raised me Catholicl; she was the person I was most scared to tell. To the rest of my family, I was the original definition of queer — “strange or odd from a conventional viewpoint” — a nervous, neurotic, precocious kid coddled by my mother. To her, I was her perfect son, and to me, she was everything.

I told my mom I was gay before we climbed the last hill on our walk. She assured me it was OK, and we hugged, our breaths fogging each other in the cold Northern California night. Three weeks later, she was leaving conversion therapy pamphlets on my pillow.

My mom, and by extension the church that counseled her, cut off my legs right after I learned to walk as an openly gay man. The person I thought loved me most made it clear that the core of me was as wrong as I’d always feared, and, therefore, unlovable, flawed and confused.

It made me weak. It made me doubt my own truth; it made me distrust everyone and everything that walked. I siloed myself again in the loop — the loop that said I was damaged goods. I bounded a simmering rage inside that circle — lashing out in rare, violent bursts, knowing that if I could just convince my mom I was a human worthy of love, then I could break free again. That was the only way I could unfreeze my heart.

My mom died from an overdose on my 27th birthday before we ever fully reconciled; leaving two Philips wrestling in her wake.

There’s Little Philip, the scared boy who cried gay, who manipulates people’s affections with a sparkling edifice, who’s terrified of confrontation, who eats praise served by showmanship, who constantly fears losing his little crown, and hates that he isn’t king of a bigger country. He wants more and more so badly; he lives and dies by those wants.

And there’s Big Philip, the grown-up who whispers what I need over what I want, who is satisfied in the silence of having nothing to do, who loves my flaws, who knows best and is ignored. I’m ashamed that I don’t listen to him.

My whole life has been trying to get back to that moment I came out of the loop. I was so scared to say I was gay, and it went so wrong. I was Catholic in my bones. I believed, literally, that Jesus called me to be a modern-day queer apostle, transgressing from my book of gay apocrypha. The whiplash of being told that I was crazy to ever think so— it buried my adulthood alive, right as it was being born.

And so, over the years, I’ve thrashed against a cage I knew existed but couldn’t see clearly enough to escape…until I tried ketamine therapy. And, finally, I could see myself from outside myself.

(And if that last sentence sounds like an ad, blame it on grandiose writing style — I’m not being paid by anyone from the newly legalized medical-grade ketamine industry).

Until ketamine, I’d tried (in no particular order): talk therapy since I was 12, prescription anti-depressants from A-Z, acid, MDMA, ayahuasca, smoking the toad — not once but twice, following a duck on mushrooms in Amsterdam, healers with psychic dogs, lucid dreaming, philosophy from Aristotle, meditation retreats, Burning Man, realistic mystics, magical thinking in Korean spas, timeline therapy, and a 3-week stint in Bali to eat, pray, and kill myself with boredom.

Every time I have a life-changing revelation from these substances or experiences, I feel the pendulum swing: I’m a new man! I’ve broken through! I’m whole again — for a moment.

And then the pendulum arcs back, harder than before, and I’m trapped again in behaviors I swore I’d give up. The more epic my post-trip pronouncements, the harder I’ve regressed, leaving me more hopeless each time. There’s so much further I want to go, so much I want to reclaim.

And so it goes, on and on, this ring-around-the-neuroses. I signed up for ketamine therapy four months ago because I figured, “Nothing else has worked. Fill me up with horse tranquilizer. Let’s go. ”

Mindbloom sent me Pepto-Bismol colored ketamine in the mail from an address in Utah, apparently where they make medical grade ketamine in 2021. We’re talking 1000mg doses— no street bump of impure white powder.

Leg twitching under my desk, I first counseled with a Mindbloom psychiatrist via Zoom, undergoing a clinical diagnosis of my treatment-resistant depression, in order to qualify for legalized ketamine therapy. Then, I met with a Mindbloom guide— joining me live from Costa Rica via Zoom. His name was Richard; he was gay and kind; two things that don’t always go hand-in-hand. He offered me advice I’d heard on many trips before: TLB (trust, let go, be open). The actual experience would be solo (with a friend hanging out in another room just in case): I was to set an intention, sublingually ingest the ketamine, hold it in my mouth while listening to an optional inspirational Oprah or Eckhart Tolle track off Mindbloom’s Soundcloud playlists, and then spit out the ketamine after seven minutes. I was to set-up my bedroom as a quiet, dark space, with no pets at hand (my dog Star none-too-pleased to be banned from ketamine therapy). And then, sleep mask over my eyes, I would fall back into a K-Hole of my own resolution, into dissociation, into a last hope.

Ketamine cut the bullshit fast. As the drug took hold, I could trace my behaviors with clear-eyed, ego-free lenses: “Why do I act like that? That’s not what I really care about. Why am I holding onto the past? Am I acting from love or fear?”

And it was funny: “Is this like in Dune where they go into a spice trance? Am I in a spice trance? Am I Philip Muad’Dib?!”

I felt a pleasant, euphoric detachment from feelings that had felt incomparably heavy ten minutes earlier. The insights felt clear, sharp, digestible, and I never felt my mind blurred by the inertia rocket-ship up-up-up-and-away of hallucinogens, where I could be teetering on the edge of literal sanity for hours at a time.

50 minutes later, the first session abated, and I came back into my body. I felt a burning desire to call my friends and tell them I loved them, make amends for mistakes, express gratitude, try to come clean. I dialed my friend Chad, my voice low and grounded when not giggling with delight, and spoke truth to things I’d been too afraid to share.

In the neuroplastic days after each session, I experienced the world in a minor fugue state. I’d be easygoing; I’d be less thrown by shit; I’d offer abundant praise and compliments. I was more content, though less effusive, and quieter. It felt good to shut up and listen more.

But I didn’t write this essay. I wanted to chronicle it all, right away! But I waited. A part of me was skeptical. Would anything this time last?

So, I tripped five more sessions, and journaled the revelations I garnered over three months:

I saw myself as a lamp post. Why? A lamp post holds down its corner of the street, guiding people home. A lamp post doesn’t need to shine as bright at the Empire State; it’s happy with its little flame of old-world incandescence. Passersby and lovers can swing on a lamp post — they can sing in the rain and dance, and the lamp post holds their weight. Not to mention…she’s a pretty thing herself, that little lamp post that everyone loves, on the corner of a street in North Brooklyn.

I saw a billion-year-old limestone rock wedged into the side of the Grand Canyon, with a carving on it that read, “Authenticity is everything.”

I saw my dad snatching a bottle of red wine from my hands before I could uncork it, offering a smirking admonishment to “let that wine age a little bit.” I knew this meant that I don’t need to figure out everything I experience right away. I can let moments age a bit — consider them, sleep on them, trust that time is my friend and rushing decisions to check them off a list doesn’t make things easier. It just means I make more mistakes.

I found a new verb for my purpose. Before, it had been TO BUILD. To erect new communities, new platforms, new shining edifices to the creative worlds I inhabit, with the name Philip Sparkle plastered on the side. But building things is exhausting, not to mention there’s so many zoning permits, and I was ready TO WEAVE. To stitch people together, to bring out the best in friends and peers, and celebrate everyone doing their part to hold the center. I didn’t want to build things on my own anymore.

I saw the happiest version of me: “Smiling on a couch, with nothing to do, surrounded by good company.”

I saw Little Philip in the center of a crowded party, buzzing and socializing with everything that walked, while neon lights flashed above his head: “Your Agenda < Real Connection.” I introduced him to Big Philip, and we had a makeshift potluck dinner to talk things out.

I saw the loop, and for the first time since I was 17, I saw myself outside it.

I finally wrote this essay on the day of my 36th birthday, what I’m calling Big 36. It felt old to still feel like a teenager inside. I was ready to grow up.

Re-reading my Mindbloom journal, I discovered that I’d forgotten some of these revelations. I would have felt bad about that before; this time, I shrugged. I accepted the fact that insights would fade. I would still throw away newfound commitments, regress into old habits, eat an entire Domino’s pizza at 4 in the morning, but now knowing the goal is not to escape this process, but to make lifelong peace with incremental, imperceptible change. And the clarity of the loop remained, and the feeling that I was no longer inside it.

Like everybody, I’m world-weary these days, exhausted from the last two years — not only in terms of my mental health journey during a pandemic, but in terms of my hope that things will ever improve as much as I desire. Every time I’ve opened one Russian Doll in my mind, there’s been another inside — smaller, denser, harder to unlock.

But I see adults harden over time, trapped in their own loops because it’s just too exhausting to keep evolving. I’m grateful for these little growths. To become friendly with my demons, to explore the scars, to trace my pain and know it will always be there, part of me. To honor the changes so small I don’t even notice them until months go by and a friend points out that I’m not doing that annoying thing I used to do — that’s real.

I forgive my Mom. I wish she had changed, but I don’t need her permission anymore to let go. I love her so much.