A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life - Hardcover

Waldman, Ayelet

 
9780451494092: A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0451494091 ISBN 13: 9780451494092
Verlag: Knopf, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

The true story of how a renowned writer’s struggle with mood storms led her to try a remedy as drastic as it is forbidden: microdoses of LSD. Her revealing, fascinating journey provides a window into one family and the complex world of a once-infamous drug seen through new eyes.

When a small vial arrives in her mailbox from "Lewis Carroll," Ayelet Waldman is at a low point. Her moods have become intolerably severe; she has tried nearly every medication possible; her husband and children are suffering with her. So she opens the vial, places two drops on her tongue, and joins the ranks of an underground but increasingly vocal group of scientists and civilians successfully using therapeutic microdoses of LSD. As Waldman charts her experience over the course of a month--bursts of productivity, sleepless nights, a newfound sense of equanimity--she also explores the history and mythology of LSD, the cutting-edge research into the drug, and the byzantine policies that control it. Drawing on her experience as a federal public defender, and as the mother of teenagers, and her research into the therapeutic value of psychedelics, Waldman has produced a book that is eye-opening, often hilarious, and utterly enthralling.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

AYELET WALDMAN is the author of the novels Love and Treasure, Red Hook Road, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, and Daughter's Keeper, as well as of the essay collection Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace, and the Mommy-Track Mystery series. She was a federal public defender and taught a course on the legal implications of the War on Drugs at the UC Berkeley law school. She lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband, Michael Chabon, and their four children.

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This morning I took LSD.

The table I’m sitting at right now is not breathing. My keyboard is not exploding in psychedelic fireworks, lightning bolts shooting from the letters “R” and “P.” I am not giddy and frantic, or zoned out with bliss. I feel no transcendent sense of oneness with the universe or with the divine. On the contrary. I feel normal.

Well, except for one thing: I’m content and relaxed. I’m busy, but not stressed. That might be normal for some people, but it isn’t for me.

I did not drop a tab of acid. What I took is known as a “microdose,” a subtherapeutic dose of a drug administered at a quantity low enough to elicit no adverse side effects yet high enough for a measurable cellular response. A microdose of a psychedelic drug is approximately one-tenth of a typical dose. A recreational user of LSD looking for a trip complete with visual hallucinations might ingest between one hundred and one hundred and fifty micrograms of the drug. I took ten micrograms.

Microdosing of psychedelics, so new and renegade a concept that I had to teach it to my computer’s spellcheck, was popularized by a psychologist and former psychedelic researcher named James Fadiman in a series of lectures and podcast interviews and in a book published in 2011 called The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys. Since 2010, Dr. Fadiman has been collecting reports from individuals who experimented with regular microdosing of LSD and psilocybin, a naturally occurring chemical found in a variety of different species of mushroom. Soon after his book’s publication, in a lecture at a conference on the potential therapeutic value of psychedelic drugs, Fadiman presented what he had learned from reading the dozens of reports mailed and e-mailed to him, some though by no means all of them anonymously. He said about microdosing, “What many people are reporting is, at the end of the day, they say, ‘That was a really good day.’

A really good day. Predictably, regularly, unexceptionally. That is all I have ever wanted.

For as long as I can remember, I have been held hostage by the vagaries of mood. When my mood is good, I am cheerful, productive, and affectionate. I sparkle at parties, I write decent sentences, I have what the kids call swag. When my mood swings, however, I am beset by self-loathing and knotted with guilt and shame. I am overtaken by a pervasive sense of hopelessness, a grim pessimism about even the possibility of happiness. My symptoms have never been serious enough to require hospitalization, nor have they ever prevented me from functioning either personally or professionally, but they have made my life and the lives of the people whom I love much more difficult.

I have sought many treatments for these moods and miseries. Though I managed to be one of the only neurotic Jewish children growing up in the seventies and eighties in the New York area to stay out of a shrink’s office, I did eventually dip my toe. Or, to be more accurate, I waded into therapy with the eagerness of a dehydrated camel sloshing into an oasis mud puddle. I wallowed in therapy of all kinds.

My first therapist was a psychiatric resident assigned to me by University Health Services when I was a third-year law student. I was looking for help dealing with a breakup that at the time felt tragic but that now seems like that moment when you look up from your phone just in time to avoid being plowed down by a city bus. I sat in my therapist’s office and sobbed. Once I stopped crying (two or three sessions in), we talked about my boyfriend and my ambivalence about the breakup. We talked about the guy (and the other guys, and the one or two girls) I cheated on him with. We talked about my mother’s anger and my father’s emotional reserve, and about how hard it was to grow up in a home where two people spent so much time fighting.

Since that first series of appointments, I have spent hundreds of hours in the offices of psychiatrists and psychologists, social workers and licensed family therapists, wearing my unique assprint into so many leather couches. I’ve nattered on to Freudians and diligently filled out the workbooks assigned by cognitive behavioral therapists. I enjoy these sessions; I’m analytical and an extrovert, so I enjoy picking apart my life and my feelings, especially with people I’m paying for the privilege. I was a good student in elementary school, and I find workbooks soothing.

Even though I am a cynic about all things countercultural (nothing makes me roll my eyes faster than a yogini pressing her lily-white palms together in a Namaste), I have on occasion even abandoned mainstream therapy for the decidedly alternative. In my eighth month of pregnancy with my second child, desperate to avoid another Caesarean section, I engaged in a series of sessions of hypnotherapy, during which I “rebirthed” my oldest child. This would, the hypnotist promised, guarantee a vaginal birth this time. I lay on her couch, my knees bent up around my ears, as she guided me in excruciating detail through the vaginal birth I did not have. Together we imagined every twisting contraction, the burn of crowning, the exertion of pushing. I panted, I moaned, I gritted my teeth and bore down. It turns out that the only thing one is guaranteed to produce by such efforts is a massive and propulsive fart.

One month, two doulas, a midwife, and forty-four hours of nonimaginary contractions later, my son was delivered by an obstetrician who waited with surprising patience for me to finish futilely visualizing my cervix opening before he performed the second of what went on to be four C-sections.

I’ve done mindfulness-based therapy, which required me to spend torturous minutes meditating, and many more torturous hours discussing with my therapist why I hate meditating so much. I responded to a crisis in a friend’s marriage by forcing my long-suffering husband into an infuriating kind of couples therapy that involved repeating back each other’s words, theoretically in a tone not dripping with passive-aggressive fury. (“I hear that it upsets you when I criticize how you load the dishwasher, but I feel sad when you insist on putting the glasses on the bottom rack, and I feel rage because, despite your vaunted intelligence, you can’t seem to learn that that’s how they get broken.” Oops.) We might still be frantically using “I” language with one another had my husband not pointed out that it was the therapy that was the most serious threat to our marriage. “I” had to agree.*

Despite all of these hundreds of hours of talk therapy, I can’t say that I have ever experienced much in the way of a change of either outlook or behavior.

And then, one day, on my way home from giving a depressingly poorly attended reading in bucolic and beautiful Marin County,† I found myself considering the possibility of steering my wheel hard to the right and hurtling off the Richmond Bridge. The thought was more than idle, less than concrete, and though I managed to make it across safely, I was so shaken by the experience that I called a psychiatrist.

That psychiatrist diagnosed me with bipolar II disorder, a less serious variant of bipolar I, which was once known as manic depression. Though this diagnosis was a shock, it wasn’t a surprise. Bipolar disorder runs in families, and my father and other members of my family have it. I suppose in the back of my mind I always feared that my shifting moods might be an expression of the disease.

Bipolar disorder is characterized by changes in mood, energy, and activity levels. Most people experience these...

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Verlag
Knopf
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0451494091
ISBN 13 
9780451494092
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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Softcover