Safe in the Hole

I think I finally found a groove with these treatments.  And it only took 2 months. LOL.  Session 14 (or Bonus session 2 for those of us keeping track) went well.  Not well in a calm relaxing way but well in an epiphany sense which is really all I seek in these “trips”. 

First of all, I went into it feeling very peaceful somehow.  I am not sure how because I had to deal with the ridiculousness of ANOTHER car repair and its cost and still fighting with the dr’s office over Jym’s surgery.  In addition when I went to meditate my ipod was dead and then I ended up trying to field email replies etc and never really got to write or anything prior.  It has been a battle with everyone lately and so to sit there in the chair on the bad side of the room and feel at peace was really a win for me. 

I was sitting there on the side of the room I don’t care for and the last cubicle farthest from the bathroom but my playlist was good and I went over my checklist.  I had my ani-nausea meds, my sleep mask, my feety socks, my blanket, my Nemu and my lozenge.  I was all ready to go.  I reclined my legs up and did my first spray.  Put on the headset and eye mask and waited.  5 minutes passed with nothing.  I get dose 2.  Nothing.  Feel slightly drunk.  Dose 3 comes along.  I spray.  I recline.  I wait.  Nothing.  Just grey.  And I say grey because when you put on a sleep mask you think you see black but it is more of a very dark grey color.  It is matte, without depth.  The ketamine trip for me always starts with the blackness that I call Ketamine Black.  It is the black of the universe.  It has dimension, depth, it feels full of nothing and everything at the same time.  But now I had only that dark grey.  That flat dark grey.

I tried to move my head as my vertigo is always an indicator that the med is kicking in.  I was dizzy.  I noticed I could not feel my face (normal) and my hands felt strange.  Nemu felt scratchy.  Check.  Check. All in order.  But where was the “trip”.  I waited. 

Although I have no gauge of time behind my eye mask I can guestimate that it was maybe a good 10-15 minutes at least of waiting after the last dose was administered.  I am not sure I am getting my dose all the time.  I did read on the Facebook page that this is normal and the second spray in each bottle is almost nonexistent.  I also wonder if my nose is stuffed up a bit so I am not getting the full dose into my body before it heads fast down my throat and into my belly where it is useless. The spray is supposed to enter the body thru the mucus membrane in the nose like (and I hate to compare this) cocaine or other drug you sniff I guess.  Anyway I don’t know if it always all gets in is what I am saying.  I feel like my constant congestion and annoying post nasal drip leaves a thin layer blocking out things from entering fully.  Possibly why I have not gotten covid yet.  Who knows.  Either way I am still waiting at this point.

Eventually I did start a very mild trip which consisted of a recurrent theme.  I feel as if I am in a hole.  It is dark.  I look up and I see walls around me.  Not solid walls but just towers completely surrounding me.  They are tall and as I look up to the sky in the narrow funnel of space I can see the circle of towers surrounding me.  I look way up into the circular space.  It is as if I am looking up thru a tube to the sky.  It is not like being in a city. It is being in a well. Very narrow. The sky is above me but the sky is not bright.  It is always dark.  Not like night.  More like storm.  It is not good up there.  As bad as it may be to be in a hole, I do not feel trapped.  I feel cocooned almost.  Alone and empty with nothing around me (like if you fell into a well) but I have no desire to be up there in the free sky above. 

Part of me has always wondered if it is my innate fear of getting out there.  Since the pandemic I have become quite reclusive. I have to force myself to have any social interaction at all and when I do it is very limited.  I don’t want it.  I don’t want to be around people.  I prefer to be alone.  I prefer to vacation where there are few people.  I want or need to be alone.  It is wrong.  I know I don’t want to be this way. I just am this way.  There are probably a lot of reasons for this. 

In the past sessions when I have experienced this “hole” if you will it just is.  I never really considered it or analyzed it beyond what I said above.  But this time was different.  I knew that the hole was not where I should be but also I felt safe there.  Above me in that space this time was more than I saw before. This time there was chaos up there.  There was fire, like the breath of a mighty dragon destroying in an instant.  I watched it all from my hole in the darkness.  No one above could see me down there.  I cried at what I was witnessing above me, that I didn’t want to be a part of it, that I needed and should be a part of it no matter how bad it was.  There it was.  I filled the small pads of my eye mask with my gentle tears. 

I have been in this hole for years now.  I knew it.  It was not news to me.  But I always felt like I fell here into the hole and just didn’t know how to get out.  The real truth is that I don’t want to get out.  I want to stay here in the hole where it is safe.  Or relatively safe.  I have left the fight.  I don’t want to be in the fight.  But the fight is all around me.  It is my state, my country, my planet.  It is everywhere.  It is inescapable. 

I thought that ketamine would help me find my way out of the hole but honestly I think I’m resisting getting out of it.  Because I am terrified of what is out there.  I will step from the hole into the fight and although I was absolutely prepared for a fight when I was younger, I don’t think I was ever strong enough for the fight on our doorstep now against this hate filled world.  Before I always believed that MOST people were not racist or hateful or selfish or evil.  I thought I was a pretty good judge of character.  But I was wrong.  I had no clue that half the population was subject to ignorance and propaganda.  That half of us are as swayed as those that stood at the feet of Hitler and raised their hands in allegiance to his sickness and yet here we are.  I don’t want to be a part of the world we are in and I don’t know how to change it.  I used to know.  But I don’t anymore.  It is the hopelessness that fuels my depression.  It is the feeling that nothing I do will ever make a difference. 

I think that although this was not a “good” trip in a traditional sense, it was a “good” trip in that it brought out some of what is buried deep in that earth it stirred up sessions ago.  And better out than in right?  If I know it, I can confront it.  I don’t know how yet but knowing is part of the battle.  It is also something for me to work through in my therapy this week. 

I have been called naïve many times in my life and maybe I am.  I always believed that good would always prevail and that I lived in a country capable of that.  Now I am not so certain.  I always believed in hope and love and kindness and acceptance and that if I put that out there then it would return to me and that is just simply not true.  I know good and kind people who embrace diversity and love and who put all of that into the universe and they have some of the worst struggles.  Then I see people putting hate and ignorance and fear and judgement into the universe and they have lives untouched by real pain or struggle.  Jym always said that he doesn’t believe in hell.  That there is no hell.  That we are IN hell already.  I think he may be right.