What happened in Peru? (Part 12)

Previously: I said too much.

I was re-reading earlier entries and noticed that, way back when (I started writing this in 2011… that’s pretty wacky, right?), I called my depression “largely situational and self-inflicted.” That may have been true at some point, but these days it seems definitively chemical. I’ve seen studies to suggest that depression medication may in turn cause deficiencies in serotonin, etc. in the brain: in effect, the meds take a bad situation and supply the chemicals you need, but leave you incapable of ever producing what you need on your own. Maybe? I don’t know. Did events cause my depression? Did depression bring about the events? Am I chemically depressed now because I treated that depression? Or, was I always chemically depressed and it was just waiting for a decent confluence of events to bring it out?

There are certainly times when I feel like I live in the grand age of leeches when it comes to psychiatric care.

The period after coming back from Peru was really terrible for me, and it started before we even got back home. We were there for another week or so after the ceremonies. We left Iquitos and went to Cusco to see Machu Picchu, which we never did. It’s high altitude in Cusco and it was really hard to adjust to it. Mostly, though, my depression was back and it was worse than before I had gone. What it boiled down to was… imagine you saw god. Imagine you saw god and felt absolute joy. In effect, imagine you went to heaven. And then, it just stopped. It was awful. It was just gone, and worse… it was turning into just a memory, one I couldn’t have faith in or feel. It was just another memory, just an illusion.

How did I get back to it? More desperation, honestly, I think. The experiences I described last time helped, but they wouldn’t have come about if I hadn’t been trying so hard to find ways to reconnect to the whole thing. I had a therapist who supported what I was trying to do and tried to help me find my way without going back on meds and then, when it became clear it wasn’t working, helped me find new meds to try. Luckily for me, this time they worked, and without the various side effects I’d suffered on them before. They didn’t create happiness chemically in my brain, but they left me somewhere above “barely perfunctory” that I hadn’t been in a long time.

But I also don’t think it was the meds. I think the aya altered my brain chemistry. Rewrote sections of my brain. Allowed me to spend the time afterwards to try and figure some things out. Hell, I cared enough about my life to TRY and figure them out. I talked a lot of stuff through, I wrote a lot of stuff down. They said it would take a year to try and unpack everything ayahuasca shows you in the ceremonies, and I think it was true for me.

It’s not just that I’m a different person than I was in 2010, I know you can pretty much say that about anyone, really. It’s that I’m on a different path than I was. I don’t know where I was headed before, I let that cynical voice, that base, lizard brain make a lot of decisions and pretended I was just along for the ride. Now, I like to think, I’m actually trying to actively create a path, to head towards being something better.

Next: Okay, so what, exactly, did I learn?