Author: Paul

Because I’m going to Peru in November, and it felt like I really needed to finally close the door on the first trip. It’s not that I feel like I finished the process of learning, really, but I do feel like I’ve traveled as far down a particular road as I can alone and I need more guidance. I made great strides, I think. I hope. But I would like to make many more.

I started weaning off my usual daily 60mg dose of Cymbalta back in August, and should be meds-free by October 1st. Because it’s a capsule I’ve been following a particularly tedious method that I found recommended online. I took about two weeks to shift to 30mg capsules, and since then I have literally been opening the capsules and removing five more ‘beads’ from the dose each day. It’s not an exact science, ans the number of beads actually varies from capsule to capsule, but it’s slow and less of a shock to the system. As of today I am taking roughly a 10mg dose. It hasn’t been as bad as I recall the last time I weaned off meds to be, although the last few days I have been feeling it more than most.

It’s an unpredictable process. It is why I have nothing planned musically after the next 2 shows.

Still, I remain capable of having creative ideas and acting on them to an extent, and that is something. I remain capable of writing silly blog posts detailing the process as if there are people who would want to read them.

I’m going alone this time, which is something of a THING for someone who doesn’t travel well to begin with and will be off his meds. I leave on November 13th, I’ll be back on the 24th. In between I will participate in five ceremonies. I will try to write while I am there this time and take lots of photos.

I did not edit this post for clarity.

Previously: The journey wrapped up.

If you’ve been reading this whole time, you might be happy to know I’ve decided to be really direct, here at the end. Because otherwise, I will never get to the end of this thing.

So, let’s review. I suffer from severe chronic depression. It landed me in a psych ward for a week. It killed music for me. Eventually, I became meds resistant and the idea of electro-convulsive therapy began to be discussed. At that point I decided, what the hell, let’s try something crazy first, so I went to Peru to take ayahuasca with a shaman.

Ayahuasca is an information dump. It opens up your brain and drowns you in data. I’ve spent the four years since trying to live the process of figuring it out. It hasn’t been easy at times, but it’s made me a better person. Better doesn’t always mean good. But better than before, at least.

When my depression or anxiety comes, I’m able to stay separate from it in some ways. I recognize it when it arrives, I let Sarah know it’s on me, and I just wait it out. It doesn’t consume in the way it used to. It’s more like a medical condition, with physical symptoms, that requires maintenance and I treat it the same way. It sucks but it’s a hell of a lot more manageable.

On the other side of that, I have good days. I’m creative again. I make things. I have ideas. I pursue them, or at least try. It’s not constant, and it’s a thing I also have to work at to maintain. But that it exists at all is a huge difference from before I went.

I can’t prove that those changes are a direct result of what happened. In some cases, it’s definitely not direct. But even then, I don’t think I would have done the things that led to the rest without that one altering experience. I wouldn’t have been able to struggle (and continue to struggle) to turn things around without learning the things I did.

So, what did I learn?

Lesson #1 (the one learned immediately, in ceremony): God is love. That’s a plattitude. You see it all the time, it may not even register. I know it never did for me. I don’t even know if I believe in god. I don’t think I do in terms of the conventional notion of it. But I believe (and yes, “believe.” I used to say it but I never believed it until after Peru) that there is something higher than us. Something we can’t comprehend. And whatever it is, it feels nothing but love towards us, and wishes we could do the same.

Lesson #2 (the one I worked to learn): The main thing, that everything else seems to radiate from, is that my cynicism has never created anything. Never brought anything worthwhile into the world. It can’t. It’s incapable of it, because creating requires being open. Every movement forward requires saying “yes” to something.

No more turning down the third ceremony.

No more trying to imagine the future of an event (because I am always wrong) and deciding against a thing based on that inherently faulty premise.

No more turning down the chance to ride a giant broom.

No more going down with the floor.

I don’t manage it every day. I don’t manage it every other day. But I manage it as much as I can, and I try to manage it more all the time.

No more being afraid.

The answer is yes.

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?