#6: just a little bit longer...
the end times are nigh!
Hi, welcome back to Secret Blog ᕙ(‾̀◡‾́)ᕗ
Today, we’ve made it to Week #6. I know last week’s email was titled “Week 6” but that was a mistake on my part, and has been corrected in the record. The magnets fix a lot, but not everything!
Now, where were we….
*°•★•°∵ ∵°•☆•° . * * * *
Session #25
“Not my usual tech, had magnet a little further from head than usual. No pillow, so read uncomfortably.”
My day shuddered and started slowly before settling into a plain “blah” of a morning. I couldn’t imagine reading or painting, so instead I cleaned the kitchen before heading out to TMS.
This weekend, after a series of shit weekdays, and exactly 30 days after the start of my abstinence, I had alcohol. I had a small glass of wine and half of a glittering 3.4% beer on a sun-drenched patio. While waiting for that first glass of wine I was convinced that this was going to be revelatory, and would reunite me with a desire or knowing that would rip me apart. I was excited by the prospect.
I sat down at the bar, and yes, that first sip was incredible. The flavor of a juicy red wine made my eyes go wide, I felt the urge to message everyone I’ve ever met and tell them just how good wine, the world, my life was. I savored it, but too quickly the returns lessened, before falling off a cliff entirely. I blame this on the glass clearly being from a bottle of wine that was opened days ago, but also from the volcanic buildup of expectations erupting into a very boring letdown.
We quickly flash back: I’m standing behind a workbench panicking, holding out my finger before quickly withdrawing it while my junior year Biology teacher harrumphs before me. She’s armed with a finger pricker to draw out a drop of blood for that week’s lab — something involving a blood test — and I can’t bring myself to stick my finger in the little black box, no larger than a thimble.
“The taller they are the harder they fall,” she clucked before handing me the packet for kids who refused the prick. I’d built it up so much in my head, to the point of no return (and embarrassing hyperventilation). To this day I still don’t know my blood type.
We flash forward to tragedy: I was still coming off of my food poisoning from last week, and this duo proved to be a grave mistake. I spent the rest of the night sick to death with a slight headache as I replayed the ways words went soft in my mouth while trying to talk to my friend.
I miss alcohol, but these days… I don’t know what I’d do with it. I’ve explored a lot of interesting NA beverages since my zap-mandated prohibition began, and it seems like I just miss the cultural element of it… And, well, an alternative to the gross-as-fuck NA options at bars I suppose. I miss being able to have a beer when I want, but I don’t think I really care about being drunk too much anymore.
“My new and tenuous relationship with sobriety vs. the back to back of a family visit and a wedding trip to Missoula,” I wrote in the private mock-Twitter page of a Discord server with friends.
Side effects:
- Definitely felt better after TMS, I was dragging in the morning but post treatment I felt reenergized, and even went to hang out with a friend after
- Painted, despite feeling ill and not particularly creative. I decided a quick visit was better than none
- I repeat: did the dishes!!!!!!!!!!!!!
✶
Session #26
“Extreme eye pain today, I closed my eyes for the entirety of the first zap round. Fixed, thank god.”
I wanted to cry, but it felt like even if I could force out tears my face was scrunched so tightly they’d never flow. I wondered if closing my eyes during that round would set me back some, given the whole thing about the brain waves.
When I can, I like to ask my tech questions about the process. She doesn’t know much about the exact science, and frequently offers to run down the hall and get my doctor to answer them, but my questions are more rooted in curiosity than a need to be comforted. Documentation about this online is so hard to read I tell her, “Yeah, I barely understand it myself,” she agrees.
I learned to ask her about what she’s observed, and today I’m curious about the pulse strength.
“What’s the highest percentage you’ve treated so far?”
She tells me about a pregnant woman she sees who has her pulse set to 50%. For context, the average range is between 30 - 40%, and I sit at 34% post-remap (when I began I was at 36%). 50% is wild to me — as is doing this while pregnant — but the tech assures me it’s totally fine (which, why wouldn’t it be? The ray isn’t coming anywhere near the baby, I suppose). The lowest? 21%. “Yeah, I think it’s crazy but it works for her!”
I always swear I’m going to ask more later, or look it up when I get home, but I don’t. Those 19 minutes I’m in the room with her are the ones I feel most curious.
I diddled around with my to-do list, and on the drive home I thought about what TMS doesn’t fix, which most notably, is “ *vague hand gesture* everything,” which really means motivation to do the obnoxious real-life-tasks. I keep putting off hard conversations and going to the pharmacy. Avoidance is the slide I keep going down before wondering why I’m in a sharp pile of wood chips. At the last second I snapped out of thinking, made a U-Turn and pulled into the pharmacy parking lot.
Side effects:
- General detachment, avoidance is proving hard to kick
- Numbing out by looking at my phone so so so much, feeling of general malaise and funk
- Dealing with deep exhaustion, maybe it’s something to do with the nonstop white noise (cicadas) and gradual tilt into Tennessee summer
- At least I made it to yoga!!!
✶
Session #27
“Noticing the pulsing feeling more today.”
I was still feeling the funk from yesterday, but I attacked a pile of dishes that had fully taken over the sink and the counter (You may ask “Hey, didn’t you just deal with this the other day?” To which I respond… Don’t get into cooking, you will spend most of your life dealing with dishes), then went in my room and put on an outfit. I believe that much of your life can change in the instant you take the time to put on a goddammed outfit.
“It’s hilarious to get brain fixed then go right back to the source,” I wrote in my journal. I wonder how a brain with its recharged depression chunk will handle up against an IRL visit to the emotional elephant’s foot I’ve tried to keep quarantined in the back of my mind. When I’m at my most confident, I feel like this is a great experiment, a moment in my hero’s journey that can define me. “I want to move past fear and a lifetime of coping, burrowing and hiding,” I tell myself. At my worst, I try to make new advances in the amount of skin one can pick off of their nailbeds.
Side effects:
- I’m feeling and seeing light within myself that I understand requires protection and kindling to grow. At this shaky time in my life I have to work hard to protect and foster this peace within myself. Fire needs kindling, then breath, then sticks, then logs to take and grow. I am the same.
- I’ve found that anxiety/ depression spirals are easier to exit. In my bathroom I have Sister Cortia Kent’s “Ten Rules for Students” hanging directly across the toilet. I find myself passing over Rule #9 “Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think” in favor of the more workaholic-friendly ones like “The only rule is work” or “Consider everything an experiment,” but recently I’ve found myself trying in good faith to implement #9
✶
Session #28
“Zap appointment passed by in a blur.”
Walking across the parking lot afterwards I noticed four figures waiting in their cars for loved ones — a display of legs lounging out of open doors and dismembered hands holding phones peeking above the window-door-border. I wondered what it was like for them, the people who come and drop off their loved ones for 2 hour treatments that exist on the cutting edge of psychedelic and psychiatry, privy to nothing but the roar of the road that laps up against the parking lot.
Despite offers from a handful of people, I’ve driven myself to each of my TMS appointments since the beginning because, for whatever reason, I’m nervous to have people see me afterwards. Despite sharing openly online and in casual conversation, the process as a whole has been one I’ve wanted to keep private.
I keep thinking about the parking lot as an airlock as I get in my car, and something about the waiters moves me deeply.
Side effects:
- I feel more normalized
- I can recognize when I’m not present
✶
Session # ██
I missed TMS today.
I’m not allowed to receive treatment unless I’ve had more than four hours of sleep, and the night before I found myself in a fitful, restless sleep. All night I waited with eyes wide open to doze off. You may wonder, “Why don’t you get up and do stuff?” Well, I’m always afraid that getting up will wake me up more, and I was straight up tired. I suffered from long bouts of insomnia throughout my life, so I was no stranger to the sensation of your brain humming along all night while dry eyes beg for sleep. I imagined it’s what an immortal being felt like when they realized they had no respite from the world, from living.
Side effects:
- Exhausted, but still did my near-daily routine of going to the coffee shop to write and draw. I had a long day of work that I couldn’t skate out of, so I drank two caps in rapid succession and blasted back home. I felt like Bernie’s corpse on rocket powered roller-skates.
- For the first time in a while, I experienced suicidal ideation. This was probably due to exhaustion, and I found myself stopping short of verbalizing the desire. Usually when I get that way I find myself saying “I want to die, I want to kill myself” over and over again in my head until I experience some kind of temporary insanity. This time, while I felt the urge, I didn’t say it to myself. Even if the words are an empty threat, the echo knocking around in my head drives me crazy.
I didn’t write much this week, I was disconnected from myself and this project, and even TMS. In some ways I feel like I’m trying to put space between us so I don’t feel as devastated when it ends. I’m extremely nostalgic, so endings are hard for me, and the concept of ending the treatment designed to make me feel better is terrifying. What if I’m not ready? What if it doesn’t work? What if it was all an extremely expensive waste? It’s been a long time since I’ve feel like I was about to be pushed out of the nest, I usually take those leaps myself, and I’m struggling with it. I find that I stop writing as a protective measure. The years that I spent extremely depressed I refused to journal — seeing what I’d written down broke my own heart, and having to recount my woes made me worried they’d duplicate and haunt me. Even more, I felt nervous about sharing stuff here. I became increasingly nervous about how people reacted to this newsletter — was it boring? Was it weird? Did they subscribe out of pity? I don’t know. I thought about giving it up, and my handwritten journal entries grew shorter and shorter, a page becoming a paragraph becoming a messy line becoming nothing.
For an idyllic week and some change the summer before seventh grade I went to surf camp with my best friend. We wobbled on cartoonish foam longboards and ate shit in the break more times than I can count. We learned how to spot waves, with our eyes but also with our bellies pressed to the foam, picking up bobbing cues that transcended measurement. I feel like that right now, on my belly before a wave, trying to determine my next course of action.
I’m in an incredible season of change right now — seeing family for my sister’s graduation, visiting Missoula for an old friend’s wedding, and a week after that, I’ll be moving to Brooklyn for two-ish months. I’ve only been to New York once, a blurry and hungover six days that passed like velvet through my fingers, and I’m grateful to return for such a long period of time. I’m looking forward to the change of scenery, and what changes it will have on me. I’ve always wanted to go, but I kept telling myself it wasn’t the right time, swells rising me up on my board and passing my without so much as a look back. Now’s the time I say, and I get up on my feet. Even if I crash, I’m still taking that ride.
And to you all, thanks for reading.
⋆౨ৎ˚⟡˖ ࣪✧˚ ༘ ⋆｡♡˚｡˚ ༘⟡˖ ࣪✧⋆౨ৎ
The next post in this series can be found here.