2021
I exhaled as the needle slid into my veins. Ketamine flowing through my body felt like an act of desperation—it was an act of desperation.
Four years earlier, in 2017, I had checked myself into a facility in Tucson, Arizona, for intensive trauma treatment. Now I was in trouble again, experiencing some of the same symptoms that had landed me there—dissociation, an inability to concentrate, and increasing social isolation. It was getting harder to leave my apartment, let alone get off the couch. Which was weird, because by then I was a public person. People saw me on television several times a week. A year earlier, I’d published a book that had launched me into the national conversation about my uncle Donald. Everybody was a shut-in during the pandemic, so no one noticed that I was, too. The problem was, by 2021 everyone else was going outside again, and I wasn’t.
Within five minutes of the ketamine entering my bloodstream, the world had expanded and I began to fall through it slowly and pleasantly. I felt lighter than I had in a very long time, almost euphoric. Anything seemed possible. I made connections in my mind, I made plans, I saw potential.
I suddenly had an overwhelming desire to text. I started with close friends, then people I thought were my friends but who turned out not to be. Then I texted people I didn’t know particularly well but with whom I still felt it was crucially important for me to share the fact that I was high. “I am so high.”
And then I saw the coat hook.
I’d recently read Mike Sowden’s Everything Is Amazing Substack newsletter about pareidolia, the human impulse to construct visual patterns that aren’t really there. This led me to a Reddit post on the phenomenon that featured a picture of a metal coat hook under which had been written in Sharpie, “Drunk octopus wants to fight you.” And there it was, exactly the kind of oval, two-armed coat hook that is screwed to doors in doctors’ offices all over the world. I needed to share this, too.
Because of the needle in my left arm, only my right hand was free, so it took a while to focus the camera on my phone and get a photograph that wasn’t too blurry. I proceeded to text it to all the same people, noting that it was one of the funniest things I’d ever seen.
Slowly, though, things began to shift. I still felt light, almost invincible, but my vision was clearing and everything was beginning to feel more solid.
An hour had passed. The nurse came in to remove the needle and check my vitals. It would be another thirty minutes before I felt steady enough to go home. It was during that space that a thought came to me as if carved in glass, so clear, so stark was it: I don’t want to die.
I texted that to everybody, too.
I had met with the psychiatrist who ran the ketamine clinic, a mild man in his mid-seventies who seemed beyond surprise, only once. Before we discussed the treatment—how it worked and what I might expect—the doctor needed to find out whether I was a good candidate. I needed his reassurance that there wouldn’t be any side effects I wasn’t willing to risk. The only drug I’d ever tried was pot, a handful of times, in college. I’d found being high unpleasant and, at least once, terrifying, and I wanted to make sure this experience would be different.
I’d always liked that part—the intake, the initial gathering of information, the telling of the story. Over the decades, my family’s history, and my own, had become simply that—a story I told to therapists and psychiatrists whenever I decided to start therapy again. I’d become so detached from the narrative I spun that I no longer had any feelings about it, which afforded me a certain pleasure of mastery—over the material, over my ability to describe the contours of my pathologies as if from a great remove, over myself. The narrative I’d constructed to explain who I was—to explain how I had arrived at a particular moment—remained neatly contained within the borders I’d erected long ago.
In December 2021, though, it was no longer that simple and had long since stopped being true. There was a new part of the story I couldn’t control because, although it had a massive impact on my life on an almost day-to-day basis, it fundamentally had nothing to do with me: having to sit in front of a total stranger and say, “I’m here because five years ago, I lost control of my life. I’m here because the world has fallen away and I don’t know how to find my way back. I’m here because Donald Trump is my uncle.”
Saying it filled me with a shame that proved impossible to detach myself from. Hearing those words come out of my mouth unsettled me; they needed saying, but felt like a curse. And whether they had any explanatory power depended almost entirely on the perspective of whoever was listening.
Saying it reminded me of all the times, at a restaurant or a store, that I’d used a credit card and was asked, “Are you related?” I always said, “No.” And the response was always some version of “Don’t you wish you were?”
When I finally confessed, the doctor raised his eyebrows and sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That must be very difficult for you.”
I shrugged. I didn’t know where to start.
One of the most disturbing things I learned during my weeks in treatment was that, for the better part of my adult life, I had been merely subsisting. I recognized the truth of this as soon as it was presented to me. Initially, I reacted with resentment. What’s the point of recognizing you’re at the bottom of a deep hole that other people have put you in if you don’t have any of the equipment necessary to climb out?
But it’s better to know. It’s always better to know. I’m still figuring out what to do with the knowledge.
To that end, at the Tucson facility, I had to do a lot of writing outside of individual therapy and groups. In one exercise I was asked to list six reasons I wanted to stay in treatment. For number six I wrote:
“I want to live.”
As of autumn 2023, my life has gotten smaller. Days go by without my seeing another human being. Sometimes I can’t remember the last time I went outside.
Yesterday, I brought the grocery delivery in from the hallway. The handles of the bags were cool to the touch and the bags themselves carried the scent of late autumn with hints of winter. That surprised me, to find I’ve missed another season. I’ve missed so many things—another holiday, another trip, more moments to connect than I can count.
I started writing this book because I realized I was killing myself—with stress, with self-loathing, but above all with isolation that started on November 9, 2016. But I don’t want to die. I want to live.