Can you enter a K-hole to exit depression?

A thing worth knowing...

One year ago, I hosted a pizza party at my house for 30 elementary-aged kids and their parents. The two hours leading up to the event nearly broke me.

I thought it was a good idea to send my vegan nanny to the market and pick an assortment of stinky, fancy cheeses and smoked meat sticks for a charcuterie board. When she texted me photos of questionable cheese options, I started to crumble. 

Nothing made sense when I called her to clarify what I wanted, just little spittles, half words and broken sentences. The exact kinds of bougie animal-based goods I had in mind stopped short at the tip of my teeth. I could not blurt out a thought because my brain was maxed out with confusion and decision overload.

I was having a panic attack.

Then a former neighbor, an ex-prisoner who had more face tattoos than I remembered, rode his Harley motorcycle to my front gate, crawled under my fence, and walked up my driveway to ask me if I wanted to buy some expensive purses he “found.” 

Barely muttering the words, “I can’t talk right now,” I shut the door, hoping this man with questionable motives would leave before a bus load of kids were about to arrive. I wondered where he was at in his mental stability and drug use. 

I realize now I wasn’t far off from his questionable state.

A week prior, I wrapped up ketamine IV infusion therapy. “Special K”, a psychedelic originally used as an anesthetic in hospitals and veterinary clinics had been approved by the FDA in the US to treat depression.

I was banking on this to work. I pulled a considerable amount from our account and spent thousands of dollars out-of-pocket – because health insurance does not cover this therapy – to fix my years’ long issues of depression, anxiety, and extreme mood swings. 

I had been going to talk therapy, on anti-depressants, walked daily, cut alcohol, exercised, and failed many attempts at meditation. Sometimes I did them all, sometimes I didn’t at all. 

Prior to trying ketamine, I read A Really Good Day by Ayelet Waldman, who experimented with microdosing LSD for 30 days to combat her moods. It prompted me to try something new and more radical than I had done before. 

Meanwhile, my psychiatrist suggested an anti-anxiety pill, while my ObGyn recommended birth control pills. I didn’t want to do more of the same. What I really wanted was a break from my mind and tripping out seemed like a good plan. 

I completed the recommended six ketamine sessions, where I sat in a squishy recliner in a dark room with instrumental music, watching a drone video over European countrysides like the Swiss Alps. I was in a k-hole, dissociating, unable to move, with an anesthesiologist watching me in my most vulnerable state. 

He asked, how are you doing? Mustering up my vocal chords, I belted out, “I’M MELTINGGGGGGGG.” 

Thoughts about my problems withered away, not the usual crimes of overthinking and overwhelm. Worries about my kids, my new dog crapping in the house, my unfulfilling career, how I’m tired all the time – went bye-bye. 

But my one-hit-wonder flopped. While flying high in the sky, I was fine but, in the real world, where pizza parties were at stake, it couldn’t help my mental shattering. 

It took me a chunk of good change to realize there’s no one magic bullet to “fix” my mind. It’s been a daily science experiment. It was all of what I was doing before, and more, and continuously working on it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make a good story. 

I added the anti-anxiety and birth control pill and I felt better almost immediately. I also choose to do less. It’s evaluating life consumption and reconfiguring what works that week, that day, that moment in time. When I agreed to host this party two months earlier, I could have listened to my gut telling “hell no, this sounds like it could be a planning nightmare.” Alas, I was (and probably am still) a glutton for punishment.

Working on my mental acuity will never have a finish line because my mind and my body are always changing. Exercise, what I eat and drink, sleep habits. Literally all the things we know we should or shouldn’t do, it matters. Do the work on everything all together as best as I can was, and is, the answer. Simply falling into a k-hole as a single solution could not fix what was broken.