A Really Good Day

by Ayelet Waldman

  Then I closed my eyes. For about fifteen of the next twenty minutes, I alternated between cataloguing my anxieties and haranguing myself for my inability to clear my mind. Finally, exhausted by self-reproach, I just kind of zoned out. When the alarm buzzed, I opened my eyes and looked out into the canyon. The orange flowers glowed; their petals shimmered in the sunshine. And then, with a trembling rush, they took flight.

  They weren’t flowers but monarch butterflies, thousands upon thousands of them. They had rested still for the entire twenty minutes of my meditation, and then they rewarded me with a swirl of sudden, unexpected beauty. It felt as if someone or something had decided to show me that the world is filled with grace, and that I need only open my eyes to see it. It felt, though it pains me to say it, like a gift from the divine.

  I wish I could say that I was so inspired by that experience that from that moment on I meditated every day. My depression lifted a little, but it didn’t fly away. For a while, I could raise my spirits just by closing my eyes and thinking about the butterflies. But soon enough I stopped thinking of the experience as a divine gift, and instead dismissed it as a delightful coincidence. The monarchs, migrating from the Rockies to their winter home in Mexico, just happened to stop for a rest in that little hollow between the hills, and I just happened to open my eyes as they, rejuvenated, took wing. Just as it is hard for me to believe that my husband is not making a terrible mistake by loving me, it is hard for me to believe that some larger force in the universe wrangled that butterfly show just for me.

  But I have always sworn that the thing I believe in more than anything else is my own fallibility. If I’m not to be a hypocrite, then I think I must at least explore the possibility that it is I who am blind, not the psychedelic researchers. Surely, it’s possible that Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception might open to admit a spiritual experience even to the likes of me? If the author of Brave New World believed in the “Dharma-Body of the Buddha,” who is the author of Death Gets a Timeout to sneer?

  There are so many things I believe in that are ephemeral, and I don’t mean atoms and quarks. The most profoundly important thing in my life cannot be quantified or photographed. It lacks all substance, yet I not only believe in it but govern my life by it. The love I feel for my husband and my children is entirely intangible but absolutely “real.” If I can love so deeply and so specifically—this man, not any other—if I can believe that this love is as real as the hands that type on this keyboard, if I can wrap my mind around love, why do I have such a hard time wrapping my mind around the concept of a greater spiritual meaning to life beyond our corporeal existences?

  Is my mind opening? Is the microdose responsible? Or is it merely a result of being exposed to the writing and research of so many philosophers and scientists, to being immersed in this psychedelic world? I don’t know the answer. All I know is that something feels like it’s shifting in me. Who knows? I may end up publishing these notes scribbled in blue crayon on recycled grocery bags, replete with illustrations of mandalas and all-caps exhortations to create the CALM CENTER and BE HERE NOW.

  * * *

  *1  Charles S. Grob et al., “Pilot Study of Psilocybin Treatment for Anxiety in Patients with Advanced-Stage Cancer.”

  *2  David Jay Brown and Louise Reitman, “Psilocybin Studies and the Religious Experience: An Interview with Roland Griffiths, Ph.D.”

  *3  Perhaps if the board had been more open-minded AA might have provided a more effective treatment. Critics of AA estimate its actual success rate at somewhere between 5 and 8 percent. See, e.g., Lance M. Dodes and Zachary Dodes, The Sober Truth.

  Day 19

  Microdose Day

  Physical Sensations: Nauseated and flushed. Diarrhea.

  Mood: Activated. Maybe even a little agitated.

  Conflict: Feeling a bit irritable but managed to tamp it down.

  Sleep: Restless. Woke early but eventually fell back asleep.

  Work: A solid day’s work.

  Pain: None.

  Microdose Day is fun and productive, but sometimes it has an edge. Senses are ever so slightly heightened, which can be pleasurable, but does incline me to a version of my infamous irritability, albeit a mellower one. My husband and I have a test we do to evaluate how irritable I am. I sit in the living room, he stands two rooms away in the kitchen, and he chomps on some almonds. I have a severe nut-noise allergy. If the sound of his chewing makes me feel like running into the kitchen to throttle him, then we know I’m a bit more activated than I should be. Today I did not run, nor did I throttle; I just stayed where I was, making a Darth Vader throttling gesture with my hands.

  My conclusion? Microdosing makes me both irritable and able to tolerate irritability.

  Feeling blinding rage in response to chewing is not (or not merely) a characteristic of being a jerk. It’s a syndrome, though one not yet recognized by the DSM-5. Misophonia, or selective sound sensitivity syndrome, was first identified by two married neuroscientists, Margaret and Pawel Jastreboff. They proved that something happens in the central nervous system of those of us with misophonia when we hear certain types of sounds, especially ones like slurping, sniffing, throat clearing, gum chewing, whistling, and food chewing. We sweat; our muscles tense. We even experience unwanted sexual arousal.

  The last effect is particularly bizarre. I remember once sitting in my law school final exams, being driven mad by a fellow student with a head cold. Even on a good day, I loathed this guy. He was a classic Harvard mansplainer who smirked and rolled his eyes whenever women spoke in class, even the women professors he was paying good money to smirk at. This particular morning, his thin lips were twisted into their usual sneer, but his pinched nose was red and dripping. Every few minutes, he would suck up his mucus with a cacophonous, wet snort. Each time, a wave of rage would course through my body. I felt it in my face, my gut, my arms, my legs. And then, to my horror, the feeling settled into my groin. I was overwhelmed by the urge to flip the hateful jerk over and fuck his disgusting brains out. The feeling was, to say the least, disconcerting.

  When I was young, my misophonia was primarily triggered by my father, though, fortunately, without the gruesome erotic component. I would sit at the dinner table, my fingers in my ears, trying to muffle the sounds of his chewing. That he tolerated this for an instant, let alone the entire period of my adolescence, gives lie to my claims of his occasional fits of bad temper. Or perhaps his bad moods simply didn’t correspond with mealtimes. At any rate, the man deserves a medal, or at least a shout-out, for forbearance.

  This morning, after I found myself bickering with my husband about something pointless, I handed him a handful of almonds and walked out of the kitchen and into the living room. I heard a crunch, the smack of lips; I felt a wave of anger. Rather than do what I might once have done—hang around waiting for an excuse to pick a fight—I packed up my laptop and headed out for a café, where I could safely be enraged by the sounds of strangers chewing.

  Day 20

  Transition Day

  Physical Sensations: None.

  Mood: Fabulous. Truly delightful.

  Conflict: None.

  Sleep: Adequate.

  Work: Chugging along happily.

  Pain: Virtually none.

  Today I’ve been reading accounts of “bad trips.” The description of these awful, painful, grotesque, and yet life-altering trips can be terrifying. In a typical narrative, reproduced in Albert Hofmann’s LSD, My Problem Child, Jürg Kreienbühl, a Swiss painter, writes, “ ‘Hellish’ went through my mind, and all of a sudden horror passed through my limbs.” Over the next fearful hours, his beautiful young mistress’s yellow-and-black shoes turned into malevolent wasps crawling over the floor. Water seemed slimy, viscous, and poisonous. He felt a pervasive sense of dread and fear. Finally, as the effects of the drug wore off, he realized that what he had been experiencing was his personality, boiled down to its essence. And that essence was selfishness. He saw himself clearly, a cy
nical and cold man motivated by greed and self-interest. “I loved only myself,” he told Hofmann. Afterward, Kreienbühl left his mistress and returned to his wife and children, a changed man.

  My fear of a “bad trip” has always prevented me from trying a typical dose of LSD. The prospect of being locked in my own, ugly mind terrifies me. What I’ve learned about the concept of set and setting inclines me to think that I wasn’t wrong to avoid the drug in the past. The settings in which I was offered LSD were not awful, but they weren’t ideal, either. Though I liked college well enough, I was never so happy that a dorm room full of other tripping students would seem like a sufficiently supportive environment. Furthermore, set is the ultimate of self-fulfilling prophecies. A mental state of fear and dread can only lead to an acid trip of fear and dread.

  The day I ate those few mushrooms and swung for hours on a tire swing was pleasant enough, but not so delightful that I wanted to repeat it, or try anything stronger. And then, about five years ago, I had an experience that was so terrifying I’m surprised I’m even doing this experiment at all. Though I hadn’t taken a psychedelic, I definitely had what can be described as a bad trip.

  It happened while my husband was out of town, at a writers’ retreat deep in the New Hampshire woods. This was a few weeks after I had weaned myself off of Ambien, using prescribed medical marijuana to fall asleep instead. I don’t like to smoke, so I bought cannabis capsules from the dispensary. With the help of the marijuana, I’d drop off to sleep readily enough, though not with the effortless bliss of Ambien. That night, however, when I swallowed the capsule, the walls began to breathe.

  I lay in bed watching the walls, my own breathing growing shallow. I broke out in a clammy sweat. A drink of water, I thought, might calm me. I sat up in bed and stretched one foot out to the floor. Stepping on the floor in my bedroom was like stepping onto a sponge. My toes sank into the wood planks with an audible squelch.

  That’s when I called my husband. He answered the phone, but the line crackled, and I missed every other word. He had almost no reception, he said. His screen showed a single indicator bar of signal.

  With what I considered at the time to be admirable calm, I told him that I was about to dial 911. I was just calling to let him know.

  “Please don’t.”

  “I have to. I’m dying.”

  “Sweetie, I promise you, you’re not dying. Do you really want our kids to end up in foster care because you are having a pot-induced delusion?”

  “Here’s the thing,” I tried to explain. “My lungs have forgotten how to breathe. The only reason I haven’t died yet is that I’m consciously inhaling and exhaling.”

  “That isn’t true. Honey, I beg you. Just shut your eyes. You’ll fall asleep and everything will be fine.”

  I wanted to believe him. I knew that it was at least possible that he was right. But then it occurred to me that no one actually knows what goes on in the moments immediately before someone dies. Maybe all the people who have ever overdosed actually died because they forgot to keep breathing!

  My husband gently reminded me that marijuana is among the most benign substances a person can ingest. Hadn’t I told him that government sources calculate a lethal dose of marijuana to be one-third a person’s body weight, consumed all at once? Had I swallowed forty pounds of weed? No? Well, then, I wasn’t going to die.

  That was all well and good, I told him, but now I had a problem even worse than my lungs. I knew for a fact that if I didn’t tell my heart to beat it would stop.

  At this point, his phone cut out for the third or fourth time since we started talking. I had been frustrated when this happened before, but now I was relieved that it took him a little while to find a signal and call back. Forcing my heart to beat was requiring a tremendous amount of attention, and I had little to spare for someone who was failing to appreciate the seriousness of the circumstances. I was performing CPR on myself, with my mind, and I needed to focus.

  He called back. We went around on the subject of voluntary and involuntary bodily functions for another two minutes, or an hour, or a week. (My sense of time was a little whacked.) Then I gasped.

  “Oh my God.”

  “What?”

  “I just died. Right there. For a split second. My heart just stopped.”

  My husband observed that this was not very likely, since I had been talking nonstop for the past five minutes. Even in my addled state, I could tell he was getting bored.

  “Okay,” I said, realizing that I’d taken up far too much of his time and attention. “This is what we’re going to do. I’m going to hang up and try to sleep. But you keep your phone on for the next half-hour. If I die, I’ll call you.”

  “If you die, you’ll call me?”

  “Yes. I promise.”

  “You’ve got a deal.”

  Sweetheart that he is, he stayed up until four in the morning, just in case I tried to call to tell him I was dead.

  I didn’t use marijuana again until the pain of frozen shoulder made me desperate enough to go back to the pot club. And even then, I was careful to buy only weed engineered to be nonintoxicating. I’ve got enough to do without having to sit around keeping my lungs working and my heart beating.

  When I imagine experiencing anything like that again, but with the intensity of LSD, it makes my stomach clench in horror. Not for me, a regular LSD trip. I’m happy with my microdoses.

  Day 21

  Normal Day

  Physical Sensations: None.

  Mood: Fine, until the evening, when I lost my mind.

  Conflict: None.

  Sleep: Fine, once I fell asleep.

  Work: Fine.

  Pain: Moderate.

  I am convinced that adolescents take up exactly the same amount of a parent’s time as do toddlers. With toddlers, you spend those long hours tending to physical needs. You change diapers, spoon food into mouths, set up towers of blocks to be toppled. With adolescents, you spend those long hours fretting. Though my eldest child does an admirable job of caring for herself while she is away at college, I find I am punching the time clock with the same regularity as I did when she was thirteen months old and had just learned to walk. Back then, my day was spent chasing after her as she hurtled through space. Nowadays, I just worry.

  Some research has shown that light at the blue end of the spectrum—the “short-wavelength light” emitted by e-readers, laptops, or smart phones—interferes with circadian rhythms and with the sleep-promotion hormone, melatonin. It can take as much as ninety minutes longer to fall asleep after exposure to blue light. Even a glance at a screen can reduce and delay REM sleep, and make a person less alert the following day. During this protocol, sleep feels so precarious to me that I have tried to avoid watching movies on my laptop, reading on my iPad, even on the dimmest setting, or even peeking at my phone in the hour before bed. But last night, while lying there getting ready to go to sleep, for no reason other than that I’d had a good day and was, I fear, feeling immune to trouble, I picked up my phone and opened Instagram. I was swiping through, liking photo after photo, when I came upon a photograph my eldest had posted. It was blurry, a selfie shot in a dim room. Her head was angled up and to the side, her face turned away so that her throat was in the frame. The shot was blurry, but I was able to conclude that on her neck she now sported a blue-black tattoo that looked like this:

  : /

  My eldest had already acquired a number of tattoos. The first was a quote from William Faulkner etched on her side beneath her arm. She got that one the summer she turned eighteen, when she spent a couple of weeks alone at home. As tattoos go, it’s not bad. You might even argue that it’s a reasonable choice for the child of two writers. A year later, she got a complementary inscription on the opposite side of her rib cage, a quote from a somewhat less illustrious source: a fellow college student’s response to T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Those tattoos are easy enough for a mother to tolerate. They are
generally hidden by clothes, and they are competently executed.

  I cannot say the same for the stick-and-poke tattoos she’s scrawled on her upper arm, along her wrist, on her ankle and thighs. Blue and blurry, they remind me of the marks my prisoner clients would carve into their bodies to pass the endless months and years of incarceration. I know that my daughter is not alone, that she is only one of a million artistic college students sticking and poking her body. But I really don’t like those tattoos.

  I was taught that Jewish law forbids tattoos. By “taught,” I mean I heard it on my parents’ Lenny Bruce record. When she sees his tattoo, Lenny’s aunt, whom he calls the Jewish Seagull, caws, “Hah! Hah! Lenny! Vat you did! You ruined your arm! Vy’d you do that? You can’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery!” The Jewish prohibition against tattoos stems from Leviticus 19:28, which states, “You shall not make gashes in your flesh for the dead nor incise any marks on yourself: I am the Lord.”

  “Any marks.” Seems pretty clear. But of course the Bible also prohibits holding grudges against other Jews (Leviticus 19:18 “Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people”), and Lord knows I hold many a grudge, especially against the children of my people (I still haven’t forgiven Maxine Nudelman* for stealing my boyfriend at Camp Ramah in the summer of ’76). Also forbidden? The eating of shellfish and pork. I’m typing this while stuffing my face with two tacos, one fried shrimp and the other carnitas, so obviously this has nothing to do with law, Jewish or otherwise.