A Really Good Day

by Ayelet Waldman

  But I’m not my grandmother, clutching my pearls as I sip my saccharin-flavored Sanka and fretting about the bright and shining youth of America’s transformation into a bunch of dirty hippies. I am confident that this drug is safe at a dose far higher than the near-homeopathic one that I’m taking.

  I took a few more deep breaths and finally drifted off to sleep. First thing in the morning, I picked a fight with my husband.

  One of the reasons that I started this experiment was that I had come to feel, even in moments when my mood was fine, a faint sense of peril, as if I were perpetually at risk for a setback that could trigger an outburst. My temper felt like an angry bullmastiff, kept in check by a frayed muzzle. After my brutal night, the mastiff slipped the leash.

  My husband is out of town again. He travels often, as do I, but this year it’s been out of control. In the months since September 1 of last year, we have spent 103 days apart. If things go as planned, before September rolls around again, we will have spent a total of 195 days and nights apart. More than half of the year.

  We have been married for over twenty years, and our marriage in a very real way defines not just my personal life but my career. A decade ago, I wrote an essay in which I credited my happy marriage to the fact that, though I loved my kids, I wasn’t in love with them. If a good mother is one who loves her children more than anyone else in the world, I wrote, then I am a bad mother, because I love my husband more than my children. In some ways, my career has been built not on my dozen books or the many other essays I have published, but on the outsized response to that essay.

  The morning of the essay’s publication in the New York Times Modern Love column, my e-mail inbox was inundated with angry responses. Then I went ahead and made things worse by going on Oprah to defend myself against the mob of angry mommies. In the decade since, I have never given an interview, a reading, or a lecture in which that essay hasn’t been brought up at least once. To be fair, that’s mostly my own fault. A few years after I published the essay, I wrote an entire book, Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace, about the destructive impulse of mothers to castigate each other and ourselves.

  Because I have become so thoroughly identified with the topics of motherhood and marriage, the prospect of experiencing a rough patch in my marriage terrifies me. Though I know all marriages experience ups and downs, when we are in a low period I panic, imagining the sanctimommies of the Internet gleefully reveling in my unhappiness. (Okay, yes, I’m probably being paranoid, but I bet at least a few people would gloat.)

  This patch has been rough. Really rough. I cannot decide whether the continued separations are part of the problem or if they are what has kept us from permanently fracturing. When apart, we fight only rarely. Mostly, we stay in close touch, texting and talking, consulting on every issue, and sending gooey emojis. Hearts. Smiley faces with hearts for eyes. But lately, when we are together, we bicker. Worse than that, we fight. We yell, we cry, we collapse and promise it’ll never happen again. And then it does, over and over.

  I’ve been desperate for my husband to come home to help me take stock of my protocol. More than anyone, he can evaluate my state of mind and judge if there’s been a noticeable change. I am also eager to talk to him about the mild perceptual differences I’d noticed in the hour or so after I first took the microdose, the way my senses seemed slightly enhanced, like I’d been bitten by a radioactive no-see-um. Unlike me, my husband has experience with typical doses of LSD. I knew he would be able to give me insight on that aspect of the experience. Also I missed him.

  The fact that I have been waiting so impatiently for him to come home makes the argument we had on the telephone, usually our happy place, even more painful. After I woke up wretched from my sleepless night, I called him. I shouldn’t have, because from the very beginning I was gunning for a fight. Nearly as soon as he picked up the phone, I began complaining about our shared workspace.

  A couple of months ago, my husband had an idea. The inspiration for this idea is one of the things we fought about, but, because I have vowed to stop imputing bad motives to the people I love, I will present his side of the argument as fact, without picking apart ulterior motives or launching into a digression about whether or not Freud was right about the role of the unconscious in directing behavior.

  Not long ago, my husband surprised me with a couch. He placed it in a corner of the studio we share (really his studio, which he allows me to squat in), and moved his own workspace into the middle of the room. He says he bought the couch because I hadn’t been using the studio and he was trying to lure me back. He expected me to recline on the couch, laptop in my lap, and immerse myself with a newfound focus. But the couch is too narrow, the arms are too hard; I can’t get comfortable on it. Moreover, with his workspace now in the middle of the room, I feel crowded. Crowded out.

  This morning, when I called him, I suddenly and for no particular reason launched into a familiar litany of complaints. There’s so much I don’t like about his studio! I complained about the couch and the light and about how I feel crowded and pushed out. It was neither the first, the tenth, nor the one hundredth time he’s heard me bitching about this. Is it any wonder he got frustrated with me?

  “How many times do we have to have this fight?” he asked. “You should just get an office of your own.”

  That really infuriated me. Little postage-stamp offices rent for a thousand dollars a month in the lunatic Bay Area real estate market.

  “So we’ll spend a thousand dollars a month,” he said. “It’s worth it.”

  “We don’t have an extra thousand dollars a month!” I yelled.

  When I am angry, I do stupid things. I hang up the phone (oh, how much more satisfying that used to be when it could be done with a furious bang!). I Google phrases like “The effects of divorce on children.” I check real-estate listings for one-bedroom apartments within walking distance of our house that we could trade off living in while the other is on duty as that week’s custodial parent. After I engaged in these customary behaviors, I began, also as is typical, to berate myself. The whole fight was my fault. It’s always my fault when we fight, because my husband is easygoing and cheerful, and I am a bitch. If it weren’t for me, we’d never fight. I’m an awful wife, a terrible partner. How can he stand me when I can’t stand me?

  The problem with self-blame is that it launches a vicious cycle. It makes me despondent, and when I am despondent I lash out at my husband. Which makes me feel worse. Which makes me lash out. Which makes me feel worse. And so on and so forth, with the sharp threads of my shame spiral screwing a hole right through our relationship.

  The cognitive behavioral therapist I have lately been seeing tells me that conflict is a dynamic. Couples react to one another in an infinite, closed loop, and thus one person is no more culpable than another. She insists that my self-reproach is a barrier to happiness, both my own and ours as a couple. Even though I trust her insight, I cannot seem to change my behavior or my thought patterns. Just articulating the thought that blaming myself is bad for my relationship is really nothing more than another round of self-reproach. If my self-flagellation is the source of our conflict, isn’t it necessarily true that I am the problem lurking at the heart of my family, like a flaw in the center of a diamond?

  * * *

  *1  As if I have the faintest idea what the difference between a normal and an abnormal pulse is.

  *2  The morning-after pill for medieval women who preferred a gangrenous, raving demise to a baby. There are days when I can totally empathize.

  *3  Michael W. Shannon et al., Haddad and Winchester’s Clinical Management of Poisoning and Drug Overdose.

  *4  Rick J. Strassman, “Adverse Reactions to Psychedelic Drugs. A Review of the Literature.”

  *5  Peter S. Hendricks et al., “Classic Psychedelic Use Is Associated with Reduced Psychological Distress and Suicidality in the United States Adult Population
.”

  Day 4

  Microdose Day

  Physical Sensations: Energized and activated.

  Mood: Terrific.

  Conflict: None.

  Sleep: Better, though I woke early.

  Work: Found myself so effortlessly in the flow I didn’t even notice time passing.

  Pain: Significantly less than in days past.

  I was so very glad to wake up this morning. First of all, I slept better than I have over the last couple of days, perhaps because by last night the LSD was completely out of my system. Most important, however, today is once again Day 1 of the protocol cycle: Microdose Day! I don’t know if it was my eagerness or the LSD that made me so cheerful, but, one way or another, today was an absolute delight. A series of annoyances did nothing more than make me shrug. My kids dawdled over breakfast and were late to school. I missed the deadline for booking a flight, and ended up having to pay a higher fare. Then the dog knocked my arm while I was sipping from my teacup, causing me to splash Earl Grey all over the pages of the book I was reading. She looked at me guiltily, waiting, I expect, for me to scold her. Instead, I scratched her ear.

  “It’s all right, Mabel,” I said. “Shit happens.”

  Shit happens? When have I ever uttered those words in a tone other than ironic?

  I decided to call my mother and spread some of my good cheer around. Poor Mom. She’s been going through her own hell. She lost four close friends this year, and had a knee replacement that went horribly awry, made worse by an incompetent wound specialist whose unnecessary and traumatic surgery resulted in her being infected with MRSA. Add this to an unsatisfying marriage, and it’s a wonder she can get up in the morning.

  The specter of my mother’s unhappiness, even when uncomplicated by health issues or grief, haunts me. I wonder how much my search for contentment is motivated by fear of her example? I certainly have no fear that my marriage will be as painful as hers has been. My husband is loyal, loving, and expressive. My husband and I fight, but not with the same fervor as my parents, or anywhere near as frequently, even during this last, terrible year.

  My mother’s work, too, has been a series of compromises and intermittent disappointments, from the moment my father encouraged her to drop out of graduate school and marry him. The tragedy of her life is that she abandoned a field that gave her joy. My mother is so obsessed with art and architecture that visiting Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater is for her a pilgrimage as spiritually uplifting as the Hajj. My mother has always said that her decision to leave school was a function of the times. In 1963, at age twenty-three, she felt like an old maid, she cared for my father, and she believed that her only choice was to give up her career aspirations and become a wife and mother. In recent years, she has wondered to me whether there was more to it than that. My father’s proposal, delivered as a joke in a telegram—“I’m pregnant. Come marry me”—came at a moment of vulnerability. Newly enrolled in school, and living with her brother and his wife, who had only recently married, she was feeling like a third wheel, but too nervous to strike out on her own. Had that telegram arrived only a few months later, once she was better established, she doubts she would have married my father.

  When I was in high school, my mother made the decision to go back to graduate school, but not in art history. She is sensible, fiscally responsible. She chose a professional degree that was more likely to lead to reliable employment. Unfortunately, though she was a skillful hospital administrator and excelled at her job, I know she found it less satisfying than architecture, her first academic and professional love.

  I am in many ways like my mother. Like her, I am competent and reliable. Like her, I’m a little bossy.* Like her, I do my best to help, even when that requires sticking my nose someplace it doesn’t belong.

  There’s a story my husband tells about me, how, late one night in Los Angeles, we were driving up a nearly deserted street when we saw a car pulled half on the sidewalk, its doors gaping open. A man and a woman were struggling beside the car. I screamed at my husband to pull over. Before he had even rolled to a stop, I was out of our car and reaching out a hand to the woman.

  “Do you need help?” I asked her.

  “Yes!” she said.

  Her husband shouted, clawed at her, but I grasped her hand in mine and yanked her free. Then I pushed her into our car and jumped in behind her. I was eight months pregnant.

  That is definitely something my mother would have done. I’m proud of helping that woman. I’m proud that, like my mother, I have tried to integrate public service into my career and my life. And yet the characteristics I share with my mother, even the most positive ones, have always worried me. Competent, reliable, and helpful far too easily topple into pushy and critical (as my children would attest). In thinking about my relationship with my mother, I realize that that anxiety has colored—even damaged—my relationship with her. My own insecurity and self-loathing have somehow become all knotted up with my feelings toward her. Fearing our similarities has made me occasionally ungenerous with her, overbearing when I should be compassionate, distant when I should be engaged. I’m always willing, even eager, to help and advise her, but before today I rarely just listened to her, without judgment.

  The ease with which I was able today to express compassion and concern without trying to push a solution on her is surprising. I wonder, is it possible that the LSD is making me a better listener?

  * * *

  *  Okay, more than a little. A lot bossy.

  Day 5

  Transition Day

  Physical Sensations: None.

  Mood: Started out activated, but calmed down.

  Conflict: At first a little prickly, but nipped it in the bud.

  Sleep: Woke early but felt well rested.

  Work: Worked well. Not in the flow, but not struggling, either.

  Pain: Almost none!

  Today, though I woke up feeling a little irritable, I managed to assert control before losing my temper with the kids or flaming anyone on the Internet. Impulse control? Me? Can this really be happening?

  My persistent failure to control my impulses is one of the main reasons I keep trying different therapies. I want to increase the time between psychological trigger and reaction. I need only as long as it takes to take a single breath, enough of a hesitation to activate my superego and soothe the immediate agony of id. A moment to stop and ponder the question: what is the sensible reaction to this provocation, not the most pleasurable?

  Having grown up in a family of yellers, I am far too prone to top-volume reactions to provocation. My mother yelled at me; I yell at my kids. I’ve always thought it was merely a conditioned response, but I have lately come to realize that I do it because I enjoy it. The yell, the angry e-mail, the snarky tweet, the sarcastic comment, all provide a momentary release of tension that feels really good. It is like the joy of scratching an itch until it bleeds. The pain is the point. It erases the irritation. For a moment. But then the itch returns, worse than before, and soon you’re wearing long pants in August because you’ve got scabby legs.

  On the first day of this experiment, when I felt I was noticing the world around me in more detail, I had an idea that the microdose of LSD might be slowing me down in the best possible way. I hoped that, as it heightened my ability to pay attention to my surroundings, it might also help me become capable of resisting the impulse to act. Isn’t that exactly what mindfulness promises? By paying attention, we will increase our self-control. We will find ourselves able to stop and think.

  This morning, when I managed, despite feeling irritable, not to blow up at anyone, I began to believe that, though it’s obviously too early to tell, it’s at least possible that my hopes will be realized. The question, or at least one of them, is how.

  I turned to a psychopharmacologist to find out what is going on in my brain when I consume the microdose. He told me that LSD is an agonist, a stimulator, of the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor. Antidepressants also act
on 5-HT receptors, including 5-HT2A, but they work by inhibiting the reuptake of serotonin, causing it to remain in synapses longer. Because serotonin is one of the neurotransmitters thought to be most closely linked with feelings of well-being and happiness, the theory behind SSRIs is that having serotonin sit around longer, with your synapses marinating in it, makes you feel better. By contrast, when a psychedelic drug stimulates 5-HT2A receptors, that leads to the stimulation of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which my psychopharmacologist friend described as “like Miracle-Gro for your brain. It stimulates growth, connections, and activity.” A psychiatric researcher described the neurological effects of LSD to me this way: “By activating the 5-HT2A receptor, you increase the transmission of glutamate.” Glutamate is the neurotransmitter most responsible for brain functions like cognition, learning, and memory. Though they’re talking about two different substances in the brain, the two doctors are essentially saying the same thing. BDNF and glutamate are interrelated. Psychedelics enhance neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to grow and change, by increasing the level of BDNF in the brain and by increasing glutamate activity.

  Can this enhanced neuroplasticity, this stimulated growth and connectivity, be what’s causing me to be less impulsive? Rather than slowing me down, can it be making me more reflective and thus better able to control my anger? Can that be what’s making me feel better? Two Swiss researchers at the Neuropsychopharmacology and Brain Imaging Research Unit at the University Hospital of Psychiatry in Zürich published a paper in 2010 that suggests that this is possible. In “The Neurobiology of Psychedelic Drugs: Implications for the Treatment of Mood Disorders,” Franz X. Vollenweider and Michael Kometer reviewed forty years of LSD, psilocybin, and ketamine research in the context of “modern concepts of the neurobiology of psychiatric disorders.” They concluded that psychedelics may well be useful in treating mood disorders, depression, OCD, and anxiety. A British feasibility study published in the Lancet in the spring of 2016 found that psilocybin not only reduced depressive symptoms but also anxiety and anhedonia.*1