Remembering the Hardest Moments
How writing, ketamine assisted psychotherapy, and time have enabled me to survive
I’ve always been best able to process and learn best when my thoughts are able to come out via pen and paper or fingers on the keyboard. I’ve written small bits about currently undergoing IV Ketamine infusions to manage my previously medication resistant Depression. Along with that often comes bits and pieces of memories or experiences - many I never would’ve remembered on my own - with the purpose of identifying and understanding the neural pathways that were created in my brain as a child, and as I’ve grown, how those foundations need to adapt in order for me to find my way out of the darkness and establish a real path in the light - one that allows me to truly live again, to be present, to be well.
And this, this process, it’s led me back to writing, in a way that I haven’t truly written in years. Something about that feels full circle. I started writing when there wasn’t enough space for me to speak, or when there wasn’t anyone willing to listen, and now that I’m finally in a place where that space is being created, I write with the hope of bridging the past and the present into the future.
I’ve written regularly since I was 14 years old.
What started in notebooks secured in school lockers or stored at friends houses transitioned to password protected word documents on my computer, and eventually I found the courage to share some of that writing with the world.
I remember the first time I heard this quote by Iyania Vanzant:
When you stand and share your story in an empowering way,
your story will heal you and your story will heal somebody else.
I finally felt like I knew what the purpose was of having endured so much - that maybe someone else would feel less alone if they came across parts of my story.
Now, if you’ve known me for a while, or have traveled around the various corners of the internet in which I’ve published pieces over the last twenty years, than you know that I’ve written mostly about moments and feelings. The good ones. The bad ones. The hard ones. The beautiful ones. The ones that shape us and the ones that change us.
Recently I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the things that have happened to me, to the people I love, and to the world I live in. Every single one of those incidents, many heartbreakingly traumatic, have compounded, changing me into an entirely different person than I once was. It’s not just that I’ve grown up in the last two decades - it’s that specific moments shifted my ability to ever see myself or the world the same again.
Now, there’s still so much to remember, to think through, to process, and to choose to integrate, but I’ve noticed that each of those moments, those wins and especially those losses, they’ve seared seasons of pain onto my brain. They’ve imprinted molecular memories inside of my body - some tiny and others much larger in size.
& Writing?
Writing has been the only way I’ve figured out how to both process and carry the hardest moments beside the best ones.
It would be easy for me to list the top five days of my life, the days that were filled with the most joy and happiness - and maybe I will write on those one day. But tonight I need to write about the other list. The five worst days of my life.
I can also, unfortunately, without needing to think, list these off in succession, with each having been “the worst” until the next one came along.
Jordan dying due to a freak accident in 2016
Being a victim of medical malpractice in 2017
Delivering Noah and Victoria at home alone and holding Noah as his heart stopped beating in 2021
Manda’s battle with and ultimately devastating death due to stage 4 metastatic breast cancer in 2023
Rowan’s surprise ectopic pregnancy along with the rupture of my fallopian tube and extensive internal bleeding in 2024
Now I look at this list and I can’t tell you exactly which one hurt the worst, or has hurt the longest, or has changed me the most. The truth is - there have been seasons over the last eight years during which some of these moments have suffocated me, have taken over me, have destroyed me, and have required that I put myself back together in order to keep functioning one day at a time. There’s been therapy and medication, theres been books and poems and tv shows on repeat.
There’s been my husband, my rock, who has spent months sleeping on the couch with me when I was too traumatized to get into bed. The same husband who has held me as my body has shaken from sobbing so hard, day in and day out, until eventually I ran out of tears to cry. My husband has been the person who has heard every story, listened to every memory and every desperate question, and the person who for much of this time believed fiercer and harder than anyone else that I could and would survive, despite the unfathomable amount of pain I’ve been forced to endure.
This past weekend, as I sat in the deepest heartache I’ve known in quite some time reflecting on what should’ve been Rowan’s due date, my body released somatic experience memories which not only were terribly uncomfortable, but they were also incredibly devastating as I was instantly transported back to the moment I knew something was wrong inside my body. My body remembers exactly what it felt like to discover the pregnancy and to lose it, and nearly dying in the process.
In the thick ache of despair, I texted someone I trust deeply, and I said “When will there be a break? Is it normal to feel things this deeply? My heart can’t handle any more heavy and hard.”
And her reply was so poignant and true that I’ve continued to turn it over in my mind since reading it the first time…
It’s terrible to have to feel this.
It’s dangerous not to.
As someone who is deep into utilizing ketamine treatments to manage medication resistant depression, there is both a fragility and an empowerment in identifying both the things that have destroyed me and the things that have built me back up, as well as which have been passive and which have been active choices. And language - finding the right language at the right time has always been critical to me as a writer and an editor, regardless of the topic or the platform. These words that were said to me came with such conviction, such meaning, that I knew I couldn’t just file them away. I had to hold them. I had to sit with them. With the acknowledgement that what was happening in real time was both awful and necessary - somehow giving me permission or validation or credit or something to hold onto in the process.
It’s terrible to have to feel this.
Theres no other truer words. If there was any way to go back and start again, to somehow avoid Rowan’s death, had Rowan implanted just two inches further down, had I known there was a remote possibility of getting pregnant on my own, had any number of things been a sliver of different - my heart would’t be here in a thousand pieces, knowing that my dream of a big family likely died with Rowan, and that my body in some ways died with him too; if there was any way for a different outcome - I’d do almost anything in a heartbeat.
But I can’t. That’s not real life.
This, here, what I’m writing tonight, this is my hardest moments coming back to try and haunt me. Not just mentally, but emotionally and physically too.
The real punch, the real key, the real importance to the response above is what just about did me in…
It’s dangerous not to {feel this}
As someone who has spent most of her life censoring what has come out of her mouth at any given time, in any given environment, with any given person, a lot of what I’ve shared aloud has been partial, succinct, straightforward and many times devoid of emotion, I’ve somewhat successfully carried most of these big feelings on my own. From time to time there have been people who’ve felt right or who’ve fought hard enough for me to be more open, more honest, but it’s a real challenge. Nobody want’s to hear or sit in the hardest moments.
But not feeling it, ignoring it, swallowing it down, numbing it, running away from it - I reached a point where those methods were making me physically sick.
With therapeutic Ketamine providing a safe (& monitored) way for me to to recall, identify and reprocess many of the things I’ve experienced and buried in time, and with a psychiatrist and a therapist and other resources in place, I have to believe that the net is strong enough, that the foundation I’ve built is strong enough that feeling these gut wrenching feelings is feasible - awful, terrible, horrible, and heartbreaking - but feasible.
They hurt like hell, but feeling them won’t kill me.
The lesson here? Not feeling them - is no longer an option.
And so, with a deep breath, I sit here and I remind myself the things that I’ve learned in this season are critical on my pathway to healing - feeling my feelings is in fact terrible, however, feeling them means not storing them. It means theres a possibility of releasing them, somehow, in some way… It mean that there could be a future in which a different connection exists between my brain and my heart, between my thoughts and these feelings, between clutching the pain and suffering for dear life versus establishing a new type of bond all together.
Those things - they’re not overnight things. They’re things that hopefully will come with time, so much time, oh, and work, so much work. But I signed up for this time, and this work. I also knew that at one point, this felt like the only choice I had left. So I’m going to keep taking one tiny step at a time, relying heavily for now on my resources but believing that one day, maybe I’ll be able to do it on my own.
Sidebar:
& Realizing that referencing “one day” means that I’m thinking about the future, a future that I plan to be a part of, and tonight that in it of itself feels like a gigantic win.