Prologue

They say time heals all wounds. That’s a load of shit.   

A lot of the voices speaking out about PTSD and suicide come from special operations. And they should. I’m grateful for them, both for their service, and for being willing to share both their struggles and their successes regarding mental health. But they don’t look like me. Their experiences are obviously very different. My exposure to war was minimal by comparison, and that realization is something that contributed to my inability to get past it. I told myself I didn’t have the right to feel the way I did. Like there was some invisible threshold I hadn’t earned the right to cross. 

I was an operating room nurse, deployed with the Navy to Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2016. For ten years, I dealt with PTSD—short temper, anxiety, depression, anger, hypervigilance. Wrecked sleep. Nightmares and recurring dreams. Until recently, I was still seeing patients’ faces in my dreams.

I couldn’t stand waiting in lines, especially base gate traffic. I felt like a target. I couldn’t tolerate crowds or anyone approaching in my periphery. If anyone was coming at me from an angle, from my periphery, I was thinking about fighting them. When I wasn’t angry, I was depressed. I lost the ability to feel joy. I could recognize a beautiful sunset, enjoy a great meal, laugh with friends—but it was like there was a veil over everything. I knew I should feel something. I just… didn’t. It wasn’t real.

It bled into my relationships. Mostly my temper, but also the distance. I kept everyone at arm’s length.

I tried to fix it. Fitness. Time in nature. Veteran communities. All good things. They helped a lot. Kept me going. I tried talk therapy on and off. It wasn’t enough. I was throwing on Band-Aids.

Ten years. A decade. Things were not improving. In fact, they were getting worse. I was stuck in emotional loops: anger, depression, anxiety, indecision. Not trusting my gut. Not trusting people. Letting no one in. I kept adding things that helped, but I wasn’t removing the root problem.

As I got closer to retirement, I made a decision. I wasn’t bringing this with me into the next phase of my life. I was going to fix it. For real this time.

I booked my ayahuasca retreat a few days after I dropped my retirement papers. I was still afraid to talk about it, even then. I remember being afraid to even google it. I learned about the ayahuasca center from a friend, and we talked about it like it was some kind of covert operation. In fact, many people I talked to at the plant medicine center had either lied to their family and friends about where they were going, or they told the truth and had people ask them why they were messing with “voodoo.”

I had tried therapy on and off for several years. I had some luck with ketamine-assisted therapy. I was unable to talk about Afghanistan, or anything really, until after ketamine therapy. I would try to talk about it, but I physically couldn’t get the words to come out. It was so strange, like the words were caught in the back of my throat. Ketamine helped with that. But, even though ketamine itself is FDA approved, it is approved for pain control and anesthetic purposes, so using it to treat PTSD or depression is considered “off-label.” It is not covered by insurance. It is not available everywhere. This inconsistency in availability led me to stop the treatments. This experience, along with stories of other veterans’ experiences with psychedelics, encouraged me to keep trying.

Exactly how psychedelics help with PTSD and other mental health disorders is not fully understood. Clinical trials are difficult for many reasons, partially due to their classification as Schedule I substances by the Drug Enforcement Administration (as of this writing). It appears that psychedelics increase neuroplasticity, which aids in processing memories.

At the plant medicine center, they explained it simply: Ayahuasca is like a machete. It cuts a new path in your mind. But the old path is still there. You have to choose the new path through practice.

I’m not an expert. I’m not a therapist, or a mental health nurse. This is not advice. These are just my experiences. I’m sharing them because other people shared theirs first, and that helped me. And, writing this helped me make sense of the mad rush of insights that followed ayahuasca.