A Really Good Day(18)

In my mind Shimon was always old, though he can’t have been more than forty-two or -three the first time I sat on his lap. On that last visit, in 2014, he was ancient, but his eyes still sparkled with pleasure when I walked in his front door. He cracked walnuts for me with his trembling yet still-strong hand, placing the nut meat in my palm just like he did when I was seven years old. I am a middle-aged woman, and I had not seen Shimon for more than twenty years. As I sat there eating the nuts he cracked for me, I felt beloved.

How many other Shimons have there been over the years, older men whose company and attention I have eagerly sought, who listened when I set my (little) chair down in front of them? My high school English teacher Mr. Bennett. Derrick Bell, my constitutional law professor. John Cillag, a Hungarian gentleman with whom I struck up a conversation in a Budapest museum while researching my novel Love and Treasure; afterward, we corresponded by e-mail, met for coffee, and he was kind enough to read drafts of the book and offer helpful suggestions. A wise and gentle educator named Tom Little, head of Park Day School in Oakland for thirty-eight years before his untimely death in 2014.

And Dr. James Fadiman.

After he sent me the memo outlining his protocol, I asked Dr. Fadiman if he’d be willing to talk to me, not really expecting him to agree. I figured he was inundated with e-mails from people like me, people seeking a solution to some problem or a resolution of some pain. But he sent me his telephone number, and one evening, after I’d settled the kids for the night, I called him.

Fadiman’s voice is deep and avuncular, and when he is smiling you can hear it. We ended up talking for a long time, and not just about the intricacies of microdosing. We talked about my moods and the troubles in my marriage. There was something in Fadiman’s voice and manner that made me feel I could confide in him, ask him for advice, seek and possibly earn his approval.

A couple of weeks later, at Fadiman’s invitation, I drove down to Palo Alto to attend a lecture he gave on the topic of psychedelic research and mental health. After the talk, I went up to the stage to say hello. I was a little tentative, not wanting to intrude or impose. I didn’t know if he would be as eager to meet me as I was to meet him.

Fadiman is a youthful seventy-six, hair still mostly brown, with sleepy eyes and a trim brown beard, only lightly threaded with silver. The moment I told him my name, his face lit up with the smile I had heard over the phone, and he gave me a warm, fatherly hug.

During that long first phone call of ours, in the course of which I had confided more to Fadiman than I’ve confided to my father in my whole life, he asked me why I thought I was drawn to microdosing, what I thought I was looking for. My answer at the time was “the ability to manage my moods and enjoy my life,” but now it seems to me that maybe a more accurate answer might have been: “This.”

If so, then it’s probably the sad truth that nothing, not even Dr. Hofmann’s magical “problem child,” can give me what I’m looking for. I’ll never have the father I’ve hoped for, wished for, needed all my life. But today, for whatever reason—thanks maybe to Albert Hofmann, or Jim Fadiman—when I called my father and settled in for the usual lecture, I didn’t get impatient. I didn’t get annoyed. I hung in there through the intricacies of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (or maybe it was the Great Purge), thinking, Look, this is the father you got, and he’s the only father you have. Might as well let the man talk.





Day 7


Microdose Day

Physical Sensations: Activated.

Mood: Giddy.

Conflict: None.

Sleep: Slept well.

Work: Amazing.

Pain: Didn’t notice any.





I’m feeling good today, perhaps a little too good. I am happy and cheerful, but my words are tumbling out faster than I can control. This feels a little like hypomania, that energetic state of mind that can be productive and pleasurable, but can also lead to risky, impulsive behavior. Though I’m not experiencing any delightful yet troubling euphoria, I am certainly disinhibited. This afternoon, I found myself telling the physical therapist who was working on my shoulder all about my experiment. I have, since I began taking the microdose, been so circumspect, confiding in only one or two very close friends. Yet here I was, gushing to a virtual stranger about microdosing and how it was making me so productive and happy. Ironically, one of the things about which I waxed poetic was how much less impulsive I’ve been. I have been feeling a certain unfamiliar control, I told her. I’m still getting triggered by the kids, the dog, the husband, the Internet, but for the last couple of days I have felt as though there is a little room around these triggers, space for me to decide how to react, instead of just reacting. But of course there I was, lying on a table, supposed to be breathing deeply and silently, and instead babbling on like a psychedelic twit.

My work, however, went beautifully.

Albert Hofmann, discussing his first planned LSD experience, wrote, “There was a change in the experience of life, of time. But it was the most frustrating thing. I was already deep in the LSD trance, in LSD inebriation, and one of its characteristics, just on this bicycle trip, was of not coming from any place or going any place. There was absolutely no feeling of time.”

I’m taking a tiny fraction of what Hofmann did, and I haven’t tried to ride my bike, but I can say with some authority that a change in the experience of time isn’t exclusive to bike riding while on a massive dose of LSD. Today, as on the two prior Microdose Days, I became so immersed in my work that I didn’t notice time passing. Getting lost in work, what’s known as “flow,” is one of the most exciting things about the process of creating. Conceived by the Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, flow is the state of “intense emotional involvement” and timelessness that comes from immersive and challenging activities. Flow can happen when you are creating art or computer code or when you are scaling a mountain. It’s a gift that arrives rarely, when you are most focused and present.