The Weeks Between

The outfit was wrong. You could feel it before you turned the key — a button-down tight in the shoulders, khakis that belonged to someone else's idea of you, shoes too formal for the coder you were trying to become. You got in the car anyway. It was a Tuesday or a Wednesday, the kind of light that makes everything look accurate and nothing feel right. You were driving to an interview for a dev boot camp in an unfamiliar city, for a life still waiting to take shape, and the voice started in before you hit the freeway.

Your shirt is wrong. Your khakis are wrong. You don't look like someone who gets in. You never did.

I cannot recall the exact words. I remember that they were inside the car with me. I remember they continued all the way to the interview. I remember the small, terrible clarity — the first of its kind in my life — that something other than me was speaking inside my head, and it answered to no one I knew how to reach.

They rejected me. I drove home in the same outfit through the same light and walked into the same apartment, and the voice followed me there and stayed.

I was twenty-seven.

This is a story about the phase between the crisis and whatever came next. The stretch where the machinery had stopped working, everything was unresolved, and the vocabulary was still being found. Every contemplative tradition has a name for it. The Christian mystics called it the desert. The Zen masters called it the great doubt. Sufis called it fanā. St. John of the Cross called it the dark night.

In my life, at that moment, it was still unnamed. It had only a voice in the passenger seat and the weight of a shirt that belonged to someone I was trying to become.

Before the voice, there was the life.

I was working second shift at the IRS. The building itself felt like a prison: you entered through a security corridor, badged in past guards, rode the elevator to a floor where the ceilings were low and the light was fluorescent and the hours were locked in a way that a body can feel even if the mind pretends otherwise. I started at three in the afternoon and left at eleven at night. The drive home was dark on both ends of the year.

In the mornings, before the shift, I sold weed.

It was, in retrospect, the only part of my life where I had any agency. A small side business run out of the apartment — buying, pricing, arranging drop-offs, managing a scattered clientele of twenty-somethings who treated it like a grocery run. I was good at it. It required a kind of attention and flexibility that the IRS did not ask of me. It was, unambiguously, the best part of my day. Which tells you something about the days.

In the evenings and on weekends, I dated two women at the same time. One was eighteen, a freshman at a college I was nowhere near attending. One was twenty-eight, a teacher my own age. Both were kind. Both knew about each other eventually, because eventually everyone always knows. Both relationships fell apart around the same time, in a way that felt less like two separate endings and more like a single structural collapse.

I drank. Christmas week that year somebody gave me a bottle of tequila infused with strawberries — the fruit softening inside the glass, the liquor tasting like dessert. I drank a whole cup before I knew I was drinking. I smoked with it. The next morning I woke up to a specific sensation in my eyeballs — a sensation I can name only to people who have felt it themselves: bees were stinging the insides, from a place somewhere behind the bone. I lay very still and tried to figure out if I was going to throw up or cry or neither or both.

Each part of this life, on its own, was survivable. Plenty of twenty-seven-year-olds sell weed, date too much, drink too much, work jobs they hate. That is a demographic.

What escaped me then, and what I am only naming now almost a decade on, was that each piece was quietly solving the problem created by the piece before it. The IRS was unbearable, so the weed was adventure. The adventure made the IRS tolerable. The women were stimulation the job refused to provide. The tequila and the weed metabolized the rest. The whole architecture was load-bearing. Every piece was holding up another piece, and together they were holding up me — a me who was tired of being held, and who lacked any vocabulary for asking for a different kind of structure.

The dangerous life is the one you built to manage itself. Until the management stops working.

The collapse arrived as a slow recognition.

The voice in my head — the one in the car to the interview, the one that had been there for months, maybe years — belonged to someone other than me. That seems obvious now. At the time it was seismic. I had always assumed that whatever was thinking was whoever I was. I had no vocabulary for the distinction between I am thinking and there is thinking happening inside me, and no one in my life was pointing at it. I had to find the distinction alone, the way people find everything important: by accident, because the pain got loud enough.

What the voice said was the usual material. You're not good enough. You don't belong here. You never will. Look at yourself. The content was cliché. The revelation was the it — that there was an it, that it belonged to something else inside me, something running on its own current.

I could not make it stop.

So other things began to stop instead.

I had been a three-times-a-week gym person for years. The gym was my engine. Lifting was how I got my energy, how I emptied the day before sleep, how I felt — however briefly — like someone who was building something. I stopped wanting to go. I told myself I was tired. I was tired. Less gym meant less energy. Less energy meant less desire to go. Every day I skipped took a little more of the thing I went to produce.

In the yoga I would later study, there is a teaching about the river and the dam. Depression, the teaching says, is blocked energy. Energy forced to pool behind something you have spent a great deal of power constructing. The dam takes tremendous effort to hold. Your exhaustion comes from all the power being spent to hold back the river you are trying to live.

I lacked this teaching then. I had only the unmistakable sensation that every attempt to move felt like moving through something thick, and every morning felt like starting further down the same slope I had started down the day before. I called it, in the phrase that survived the decade: the bottom of the abyss.

The existential question arrived underneath all of it. The old, strange question: what is the point? It arrived quietly. Underneath making coffee, underneath driving to work, underneath the shirt and the interview and the voice. What is the point. Why live. What was any of this for.

It was the first unanswerable question I had ever asked. Everything before it had been an answer to something. This one had no answer.

The real answers to that question — the ones that stick — arrive through living, not through thinking. I would learn that later. What I knew then was that the doing of the life had come unhooked from the meaning of the life, and the unhooking was the thing any therapist would miss in an hour-long session, and the voice would keep speaking until something in me changed.

One door closed. Something had to open, or I would keep descending.

I was one step from antidepressants.

That is what modern life offers, in its gentle bureaucratic way, to someone in the state I was in. You go to the doctor, you answer the nine questions, you leave with a prescription, and within a few weeks, in theory, the edge comes off. The voice gets quieter. You eat again. You can get to the gym. The pill is smart. It meets a real need — the need to stay functional, to keep the job, to survive the worse version of the descent. I honor it. Many people I love are only alive because of it.

Then the neighbor knocked on the door.

He had taken them. He was a friendly man, mid-fifties, the kind who notices a younger neighbor's lights on at three in the morning, week after week, and decides to say something. He asked no questions. He said: I took them. I have not been right since. He said it slowly, without drama, the way a man tells you there is ice on the road ahead. Think about it before you do it. He left the choice to me. He left the sentence in the apartment and went home.

I tried three therapists in sequence. Each was capable. Each was kind. The math simply refused to work: a person who met me for an hour a week, who would never see the inside of my apartment at two in the morning, who would never ride along with the voice in the car, could know me only in the thinnest way. I was with myself all the time. They were with me for an hour. No amount of training closes that gap.

So the weeks began.

I want to describe them accurately because they are the part of the story almost no one describes accurately. Everyone tells the before — the crisis — and the after — the transformation. In between is a stretch of days that gets compressed in the retelling into a single line. A month later I was in Peru. That line is a lie of omission. The month has a shape. The month is the actual descent.

What I remember is this. I slept. People expect insomnia in the dark night — I slept, sometimes too much, which was its own kind of avoidance. I kept going to the job at the IRS, because I lacked the nerve and the savings to stop. I told my dad something was wrong, and I had no way to say what. Language was the obstacle. Trust was fine. Whatever I was living inside had not yet found its words. The language comes later. Often years later. Sometimes in essays.

I felt alone — which is different from lonely, and this is the part I find hardest to explain. Loneliness is the ache of a belonging you want and do not have. Aloneness is the simple factual condition of being the only occupant of your interior. For some people the two collapse together. For me they stayed separate. I was crying, when I cried, because the room I was in had no known exit, no chair to sit in, and no window to watch.

I Googled at night. During the day I managed the appearance of a life. At night I typed questions into the bar that I would never have asked out loud. How do I know if my thoughts are me. Why do I feel dead. Is there a way out of my head.

Somewhere in the Googling, mother ayahuasca appeared. I cannot tell you why, only that she did, the way certain names start appearing in a life when a life is ready to meet them. I read everything I could find that night. I refused to romanticize it. I was suspicious of it. For the first time in weeks, I was also curious.

A month later I was in Peru.

What I want you to see is the shape of that month. The texture of being no longer the person who would take the pill and not yet the person who had been to Peru. That hinge. That interval. The small factual days between the decision and the departure, in which you are neither who you were nor who you are about to become, and the only companion you have is the ground you are standing on.

Every tradition has a name for this interval. Holy Saturday. The cloud of unknowing. The desert. Fanā. The dark night. Each name is a different tradition's attempt to point at the same fact: every life that genuinely changes passes through a stretch where the machinery stops working and nothing arrives to replace it — and most of the culture's equipment will offer little help in finding a way through.

It is the place no one can follow you into. Your people love you; the room is simply built for one occupant. The work that happens there is the work you were avoiding by living the life that collapsed, and no one else can do the work for you, however much they may wish to.

You are alone.

That is the beginning.

The truth about environments is worth telling before I tell you about the ceremony.

The environment begins its work the moment you leave. Somewhere over the Gulf — or maybe when the pilot announces in Spanish that we are beginning our descent — the thing in your chest that has been clenched for months starts to loosen by a degree you cannot take credit for. You solved nothing. You simply put the body in a different place.

I spent a day in Lima before the ceremony. I walked. I walked without purpose, down streets I had never seen, past signs in a language I had to lean on. The voice stayed — I want to be honest about that — but it grew quieter. It had been sharpened on years of my apartment, my commute, my gym, my bed. Lima offered nothing fixed to project onto. Just buildings, weather, unfamiliar food, strangers who owed me nothing and gave me nothing back.

Environment, the yogic teaching holds, is greater than the will. You can strain against the circumstances of your life for a lifetime and make marginal progress. Or you can change the room. The room does in weeks what the will takes years to attempt, because the room is what was shaping you all along. You were always being shaped. The only question was by what.

I understood this on a sidewalk in Miraflores, eating something I could not name, at peace in a way I had been a stranger to for months. Before any ceremony. Before any plant medicine. Before any of the things that would later get the credit for my rebirth. The unacknowledged first healer was geography.

The ceremony worked. I say this as a simple fact: something had been compressed inside me for years, and the plant released it in a single night, and the next morning I felt, as clearly as I can report it, like a child. The wonder was back. The curiosity was back. There was spark where there had been ash. I am grateful to her.

I am also — and this is harder to say in a culture that flattens psychedelics into either gift or abuse — skeptical of her, in a specific way.

The metaphor I have used since to explain it is a mountain.

The spiritual life is climbing to a peak. The state at the peak is what the traditions have been pointing at for millennia — stillness, freedom, a self that is both smaller and larger than what you carry up the slope. You can climb the mountain, step by step, through practice. It is slow. It is hard. It takes decades. It may take lifetimes.

Or you can take a helicopter.

Ayahuasca was my helicopter. It landed me at the peak for one night. I saw the view. I understood, in my body, that the view exists. And then it flew me back down and I was at the bottom of the mountain again, with the view still inside me as a memory and a proof, but the mountain still unclimbed.

The seduction of the helicopter is that you can always take it again. If the peak is what you wanted and the helicopter is what got you there, why not keep flying? Why climb?

Because the helicopter is only a glimpse of the peak. The peak is what you become by climbing, and you cannot become it by being flown. Many miss this distinction. They keep flying. The flights get less vivid each time. The bottom, in between, feels further down, because the memory of the view stays alive while the view itself has been lost. The addiction to the helicopter is one of the hidden casualties of the psychedelic renaissance, and nobody writes about it because the brochure has room only for the upside.

A month after Peru, I enrolled in a dev boot camp in Boston. I had been rejected from the first one in the wrong outfit; this time I got in. I moved to a city where I knew no one. I started to learn to code. And when the practice that was actually going to save my life appeared — Kriya Yoga, the lineage that came to me through Yogananda, the teaching that half the Christian mystics and the Zen masters and the desert fathers are all pointing at from their different directions — I chose the climb.

I have never flown the helicopter again.

I hold no moral claim here. I know beautiful people who have taken it many times, and some have been helped, and some are lost. The distinction between the two groups is almost always whether they used the helicopter to remember that the view exists, or to avoid the work of climbing to it. The plant cannot make that distinction for you. Only the climber can.

I came back from Peru the same person, briefly unblocked, with a view of the peak I now had to climb.

Climbing has been the last decade. It looks ordinary. Meditation at five in the morning when I would rather sleep. The breath moving up and down the spine, again, again, again, thousands of times. Affirmations I would have rolled my eyes at in my twenties and that I now say because I have lived enough to know the mind is a tool, and a tool wants to be sharpened.

The one I have been repeating lately goes:

That is what I say.

The voice remains. I want to be honest about that too. It is quieter. It has less authority. Most days the passenger seat is empty. I have stopped letting it drive — and the stopping is the practice.

I think sometimes about whether the descent will come again. I suspect it will, in some unrecognizable form. The life I am building now differs from the life at twenty-seven, and whatever collapses this time will wear a new face. I stay ready, in the only way readiness makes sense: I try, on the best days, to remember that I am one of the actors in a cosmic drama I did not write, that the role is outside my control, and that the things I can attend to — the breath, the posture, the returning of attention to the practice — are the only things I ever had in my keeping, even when I thought I was running the life.

The line I keep coming back to is one I cannot attribute cleanly: the world is stranger than we can imagine. If it is a quote, it is a quote I have half-remembered and half-composed, which is how most lines that help us live arrive. The strangeness is the grace.

The descent at twenty-seven was the best thing that ever happened to me. Saying that to my twenty-seven-year-old self would have sounded like cruelty. I can say it now because I have lived long enough to watch what grew in the empty field the collapse cleared. This is the descent I would spare anyone if I could — and I would refuse to trade what it gave me for any version of the life I was building instead.

If you are in your own version of it right now — the cage, the voice, the tequila night you can barely remember, the bees stinging your eyeballs in a room no one knows you are in — here is what I want to tell you, and it is the only thing I feel honest telling you:

Enjoy the journey. Everyone's is unique. You will take detours. You may break your leg. The pain will be real. Eventually, in some way you cannot foresee from here, you will get back up, and you will go on. You may not finish the journey in this essay. You may not finish it in this life. The timeline is bigger than the mind can hold.

That is the grace.

From the Road

I wrote this piece after reading Paul Kingsnorth's In the Desert of the Heart — one of a small cluster of essays arriving from contemplative writers this season, all of them pointing at the same interval from different angles. The words carried me back to a version of myself I hadn't visited in years, and I realized the thing worth writing was the part of the story I usually skip: the weeks between the decision and the departure, when nothing was working yet. If you are there, I am sending this to you.

— The Pilgrim Age