A Really Good Day

Ayelet Waldman has long been “held hostage by the vagaries of mood.” She's combatted her mercurial nature with a “shit-ton of drugs” that goes on for half a page and reads like the advance battalion of some YA dystopian sci-fi novel with names like Celexa, Lexapro, Prozac, Zoloft, Cymbalta, Effexor, and more. All legal but not altogether effective.

Desperate to alleviate not only her own suffering but the suffering of the people she loves that have had to deal with her fractured moods she embarks on a 30 day microdosing trial with 10 micrograms of LSD on every third day.

Understand that Ayelet is the type of person I can't handle at close quarters. She's the oversharing dinner guest prone to tangents and manic bouts of neurosis. At 52 she's the “totally basic” woman in line ahead of you at Starbucks ordering a skinny vanilla latte that seems a misspelled name away from demanding to speak with the manager.

In other words she's fallible and entirely human. She's not hiding behind a pose or putting herself at a scientific journalist's remove. She'll drop her credentials as a federal public defender, a consultant for the Drug Policy Alliance, and a law school professor but also cop to her affluent white privilege that lets her partake, and write about, a Schedule 1 drug.

And while we'll get books from Michael Pollan talking about the efficacy of psychedelics to treat depression, addiction and end of life anxiety, or breathless articles about how techbros are hacking their productivity with microdosing I like Waldman's approach.

Microdosing helped with her chronic shoulder pain, increased her productivity and leveled out her moods to the point her kids even comment on her new chill. She's the soccer mom, the PTA chair, the Facebook user clipping articles on her timeline - in other words the perfect vector to begin the process of normalizing these long maligned drugs.

Well, that was awkward.

I get it: to write about deeply personal issues, you have to TMI. Waldman does—and how!—what made me cringe is that she also TMIs about her relationships with her parents, husband, children. Did they sign up for this public airing? I feel uncomfortable for them all. I'm also uncomfortable with her depiction of microdosing: Waldman's experience was well into the positive range, possibly because she went into the experiment with intention; this may cause high expectations, and possibly disappointment, in some readers.

Even so, and even though there was little material new to me, I enjoyed it. Waldman's candidness won me over. Her frank contempt for the U.S.'s moronic War On Some Drugs, her (much abbreviated) history of the rise and fall of psychedelic research, even, yes, her copious neuroses too, all were thoughtfully written. And, finally, unpleasant as she comes off, I recognize myself in her. I've been mean and spiteful. I've despised myself. I've sought and, to a surprising degree, found new direction from psychedelics, both micro and megadose. I just don't have her talent or courage.

I think I'm going to ponder this book for a while. Recommended, even if you're already aware of the goings-on in this area.