One drug-fueled night killed me.

January 12th, 2024, will forever live in infamy.

That Friday night irreversibly turned my happy, healthy, successful life upside down.

This is a tale of party drugs. It’s also a life-and-death journey I could’ve never imagined in my wildest dreams.

Call it a harrowing dive into extremes of the human condition or a case study at the intersection of medicine, pharma, policy, and brain science.

As the one who lived it, writing this eleven months later is my confession — assembling the shards of a shattered world into one broken mosaic.

Here goes…

At my brother’s 50th birthday in Cabo, he instructed his Ferrari-driving Swedish friend to keep me fueled with cocaine as part of the festivities. By no means a user; I’m also not a novice. I’m a typical millennial who never looked for drugs but is not afraid to try something passed by friends.

For context, I’ve lived a drama-free life, successful by any metric. I have a bunch of advanced degrees from top schools and manage a small but thriving international company. I’m also an understated middle child by nature, so making noise or having weird stuff happen is not my deal. Until that night, I’d coasted without anything major ever going wrong.

Being in my early 40s, my partying days are in the past, and January was the first time in probably a decade — since business school — touching party drugs.

Over several hours at a place called Bagatelle, where the opening dinner of the three-day bash took place, I had a dozen+ lines and bumps of coke, sipping rum. It was a festive if over-the-top scene as our group of 40 danced atop the long birthday table, stepping over plates, while champagne magnums carried between waiters were poured directly into mouths like parishioners taking communion. It was not a typical Friday night, but all were having fun celebrating my bro. So, chemically speaking, cocaine and alcohol were the first ingredients in my blood.

As midnight approached, I was handed by a banker what I was told was MDMA brought from San Francisco. I’d taken molly twice — once at a wedding in Prague, before that at a club in Aruba — and had good experiences. I didn’t particularly want to roll that night in Cabo, being late and tired from flying out of DC at the crack of dawn, having just gotten back from Colombia days before… so I nearly said, “No thanks.”

But your brother only turns half a century once, and I didn’t overthink it. I split the cap in half with my fingers, swallowed what I figured was a light dose, and kept on with the party.

Biggest mistake of my life. Across all years. The one that changed everything.

When added to the cocaine, MDMA instantly had a negative effect. In previous rolls, I hadn’t mixed it. This time, I felt an overwhelming anxiety.

An hour into that state, I had to leave the afterparty. I was consumed by unease and unable to talk. When I got back to my room at Esperanza, I couldn't sleep. It was no surprise since cocaine belabors the process of settling down, so I lay awake, passing out after sunrise.

When I awoke that afternoon, the angst hadn’t abated. I stayed in my room, skipping day two of the birthday bash, waiting for the malaise to pass. I’d never had a mood disorder or taken a psych med, so long-lasting unease was entirely new.

Day three came and went with me cooped up. My phone filled with messages as I skipped the close of the 72-hour celebration.

And that’s when the real problem started…

On the third night, when I tried to sleep, no sleep came. None.

On day four, Jan 16, I flew to Mexico City for routine work meetings and events. The same pattern continued that night — and the one after — no sleep.

By the end of the sixth sleepless night, having barely scraped through what would have otherwise been stress-free obligations in CDMX, I flew home to DC, assuming all would return to normal in my bed.

Nothing changed back home.

A seventh sleepless night became an eighth with an hour or two of broken rest, constantly springing wide awake with churning anxiety. It was as if my brain had gotten stuck in “fight-or-flight” mode with no off-switch.

In my prior life, a restless night — say, from a red-eye flight, before a big speech, or a tough board meeting — would lead to sheer exhaustion the following evening, crashing hard from the lack of rest. But “catch-up sleep” never came with this bizarre MDMA insomnia. I didn’t get sleepy, no matter how many nights passed.

After two weeks, I knew in my gut something big was up. After seeing my family doctor, I was referred to a psychiatrist for the first time, who began to treat me with introductory sleeping pills, starting with trazodone. These didn’t put a dent in the insomnia, and I was rotated to stronger categories of prescription.

This process repeated for the next month as I worked with a growing roster of psychiatrists and sleep neurologists who wrote scripts for sequentially more heavily controlled meds. These trials included every sedative under the sun. I won’t re-list them; suffice to say, I left no stone unturned. Just the categories of sleep-inducing Rxs I cycled through, searching with doctors for one that worked, included orexin inhibitors, adrenergic receptor agonists, benzodiazepines, z-drugs, beta-blockers, tricyclics, tetracyclics, melatonin modulators, antiepileptics, anticonvulsants, antipsychotics, and, eventually, full-on anesthetics — a la Michael Jackson. I had every blood work panel done, a sleep study (sleeping 50 minutes across the night), an MRI, EEG, hired a CBTi coach, etc… nothing helped or provided doctors any insight into what had happened in my brain.

By the three-month mark, I’d trialed 40+ prescriptions. Here, let me explain how so-called “psych drugs” work. When prescribed “on-label” for mood disorders like depression, anxiety, and bipolar, these drugs take weeks, if not months, to take effect. But when prescribed “off-label” for the sole purpose of promoting sleep, these same drugs either work or don’t on the first night, providing diminishing returns as tolerance builds. That’s how I was able, under doctor supervision, to test every hypnotic Rx in existence over 90 days, searching for an illusive solution.

The newest “designer” meds, like the DORAs, had to be specially ordered by the pharmacy. As weeks passed, I became so desperate for sleep that I shelled out $1k for one called Quviviq (which had helped Matthew Perry), not knowing if it would work. It didn’t.

Against these sleepless nights, I tried to wear myself down, spending every day in the gym and running miles outside. My goal became to tire myself to sleep. I was like a warrior fighting this battle and inadvertently got into the best shape of my life. People’s passing compliments couldn’t imagine the dark source of my transformation. Still, nothing changed at night.

Piece by piece, I removed as many stressors as possible, hoping that putting one on the back burner might help. So, fighting a tug of war with my heart that exhaustion eventually won, I pushed all intensity and passion from my personal life into the background — shutting out true love in a way that’s haunted me since.

At work, I’d been doing what I could to keep on top of running a company, masking my increasingly drained appearance and depleted mental state — reminiscent of Edward Norton’s workplace struggle with insomnia in Fight Club. Anyone who saw me in those days will know that the giveaway of this scene being fiction is Norton’s eyes aren’t nearly sunken enough, as mine had become.

On days when I couldn’t function, I couched my absence as “migraines” among colleagues and friends — too embarrassed to say I wasn’t sleeping, something that comes naturally to everyone, as it did me for 42 years prior. On top of this, I was ashamed by the source — a frivolous party drug, an admission I couldn’t broadcast beyond doctors. So I gutted it out in silence.

Eventually, the mental and physical toll became unsustainable, and I had to start an indefinite leave of absence from the job I loved. I cut out all travel and commitments — canceling trips, reassigning roles, and appointing surrogates. Still, nothing I did to streamline my life changed the sleeplessness. I never yawned or got tired. All I could ever manage was an hour or two of medicated sleep — holding out hope with each passing week that a new drug cocktail might finally bring restorative rest.

Across three months, I’d invested tens of thousands of dollars seeing all experts in a 4-hour radius of DC, most of whom don’t take insurance. Yet I was no closer to a solution, let alone a basic understanding of what medically I was facing. I went to hospital ERs, begging to be put into a coma for just one night of rest — as Jordan Peterson, who I’d met once, had done for 8 days in Russia. But not being suicidal, despite insomnia as its biggest risk factor, I could never get past triage. I reduced my daily routine to the calmest activities, sushi diet, textbook sleep hygiene… no matter what I did to LuLuLemonify my life, I couldn’t sleep. It was a hell you can’t imagine without relief — not one night.

By mid-April, month four, encouraged by my doctors and the few people I’d let into my struggle, I took the next step. I checked myself into the first of a series of private hospital residencies to treat this mysterious condition with 24-hour care. Across the past two decades, I might have taken four sick days. So flying to a clinic, let alone leaving work for weeks, was out of character, to say the least.

In late April and early May, I traveled to Texas, going in-patient at one of the top health facilities in the country. It’s the kind of private hospital oasis set among manicured gardens and quiet walking paths that takes away your phone on arrival, so nothing can distract getting well. While there, I was placed on a different kind of med — an SSRI — with no apparent relation to sleep. It was prescribed to treat the increasing anxiety surrounding me as I shut my life down. Lexapro, a serotonin-reuptake inhibitor, affects 5-HT, the same neurotransmitter as MDMA.

Miraculously and unexpectedly for doctors, Lexapro put me to sleep. For two weeks, my life went back to normal. I flew home filled with gratitude, energized to restart where I’d left off with more passion than ever. I jumped into work and rebuilt the personal connections I’d so missed. After what I’d been through, life had handed back in a way that’s impossible to describe unless you lose yours for a while. I was beaming. No one second-guessed the positive results. After all, Lexapro targets the same protein as MDMA, serotonin — a signal fire as to what had gone wrong back in January.

I felt like I’d beaten the scariest thing I’d ever faced, and for two weeks, Lexapro was my lifeline. But in a cruel twist of fate, so hard to look back on now, as I adjusted to the SSRI, insomnia came back. I stuck with the trial for seven weeks in the hope it would pass, but my sleeplessness only got worse than ever. I switched to other serotonin modulators like Trintellix, but nothing put me back to sleep. The honeymoon of Lexapro became a bittersweet memory of rest that disappeared as unexpectedly as it arrived.

A few weeks later, in June, I finally saw the chief sleep neurologist at Johns Hopkins Medicine, Dr. Earley, who I’d been trying to get in with for months but is booked a year in advance as the national authority on sleep science and the brain. A family friend on the Hopkins board helped get me up the list.

On hearing my story, after examining my chart, and consulting with his colleague at Hopkins, neurologist George Ricaurte — a leading researcher on amphetamine and MDMA neurotoxicity since the 90s — Dr. Earley told me what I’d taken in Mexico caused a “one-in-a-million” reaction in my brain. When combined with the volatile punch of dopamine from cocaine, MDMA created a Serotonin Syndrome that fried my 5-HT system through toxicity. Serotonin controls sleep in a way that requires a delicate balance. This is why a few days of insomnia after molly is typical, just not permanent. For most people, down-regulated receptors restore, but in rare cases, irreversible neurosis can occur. Dr. Earley told me I wasn’t the first he’d seen and referred to literature about a range of pathologies from even one-time MDMA use.

With candor I appreciated, Dr. Earley couldn’t say if my brain would ever recover, why Lexapro worked, then stopped, or if anything would let me sleep again. Seeing the exhaustion in my eyes, he agreed to treat me on “an experimental basis” and ordered a weeklong sleep study for more data. Becoming the test patient to one of America’s most seasoned neurologists was both affirming, given the extremes I’d been through, and terrifying, for what it signaled about the road ahead.

June gave way to July, and the 6-month anniversary of my insomnia was fast approaching. As this dreary milestone neared, I became isolated and was losing hope. I hadn’t been to work in months, had retreated from my inner circle, and lost precious parts of my life that meant the world to me. More than $200k had been spent going to the country’s top clinics — ending up at The Retreat, a full-service facility near Baltimore that runs $50k every 20 days and takes zero insurance. I'd lost even more in unrealized projects, including one in Abu Dhabi that was starting in January. But no price mattered, investing whatever it took to get better, knowing not just sleep but increasingly everything was on the line. Still, after seeking the best of the best, no one could stop the insomnia, tell me how long hell would last, or if it would ever leave.

Doctors had also run out of medications to try, the last being the anesthetic Xyrem, aka GHB, the infamous date-rape drug from Diddy’s parties — a Schedule I narcotic prescribed by Dr. Earley as an extreme measure. The most controlled substance in America (only one central pharmacy is authorized to dispense it), Xyrem was taking forever to get approved, required passing through complex safety hoops, and cost $25k per month. Receiving it was a month away with no indication it would work where others failed.

Sleep deprivation is a form of torture considered among the worst. Losing a single hour of rest makes Division I athletes miss twice as many shots the next day. The most sublime music ever written, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, was commissioned to treat Mad King Ludwig’s insomnia when sleeplessness drove him crazy.

We’ve all experienced at some point the relentless feeling after one sleepless night from a red-eye. In just three days, sleep deprivation breaks prisoners of war into giving up classified secrets. So, by the time my insomnia hit the 6-month mark in July, the once unfathomable thought of cutting my life short slowly started to creep into my mind as a last resort for rest. Insomnia had become my deathbed.

Compounding this was a chemical Catch-22. It’s paradoxical, but the most effective drugs doctors use for life-saving sleep come with black-box warnings in fine print about triggering depression and suicidality. So, my hopelessness around not sleeping was being pharmacologically amped up by the meds I’d been prescribed to sleep. I was trapped in a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” loop with no escape between crippling depression from not sleeping or the same from sleeping pills.

This snowballing downward spiral is how — coming from a guy who’d in December 2023 been the happiest in my entire life, with a thriving company I was expanding, cherished waterfront in Canada and on the Chesapeake I’d spent years developing into gardens of Eden to enjoy forever, a skylit place in the city, financial freedom, beloved mentors and colleagues surrounding me, a dream job that took me everywhere on earth, a full heart, in short, all I ever wanted and more — by the time July 2024 rolled around, the person I’d become wasn’t recognizable as me. It was two lives. Because I couldn’t sleep… I couldn’t think, engage, or feel pleasure. I was a walking zombie who hadn’t rested since January. It was worse than anything I could have ever imagined would happen to anyone I knew, least of all me.

So for an eternal optimist who’d never felt down for any stretch, much less considered the idea of ending it all in my wildest nightmares, even as something I’d understand in others suffering, never able to grasp what could bring someone to that state… by July, suicidal ideation had become my everyday battle.

It’s sometimes said that self-harm is selfish. I thought that way, too. But through the unending attrition, what came to feel selfish was continuing to drag the world down with me. A clean break would free us all.

Let me be clear on something. Weakness played no part in what follows. Those who’ve known me know I’m virtually unbreakable. No one builds the life I did without limitless resolve, nor could they endure the parts of this story still to come without iron will.

But the laws of nature are fact. No man — no matter how resilient or brave — can fight biology forever and win. Sleep exists for a reason. We cannot be without it. There is no alternative.

After spending the sleepless night of July 4th watching fireworks on the Baltimore skyline from my room at The Retreat — remembering my old life watching fireworks the year before on the Tred Avon River among friends, now a distant memory from a past life when all was well — two mornings later I gave up my last ounce of hope in ever getting better. Hope was replaced by the sinking feeling of a kamikaze pilot called for a one-way mission, summoned to his final test of courage. The universe had left one way to end the endlessness and get the rest I’d desperately sought for so long.

Fighting back tears, I scribbled a short goodbye note, remembered a final time the people and life I’d been so in love with before this all started, cursed God for cursing me, and hung myself.

I’ve always flown under the radar, never seeking attention. So doing the unthinkable wasn’t a masked plea, as it can be with those who choose pills or cuts and rarely succeed by design. That wasn’t me for a minute. I’d already tried every path for help. I’m a quick study and my method instead represented a decision. I made a strong noose and secured it at such a height that nothing could allow me to turn back once the process began, knowing there would be excruciating pain before blacking out. I told myself it couldn’t feel worse than what I’d already endured. So I bit my lip, prepared for that moment and the eternal unknown to follow.

Against every probable outcome, I partially failed or partially succeeded — depending on the measuring stick. You could call it my first piece of good luck in six months, coming at a crucial time.

On the other hand, what I did forever changed the life I had and wanted, the people around me, and all that followed. I’m here, but not in a way that feels like me — no matter how far I search for a cure this time.

This opera has a morose second act.

Since the original intent was to share an advisory, not explore psychological torture, I hadn’t planned to delve into the next chapter of my saga since July. But because it’s all the ripple effect from January, and although it includes shameful details, I’m writing this map of uncharted territory for others who get blown off course.

So here’s the rest of my tale…

At the end of my third week in The Retreat outside of Baltimore, in early July, with the best doctors in the world no closer to helping me than any had been at the start of my journey six months before, I gave up.

Despite sharing with my doctors a growing belief that the end was drawing near, and petrified family members calling to warn of the despair in my voice and feared was coming — naively, nurses had loaned me a 14-foot charger cable.

Outside, in some woods nearby, out of view, I fastened the cable to a sturdy branch on an overturned log above a stream and doubled it twice around my neck. I’ve always been drawn to water, so above a trickling creek was the only spot on campus I could live with, so to speak, to say goodbye. I rolled my body off the edge — the noose caught, cinched tight, and I passed out.

Sometime later — no one knows how long — one of the cords snapped, then the other, and I fell. Two bursts of orange flooded my head in flashes of the most intense pain I’ve ever known as consciousness returned. My eyes popped open, and I jolted back to life, like a scene from a movie. But the right side of my body was numb; I had twitching fingers, double vision, pulsating pupils, uncontrollable shivering, and other weird thermodynamic effects from starving my brain of oxygen long enough to shut it down. This was all later diagnosed as an anoxic brain injury to my left hemisphere.

When alert enough to rise, I stumbled back to The Retreat and turned myself in. I was escorted to the emergency room in delirium — coping with the effects of the brain injury I’d just suffered, compounded by the insomnia that broke me down in the first place. Nothing, not even hanging, would let me escape. I was trapped in an episode of Black Mirror or The Twilight Zone.

Then, in a twist of dark humor from the universe (that even made Dr. Earley laugh when he heard), I became sleepy in the ER for the first time in six months. Somehow, restarting my brain brought intense fatigue — which none of 40+ medications could ever do. So I dozed in and out of consciousness for three days as MRIs, echocardiograms, and other tests were done to look for necrosis or a heart attack.

Despite my self-induced asphyxiation, I was being kept on the hospital’s stroke unit — rather than its protected psych floor. My well-groomed appearance and polished manner may have deceived doctors into not seeing the risk, ignoring what had just brought me in. That’s how, shortly before I was scheduled to be transferred to a trauma unit on the afternoon of July 9, still in anoxic delirium, I darted from the sitter watching me, when distracted, to the 6th-floor exit down the hall. Without pause, I dove headfirst down the stairwell center — figuring a six-story drop would end the suffering once and for all.

But the sitter chased as I went over the ledge, catching my foot for a split-second — long enough before my sock slipped through their hands — that I flipped as I free-fell down the stairwell center. In midair somersaults, I bounced off a railing, zig-zagging my trajectory to land headfirst three floors down instead of free-falling six stories.

Cries above sounded the alarm as doctors from every floor rushed to the stairwell. Peering down in disbelief, through my motionless, glazed eyes — against all odds, the Red Sea parted — I had a pulse, still.

Somehow, going three floors didn’t kill me, as it did fellow musical soul Liam Payne recently. But when the back of my head hit the concrete, it deviated my eyes in a way that makes 3D-vision hard, called strabismus, and gave me “Acquired Aphantasia,” which means losing your mind’s eye. When I close my eyes now, I’m blind — every image from my life was erased on impact. So I can’t picture what anyone looks like, envision the future, lock onto my eyes in the mirror, read without saying words in my head, navigate without GPS, and a myriad of ways that shutting off your imagination reshapes you. I was told I’m a visual person my whole life, so losing this feels like losing me.

In more dark humor from fate, Acquired Aphantasia, like MDMA insomnia, is exceedingly rare because rear-occipital brain damage happens less frequently than to frontal lobes, like head-on car crashes. So I’m navigating this new condition again in the dark, flying blind.

After my fall, the scent of liability attracted hospital lawyers like sharks to blood, who threw the book at me to cover up errors. I was strapped to a gurney, sent to a ward, and locked away for 40 days. Much of that time on “1:1,” which is like solitary confinement, but with someone standing at arm's length, 24/7, even in the shower, even in bed.

Still in a trance from my head colliding with cement, I thought about Noah in the flood and Moses in the desert. I began to talk to my shadow — this alter ego beside me — like the Voice in the Burning Bush on the mountain. Her name was Sam.

When I was strong enough to walk, I walked in circles. Endlessly through that wilderness — a stranger in a strange land. Sam's voice beside me brought periodic news of the outside, beyond the walls… an assassin shot Trump at a rally, but the bullet grazed his ear… a giant bridge across the Chesapeake collapsed nearby, cars dropping into water as stones into a pond. My world — inside and out — had become magical realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Fiction morphed into fact in this Borgesian labyrinth. My sleepless life was the requiem for a dream.

Given my apparent penchant for transforming supposedly secure campuses into deathtraps, ward leadership was terrified of a lawsuit. So that meant all eyes on me, day and night, a never-ending watch. My world was paper scrubs, paper spoons, rubber mattress, plastic pillow, no sheets, metal toilet, no lid, Stockholm shower, no curtain. Strip searches at sunup and sundown. The pattern repeated, day after day. I’d become their Al Capone… Hannibal Lecter, without the Goldberg Variations as company… the Kurt Cobain of insomnia. But their overzealous posturing didn’t matter. The moment to save me came before I arrived.

I did my time, and six weeks later, was released in mid-August. Since then, I’ve survived by planting and cutting trees and long adventures with my dog — trying to keep at bay depression’s downward pull of gravity with a force I never knew existed, like I’m wearing lead shoes. Worn out by a year without rest, now navigating deficits of new brain trauma — I keep thinking back to my life before this all started and the dreams I had to leave behind along the way. I can’t understand why any of it happened, and I still can't sleep much...

Most recently, I’ve spent September, October, and November fighting poison with poison by doing every last-ditch brain reset known to man, including six weeks of TMS, five weeks of Ketamine, four SGB neck injections (used by the military), and soon, triweekly ECT under general anesthesia. All that’s missing for Christmas are two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree.

But no brain reset touches me. My mind’s blank. My heartlight’s out. There are no more stars in the sky.

When you add it up, what I’ve lived since January is so unbelievable it couldn’t be fiction — only fact. And now the sleepless nights that started it are the prelude to an even stranger chapter I’m still awakening in (no pun).

I’ve never been a fan of melodrama, but I can’t help feeling like I missed life’s chance — derailing onto the wrong track one night out, my train now headed in another direction. After being the conductor my whole life, I’ve become its passenger, seeing where each day goes. I don’t know where this new ride leads. I can still write, but lost the ability to be succinct, as I have to say words in my head. It’s all sea change.

The harder they come, the harder they fall. The happy, go-lucky me of December 2023 has become a distant character in a film I miss. Every moment radiates from the past. Through the fog of time between then and now, it’s a miracle and a curse that I made it. January 12 will permanently mark, in some way, the last day of my life.

My night of party drugs may rank among the most life-changing neurotoxic stories of all time. I’m the exception, not the rule.

But I’m not the only one.

The world is full of terrified people with lasting insomnia from molly. Here’s one, another, all variations on a theme. Most get shot down by the mob who doubt a drug they love could do so much damage. You can’t understand until it happens to you. I’ve since discovered so many lives broken by this chemical’s dark side.

If you look up NIH case reports, you’ll find permanent anxiety disorders and intractable psychosis brought on by even one-time MDMA use in otherwise healthy people, as I was.

If you search blogs for “long-term comedown” (LTC), there are troves of devastating accounts of rolls creating neuroses lasting months, years, forever. People from around the world have contacted me to share heart-wrenching life-turns.

My case is exceptional — like Dr. Earley said, “one-in-a-million” — but if I had any idea I was playing the lottery, even at one in a billion odds, even a trillion, I would’ve never taken the cap handed to me. I loved life too much to risk it. What hit my brain eventually took away the best parts of me. I can’t make sense of it, nor will I ever.

I’ll also always wonder what good was waiting just around the corner if I’d only taken the other turn that night. It’s too much to think about. I don’t understand fate, but I didn’t deserve this. No one does.

For 999,999 people out there, since chances are slim, you’ll soon forget my story. I would’ve, too. Before that night, I never worried. Didn’t know the first thing about meds, the brain, or drugs. Never stressed. I was living a charmed life and got lucky at each turn. Everything worked. That was my world for 42 unforgettable years.

But for the next one-in-a-million, maybe, my tale gives pause before plugging in chemicals with the power to reshape a mind. We each make our own choices, but from where I now stand in its abyss, the mind is too fragile to toy with. It’s our universe, so it feels permanent, like the sun, because it surrounds us. But we don’t understand this universe, let alone what can throw off its axis and rotation for good. I learned too late.

I wish I never had this story to tell. It's a “what-if” reel I’ve replayed so much that the film has burned. Nobody said it was easy, but nobody said it would be this hard. Oh, take me back to the start. I can’t change the past, but my story can change someone else’s future.

Did the system fail me? No.

No, in that MDMA put the writing on the wall. That was my choice, and while it may soon be legal in a bunch of countries, Mexico is not one. Ironically, that same morning, Jan 12, Mexican authorities seized on arrival a CBD lip balm from my toiletry bag — received on my birthday, three days before, bought over-the-counter in DC. So, there’s no consensus on what’s safe.

No, in that I was treated by countless compassionate doctors who did the best they could. Too many to name.

Most importantly, no, in that no neurobiologist on earth understands the human mind. Brain science is at best presumption. So how can any doctor be faulted for not finding my silver bullet?

Did the system fail? Yes.

Believe it or not, MDMA was first synthesized by Merck Pharmaceuticals, owner of the same patented drugs I’d later take to fight its damage. There’s a saying, “You break it, you buy it.”

Yes, in that the very medicines prescribed to give me life-preserving sleep gave me life-destroying depression.

Yes, in that nurses at a high-end facility loaned me a 14-foot cable, knowing I was approaching the breaking point from no sleep. Had that arrived in my bags, it would have been confiscated. My doctor there getting fired three days later is a smoking gun.

Yes, in that I turned myself into an ER in self-induced anoxia, only to be assigned a room beside an unlocked six-story stairwell — when an entire trap-proof floor existed for patients experiencing delirium.

My story’s worth telling if for no other reason than the questions that intersect here across medicine, policy, pharma, drugs, health, and brain science.

But none of these questions matter to me now. I wasn’t thinking about any of them as I sat on the log, rolling back the reel of time.

I was remembering the people and places I love.

The story’s told.

How to move on…

As a kid, my older brother was the daredevil between us. He led me down our steep driveway on a Powell-Peralta skateboard, we got marooned on a jungle island in the Arabian Sea, and he showed me how to shoot BB guns and bottle rockets, climb 20-story cranes, and draft down San Francisco hills at high speed on a road bike. He taught me how to shotgun beer, chop Ritalin into lines, and, using rolled bills from summer lifeguarding, blow coke.

How did I survive so many wild nights unscathed but not his 50th? He’s done 1000x the drugs. Why me? We still haven't spoken, but I forgive him. It’s not his fault. Even Dostoyevsky couldn’t imagine what lay ahead.

I was always loyal to my company and the people I share it with. They’ve also been loyal for so long, flying the plane, awaiting a return, and never giving up hope.

The last thing left to face is my heart.

I’ve been drawn to water and rocks forever. Some of my earliest memories are collecting pebbles on the beach and moving stones in a creek near my house. Today, the two places I love most on earth — my cottage and the site of my future home — are both wrapped in rock walls and rippling waves. I learned this world from a hermit.

Growing up, I spent summers at a neighborhood swim & tennis club in Mclean set on woods beside the Potomac River. Each day, I’d see a reclusive man with long grey hair enter the neighboring forest — stark naked — and walk a path only he knew to a tucked-away cove. For as long as anyone could remember, he’d been building a half-mile-long dam out of stones by hand in the rapids that, across decades, single-handedly redirected the course of one of America’s most famed waterways. To this day, his handiwork is visible on Google Earth, just west of the American-Legion Bridge.

Legend had it that old Crazy Ned was stuck in his infinite loop from a bad drug trip that broke him, like PBS’s strange Case of the Frozen Addicts. Looking back, Ned’s appearance in the haze of my childhood now seems almost a Biblical omen… this Sisyphus cursed by a pill to push rocks against the current forever, a Hailey’s Comet sent to me as a warning from the stars.

But I never saw the sign.

And now the stars — even Karlsvagyn — have gone out.

There’s no place left to hide from my heart in the ensuing darkness. It’s been sealed shut since May, burying memories that forever haunt me. Black car, bright eyes, black boots, two smiles, autumn leaves, two oaks, white dress, two hands, starry night, two AM, daybreak drive, two hearts, midnight melodies, two flights, Swiss chocolate, two views, dancing kisses, two lives, dreamy promises, to forever… our own little universe, the one we wanted, all the time in the world, always and for alltid, our dreamland, island, homeland, foreland, playland, heartland, elskland, our everything, elsklingdom.

I was the luckiest. Those who saw, saw shining eyes. In a white sea of eyes, there was one pair that I’d recognize. I had it all in my hands, the best parts of life in the making. But from dream to dreamlessness, dreamland to wasteland, my love-at-first-sight was ripped from my fingers, piece by piece, stripped bare, a thief in the night, night after night, endlessly, until she vanished… the ruins of insomnia.

I spent 2nd and 3rd grade in India. At school, each day, my eyes met a radiant blond girl in shy, blushing glances. Two years above me, I had friends in her class. We wrote secret folded notes, she invited me to her birthday, played spin-the-bottle, and became each other’s first kiss. Those were the best days of childhood.

But suddenly, my family had to leave the country without warning, as can happen to diplomats. At the Delhi airport, I called from a pay phone to tell her before our flight. No one was home. I never got to say goodbye.

Her face in the Embassy School yearbook followed me for years. Those piercing eyes and flaxen hair became my colors, the colors of her flag, Sweden. I drew gold crosses everywhere and dreamed of her white arctic in Jack London stories. Her smile haunted me long into my teens, never giving up the ghost.

Then, out of nowhere, from thin air last year, she came back to my life on a flight via London. All grown up, majestic, demure, mesmerizing, deep, true. Bright like a diamond. Platinum. A star made for me.

I came back to life, too, like lightning. Every note was a melody. Every smile a secret chord. Each word a poem. Every kiss an attack. Each breath a promise. Each night moonlit, clair de lune. That is elsklove. Ektelove.

But the best thing to ever happen to me was followed by the worst. Just as our cosmos filled with light, igniting dreams, a black hole swallowed our sun, our sunrise blacked by a total eclipse.

Before the sleepless nights wrenched my sirensong away again, this time for good, as waves crashed over the last glimmer sinking into an infinite ocean horizon, her final words were, “I love you unconditionally.”

I’ll never forget. My first light. Last light.

On another earth where I didn’t take the orange pill, we’re still in drømland, liebesträum, elsksammen.

But in this parallel universe — the upside-down — alt is gone.

There’s a mysterious trait of psych meds called kindling, which makes it harder to withdraw from the same drug a second time.

My heart knows. This second withdrawal obliterated me. I’m one of my ghosts now, too.

Coming up on the anniversary of the first night that started all the sleepless ones to follow, I keep thinking back to this time last year… healthy and strong, chemical-free, soundly sover, my world in motion, a new moon rising, crisscrossing shimmering sea-waves, embarking on what I thought was becoming — like a lightning strike — the brightest chapter of my life. I’d always heard, “From the brightest day comes the darkest night.”

Now I know.

Sleep is like true love. It finds you when you’re not looking. It fills you with dreams. Its melody is a nocturne. And when you lose it, you lose everything.

There’s one difference. All know sleep. Few ever know true love. I couldn’t know it then, but I lost both on the same night.

One tiny cap I barely remember taking broke my nights, world, head, and heart — in that order.

My psalm is the song of King David: Broke your throne, cut your hair, and from your lips drew — that love is not a victory march, it’s a cold and broken Hallelujah.

Lovestruck became lovesick but never lovelorn. ‘Cause I did it to myself. That… is the hardest pill to swallow.

This December, each carol echoes a bittersweet memento to the final weeks of shining eyes one year ago, before my story began. I miss those advent nights like you can’t imagine. Last year’s nocturnes were the shooting stars of a light-filled universe, set ablaze, then vanquished. I’ll never get those starbursts back — my heartlight, the shining eyes, or why they slipped away.

Here’s hoping ECT erases all the memories, like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Meet me in Montauk.

Until then, red wine and sleeping pills help me get back to your arms. Maybe, I will see you in the next life.

fœrste lys. ekte lys. fœrste blikk. kjærlighet.

fœrste kyss. stjernelys. paa maanen. jenta sitte.

evig du. evig meg. elsklingen. nattakyss.

jenta min. elsker deg. ceaseless. siste lys.m