This research continues to leave me extremely hopeful.

After reading a similar report a few months ago, I decided to roll the dice and put aside my fears of more serious drugs to see if this could work for me.

Let me tell you. MDMA delivered. Here's an anecdotal stream of consciousness about it.

I am unsure whether the thing I experienced is something that only MDMA can provide, or if it is something that is normal in healthy people but is otherwise unobtainable in people such as myself. In the context of PTSD the phenomenon typically sought and described is something along the lines of "zoom out, see yourself, forgive yourself". It does this.

There's an episode of House involving a war vet who lost his hand while clenching his fist in a moment of trauma. The ghost of his severed hand remained alive in his mind, clenching, for every day of his life thereafter. Finally, House sets up an experiment with a mirror in a box that creates an illusion that his lost hand is intact. The man's mind, sufficiently convinced that this new reality is plausible, allows him to unclench his haunted fist, for the first time. The man breaks down in a wave of profound gratitude. I am weeping as I write this, so familiar is the sensation of existential tension and release.

That is the most apt metaphor I can conjure for the emotional experience MDMA provides. You just... let go. Finally. With ease. A task which was previously not merely impossible, but flatly inconceivable.

Except letting go isn't about whether you're holding a foreign object or not. It's more like a transition between two states – two shapes the hand can be in. Closed to open. Imagine having no nerves, no muscles, no sensation that would let you direct your hand from the shape it is in now, to this hypothetical other shape it could take. Similarly, you go from one mental model of the world to another. And so you have to have an idea of what this other place is.

In the past, I've described to my therapist the struggle of imagining this place and unclenching, emotionally, as being asked to draw an animal you've never seen. "Paint me a zarnur", I say. Well.. how many legs does it have? Is it a mammal? Eyes? Color? Size? There's no sensible place to get started that isn't just firing birdshot into the dark. It is a special helplessness borne in the void of total disconnection from what your goal might be.

Emotional forgiveness is an animal you can't draw, because the door that blocks your sight of him is too heavy for you to move on your own. When I took MDMA, it was with the pretense that god damnit, if I can't open that door with my mind, with all my effort, in my current state, then maybe we bulldoze it open. And maybe it's only open an inch, and I get a peek at a single hair. And maybe it's only open for a moment, and my glance is fleeting.

And maybe it kills me. Fine. We've gotta try.

Because if it works, it would be something. The beginning of some north star, from which I might be able to plant myself and work outwards, where previously there was no ground beneath me.

And that's what happened. For five hours on one night, I felt like a version of myself that not only might be worthy of love and acceptance from other humans, but a version of my self that was inarguably worthy.

That evening remains the only blip of signal in an otherwise empty transmission log. I don't say that to be morbid – I say it with profound gratitude. It went from zero to one. That's huge.

My biggest regret? That I didn't have a voice recorder. I remember snippets of conversation, but four hours of mental rearchitecture is not easily recalled with much fidelity by an amateur.

Nevertheless, the emotion, the sensation, was so real and so profound that I could never doubt it. Perception is reality, here, and I saw to my satisfaction that the place I wanted to go, the state where one hopes to finally be at rest, certainly exists.

If you want to buy runway for hope, that's about as good as it gets.

Your mileage may vary, of course. I was extremely fortunate that I have a group of friends whom I've known nearly a decade, lived with, grown up with, and trust fully happen to also be experts in administering such an experience, so it was about as good as I could have gotten. I feel, having been through it, that this is a fairly safe thing to attempt. But do take precautions. Rollsafe[1] appears to be an authority in this space.

[1]https://rollsafe.org/