I went to the hospital today.
A small cut. Nothing dramatic. But being in India in a wet, humid climate with nine days of intensive treatment, I decided not to take chances with it. I flagged it to my retreat doctor, she agreed it was worth addressing, and I got in a car and went into town.
The hospital was a small building. One room, essentially ��� or maybe two, but it felt like one. There was a waiting area with plastic chairs, the kind you find everywhere in the world that has waiting areas with plastic chairs. I sat in one of them next to an older man being wheeled in who was clearly dealing with something significantly more serious than what I had come for. A child was crying in the corner. His mother was holding him and trying to calm him down and not quite managing it, the way mothers do when they are also trying not to fall apart themselves.
I looked at my finger.
I don't know what I expected to feel — maybe nothing. But I felt something. Grateful in a way that I don't usually let myself feel grateful, because my particular brand of self-involvement tends to be more focused on what's wrong than what isn't. I was here for a small cut. Not for whatever that man in the wheelchair was here for. Not for whatever was making that child cry.
I got a tetanus shot — I genuinely could not remember my last one, which probably says something about how I've been living ����� started a course of antibiotics, paid almost nothing, and was back at the retreat within the hour.
I am fine. Which today felt like more than it usually does.
But what happened when I got back matters more than the hospital visit itself.
The conversation that's still in my head.
I was showing my retreat doctor the antibiotics, walking her through what I'd been prescribed, and we ended up in a conversation I was not expecting.
I asked her about ketamine therapy. I want to be honest about why: it was the addict part of my brain looking for a loophole. A medical justification. Something that could get me high while technically being treatment. I know this about myself. I asked anyway.
She looked at me and said, simply: "You're not depressed."
Then she said something I've been thinking about since: don't fall for the marketing of depression. There's so much marketing for these labels in America. She called it, without hesitation, a medical mafia.
I'm not going to pretend I have a clean take on this. The pharmaceutical industry is complicated. Mental health diagnoses are real and help real people. I'm not dismissing any of that.
But there is something that hits differently when a doctor — a good one, sitting across from you in a quiet room in Kerala — says that she sees a great many people come here to get off medication they should never have been put on in the first place. And that the question worth asking is not which drug to take but what you're actually dealing with underneath.
She was clear about what she sees in me. Anxiety: yes. Addiction: yes. Stress: yes. Depression in the clinical, this-needs-medication sense: no. And her position was that if you address the underlying conditions — the food, the sleep, the nervous system — the rest follows. The pharmacological solution to a lifestyle problem is a category error.
I don't know if she's right. I know it's the most interesting medical conversation I've had in years.
Also: she's right that direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising makes no logical sense, and it's illegal in most of the developed world. Watching someone skip across a field while a voiceover lists suicidal ideation as a side effect and then saying "ask your doctor" is genuinely one of the stranger features of American life.
The second enema. Day two of the Virechana protocol.
Easier than the first. They told me it would get easier. They were right. I'm learning not to fight it. There's a lesson in there somewhere that I'm not quite ready to articulate.
The bloating remains inexplicable. Tiny plate of rice. Small serving of curry. Stomach like a balloon. The working theory is sleep — poor sleep increases water retention, disrupts metabolism, creates the conditions where the body holds on to everything rather than releasing it. I'm running a significant caloric deficit. The weight should be coming off. It isn't. Sleep is probably why.
I've accepted this intellectually. Emotionally I'm still staring at the scale like it owes me something.
The sound bath I couldn't surrender to.
Private session. Beautiful room. Just me and the bowls.
I spent forty minutes thinking about when it would be over.
I cannot make myself be present in these things. My brain generates content at a rate that sound healing cannot compete with. I sat there trying to relax and instead composed three emails I'll never send and reviewed an argument from 2019 that I've clearly been keeping on retainer.
Afterwards, I went for a massage. And the door to the room was open for the first time. I could see myself in the mirror on the table.
I don't know how to describe what happened. Something opened up. I looked at myself and felt a sadness that I did not feel in my head ��� I felt it in my body. In my chest. Something that went back a long way.
I've been sad my whole life in my head. I'm good at managing that. But this was different. This was body-sadness. The kind that sits in the chest like a stone. The kind I recognised, distantly, from childhood.
I think the sound bath opened something. I think I walked out of it and straight into the feeling I'd been trying to not have.
What I've been running from.
I'm going to say this plainly.
I know what this feeling is. I've known it my whole life. This is what I've been drinking to avoid. This is what I've been getting high to sidestep. This heavy, sourceless, almost-can't-breathe sadness that doesn't have a specific cause and therefore doesn't respond to reason.
I've been chasing everything — substances, experiences, projects, retreats — to get out from under this feeling. And tonight it's here, and there's nothing to take the edge off it, because everything is out of my system, and I just have to sit with it.
It's horrible. I'm not going to pretend it isn't.
But I think this might be the point. This might be what the practitioners here keep gesturing at when they talk about things coming out. Not just physiologically. The whole thing.
I walked around the property after dinner feeling like I was in an ayahuasca ceremony — unmoored, heavy, present in an uncomfortable way I couldn't escape. I've done ayahuasca more than twenty times. I've done this at retreats and centres and programmes all over the world. And every single time I eventually go back to my bullshit.
I said it out loud, alone, walking the property at night: what makes this time different?
I don't have a good answer to that. I'm sitting with the question instead.
Leaving soon.
The end of the retreat is close enough to feel now.
The weight question is unresolved. The bloating is unresolved. The deeper question — what happens when I leave — is very unresolved.
But something came out today that I didn't know was in there. Some sealed room I'd been walking past for years without acknowledging it was there.
That might be worth more than losing five pounds.
I'm not sure yet. Ask me in six months.