Returning to Life: Psilocybin and the Depression That Took My Career
Clinical depression ended my career as a surgeon at forty-two. Three years later, one session began the process of finding what came next.
I was a surgeon for eighteen years. The identity of being a surgeon was so total that when the depression made it impossible to continue, I didn't know who I was in its absence. The depression had taken my career. The absence of the career deepened the depression. The loop ran for three years.
Standard psychiatric treatment helped me function. It did not help me understand what I was functioning toward or who I was without the work that had defined me. I was stable and also directionless in a way that felt terminal.
The session was the beginning of something I'm still in the middle of. What it did was let me see myself without the identity structure — what remained when the surgeon was removed. What remained was more than I thought. Interests, relationships, capacities, values that had existed before the work and alongside it and that didn't require the work to be valid.
I'm not a surgeon now. I'm a fifty-year-old person figuring out what comes next, which is in some ways a more interesting problem than I've had in years. The session didn't give me a direction. It gave me back the belief that a direction existed. That was what I needed to start looking.
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