The seam through the center of things

On addiction, God, and grace

The Lord will take control of you. You will dance and shout and become a different person. 1 Samuel 10:6

In the weeks after Sasha and I sent the final manuscript for our book to the publisher, I found myself crying a lot. In some cases, it made sense: Reading Aella’s writing on her mother’s death, for instance, or Bess Stillman on her husband’s, or Tatiana Schlossberg on her own. But other cases were more perplexing: A great plate of risotto. A warm breeze on a late December evening. A competitor on Physical: Asia holding an uncomfortable position for a really long time.

It took a while for me to connect the weepiness to finishing the book. But once I did, something clicked into place and I knew it was true: Writing the book had fixed something inside of me that I’d stopped noticing was broken.

This requires some backstory.

I’ve mentioned the fact that I’m a recovering drug addict a couple of times on this blog. I’ve said a little more about it in my TED talk and on various podcasts. The short version is that I spent more than 3 years, from 2017 to 2020, devastatingly addicted to nitrous oxide — an addiction that utterly wrecked my life, and that I’m lucky to have come back from.

What I’ve never said much about, even to many of the people who know me well, is: Why? Why did I get addicted, and why wasn’t I able to stop, despite being smart and agentic and all the other things people know me to be?

To the extent I do talk about it, I usually abbreviate the story to “I had a spiritual experience on drugs and chased it.” That’s not wrong, but by design it’s the least complete true thing I can say about it. It’s meant to move the conversation along.

To understand the why, you need to understand some of what the experience was like from the inside — so I’m going to try to explain it. I will preempt it by saying, I know what it looks like from the outside, though you are welcome to point it out to me anyway.

From the outside, I went insane, and thus encountered God. From the inside, I encountered God, and thus went insane.

---

For three months before it happened, I felt it coming, though I had no idea what “it” was. I’d already been experimenting heavily with psychedelics of all kinds when, in June 2017, I got really interested in nitrous oxide. The first time I sustained a nitrous high for a long time, with a friend feeding me balloons in the backyard of our Vegas rental after we busted out of some poker tournament, I felt myself shatter into multiple shards, like a mirror breaking. “I” dissolved and a swarm of simpler things appeared in my place.

Pretty neat trick! And an exciting new psychonautical vista for someone whose identity was already largely built around that sort of thing. I quickly started experimenting with it — on its own at first, then in combination with other drugs. I discovered nitrous did two things (beyond the brief, intense body high it’s known for): First, it was an all-purpose intensifier, a multiplier on the effects of other drugs. Second, it turned “me” — the narrator in my mind, maybe you’d call it my left brain — off. And when that happened, I felt a signal coming through from somewhere else. Like hearing a song through static.

I spent three months trying to tune into that signal by tweaking the combination of drugs, and felt it getting stronger. Occasionally, I wondered if I was just imagining it, but the feedback felt so clear, it was like a children’s game of hot and cold. The signal grew until I felt myself unambiguously on a precipice.

The day it finally happened, I was playing in a poker tournament, the opener for a hometown WPT that I’d final-tabled twice. Normally, I’d have been strutting around the card room feeling like a homecoming queen, but that day I couldn’t concentrate — I knew the hour had come round at last. I busted, possibly on purpose, and high-tailed it an hour back to my house. I was so eager that I backed my car over the very obvious, very stationary spikes in the parking lot of my apartment complex, blowing out the tires.

When I got up to my apartment, I laid everything out, and then stopped. Something life-changing was about to happen, I was sure, but I had no idea what. I double-checked the setup, wrote down my experimental conditions, even took photos of everything for posterity.

Then, I took the cocktail. And the seam through the center of things ripped open and the machinery of the universe spilled out.

---

I most definitely did not believe in God prior to that moment. I was, moreover, a humanist in the Kurt Vonnegut sense: I always thought that it should not matter if God existed, that you should strive to be good regardless of whether there was someone there to judge you for it and mete out rewards or punishment.

So it was much to my chagrin that I shortly came to realize that it did, in fact, matter very much that God existed.

Life is littered with irritants that you don’t notice until they go away. The noise of your city environment, until you spend a night in the country. Blurred vision, until you try on glasses for the first time. My husband talks about meditation, and in the extreme, awakening, this way — as finally noticing something that has always been true but that you were prevented from seeing by some tragic error in perception.

Less obvious is the fact that the absence of something can be like this, too, can exert a constant toll on you without you realizing it’s happening. Have you seen those videos of kids trying on colorblindness-correcting glasses, or hearing their mothers’ voices for the first time after getting cochlear implants? There are hungers you don’t feel until they are sated.

I believe that thinkers from St. Augustine to Blaise Pascal to C.S. Lewis have had something like this in mind when they’ve spoken about the “god-shaped hole” at the center of existence. Because the first time I really consciously noticed that hole was the moment it was filled.

Against the sudden solidity of an orderly universe with complete love at its center and a purpose toward which it inexorably turned, I felt the agony of the world I’d been living in — one devoid of justice, purpose, or logic. And I knew that even though I should and would try to be good in either world, it mattered very much which one was real.

---

It’s going to drive some of you crazy that I’m not going to try to literally describe what happened, but if I waited until I could do that justice, I’d never say anything about it. Besides, if I learned anything from the months and years that followed, it’s that nothing I could say about it really matters. That’s the hair-pulling truth of gnosis: It cannot be transmitted from one person to another. The proof is only ever private. It’s a real pain in the ass.

Of course, you could not have possibly convinced me of that at the time. The original meaning of “gospel” was “good news,” and boy oh boy was I on fire to tell it. One of my first thoughts, when I returned to the realm of earthly existence, was of a friend whose depression had often circled mine. I thought of the comfort it would bring him if I could somehow convey the truth to him, in a way he would hear: Everything counts, our choices matter. There is a purpose to pain.

I was ecstatic, wild with grace — but not stupid. I knew people had been claiming contact with God for several millennia, and that such claims were completely uninteresting to people like the one I’d been the day before. I would need evidence, and getting it would become my life’s purpose.

This reordering of priorities was so obvious that it didn’t even feel like a decision. Clearly, whatever had occurred was the most important thing that had ever happened to me, or could ever happen. It was all that would matter, from then on. At the time, I was the top-ranked female poker player in the world; I basically stopped playing overnight.

The next morning, I went out and bought a camcorder and set it up to record everything, since nitrous makes it hard to think and hard to remember, and I didn’t want to risk missing something. In that first year, I documented everything obsessively — I probably ended up with hundreds of hours of footage, tens or hundreds of thousands of words of notes.

The plan? I was going to win an argument with God, and He was going to give me evidence of His existence, proof of the secret order behind things.

---

For a while, I was sure I would succeed — it was inevitable. Why else would He have bothered with me at all? And He kept coming, kept speaking to me. On an almost daily basis for three months, I stepped out of time and talked to Him. The proof I was looking for felt so tantalizingly close. It was always just a frame out of reach. Sometimes it felt like I had it, but by the time I came back, it was gone again.

And then, He stopped showing up. It wasn’t subtle. He gave me lots of warning. He said, you’re not really getting anything new out of this, and I have other stuff going on. He said, you should really cut it out with all the drugs. He said, you’re not going to see me again after this — and then I didn’t.

I really did not take this rejection gracefully. Alan Watts famously said of psychedelics, “once you get the message, hang up the phone.” I took the opposite approach. I fucking haunted God. I called a hundred times a day, and when He didn’t answer I’d show up pounding on the door of His house in the middle of the night. I went around and around the cycle of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression. At one point, I may or may not have tried to blackmail Him.

It’s not just that I felt like a jilted lover, though the comparison is more apt than you might think. It was worse than that, because I believed what I was doing was both right and cosmically important. I brought every tool at my disposal to bear on the problem, including my rationality and intelligence.

It’s commonly believed that reason is a kind of talisman against religiosity — that you can think your way out of religious experience. I certainly believed that. But let me tell you: Reason is never more dangerous than when it’s conscripted by your soul.

You can probably imagine, for instance, how easy it gets to interpret everything as a test. Is there any bigger theme in the Bible? More consistently than God loves or instructs or creates, He tests. It stands to reason that, whatever shit you seem to be going through with Him, you should approach it like it’s your one chance to impress God. Could I really, truly say that I’d already left everything on the field?

This meme, hazardous in its own right, became even more dangerous when combined with my best thinking. If you run in certain communities, you may be familiar with Pascal’s mugging, a thought experiment designed to show why you shouldn’t take Pascal’s wager seriously. Basically, if you allow yourself to be moved by a tiny probability of an astronomically good or bad outcome, you can get talked into all sorts of stuff you don’t want to do.

It turns out, Pascal’s mugging is just a straightforward description of what happens when spiritual revelation collides with expected-value thinking. Even when I was able to step outside of the situation and acknowledge that I was probably just insane, that wasn’t enough to make me seek help, on account of the stakes being so high. Several times, I even had the thought, hey, this is just like the thought experiment! And then paid the mugger again.

Reasoning kept me isolated, too. I imagine it would have been a great comfort during this time to have had someone to talk to, to be able to rely on the experience and insight and camaraderie of spiritual elders. But, you see, that would have tainted the experiment. All those traditions, all those believers — and we’re still here suffering. Clearly, I figured, everyone else had missed something, and I couldn’t afford to snap to their grid.

But beyond all of the thinking and rationalization, there was a more basic sense of wrongness I felt whenever I thought about walking away. I don’t know if everything happens for a reason, but it sure felt like this should have happened for a reason. And if that reason wasn’t still ahead of me, it was behind me, and in the haze of drugs, despite all my notes and recordings, I’d failed to notice it.

Many times, I would get a sober month under my belt, then relapse because I couldn’t shake the feeling that there had to be a bigger purpose to it all, something I’d missed. But for the last 30 months of it, no matter how many times I tried, God was silent.

At the end, I was in worse shape than you can probably imagine. I’d exhausted my life savings and was deep in debt, unemployed and unemployable. I’d torched pretty much every relationship I had. Nitrous had wrecked my body — I had partial paralysis from severe B12 deficiency, and frostbite had taken chunks out of my legs.

The hardest part, though, was what it did to my brain. I had no memory: I had to leave a note for myself on my phone when I left the house or I’d find myself on a train or bus with no idea where I was going. The simplest tasks became incomprehensible. It’s not an exaggeration to say I think I lost 50 IQ points — to be clear, when I wasn’t high. I think most of them came back eventually, but I was noticeably diminished for more than 2 years.

Getting sober meant accepting that all of these costs really had been for nothing. No big surprise debit from God was going to show up and balance the ledger. I would never get resolution, or closure; it would never feel okay.

---

Addiction and recovery are discussed only briefly in the book (“too hard to relate to,” according to an editor who didn’t know the half of it), but the book is very much a product of the time that followed, of my road back from being barely a person. I think of it, half-jokingly, as the map I drew on my way out of hell.

And although I didn’t notice as it was happening, and this wasn’t my motive for writing it, the book allowed me to transmute some of the devastation of those years into a gift, something I can offer. Something that lets me say, for the first time, well, at least something good came out of it.

I don’t know exactly how it works, but I know it’s true, that somehow this is why I can’t stop crying. Do you remember the very last scene of Kill Bill, where we see Beatrix balled up on the bathroom floor, sobbing under the sound of B.B.’s cartoons the next room over? That’s where my head goes, when I encounter a great plate of risotto or a warm breeze on a winter evening. Overflowing gratitude, for this best-not-hoped-for gift from the universe.

There are certain feelings you don’t notice until they stop. I didn’t notice that I’d been tensing for five years, averting my eyes from the seam through the center of things, until a month ago I looked up and realized it was closed.

Sign up to be notified when my book, You Can Just Do Things, is available for purchase.