At 48, Sheila Heti found herself thinking she didn’t need to live much longer—not because she was in despair, but because she had a strange sense that life, for her, had plateaued. She was sure that her future would simply be repetitive of her past. To mull this feeling, she took part in a series of psychedelic-assisted therapy sessions using ketamine, DMT, MDMA, and LSD, reflecting deeply after each session. Does she behold God on LSD? She does, but that’s just one of the many remarkable experiences she has on these mind-altering substances.
Before sunup that morning, Bruce had deposited an MDMA capsule into a teapot that I’d placed outside, on the front porch. Then I did as I was told: swallowing the pill at 12.30 p.m., half an hour before he was set to arrive. Trembling with nervousness, I cut up the vegetables and strawberries I had bought that morning to feed him and Ana, certain I was about to cut myself. Then Bruce arrived. We sat on opposite couches, and I began to record our conversation, talking about my impulse, ever since childhood, to be pleasing and performing, and how sometimes this even ruined writing for me – my greatest pleasure! – and how I had started wondering if, in part, I chose to write the sort of books I thought my father (now seven years dead) would approve of. Could this desire, this allegiance to his taste, be preventing me from discovering a deeper or more thorough way of writing?
More picks from Granta
For the Love of Losing
“I began to wonder if running off with a blackjack team…wasn’t my way of throwing down the gauntlet to my father…who had gambled all his life.”
Universal Mother
“Formative nightmares can sometimes fuel you.”
The Secret Pattern
“Filtered only through headlines, China had become a political entity more than a physical place where I had grown up, where half of my family still lived.”
