Disclaimer: This mentions substance use, and should not be considered as a guide or a how-to. Everyone is different and we all react differently to chemicals. Before doing any kind of experimentation on yourself, know the substances, know yourself and be in a calm mindset and environment. For severe traumas and heavy addictions, medical guidance is advised.
I’ve been struggling with mental health issues throughout my whole life. I’ve always struggled talking to people, creating bonds, getting trivial tasks done and keeping a regular life schedule. In 2003, I found out about ADHD, and read the book “Driven to distraction”. This was the first breakthrough related to finding out what kind of issues I was dealing with. At the time, ADHD wasn’t something widely known in France, I went to see a psychologist who prescribed me some anti-depressants, I don’t remember which ones but I remember having violent thoughts about my dad after taking them the 1st time and having some convulsions when I was getting intimate with someone in a relationship that had just started. Needless to say, given the lack of help those anti-depressants provided and the negative side effects they came with, I stopped taking them just a few weeks after starting. I haven’t asked for professional help since then.
I’ve had a long history of alcohol abuse from a very early age, I grew up in France, in the 90s and you could go into bars and order low alcohol content drinks (beer, wine, hard cider, …) at 16 years old. I was part of the boy scouts. Not the super catholic ones with a uniform but the cooler, less catholic ones with just a scarf and a shirt. We would sit down at terraces, cafés and bars and drink beers or monacos (beer + sweet grenadine syrup), we would buy the biggest packs of the cheapest beers and get wasted around the camp fire. The first time I got black out drunk was on tequila, I passed out a few meters away from our tents, next to cow poo in some field lost in the french countryside. I passed out so many times, I vomited so many times.
After the boy scouts, it was the metal shows. The first big one was Korn + Mass Hysteria in 1999 in Lyon. Again, France, the 90s, you could get a beer or a glass of wine for less than 1 dollar. It was around that time I got with my first girlfriend and also started smoking, or at least buying cigarettes since I would occasionally smoke with the boy scouts before that. I bought my first cigarettes to experiment with THC with my girlfriend. In France it wasn’t easy to find weed; instead there was hashish, mostly imported from Morocco and other North African countries. Hash, or “shit” as we used to call it, needed to be mixed with tobacco to be smoked. From there on, I was a regular smoker. I tried to not replicate the habits of my dad who was smoking several packs of cigarettes a day and tried to limit myself to less than 10 cigarettes a day or less. When I moved to Bordeaux, I switched to vaping which was becoming the big thing, vape shops started opening everywhere so I experimented with vaporizer models, flavors…
In 2014, I felt I was getting stuck in life, I was unsatisfied with my relationships, with my job, which was the lowest paying position a software developer could have because while I was getting good at software development, I wasn’t able to advance my career in any shape or form. It was at that point I decided to move to Los Angeles. At the time, my ambitions were to get started on my cooking app, Lunchcraft and keep growing my open source project Lutris. Sam Altman was still the YCombinator guy and I was watching his video series “How to start a startup”. Of course I never did start a startup or even finished the video series. I kept working on Lunchcraft and Lutris until I ran out of the savings I had and started looking for a job. In 2016, I got my first job for a Finnish startup located in DTLA, got a prescription for weed to deal with my insomnia since this was just before it was made legal for recreational use. Having grown up in France, and being used to tobacco mixed with hash, I got back into the habit of buying cigarettes to smoke spliffs, tobacco mixed with weed. In France, the effects of hash would make me lethargic and stoned, I didn’t use to buy much of it so my tolerance was fairly low. When I started smoking weed and building a tolerance to it, I noticed it could somewhat help to deal with my focus issues so I used it to self-medicate my self-diagnosed ADHD. While not solving all of my executive dysfunctions, I did eventually get better jobs and felt I was able to advance my career.
When COVID hit, I was let go from my job at Disney like all other contractors. I did get another part time job at Yahoo/Verizon but my main focus was to advance my Lutris project, since Linux gaming was gaining a lot of traction. During the lock down, I ended the relationship with my ex-girlfriend in a fairly poor way, like most other relationship I had in the past, always related to communication problems. Living alone again, I started getting into the habit of getting 2 6-packs of the strongest IPAs usually from Voodoo Ranger, Beer Hug or Elysian and drinking them over the course of 2 nights. What I didn’t know at the time was that highly fermented alcoholic drinks can release a high amount of histamines and after getting COVID for the first time, I started developing eczema which I made sure to handle in the worst ways possible. I had finished my contract with Yahoo and was at the time without any medical insurance so I let the problem get worse until I was a few weeks away from a big public event I was attending, which was when I decided to walk to an emergency room. When I realized how expensive seeing any kind of doctor was without insurance, I stopped getting any treatment and let it deteriorate further. By the end of 2025, I was in such pain and unable to do anything that I had no choice but to enroll for medical insurance for 2026 and get proper treatment.
During 2025, I started experimenting with ketamine. It provided one of the most fascinating and mysterious experiences I’ve had in my life. Aside from the physical bliss, with my eyes closed I was seeing fantastic visuals, depending on the dosage and stage in the trip, I would see visuals in different dimensions: at first in 1D, I could see a repeating pattern like galloping horses running in a single line; at 2D, I could see patterns of repeating shapes and drawings in different art styles like pencil sketches, manga, traditional Chinese paintings...; at 3D, I could see moving landscapes, huge walls that went up beyond what the eye could see; at 4D, the experience gets cinematic, whole worlds are created, characters are added, there is no dialog and everything is very chaotic but it’s like a big demonstration of visual effects; beyond 4D it starts getting spiritual, the feeling of being observed by other entities, entering a forbidden territory. There is no going beyond that because that’s when the anesthetic properties of ketamine kick in and you wake up 1 hour later left wondering what happened. None of the people I’ve shared these experiences with and were familiar with the effects of ketamine seemed to share the spectacular visuals I experienced. While researching on the subject of psychedelics, I stumbled upon the concept of aphantasia. This is a recent term for a condition first documented in 1880 by Francis Galton, described by Aldous Huxley in 1954 in The Doors of Perception and named by Adam Zeman in 2015. It is the inability to produce mental imagery. While I had documented myself about ADHD, autism, bipolar disorder and audio processing disorder, I had never considered mental visual imagery was even a thing. Imagining, visualizing meant thinking of the concept of an object or figure, its properties. I did think it was weird I couldn’t seem to remember the faces of people close to me, but that was just one more thing I had to live with. I wanted to stay careful with my ketamine use because it is very easily abused and has diminishing returns after a few consecutive uses. I spaced the sessions enough in order to not build a permanent tolerance which would negate the state of hyperphantasia a dose of ketamine could put me in (Ketamine will also cause bladder damaged if abused).
While on a tolerance break, I felt compelled to experiment with ketamine’s little cousin, the drug sold over the counter as a cough medicine known as DXM. After a quick run to CVS to grab 600mg of DXM HBr and making sure it was the only active ingredient on the label, I experienced a softer version of the effects of ketamine, I could still see mental images; they weren’t as vivid or chaotic but the effects would last longer than ketamine. While the trip was enjoyable, there were unpleasant side effects related to swallowing a bunch of propylene glycol from the CVS gel caps. It is easy to get pure DXM or DXM HBr, also known as Robotablets so I ordered some. I was trying to get the effects of the 3rd and 4th plateau which are for my weight, 900 and 1200mg of DXM HBr or 0.75 that quantity in pure DXM. The DXM experience, while somewhat similar to ketamine, is a lot less strong and lethargy inducing. It resurfaced a lot of childhood memories, I felt very lucid and clairvoyant. On May 7th 2026 at 00:27, I had the eureka moment, everything clicked.
The same day, I was listening to some recordings from Alan Watts, which I found quite inspiring and aligned with my philosophy. Since I didn’t know about him, I looked up his biography and noticed that he died quite young, at 58 and suffered from alcoholism. Last year, my uncle passed away, also too early and was a heavy drinker as well. While I never considered myself to be an alcoholic, since I could easily spend days without drinking, I’ve always admitted being a heavy drinker. Ketamine and DXM are not to be mixed with alcohol, ever. The combination can have disastrous health effects. While I wasn’t combining the two, I would still drink on the weeks I wasn’t using DXM. I was still struggling with eczema and since ketamine or DXM can have a tendency to release histamines, I wanted to make sure of something, so a few weeks ago I didn't go buy IPAs or red wine and would take solely DXM. A few days later, it was very clear alcohol was the main trigger for eczema. My skin would start healing faster, and stopped having severe rashes. This whole combination, the reminder that alcohol will come for you, sooner or later; that it was the main cause of my skin problems and the fact that it is forbidden when combined with more interesting substances caused an immediate shift. Aside from the bourbon I had at the dinner I was having to celebrate this breakthrough (at Funhouse, highly recommend if you’re in Little Tokyo), I haven’t had any alcohol, nor felt the need to have any. Like any substance, alcohol is more fun when your tolerance is low. When it stops being fun and becomes just a habit, that’s when addiction kicks in. When my tolerance to alcohol is at its lowest, a glass of wine or a cocktail at a restaurant will be much more enjoyable.
The positive effects of DXM didn’t stop at helping stop consuming alcohol. Similarly to ketamine, DXM can enhance neuroplasticity, form new neural pathways. This is the reason why ketamine clinics exist to treat depression, PTSD, anxiety and chronic pain. Ketamine did help pull me out of a depressive state. It also made me fully comfortable with the concept of death and awakened a desire to seek a spiritual journey, a real one, not the Christianity I grew up with. It introduced me to the concept of mental imagery, something that was unknown to me, like gaining a new sense. If ketamine puts you in a state between consciousness and the world of dreams, the DXM experience is much more awake. This led to bursts of creativity, a desire to learn about everything, wanting to connect more with others, pursue my life goals. Let’s be very clear, those are not direct consequences of taking those substances. All they do is block some receptors in your brain, what happens next is entirely coming from you, functioning in a different mental state. Many people use drugs for their recreational values, which is fine but chemicals can have immense powers when used with a purpose.
Next up on my list is giving treatment for ADHD another chance. After a first bad experience and not being fond of the idea of running on amphetamines every day, since I can have pretty bad insomnia already, I tried dealing with it with some life hacks and becoming indifferent to the negative effects it could have. With time, my views on chemicals changed and I became more willing to seek treatment. But it was my experience with DXM that was the final kick in the butt to get things started. I also want to learn more about aphantasia, I’ve had some very faint imagery through relaxation and meditation. There are other techniques such as image streaming that are worth experimenting with. And then, there’s nicotine, the final boss. I wish it was as easy as alcohol but nicotine’s a bitch. I guess I’ll go back to vaping for a while, that worked once already.
At 47, I wish I had done something about my mental and physical health at an earlier stage, but the important thing is that I had this breakthrough. On this night, as I realized one of my California resident passes for Disneyland expired today, I felt something truly magical happen. I felt as if the life I had always wished for was finally within reach. A rebirth, a renaissance.
Resources:
VVIQ (Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire)