A Really Good Day

Ayelet Waldman has long been “held hostage by the vagaries of mood.” She's combatted her mercurial nature with a “shit-ton of drugs” that goes on for half a page and reads like the advance battalion of some YA dystopian sci-fi novel with names like Celexa, Lexapro, Prozac, Zoloft, Cymbalta, Effexor, and more. All legal but not altogether effective.

Desperate to alleviate not only her own suffering but the suffering of the people she loves that have had to deal with her fractured moods she embarks on a 30 day microdosing trial with 10 micrograms of LSD on every third day.

Understand that Ayelet is the type of person I can't handle at close quarters. She's the oversharing dinner guest prone to tangents and manic bouts of neurosis. At 52 she's the “totally basic” woman in line ahead of you at Starbucks ordering a skinny vanilla latte that seems a misspelled name away from demanding to speak with the manager.

In other words she's fallible and entirely human. She's not hiding behind a pose or putting herself at a scientific journalist's remove. She'll drop her credentials as a federal public defender, a consultant for the Drug Policy Alliance, and a law school professor but also cop to her affluent white privilege that lets her partake, and write about, a Schedule 1 drug.

And while we'll get books from Michael Pollan talking about the efficacy of psychedelics to treat depression, addiction and end of life anxiety, or breathless articles about how techbros are hacking their productivity with microdosing I like Waldman's approach.

Microdosing helped with her chronic shoulder pain, increased her productivity and leveled out her moods to the point her kids even comment on her new chill. She's the soccer mom, the PTA chair, the Facebook user clipping articles on her timeline - in other words the perfect vector to begin the process of normalizing these long maligned drugs.