This is an excerpt from Breaking Awake: A Reporter's Search for a New Life, and a New World, Through Drugs. It’s out on September 9th, 2025.

-Order it here in the US.

-Order it here in the UK.

-Come to my book launch in Brooklyn, where I’ll be in conversation with Julia Hava of the Binchtopia podcast.

Breaking Awake is a work of braided memoir and reporting that examines why so many of us turn to substances of all kinds—SSRIs, opiates, ketamine—to survive modern capitalism. It starts with the story of me nearly being killed in the Charlottesville, Virginia neo-Nazi terror attack and my subsequent mental breakdown, which happened one random day in a hotel room in Oakland, California. And then the book gets into how I recovered and envisioned a new life for myself, largely through using drugs. Along the way, you’ll meet meth dealers in Vancouver, people who’ve been on SSRIs since they were nine years old, ravers doing drugs with names you’ve never heard of in an attempt to see into the future, and more! W Magazine just named it a must-read book.

Enjoy :)

A year and a half after that day in Oakland, the day my entire life collapsed, I am living in Philadelphia, with two roommates I do not really know and honestly have very little desire to know, in a shitty row house with those renovations so common these days—the gray and the laminate and cheap compressed wood that looks like plastic, or is plastic; the kind that makes life feel suicidally devoid of beauty.

And I feel stable but not good, able to live life but with no desire to live life if this is what life is like.

But at this point, I associate survival with this stability, and that stability with boringness, so I have made my life as boring as possible. I have stopped drinking; I have stopped doing cocaine. I have stopped going out most nights; I see friends once or twice a week. I see a therapist three times a week; I try to do some menial work, writing a few articles for news outlets, just enough to pay rent, but I have lost all ambition for anything except stability. Stability is my work now. I spend many hours a week watching Internet videos about yoga, or meditation, or aligning my chakras. I go to yoga once a week. I go to the gym. I hate my life.

So when a friend invites me to a party at a loft on the other side of the city one night and says she will be doing acid, I am both excited and terrified. I want so badly to leave my gray world, yet I am convinced that if I do, I will destabilize myself, fall back down down down, and have to totally start over again. My brain feels dead, but I am also at least physically alive, and I cannot take this fact for granted.

But something in me tells me to go, so I go.

I wear a black jean skirt with frayed edges and a ripped up T-shirt and a bright yellow windbreaker and a short, purple wig with bangs, my outfit willing my mind into party mode; it’s giving off fake-it-till-you- make-it; the thing I’m faking is that I am a person who knows how to have fun, that my brain is capable of processing enjoyment.

I arrive at the party and walk up to my friend and she gives me half a tab of LSD. It’s been at least five years since I’ve done it. I take it, dissolving it on my tongue, and wait. Thirty minutes pass. In that time, I am accosted by a random woman who likes my skirt and thinks that because I am dressed the way I am that I would not mind being touched by her. I also have a boring conversation with some man. I walk around the loft.

Everyone seems boring. I am bored. This was not the jump-start back to funness I had hoped for.

So I go back to my friend; I ask for the other half of the tab. She cautions me. She tells me to wait. It’s strong, she says. I tell her to just give it to me, so she does. Whoops.

An hour later I am standing in a dark, small, empty park alone, somewhere near my house. It is winter and the trees look like skeletons. I do not see faces but the trunks somehow remind me of my ancestors. They are telepathically asking me to join them. The branches their hands and fingers, above me they whoosh around until they all blend together into a brown-and-gray ceiling, trapping me in this death box. I attempt to walk toward home but feel stuck, physically. My feet have sunk into the ground. Breathing becomes thinner and faster. Skin feels prickly and coarse. I am becoming a tree. I am becoming one with the earth. I have a terrifying thought: This is death. Not that I am dying, but that I have become death itself, that I will exist as death only, as a citizen of deathworld, even if my organs and blood are technically alive.

The panic is passing now and morphing rapidly into something that feels much worse—acceptance. Let the earth take me, I think. Let me become a tree. Let me merge.

And then, the moon.

It peers out between the swaying branches, its bright, blue rays illuminating what feels like just my body—like I am in a spotlight, or under a streetlamp. Which then I realize, in a brief moment of lucidity, is because I am under a streetlamp. It is not the moon. I do not know where the moon is. But nonetheless the effect is the same. The light is life. It blinds me.

The outside world vanishes.

My vision becomes internal.

My world is now red and pulsating. Coming into focus slowly I can see my brain. I am floating above it in this crimson, viscous sky; I can see my mind’s grooves like the tributaries of a river. I zoom in. And to my surprise I can see the coffin I am trapped in. It’s on a map, no, a timeline—I am stuck in the coffin, but I see there is life on either side of it, that this is not my final resting place.

I realize that my near-death experiences have placed me here, that I am death because I have nearly died (twice). Of course I live in deathworld. What other world could I live in?

And then the solution becomes so obvious that I almost feel embarrassed: I must walk out of the coffin, out of deathworld, toward the future. Eventually this will all be a memory if I just keep walking. But I must get as far away from deathworld as I possibly can, and fast. There is nothing for me here. I may feel trapped, but I am not trapped. I cannot give in to that feeling. I must fight it like I am fighting to survive, because I am. I must leave my ancestors and the trees and the branches and the dirt behind.

Okay, I say weakly.

My external vision returns. I am still in the park, but my feet feel lighter now. I realize I can move. Slowly, like I am relearning how to walk. But then my feet burst back to full function. Across the park I see my block and my house and I run toward it as fast as I can. I burst past the front door. My dog is waiting for me. While I was gone he has apparently turned into a lion. I am surprised by this. But also comforted, because he and his mane and his aura feel strong and secure. I hold on to him tightly and absorb his confidence. He tells me we’ll walk out of this together.

Okay, I trust you, I say, and thank him.

I am still scared, but I feel resolute. Tomorrow I will begin my walk away from death.

I take a Klonopin to turn my brain off. Enough of this for now.

I awake suddenly the next morning with tears pouring down my cheeks, sobbing to the point of choking, as I rapidly come to the realization that I am finally and really and fully alive.

Thanks for reading. You can order Breaking Awake here.

P.S. Here’s my dog Remi who helped me through the acid trip. I miss him so, so much.