Lazarus: Coming Back to Life

I was ready to disappear then Ketamine changed everything.

You were dead. Or close enough that it didn’t matter.

Not in the way they measure with heart monitors and brain scans, but in the way that makes the world close in, makes breath feel optional, makes the thought of another day unbearable. The tomb was sealed long before they noticed. The air was stale. You had stopped waiting for rescue.

And then, something intervenes.

A lozenge, chalky and bitter, dissolving under your tongue. A quiet room, a blindfold, a playlist chosen carefully to guide you inward. Maybe you found this treatment yourself, searching for anything that might make the darkness more bearable. Or maybe someone placed the call on your behalf, their voice steady when yours had already begun to fade. Either way, it’s happening. The molecules enter your bloodstream. You close your eyes, and the walls of the tomb begin to shift.

At first, it is strange. You leave your body, or your body leaves you. The usual coordinates: self, time, weight, dissolve. You are lifted, untethered. Maybe you see fractals. Maybe you see God. Maybe you see nothing at all but the absence of the usual pain.

And in this space — this suspension —something breaks.

They’ve mapped this process, you know. Researchers have watched it unfold in brain scans; the way ketamine floods the synapses with glutamate, the way it disrupts the looping circuitry of despair, the way it wakes up parts of the brain that depression left for dead. They’ve seen how, within hours, suicidal thoughts can lose their grip, how the airless room of the mind suddenly has a window cracked open.

One study, published in The American Journal of Psychiatry, found that a single dose of ketamine reduced suicidal ideation within 24 hours, its effects lasting for weeks (Wilkinson et al., 2018). In emergency rooms, patients who arrive on the edge of life are given a shot: an intravenous dose that halts the descent. The change is rapid. Those who were certain they would not make it through the night find themselves, inexplicably, wanting to live.

But you don’t need a brain scan or a study to tell you what you already know.

You were gone. And now you are here.

Lazarus, come forth.

You don’t spring from the tomb. You stumble. The burial cloths are still wrapped around you. The habits of thought, old reflexes of despair. It is not a clean resurrection. The world is bright, too bright. The air is unfamiliar in your lungs. But still, you are standing. And for the first time in what feels like forever, forward is an option.

This is what they don’t always tell you: The miracle is not just in the rising. It is in the return.

Ketamine can pull you from the depths, but it will not teach you how to walk. It will not tell you what to do with this life that has been handed back to you. That part is yours. The neural pathways opened in this state: new, flexible, full of possibility, will close again unless they are walked upon. Unless they are reinforced with meaning, with action, with care.

You will need to learn how to live again.

And this, too, has been studied. The research tells us that integration matters. That therapy, reflection, connection, and practice determine whether the effects last. That those who step into this opening with intention, with curiosity, with a willingness to engage, are the ones who find real transformation.

So here you are. Alive when you thought you wouldn’t be. Called forth when you thought no one was listening. The stone has been rolled away.

What will you do with the life you’ve been given back?

(Wilkinson, S. T., Ballard, E. D., Bloch, M. H., Mathew, S. J., Murrough, J. W., Feder, A., & Sanacora, G. (2018). The Effect of a Single Dose of Intravenous Ketamine on Suicidal Ideation: A Systematic Review and Individual Participant Data Meta-Analysis. American Journal of Psychiatry, 175(2), 150-158.)