To Friends Behind A Frontier: A Long Letter About A Brain Healing Breakthrough (With Many Twists And Turns)

It’s 11:04 pm here, and I’m frankly ecstatic; I can’t go to bed without sharing this news.

It may be more prudent to wait a few days to see if this victory sticks, but I’m not the prudent type.

I believe I have exited the black forest of chronic illness, which I sometimes called “mystery syndrome—” it was plaguing me for decades, but with particular oppressiveness since 2008.

A Rough, Simplified Explanation Of What Was Wrong With Me

Some of the labels I have used to describe my affliction over the years include: Chronic fatigue, brain fog, de-realization, C-PTSD, ADHD, anhedonia, disassociation.

It was not my body so much as my brain.

Since 2020, it took on additional features, one of which might be called “severing.”

I often told practitioners things like: “I’m unresponsive, like being in shock, like after a car crash. Like I’m trapped underwater.” “Something is wrong with my brain.”

Or, I’d say:

“I have no neurotransmitter coordination,” or “I can’t understand basic instructions,” or “I can’t follow through on anything,” or, “I’m email blind, I’m email phobic,” “I can’t understand what people are saying to me,” “everything gives me anxiety,” “I don’t have dopamine,” “I can’t make meaning out of things,” “I am facing personality collapse,” and so on and so on. Recently I added “disassociative amnesia,” to the list.

What on earth was this? And why did I sometimes get better only to be returned to the dungeon again, even when I ate like a saint and did everything right?

A lyme expert would say, “You’re describing untreated lyme,” but Tom Cowan told me there is no literature connecting lyme spirochete with illness, and that I should never use that word in association with my condition—never say it.

In any case, it was a complex neurological descent, losing more and more “dopamine,” becoming more and more self-alienated, and numb.

It felt as though something was scissoring through my connective neurons.

PTSD experts would say: “You’re describing untreated PTSD.”

It was a kind of milky cosmos of not-here-ness, encroaching ghost-hood.

There was no connection between “important” and “remember.” I couldn’t make meaning out of anything, and sank deeper and deeper into a frightening fog, where nothing was differentiated. Good, bad, happy, sad, important—

I could not trust myself to remember just about anything, because the neurotransmitters that connect meaning with memory were seemingly off-line. Broken, somehow.

I had to tell my publisher and my agent in 2023, the year my book came out, that I would need repeated reminders in advance of interviews. One hour before, and also, 5 minutes before. It was mortifying.

Once, in 2023, I was sitting in Doug’s back yard in Granby, and Vera Sharav called me. I answered the phone, thinking she was just calling to say hello. “W’e’re all waiting for you,” she said.

“What? Huh?”

I had not “registered” that I was scheduled to give a presentation on AIDS in a Zoom group. I didn’t merely forget, I had no trace of this event in my brain.

I jumped on the Zoom, presented my case, and it was fine, but why did I not “remember” or know I had agreed to this?

It was like this with everything.

Like, of you can imagine, everything floating away from you like balloons, nothing tethered. “Today I need to do this this and this.”

I started telling people I had this weird syndrome and to please make sure I got pinged with reminders, and to please not be angry. The syndrome seemed identical to rude indifference, to everything and everybody, but it wasn’t. It was as though my neurotransmitters had stopped connecting altogether—stopped speaking to each other.

A cursory background: I had the entire laundry list of brain challenges, since birth—every kind of off the charts family trauma, displacement, malnutrition, sugar addiction, massive mercury assault at age 11 (11 fillings in 4 months,) leading into decades of outright terror during the decades of the AIDS war, and bracketed by repeated exposures to black mold, cell towers on my roof, and in 2021, a near death experience that I now think was an attempt on my life by way of targeting, possibly electromagnetic.

I believe I was targeted also in 2008, when the first mind collapse occurred, from one moment to the next. More about all this, maybe, another time. It took me years to realize I may have had my life targeted, and I promise to present my reasons for finally concluding this. It has to do with PCR, Kary Mullis, and some information unearthed recently by Davis Rasnick. But this has to wait for another time, another post.

In 2013 I was diagnosed with C-PTSD and all previous diagnoses were removed. I’d been hospitalized with suicidal ideation, twice, but was never one to go to Home Depot, or betray God.

I fought my way out, slowly, by trial and error, being willing to try anything under the sun, just to have “dopamine” or an ounce of self-acceptance.

I generally refused all SSRI medications, to the despair of the various doctors.

I had something like 12 intravenous ketamine sessions, starting around 2014—I went into debt to pay for every manner of detox, trauma therapy and brain healing you can imagine. Crates of supplements. Endless dietary changes. Endless rounds of haphazard chelation, parasite cleanses, fasts, somatic healing—if you can name it, I have tried it. I was diagnosed with Lyme disease in 2021, as de-realization escalated, but had been dragging something like that around since 1990 so didn’t take it very seriously. From ketamine, I got a few hours of relief, but no cigar. The doctor who runs the NY clinic, Dr. Brooks, was so kind and caring, I think he provided most of the gains I got. He held my hand when they put the needle in, and said: “It’s not a horse tranquilizer,” which made me laugh. I didn’t care if it was. I loved being 100% dis-associated for that hour, in a cosmos, floating. You know, on ketamine, that you’re not dead, it’s not scary, but you lose vision, time, space, everything. If you listen to classical music, you experience being the notes, and you work things out that you can’t explain when it’s over. Dr. Brooks took me on only after a rigorous interview about my early childhood; Ketamine only works on people whose dendrites were decimated in early childhood. Dr. Brooks had photos of mouse dendrites before and after ketamine on his wall. He told me mine were “nubs,” like the photo of the “before” mouse.

When, in 2021, I was near death—searing pain in arm bones that made me scream, vomiting, 30 lb weight loss, dizziness—it was he who said I must go to the hospital. He thought I had been poisoned.

After that event, all gains I had made in previous years, were lost again. My mind was as though covered in a casing of some kind of.. I don’t know. Muck. Tar. Like the scene in Withnail and I where Withnail says:

“I feel unusual.” (Around 4:10)

People were constantly angry with me. I lost almost all my friends.

I was “out of it.”

I’ll give you one slightly comical example: My car broke down, in 2023, and I rented a car. I put it in a garage in NY one night, and the next day, they gave me a different car, and I drove off. The car that was my rental car was silver, and this car was white, but I didn’t notice. I didn’t notice the strange stuff in the car that didn’t seem to be mine. This is what happens when you have no neurotransmitter function. It was mother’s day, the next day, and the police called. I was upstate with a friend. They said I had another woman’s car, and had to head right back. My friend Diana drove in with me and I knew I was in for an attack. She tried to stand between me and the woman whose car I had (had been given, by the parking lot attendant) but she pushed through to me and screamed bloody murder right up in my face. What kind of idiot can’t tell they’re driving a car of a different color than their rental car etc. She was screaming F bombs, telling me I had ruined her mother’s day.

My syndrome was almost indistinguishable from idiocy, for sure. It was almost always women screaming at me, so I developed a fear of women. Angry women. Because women get angry when you don’t stay on top of details—time and space.

In Spain, it’s much better, because there is no such thing as “late” or Calvinist late shaming. I score toward the top of the family here, (with time) but was always at the bottom back home.

My father and I went to Moscow on a propaganda trip for the Soviet government (tell you later) in 1985, and he was limping the whole trip, in terrible pain. Only when we got back to NY did we discover he had not removed the wad of paper in the left shoe—I’d bought him new shoes and clothes. He once mistook a bottle of white-out for his eye drops and put white out in his eyes. We took him to the ER and it worked out ok. So maybe it was hereditary, this advancing spaciness, to some extent. My uncle Jerry once reported his car stolen because he forgot where he had parked it. Nobody found it charming in me though, they just mistook me always for somebody who was choosing to bungle things. Lateness, by the way, is neuro-damage, not, as Americans believe, selfishness.

Around 2012, after my divorce, I decided I liked, no loved, a guy based on the fact that we had agreed to meet in Washington DC, but he booked a flight to Atlanta. “Your ticket says Atlanta,” I said, overjoyed. So we met in Atlanta. I enjoy mistakes, they make me feel less bad. Like others have this problem too.

It had so many ways of expressing itself, this strange brain syndrome. Objects have always been particularly troublesome: Where they go, what they mean, why I bought them. Clutter, mess, borderline hoarding, and abject inability to put a home in order.

You get the idea.

In Spain, I began to lose my ability to “show up,” as in—Zoom calls, the planned podcast—this was when I added “personality collapse” to the list, and even saw a psychiatrist, who gave me an anti-depressant. I always take them for about one week and then quit. The writing was unaffacted.

I was “exhausted,” all the time, listless, and too blank to feel “depressed,” just more and more inexplicably disconnected.

Days were engulfed by the endless battle with objects, and trying to keep the small apartment in order, clean up after the cats—and the continued addiction to seeking out cures, potions, detoxes, sound healings, demonic exorcisms, and so on and so on.

My son grew frustrated, at my inability to stop myself from flinging any money I had at endless new miracle cures. But I could not live with the syndrome—it was invisible, yet pernicious, and not at all my own invention. It was real.

Every test I ever took showed off the charts cortisol. They literally could not believe the results, and once I broke a machine, from my cortisol levels, which caused the practitioner, for some reason, to literally fall down laughing. This was in New Mexico.

I missed buses, trains, buses, lost things, froze—and lost my entire identity, now that I no longer had any assignments. I lived as a ghost. I hid from people, more and more. I used to get dopamine from hunting big stories, but that went away too, after 2008. (I was zapped, by something, in 2008, and lost all architecture of mind, interior, “self,” and agency, from one minute to the next.)

Truth be told I think it was from decades of esclating attacks, in media, in courthouses, from furious, screaming AIDS activists, demanding we all be “crushed.” (Their word) and ensuring I would have no reputation left when it was over, and no career. No income. No future. It had a supernatural quality to it—a kind of murderous. wrathful Erlkönig coming for us all.

Once when they put electrodes on my brain, maybe around 2015, it came back that I had a big band of red trauma down the middle, and the front was all but dead. No lobes were connecting and only one was even working, but I forget which one.

One de-tox practitioner, Jacquie, in New Jersey, looked at my brain scan and said: “You can’t do anything,” shaking her head. “You can’t write.” I objected. “No. I can actually. I can write. I just can’t do anything else.”

“You can’t do anything,” sounded right. That’s what I had. “Can’t do anything” syndrome. Surrounded by people who could do things.

I created a life of hiding, a very small, limited life. I was terrified of being asked to do things. (Except care for my father and stepmother—that gave me purpose, for years.)

The following things gave me relief at times: Ice baths, carnivore diet, fasting, and methylene blue. But our friend Marcy Pollan explained why Methylene blue is a threat, to neurotransmitter architecture over time (we can debate the pros and cons later) so I stopped cold.

Marcy has been a saint. She devoted herself to my case, at no charge, and got me on ASEA (cellular redox) back in March. I had an initial spike in energy, which later flat-lined, but I kept taking it. Marcy, gifted me four bottles of it, when I could not afford it, but most importantly, she made sure I understood she would not leave my side until I was healed. I had a lot of abandonment panic running in my mind, since being super spaced out is a recipe for being abandoned by people.

Once it took me two days to locate where I could pick up my ASEA box—way up in the hills of Albaicin. Some days I got only one single thing done. By the time I figured it out, the day was gone. My Spanish grows at a snail’s pace, and this country, for some reason, imposes a kind of communism around mail—receiving mail.

Did I sound “normal” in my writing this past year?

That was the one thing that didn’t go to total mush.

The syndrome had somehow spared some corner of my brain that allowed me to process the world, and compose words around what I saw, heard and read. But I lived in fear of this place (The Truth Barrier) also collapsing, since “collapse” and “ruin” were the main features of the syndrome’s footprint.

Clues, Colombo

About a year and a half ago, in NYC, I had gone to donate blood to a child who needed cancer surgery, and whose mother didn’t want him to get mRNA blood. They rejected my blood, for “low platelets”—and I was carnivore at that time. The clue was this: I was not absorbing nutrients through my digestive system.

Recent days:

I had begun to take steep hikes in the hills above Albacin, in the broiling sun—between one hour and 2.5 hours—and was proud of this, but got a bad heat rash so stopped for a few days. Still—something was happening. Me? Hike? For 2.5 hours? Marcy was excited.

ASEA seemed to be creating some kind of floor, instead of a dead-drop, energetically.

It heals your whole system, your mitochondria. Re-stiches your neurotransmitters.

I told Marcy I was feeling more energy, was doing these hikes, as well as returning to daily ice baths—not as heroic in Andalucia in summer as they seemed in New England.

And yet—the anhedonia, the brain disconnect persisted.

Consider ASEA, perhaps, the first line of attack.

I also added daily St. John’s Wort and ginseng, on my daughter in law’s suggestion. More energy improvements.

But if I am to tell this story subjectively, there was one missing piece—one I had never tried before: Intramuscular B-12.

Yet another Annie (who you will meet) a nurse from the UK, who specializes in B-12 had given me, on Sylvia’s suggestion, a free consulation, and said, after hearing all this, that I almost certainly had a B-12 deficiency. Despite going between carnivore and keto-vore for years. People often can’t absorb B-12, she explained, but intramuscular injections bypass the gut. (My gut health has always been poor, no matter how much bone broth I drank.) We ordered the syringes and the B-12, many weeks ago, but the B-12 got sent back in customs. Annie persisted—sent it via Ireland—for some reason that caused it to arrive. I gave myself the first injection 4 days ago. Nothing.

Day two, nothing.

Day three, I felt a tingling in my feet, which Annie said was a great sign.

Today was day 4, and a few hours after my shot—bang. My whole brain changed. It was like it turned to crystal, from a previous state of lead.

My energy soared. I spent the day cleaning and could not stop. (Unheard of.)

All my endless piles of detritus were on a big table and I sorted them all out, placed things in bins, cleaned the fridge, pruned the plants, and felt alive. The shame—the sticky, dark shame, and self loathing, disappeared, as though by Windex. I was out. Out of the nightmare.

I could see.

I could see what objects were, where they were supposed to be. I could move, bend down, pick things up. I could answer emails. I could remember, and make lists, and tackle things one by one. I wasn’t sad, or confused, or exhausted. Or scared, or introverted.

My energy was not dragging, it synchronized with impulses and actions. I called my sister, raving, that the thing I constantly talk about not having (get it done brain) had miraculously appeared, making me feel I was a new person. The person hidden all these years beneath the endless brain fog, shame and paralysis.

If somebody had called and asked me to go to a Flamenco show I would have understood why people do such things, and agreed to go, happily.

Meaning.

Dopamine!

When you exit “depression,” you are re-born. Just to break even—to have the kind of coordinated brain that it always seemed to me everybody else had—an organized, humming brain—this was, for me, nothing short of miraculous. I’d been a high functioning zombie, always doing things with no electric charge, only understanding what I had to do, must do, never feeling the charge of dopamine/noropinephrin.

Tonight, I walked to the store to buy a replacement cable for my phone and I was present, vividly present, able to see people’s eyes, behold the beauty around me, without that lump of dread in my chest, that always made me feel cut off from the world, strangely doomed.

In the supermarket, I was able to select items quickly, find my wallet quickly, smile at people, chat, and walk home with a new sense of almost otherworldly freedom.

NORMAL.

I’m writing this, in this somewhat borderline hyper-excited tone, because I feel I have risen from a grave. No less.

I called Annie to tell her, to ask if it could be…the B-12, and she said yes, this is typical of people who have been B-12 deficient for years if not decades, because of mal-absorbtion, something to do with stomach acid. It’s something to do with myelin sheaths on the nerves, and cholesterol in the brain. Typical to soar on the fourth day. For some it takes weeks, or even months, before they feel it. sz

We agreed I will keep taking one shot a day until I can go to a few times a week. I asked if I could interview her, and I meant it, meaning, I wasn’t “severed” and saying things I knew I could not follow through on.

I wanted to.

Somewhere between the ASEA, the sun-hiking, the St. John’s Wort, the ginseng, and the B-12, I found “eureka.” Since all these elements were new, I want to distribute possible credit between them.

I’m just reporting how it happened: Maybe some people recover with ASEA alone (this too, we will discuss, on the new podcast, the “Make Yourself Healthy Again” podcast) but I feel for me, the B-12 was the synergistic master-stroke. Again, possibly made possible also by the ASEA. But Annie says if you are B-12 deficient and do not inject it, nothing will cure the B-12 deficiency, except…B-12 injections.

So: I was B-12 deficient.

Probably for decades. You might be too. It’s quite common.

And this was the one thing I had never tried.

I have crates of supplements in storage in the states, which I refuse to through out, since they all represent a ray of hope I had at one time or another.

But didn’t I claim carnivore had cured my syndrome? Yes—I still swear by it.

However, I found that when I came to Spain, it stopped working.

I had a new round of mystery symptoms here—deeper fatigue, nose bleeds, eye swelling, and inexplicable anhedonia.

I wondered if it was the altitude, the heat, or maybe the stress of displacement or the stress of being in a foreign country, not yet speaking the language, other than to get around. I was beginning to worry I was maybe having a nervous breakdown of some sort, losing all hope to “get things done” or move forward. Hence the dopamine chase.

It’s finally over—solved.

What I can tell you is that you will be able to trust me more, going forward. I will be much more present, and the things I say will happen will actually happen, here. Before, I was concealing this syndrome, best I could. I was always trapped inside a kind of bubble, never connected, energetically, to what I was doing, only pushing ahead anyway.

So again, and to clarify, you may have seen me say I was healed before, from ice baths, from carnivore—but never like this. Never like this.

MYHA Podcast will be where we comb over all this, in exhaustive detail. Why some people get better from this or that or the other and others don’t. All the healing churches—we will listen to all, and let people tell their stories. We won’t be adamant about much, except maybe that trauma blocks healing, so no bullying of people in different healing congregations, no matter how crazy they may seem.

Our first podcast will be with Annie, about B-12. Our second will be about ASEA, and blood microscopy, with Marcy. I’ll try to get the other Annie to come on and discuss the frequency balancing (which I can’t speak to since I never got my headphones in order, yet.) Different modalities will work for different people. I believe most people are missing accurate diagnostics.

Gratitude

I want to devote much of the rest of my life to helping people transcend whatever the devil it was I “had” all those years, that stole so much of my life, wrecked so many of my relationships, starting with my relationship with myself. Hear them, and try to find each person’s needle in the haystack, now that I have found mine.

Yes—I was saying we should make ourselves healthy again, in advance of having achieved it.

Now I have achieved it. I got some answers. I can pay them forward.

I am endlessly grateful to all my healing angels—all women—who never gave up on me, never abandoned me when I was broke, never stopped believing I would make it.

I suppose this entails a risk—the risk I will crash again.

I just don’t think I will, this time.

In fact, I refuse.

Here’s the poem again:

To Friends Behind A Frontier

1

I wrote so meagerly to you. But what I couldn’t write

swelled and swelled like an old-fashioned airship

and drifted away at last through the night sky.

2

The letter is now at the censor’s. He lights his lamp.

In the glare my words fly up like monkeys on a grille,

rattle it, stop, and bare their teeth.

3

Read between the lines. We’ll meet in 200 years

when the microphones in the hotel walls are forgotten

and can at last sleep, become trilobites.

—Tomas Tranströmer,

Paths, 1973

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