Victory Has Defeated Me
The psychedelic journey behind 21 million views.
After my last two videos both got several million views within quick succession, I had a psychological breakdown. Paralyzed with depression, having binged 264 episodes of ER, I kept hearing Bane in my ear, “Victory has defeated you.”1 But I wasn’t actually hallucinating Bane. I don’t have interesting mental illnesses. I have the banal ones. The ones everyone has, only more so. Anxiety and depression. When I wrote that essay (Grippy Socks) about being locked up in the loony bin, I framed the ending as if it was the end of a journey. As if it was a miracle cure. It’s a story I so desperately wanted to be true. But the truth is I’m not cured. I still have bouts of depression. Clearly I’m doing something right though. 21 million views and 250,000 subscribers with only 13 videos over the past 3 years. But I have been white-knuckling through anxiety and depression to do it. This channel started from a mushroom trip and now I have recovered from depression, at least temporarily, with ketamine therapy. This is the story, as honestly as I can tell it, of that journey and where I’m at. I kept trying to write fiction or essays, trying to make something polished and primed for mass consumption like I do on YouTube, but it just keeps ending up being vain and dishonest. I suspect there are some nearly invisible (to me) patterns I keep repeating that cause that and eventually send me into depression. They say daylight is the best disinfectant.
Some background. I live alone. Very alone. I’ve lived alone in an RV trailer with my cat for the past 4 years. I don’t live on the streets, but I move from campground to campground every 3 weeks because of how my membership works. They’re actually really nice campgrounds with pools and trails. I live this way because it’s cheap and it’s outside the city and quiet. It’s allowed me to get this channel up and running without financial support of anyone and the psychological space I needed. I could probably afford a shitty apartment, but I’m turning 40 this year and there’s no fucking way I’m living in a shitty apartment anymore. I’m just gonna keep on saving until I can buy some land. But it’s not just about the money. I also get to travel to different parts of the country, looking for the place I want to settle down. Or you could say that I’m running away from something.
COVID was a motherfucker, man. But trauma isn’t the cause of my problems. Trauma just pushes us to the brink. It reveals the cracks. Painfully. Just before COVID, my mom had died of cancer and I had broken up with my girlfriend of 5 years. For a long time I didn’t understand why I broke up with her. I think it has something to do with being locked into a mindset I was unable to grow from because the relationship had locked me into the knocked out version of myself. You could call it toxic masculinity, but calling it that shuts down the insight into it. Calling it that is othering. It makes those men into the others when in reality it comes from the same source in everyone, but has different expressions in women and men. We look to our parents for safety and security and love. And usually the ultimate safety is the father. The buck stops with dad. At least that was the case for me. My mom could never hold down a job. She was unstable. I knew from my earliest memories that she was unreliable. But when your dad is really immature too, when you are really immature from growing up with immature parents, you panic. He panics. And you shut down. So you live in this state of shutdown, having to provide for your family, having people depend on you. Having to fight the fights, literally and figuratively. You never learned how to be a human under pressure. You were too young when you first felt unsafe. You subconsciously sensed your parents weren’t trustworthy and your brain stem, your limbic system, kicked in like it does when you get punched on the button and knocked out. Your body says “I’ll take it from here” and you’re so young you have no idea this happened. “It’s called a changeover. The movie goes on, and nobody in the audience has any idea.”2 It’s not generational trauma. Trauma implies there was some event. Trauma externalizes it. Trauma is a thing–this is the absence of a thing. It’s generational ignorance. Emotional ignorance. It’s really hard to grow up without a parent who’s grown up.
So COVID hit and I lost all of my work. I had already been living paycheck to paycheck as a freelance camera op and cinematographer and work was so slow I was driving Uber up until the day of the shutdown. I ended up moving back in with my dad. Which was a huge mistake. I mean you gotta do what you gotta do, but that shit will fuck you up. Back into this alcoholic toxic recursive cycle of dependence when you know something is wrong, but the 5-year-old in your brain wants safety and love but isn’t really getting either. My dad had found a way to live with that. Alcohol. Some sort of alcoholic equilibrium. He’s more alone than me in his 80s, not a single meaningful relationship. Sure he’s got friends, but they’re all these toxic, sycophantic relationships. But he just doesn’t seem to care. I do. I don’t know why I can see it but he can’t, so I had to get out. So I bought a trailer. Got ripped off. Bought a salvaged diesel truck, rebuilt it, and I was free to move. Then I started burning bridges like I was America dropping napalm in Vietnam. Not giving a fuck. Almost everyone I worked with. I even told famous people to go fuck himself. This was my scorched earth period.
During that period, before I got the RV campground membership and the truck, I parked my trailer for a couple of months at an old friend from high school’s house. A female friend. She had dropped out of high school and had some kids and now had a house and a good husband up in the desert outside of LA. She’s the female version of what’s wrong with my dad. I dated her briefly in high school. I should say I’m pretty attractive I guess. I grew up ugly and fat until I hit puberty. I remember wishing harder than I have ever wished for anything to be attractive to girls. And I got it. But changing on the outside doesn’t mean you change on the inside. “Residual self-image.”3 I never had enough self-esteem to really know it until it was too late. (BTW that One Direction song “You Don’t Know You’re Beautiful” is completely different for guys than it is for girls. With girls it’s charming and cute, but with guys... it’s off-putting and creepy. We’re the predators, not women! How many women have (sometimes literally) thrown themselves at me and I, so oblivious, just keep walking.) I’m just recently starting to realize that most of my platonic relationships with women (and gay men) have been influenced by it. People do it subconsciously. We all know the business guy who hires a type. “Steve sure hires a lot of hot young blondes.” We all do it. Women and men. I always wondered why I was working for a lot of female producers. We want the people we’re attracted to around us even if we don’t fuck them. One of my first gigs was flying around the world shooting video that I was absolutely unqualified for, and I realize now it’s because my boss was gay and liked having hot boys around. So that combined with her immaturity meant she wanted to be something like my mom. She didn’t want to help me from some altruistic place. She wanted to influence me. To have some power over me so she could fill that empty hole in herself that three kids didn’t fix, and she just keeps trying. But this isn’t about her psychology. The point is, it comes from the same place of emotional ignorance. Eventually I told her to go fuck herself too.
I had been on Zoloft (an SSRI) since shortly after I broke up with my girlfriend, about 2018. I’ve had mild depression my whole life, but that was the first time I really felt suicidal and sought professional mental health services. The problem is no one, not even PhD psychologists, really understand depression. At least not in a holistic way. Not in a way that can be integrated. Maybe there are some really good psychologists out there who see it, who grok it, and who have the skill to interpret another person’s problem, but if they exist they are rare and usually don’t bother themselves with clinical services. I’ve never run into one. And all the books I’ve read never seem to bridge the gap. Putting the pieces together from your own life, recognizing, understanding, adapting is a skill that people who are children of emotionally immature parents do not have. It’s a skill almost no one has. It’s so hard to see yourself objectively. It might not even be possible to come out of a loop like that on your own. You’re in a bubble, “a glass case of emotion.”4 Zoloft just numbs the pain. Zoloft doesn’t cure anything. SSRIs are condoms for your emotions. Even if they do work beyond the placebo effect (and there is doubt on even that5), a pill isn’t going to fix your emotional problems. The only thing that can break you out of the cycle, in my experience, is psychedelics. I had quit the Zoloft around 2022 and shortly thereafter started psychedelics.
I started with LSD. I only tripped on LSD once, and it was nice, it did have some therapeutic effect, I think. But it was mostly a head high. It didn’t seem to go below the surface. Then I had read about the research done at Johns Hopkins on psilocybin. So I grew my own mushrooms. I’m a DIY kind of guy... I have yet to synthesize LSD or DMT, but growing stuff I can do. The genetics take care of everything. During COVID, I grew my 6 legally allowed plants of cannabis and ended up with like 15 pounds of weed. Most of which my dad ate, tablespoon of coconut-infused oil at a time. He went through the equivalent of like $3,000 of weed butter in a couple months. I don’t even like cannabis. It gives me panic attacks. I just was trying everything. As for the mushrooms, I figured if I grew them myself, I knew they were pure. Don’t do anything illegal. But just in case anyone is thinking about trying this, I just want to echo the sage advice from a long lineage of drug experimenters:
You can always take more, you can’t take less.
This is the golden rule of psychonauts and experimenters and it has treated me well. The other thing is intention is extremely important. You can’t just take drugs and go hiking with your friends and hope magic happens. That’s how Midsommar happens. No, follow a protocol. I wish I had followed the Hopkins protocol more closely. I mostly took it and went on hikes. Started small. Not enough to barely even feel anything. And you have to understand at this point I was so fucked up. Depressed. Anxious. Binge drinking. (Though the shrooms kind of kill that desire to drink for a month or two.) Reading my journals now, there was a lot of dumb shit I was thinking. As I suspect there is dumb shit I am thinking now. But I kept trying. That’s the real difference between me and my dad: I really wanted to find the truth. I wanted it to burn away my mind. I mean I think partly why I started psychedelics is I was okay with dying. I wanted to be someone completely different if that’s what they did. And to be honest I’m a little disappointed they didn’t do that. I’m also a little disappointed I never saw any crazy hallucinations. (BTW That’s why we call them psychedelics and not hallucinogens now, because they don’t always cause hallucinations. Hallucinations are things that are not there. Visual distortions are not hallucinations. In fact, if you do see shit that’s not there, it’s beginning to be thought that that means you have some level schizophrenia and shouldn’t be taking psychedelics.) But wanting a drug that causes that total eraser effect, that’s probably that same inkling that makes me want to drink to oblivion, that also makes me want Zoloft or another pill to fix everything.
I also tried 2C-B a few times. If I wanted to do a psychedelic recreationally (which I don’t do BTW), it would be 2C-B. It feels like it goes a little more beneath the surface than LSD, more emotional. But not nearly as deep or therapeutic as psilocybin. Eventually I started taking heroic doses of mushrooms. Nothing crazy, probably about 3 or 4 grams. Which maybe that’s a lot to some people, but it’s in the therapeutic range. That’s about the dosage they did in the Hopkins studies. Anyone not taking that much is probably doing it for recreational purposes. I never understood why people would take mushrooms for fun. In my experience, if you’re doing it right, it’s mostly not fun. It’s brutal. I’m not sure if the potency of my shrooms was variable or the trips were just influenced by other factors like set and setting, but the strength seemed to vary widely. Set and setting, BTW, if you haven’t heard those terms before, are a key part of psychedelic therapy. It’s how you get therapeutic effects and avoid bad trips. Though to be honest, almost every single time I set myself a set intention for the trip, what came out of it was completely different. Setting is the most important. Having a safe, quiet place where your anxiety won’t make things worse. Because I definitely go through extreme anxious waves. People say you have to let go, surrender to the trip, which is true, but I think the anxiety wave is inevitable for someone like me, living with so much suppressed anxiety. It feels purging.
In my memory, it was this big trip in the mountains of Idyllwild, California in 2023 where things turned. I took my trailer up these steep and windy roads with my salvaged truck that struggled up the hills. And I heroic dosed. Reading back the journal entries I wrote, I didn’t really have any revelations or life-changing thoughts. But in my memory now, I can definitely feel something changed. I had had the idea for making a video showing the 3D locations of stars near Earth, and decided that to make it interesting to people, I would use the star locations of sci-fi franchises. It was up there, after tripping, where I think I recorded most of the voiceover and wrote the script for it. I spent the rest of the month working on it. Reading back my journals at the time right before I published it, I was still so clueless. Nothing had changed consciously. Something subconscious had changed that allowed me to make it entertaining and relatable. Honestly, the novelty of it was probably the most important factor to its viral success and the fact that I was just able to get my big fat stupid ego out of the way. But all along that month, after tripping and going on hikes, I wrote things like, “It’s funny too how I don’t even give a fuck anymore about that sci-fi galaxy map video. When I left it was all I could think about. One 10-minute video, once a week. Explaining something complex with visual metaphors. Symmetry. Calm.” I was preparing myself for its failure. Trying to soften the inevitable blow to my ego. I wrote this the day before I published it.
I was so high after that hike and I am so low today. I didn’t give a fuck about this video then and again now its imminent failure is crushing me. I can’t separate its failure from myself. I need a fucking win man.
I also, coincidentally, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy that day too. I had told myself I would be happy with 2,000 views on the video. When I published it on my channel, which had been inactive for 7 years, it got like 50 views in the first few hours. Then I posted it to Reddit and it got like 10,000 views before I went to bed. I cried. I was so happy with that. My journal entry was titled “A big W.” And when I woke up the next day it had 130,000 views. It would end up getting 1.5 million.
But whatever subconsciously changed from the mushrooms had not crossed the blood-brain barrier to my conscious mind. All that video did was give me a little more fuel to keep my ego going. I wrote this in that entry:
I can’t let them down again like I did last time 7 years ago. But I can tell it’s different now. I have control over my emotions. I was panicking last time. I was panicking and I also didn’t have a good sense for storytelling then. I was afraid to access my emotions. To sense, suss it out. Now I can tell I can do that. I can tell that I can feel what’s right and wrong. What works and what doesn’t.
But in the very next sentence I was still making excuses and focusing on technical shit and working in the anxiety instead of facing it.
I also have vastly more technical knowledge on the YouTube platform in general. Had I not changed the title and the thumbnail it would not have done nearly as well. That really helped. And I had to do it in a panic when it was posted. Which really does kind of focus you and gets rid of some of the bullshit. Which is why I do need to make the next video fast on a deadline, but not too fast. Jesus. Everything will be okay. You’re going to make it. Take the W, man. Take the W, and just own it.
Well I took the W, but didn’t really see the problem. The video’s success was indeed a result of my emotional work, but it was inflating my ego even more. The ego that was protecting me from this underlying fear. Fear of what? I still can’t exactly name it. I think it’s a fear of switching off, from a fear of not knowing what to do, what path to take, what decision to make. A fear of being in that anxious shutdown state I have been in since I was a kid. Where my brain stem is calling the shots. And my brain stem is a fucking moron. This changeover happens so subtly it’s so hard to tell. From the subjective state of being a human, it’s nearly impossible. I don’t want to editorialize too much. That’s what gets me into trouble. I try to analyze and interrogate and dissect and it throws me into a rumination pattern. Trying to analyze the internal is always subjective and you cannot use your own analytical methods to debug it. Having other people in your life to help you do that is probably the only way. Just now I had the urge to blame that lack of people in my life on being neurodivergent, someone who doesn’t think like other people, but that’s not true. That’s an excuse. The truth is when you’re knocked out, you can’t make meaningful relationships. They’re all toxic. Either you’re a submissive sycophant to a narcissist, or someone is a sycophant to you. I think that’s why I started burning bridges. All the people I was a sycophant to. But then I was just left with the sycophants that I curated. Because sycophants are safe. They’re at least not going to take advantage of me, to try to manipulate me. And it’s not that they’re sycophants inherently—it’s that I force them into that position. They can be mature and be supportive while not allowing my ego to run the show. But it makes the relationships shallow. It’s probably why therapy doesn’t work for me.
As I’m trying to analyze this now, I can feel my mind turning in the wrong direction. What was working was just telling my story as it happened. Attempting to honestly reflect what I experienced. As soon as I started listing the problems, editorializing and trying to itemize and narrow in on any factors, the wavefunction collapses. I think there are a number of specific things I could point to as the problem. But something about that mode of thinking is not helpful. Leads to rumination, or self-doubt, or confusion, or I don’t know what. It leads to the wrong state of mind. That’s why I’m writing this. There is a growth that can happen with the emotional side of your mind. I have experienced this with my creative work. With my design work. You make work. It sucks. Then you make some more. It sucks. Then you make some more, and you don’t make one mistake. And it sucks a little less. And you keep doing that pattern. But at no point do you analyze the fuck out of it. Well, maybe you do. I probably do. But it’s not in that analytical-only mind where the growth happens. I think it’s when the mind is whole. When both sides, everything, is working in harmony. When you can access the inner well of light. The warm core of your being. Those are the words I have been using. I’m not sure if they’re right. I’m not sure if I’m missing something. I probably am. I am not sure if I don’t fully grok it, or if it’s not possible to grok.
The next video was a longer version of the same video (The Real Stars and Scale of Sci-fi), and all the dumb jokes were a survival mechanism, and the difficulty pronouncing things was not intentional or rage bait, it was me white-knuckling through anxiety. After it got 4 million views, I quit the last freelance gig I had (which was shooting delusional rich people conferences at the Beverly Hilton, whoa boy, that was torture, and I was making less than minimum wage anyway.) At one point at the beginning of 2024 I decided to YOLO and take my shitty trailer and truck up to Oregon to spend a month or two away from my dad and visit a friend. I was still fucked up and it didn’t help that much, but as I left, the video I published (The Speed of Constant Thrust Space Travel), which I made white-knuckling-speed-run-in-one-month on Effexor, was surprisingly successful, and it gave me time to try to get my shit together. Since the mushrooms hadn’t completely fixed the problem, I had gone back to clinical psychiatry. I think it was precisely because of that lesson I’m talking about now hadn’t crossed into my consciousness. I was still trying to find an answer. I had been off and on several psychiatric drugs: Wellbutrin, Remeron, Effexor, Viibryd, and finally Adderall, which led to the suicide attempt and the hospitalization I detailed in Grippy Socks. Throwing drugs at a problem is a really stupid way to try to fix things, but that’s what the current psychiatry method is. If you can call that a method. After the hospitalization I made a video trying to dispel my self-deceptions by talking publicly about it: (The Myths of Spaceflight History). Which was a huge failure. Not only in view count (I lost like 1,000 subscribers in the first day) but because it didn’t fix anything or dispel anything in me or anyone else. After that video I had to make a change, and after having had my best friend abandon me, there was only one person left in my life that was holding me to LA: my dad. He had manipulated me into doing everything for him and taking care of him and being his sycophant when he was really capable of it himself. Even if he wasn’t, the fact that being in that situation caused me to attempt suicide gave me a reason I could justify and enough confidence to leave him. And so I decided to drive across the country to my family in New York, so I wasn’t alone for the holidays.
I talked to him one last time from the East Coast, but with his endless drunk texts, and stressing about his bills, I couldn’t do it anymore. I made the decision to block him and cut him out of my life entirely. It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. But removing the splinter doesn’t heal the wound if you’re pouring alcohol on it. After a Thanksgiving where I was still drinking to function, I white-knuckled out two more videos. (The Nearest Astronomical Anomalies and Where is Voyager Headed/Where did 3I/Atlas Come From.) At the peak, I was drinking about a fifth of whisky every 2 days. The videos were not viral, but were successful, and that bought me time once again again to try to get my shit together. I quit drinking on January 1st. Started running. Eating healthy. But none of that changed anything either. I managed to get two more videos done (I actually made the Artemis 2 video first because it was scheduled to launch earlier in the year, and then it got postponed). And I ended up publishing them both within a week of each other. Both went viral and got several million views. I was ecstatic. But thinking back on it now, there wasn’t any joy. It almost immediately turned into anxiety. I was still depressed, but it was masked. Anhedonia. Eventually the serious depression surfaced and I couldn’t function at all. And that’s about where we came in, binge-watching ER. After a little longer, I starting to get suicidal again, lying in my bed for weeks, I said fuck it, I’d rather be drunk than be like this. And I had a little relapse. Some wine and beer to self-medicate the depression away. And it does work for a while. But I knew that it wasn’t a long-term solution. So I decided to start growing mushrooms again, but that takes months. So I decided to try ketamine therapy.
I’m writing this now the day after I have taken my 5th and last dose of ketamine for this treatment course over the past month. I have felt progressively better with each dose and it has allowed me the space and perspective to write this. I feel joy again. I am working again. I want to connect to humans again. But I am in a post-glow state. I have noticed that the effects fade after a week or so and haven’t seen what the long-term durability is. I’m not sure if the fade is chemical or because of a thought pattern returning. If it is a thought pattern (the thought pattern of the analytical wrong state of mind I mentioned in the previous paragraphs, which I suspect it is, at least partially) then that’s what this essay is for. I don’t know if I’ll need to keep taking it to allow that space for me to grow, or continue with mushrooms, but writing this story in public feels right. To bring it into the daylight to see what rings true and what is bullshit.
This essay has been a bit of a mess. I guess that’s part of being a human. I wouldn’t know. I think there’s so much I’m not aligned with, so many loose threads. Like the neurodivergence/autism layer on top of all of this. There’s a lot to unpack and maybe that will be the focus of this Substack for a while. I’ve realized that the reason why I wanted to be a writer and filmmaker was really to understand myself, to unfuck myself. But you end up spending all your time avoiding yourself trying to be like everyone else. Psychedelics have at least allowed me to see it honestly. Understanding the problem, being able to name it more accurately, I think is the most important breakthrough of this. I do have a better sense of direction. I wake up feeling some measure of optimism about the future. I’m thinking about how to go about dating again. I’m thinking that there is a possible path forward where I’m not alone. That there is a possible path where the world will not end. I think we’re all a little depressed because we live in a world filled with things that break that mindset.
“We live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life.” -Johann Hari, Lost Connections6
I think maybe that’s the direction forward for me. Not to try to make the machine different, but to show aspects of our world that remind us of what’s important. To fill the machine with fewer things that break that mindset, and more that spark it. Maybe if enough people do that, the machine will start to move in a better direction. I just hope I can keep doing it without the machine crushing me. Maybe I can do it with a little help from my friends. If you’re reading this, tell me your perspective. What words do you use to describe these mental states? Tell me what you think is the way forward. I’m not saying that for engagement... I don’t give a fuck about engagement here. I genuinely want a little help from people like me on similar paths. I can’t read every comment on YouTube, but I can here.
Ketamine has been good because I had intention and structure and experience with psychedelics. I can see how it could easily be abused or lead to a cycle of dependence or megalomania. Elon has given it a bad rap. Psilocybin will work inside you no matter what you do, I believe. Ketamine takes intention. The provider I used is called BetterU, but there are many. Even though I’m not sure if it’s going to work for me long term, and it does seem to encourage dependence, I wanted to share it because I am so pro-psychedelic therapy. It’s so much better than bargain basement healthcare psychiatry. And we get dependent on SSRI’s anyway. I just think the good it could do for the world is so great. I think it’s the only treatment that actually attempts to fix the problem. Again, I would recommend psilocybin over ketamine, but if you’re afraid of psilocybin or you want to keep things legal, and want a structured protocol, ketamine is a good place to start. Just know that it’s a road that may take years. But I would probably be dead or drunk in a ditch somewhere without it.
Here’s a poem I wrote about the frustration of all the threads and ways to see depression: “Depression is”
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-psychiatric-sciences/article/abs/antidepressants-and-the-placebo-response/4C398C5513CA22231333ED1D9A38F685
https://amzn.to/4eIvCH6 (Note about this book: It did help a little. But I think the solution to depression can’t be generalized, even into the few categories he distilled it into. I think any distilling is coming at it from the top down, not bottom up.)