Intense. I have never been described as intense. Quirky. Motivated. But never intense.

Therapy makes you see yourself in a whole new light. Especially after two solid weeks of ketamine infusions - when you are still basking in the afterglow of hallucinations.

Ketamine infusions strip you bare. It's as though God enters you and whittles away the plaque on your nervous system until it glistens in the brightest of gold. It shines so much your eyes are blinded by what they see - if only they would look. And this is where therapy comes in after infusions. It makes you look into the gold. To watch a movie of who you have been for so many years. A film sometimes difficult to watch. Because it is so real.

Pain therapy can be painful. It is, to me, the most difficult aspect of the pain program. It looks at past traumas throughout your life and how they can manifest the way your body reacts to physical pain. I have a life riddled with such delights, as most of us do. Divorced parents. A car accident in college. Held up at gunpoint. My own divorce. Just to name a few.

Pain therapy begins with baby steps of how does this make you feel. And just when you begin to describe it, a rise occurs in your throat. A tightening of the chest and watering of the eyes. And it all comes out. Forty years of how it feels. And when it is done it is gold spun out of control into a finely woven fabric only you and your therapist can see. And it is perfect in all that it is and all that you wish it could be.

I have a long road ahead of me. But I have come so far - and this journey is so meaningful - I cannot imagine a life left unexamined. Even if it began in an emergency room. From a hit to the head so hard that it took my life and broke it into so many pieces it has taken hundreds of people to put it back together.

But now it is up to me. And this program that is saving my life. To try so hard to see the real and simply be. That is what the pain psychologist wants for me. To be in the moment and know it is enough. Intense is who I was. Because I ran in a gear so high that I was running from myself. And now I am so slow I am forced to be still in who I am and to know that whatever I become at the end of this journey, will in some way be spun from gold.