the mask
This piece was originally written in February of 2025.
I have now been completely sober from all psychoactive substances including alcohol for 31 days at the time of this writing. I have also been in therapy with someone who specializes in Internal Family Systems or IFS, a kind of trauma therapy, for several months, about 16 hours of therapy in total. That means I have paid $3200 out of pocket for therapy so far. In a pilot study for IFS that I found online from 2020, they gave people with PTSD and childhood trauma 24 hours of therapy in order to test whether or not the therapy was effective, which they concluded it was, for the most part. I guess that means it will cost $4800 in total to heal me. If I think about how I used to spend about $400 per month on ketamine alone, and probably tens of thousands of dollars on it over the course of my life, this seems like a small price to pay.
In IFS, there is a concept called Self, which is used as a way of thinking about the part of you that is inherently compassionate. The main strategy behind IFS is that we can heal ourselves with this Self, that is innate and present in all of us, by extending compassion and love to the other, non-Self parts of us that are hurting, or otherwise experiencing the intense symptoms of trauma. For people who have experienced severe, debilitating trauma, it can be difficult to even know that such a Self exists, because it has been subordinated to all of the other parts that aim to keep us alive in life-threatening situations. When we are constantly in a panicked state of scanning our environment for physical or social threats, there’s no room for calm emotions like compassion.
When I do ketamine, it feels like Moses parting the seas of my roiling consciousness to reveal the Self that is always there, but crowded out by the other parts of me that are writhing with discomfort in my daily experience of living. The parts of me that are vigilantly watching over my every shoulder, looking for people who will hurt me, pre-empting hurt before it even has a chance to be suggested, let alone actualized, wedging distance and coldness between me and others due to a fear of rejection, they are all silenced by the bathing of this magical drug over my NMDA receptors. I often feel as if the person I am when I’m on ketamine is the real me. It’s the me that I wish I could be all of the time. It’s a person who can exist in their own body, secure and stable like a rock, yet bending curiously and playfully to and fro in a dance with the dynamic energies of other people, without deforming so hard that they break and lose sense of who they are.
And yet, it feels wrong because I know that those parts of me that are hurting, panicked, suffering, and scared, are still me, too. When I’m on ketamine, it doesn’t feel like I’m relating to those parts of me differently. It feels like they disappeared. I know this because I have tried to sense them while I’m high, like I am swiveling a flashlight from corner to corner of my mind, only to see nothing. It feels like they were banished to an alternate dimension, and when they come back, they are more and more like strangers.
I can’t move forward in my healing without turning those strangers into my friends, lovers, confidantes, and allies, all living inside of me. Otherwise, I’m destined to be fragmented.
IFS has been helping me to see the specifics of what parts I actually have, who they are, what they are feeling, and what they are trying to communicate to me. Having a trained professional guide me through this process has been immeasurably helpful. I am going to keep seeing my therapist until I go completely broke. It turns out that these parts of me are actually affecting my life, the decisions I make, the motivations for why I do things, the feelings I feel (my felt experience of living). Now that I have been in therapy, I am able to recognize that basically every single problem I think I have with my life can be boiled down to my shame-filled and hyper-protective parts running the show since I was a very small child, without me ever even noticing. Now that I am noticing, it’s almost too overwhelming to handle. That’s because I was actually living in a dissociated way this whole time.
I have been numbing myself for a long time since before I even heard of ketamine. I think that’s why it became my preferred substance. They say that the way that ketamine actually gets you high is that it opens up your brain by releasing it from some of its sensory responsibilities. Ketamine is a combat anesthetic on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines. Its fundamental purpose is to block signals from your body to your brain. Stuff like your interoception and motor sensation are affected. The constant stream of sensory data that your brain processes unconsciously slows to a trickle, and suddenly all that processing power is freed up to imagine, to connect, to feel other things. For me, the stream feels like a constant feeling of tension, tightness, and discomfort. It feels like that gnawing feeling in your gut when you think something bad is about to happen. And because I can’t live my life feeling that all the time, I’ve learned how to ignore it. But that ignoring itself has taken up so much of my energy, that to have that ignoring taken off my shoulders by a substance feels like I am being given wings. Ketamine both energizes and calms me. It gave me the experience of being able to be still and present in my own body.
I came to the decision to try sobriety with the help of two people who shared their own experiences with me. One person gave me the encouragement and logistical thinking-through to give me the confidence to do it. They convinced me to commit to sobriety for a minimum of a single calendar year, as to fully see what sober me looks like across a true cross-section of all the seasonal versions of me. So as a result, I am intending to be sober sober from January 1st, 2025, to December 31, 2025. At least.
Another person put the whole question of sobriety into philosophical, social, and political context: did I truly want to live the rest of my life being dependent on a substance to regulate my pain? (Now, I say this without judgment towards others who have decided to do that themselves, it’s that I genuinely had never asked myself that question.) How am I going to truly step into my purpose and be whole enough to contribute what I was meant to contribute to the world, if I am denying myself the opportunity to truly feel and recognize all of the parts of me. (I haven’t been sober since I was a child.)
Do I really want to take that bump? Or do I actually want to live in a world that isn’t so fucking traumatizing, and what the fuck am I going to do about it, other than taking that bump?
So far, it has been one month, which feels too short to be proud of, yet people keep telling me that they are proud of me. I can’t shake the feeling that they are just paying lip service. I wonder if they secretly assume that I feel like I am better than them, or am looking down on them. I wonder if they think I have some sort of problem that I’m ashamed of. I guess those parts of me that wonder those things are themselves parts of me that I get to acquaint myself with through the process of being sober.
But another part of me IS proud of myself, because it has been challenging and scary, especially at first. So much of my social world revolves around nightlife, which obviously involved substance use. I was scared of the change. I wasn’t scared that people would wonder things about my sobriety. I am scared of all the things that I might only be into because of drugs. I am scared of the identity shift. I’m scared of facing the truth. Do I only like raving because I get to be high with other people? Without drugs will it all just reveal itself as a sham, and therefore me as a big poser? Do I only connect with other people because I have access to ketamine and molly and speed and 4-MMC and blow and alcohol that disguises the nasty, messy parts of me that no one would actually love? Without substances, will that mask disintegrate, and with it all of my relationships? Maybe. I find myself more and more okay with these possibilities with each day of my sobriety that passes. Maybe all of the people I thought I connected with, I actually don’t. Maybe all of the experiences I thought I liked, I don’t actually like. But isn’t that okay? Shouldn’t I try, so that I know? Isn’t the most important thing for me to be know myself and be true to myself? At the end of the day, aren’t I the only person who has been there for it all, and will be with me when my time is up, and for every moment in between?
I am grateful to DJing, and to the particular relationship I am having with music during this chapter of my life. DJing tethers me to music and community in a way that feels like a lifeline through sobriety. I have only ever DJ’d gigs when I’m completely sober. Even a single drink makes me start to feel like I can’t DJ. DJing is helping me to bridge the gap between a version of me that does drugs at the rave, with a version of me that is sober at the rave.
Before I began to DJ, I felt an extreme internal conflict between myself as an artist and as someone who is wearing a mask. I was a creative child. In elementary school, I spent my time playing elaborate, multiple-day-long games of pretend with my one very good friend who we will call Cody, while all of the other kids would be playing ball sports. I was kind of an outcast, but I spent much of my time with Cody. I slept over at his house regularly, and we were inseparable. At home, I would spend my alone time making small sculptures of animals and geometric objects out of clay and paper. I remember that I could envision a shape in my head, and imagine how it would look as a two-dimensional net on a piece of cardstock. I would draft the net with a straightedge, protractor, and pencil, then cut it out and assemble it with tape and glue into a three-dimensional form.
In my early adolescence, I started to realize that I was different from other boys in some way. I had no vocabulary to describe my experience at the time as being queer, gay, trans, or anything like that. Instead, my own understanding of myself arose non-verbally into one of overwhelming, pure, moment-to-moment sensation. Gradually, life started to happen to me, instead of happening around, within, and through me. There was a core, a whimsical, carefree child who knew himself and knew that he existed, and yet was of the world, then, somewhere along the line, I became nothing, a mere particle in the violent river of society. I was a coherent me, and then I became a social being who was pushed and shoved. I became an other. That core was painted over by layers of malleable, false sediment. I didn’t know what gay or queer was. All I knew was there was a deep, rotten feeling of something being terribly, irreparably wrong, and the more I lived, the more and more sure this feeling became.
By the time I was in middle school, I was already subconsciously trying hard to convince myself and others I was normal, but I was also not trying that hard, which I think made it somehow more convincing to others that I was actually straight. The assessment of me as a kind of faggy, soft straight boy who failed to live up to the ideals of a perfectly straight masculine boy but still worthy of being called a faggot, made more sense to my social world than me actually being a faggot, I think. I was really good at making friends, which helped. I don’t really know how I was. I am not sure if it was because I was genuinely likeable or if I was manipulating others into being my friends somehow.
I mostly hung out with the aforementioned Cody, and two other guys named Phil and Liam. (I’ve changed all these names.) There were a couple of other boys in the periphery, but I only considered Cody, Phil, and Liam to be part of the core. Me, Cody, and another boy, Daniel, had been an inseparable trio during elementary school, with Phil on the periphery, so in middle school we continued this friendship, except Daniel moved away and went to a different middle school. So then, Phil, who had been only on the periphery himself in elementary school, was promoted to core member. In my head, that meant that Cody and I, having had the longest continuity of friendship, were at the top of the social hierarchy within this friend group.
One day, the whole class of 7th graders went to the beach on a school trip. Me, Phil, Cody, and some others in the periphery were playing in the sand together. At one point, we had decided to bury Phil in the sand. He was horizontal, and laying on his back. We kept covering him up with more and more sand, starting from the toes and fingers, moving up his arms, and then finally covering his torso. Then suddenly, someone said: “hey! Phil has a boner!”, and I look towards Phil’s crotch. His boardshorts are tented, the cheap, plastic fabric jutting out from his horizontal body, rising into the air, hinting at the stiffness, inappropriately defying gravity.
I have an image in my brain of this moment, because I look to Phil’s face after he is called out for his erection, and he is smiling. I almost can’t tell from inspecting this memory if it is a smile contorted, its purpose to disguise the true feeling of shame, or if that’s just how I would have responded. Me, already so vigilant to the meta-layers of shame and shame about feeling shame. It’s probably that he expressed a genuine smile, blissful and ignorant, truly, actually, unaffected by the juvenile teasing around him. And to look up on his smile, and down at his boner, and up at his smile again, was to feel a sickening sense of something being wrong. It was a disturbing feeling, one that I still feel now as an adult whenever I become aware of how another is utterly comfortable with the natural functions of their sexual body, but divorced from its narrative context, the feeling conjures no image or memory of Phil at all, but rather a disembodied, echoed, vertiginous sensation of my body sinking, then floating, then sinking.
The following year, Cody and I stopped being friends. I was probably 13, and I asked him on AOL Instant Messager whether or not he had orgasmed when he hooked up with his girlfriend. We had just started high school, and the rifts between us were already there. Though we had been in band class together last year, this year I was not. And though he was very much interested in girls, I was very noticeably not. And instead I was asking a boy whether or not he had come. He refused to tell me and uninvited me from the marching band Halloween party.
I think it was around this time that I seriously started to split into two parts. One part of me, was this child encased in river mud, slowly and surely hiding his rottenness, and with it, his creativity and zeal for life itself. The other part, a savior, a seer, a sage, who knew what to do, how to get out of this situation. Resolutely, the sage resolved to grow up fast. We will dump Cody and become friends with the popular kids. (We were successful at this.) We will have our first sip of tequila, our first lungful of weed and cigarettes, our first green Mitsubishi pill. (Similarly, we were successful at this.) We will get straight As so we can get out of this shitty town and escape to a college in the big city and be free. We will keep covering the child in mud. We will be the thing that society wants to see. We will put on the mask.
I didn’t really start taking off the mask until I was 25, which is when I decided that I would learn how to DJ after a life-changing experience at Gays Hate Techno where I first drew the connection between my Korean ancestry, my queerness, and my experiences at the rave, which until that year felt like essential but irreconcilable parts of me, destined to be discrete. There, I realized something of spiritual and aesthetic significance. The instrumental elements of house and techno, a traditionally queer and Black artform could be interpreted as analogous to the instruments of a traditional Korean drumming style. Kick, snare, hat, bass, and monophonic synth were buk, janggu, ggwaengari, jing, and taepyeongso. Both sonic portals to kinds of collective trance-like states.
Though I had been “out” for much time already, this was really the first time I realized how deeply buried that child had been. I now think it’s because the child wanted to be an artist, more than anything, before gender and words, before drugs, and before sexuality.
The first time I DJ’d in public was in my backyard during the summer of 2021, right after the COVID-19 vaccines were released. I originally had not planned to DJ, just to organize the party. But one of the DJs dropped out at the last minute, and so I filled in. Until then, I had only ever made mixes in my bedroom, but never even played music to a dancing crowd.
At that party, I met Sookie, who was the first person to tell me, with a level of matter-of-factness I have now come to take for granted, in the way I am told this regularly today: you are an artist. I see you as an artist. What a no-brainer. To be seen in the way that I actually am, even if I am not aware of who I am myself.
The mask would not really make any further progress in coming off until my first real attempt at sobriety.
In having the mask unseal, surely but slowly, there would be revealed: the shape of a child.
The child is me, in contact with the world for the first time since I was last both an artist and sober.
Maybe the kid who was caked in clay, was actually metamorphosing in a cocoon, the layers of silica and earth compressing, sharpening, into a crystal, brilliantly shining as he emerges from the crucible, for in Korean, Hyeonje 炫才 means Dazzling Talented One, and some Koreans might say that your name is given to you to say not what you are but what you will become, and I’m not there yet but I know it’s in me, because it’s always been in me, and I will never stop becoming me now that the skin beneath the mask tastes the sweet air of a life being made to my vision.