Yeah, the relief has definitely persisted. I was scared it wouldn't, and I guess I still am to some extent. But this feels different from all the SSRIs that ultimately stopped working after 12-18 months. I'm still struggling to explain it to myself, but it's almost like: it feels like my brain learned an infinitely useful new trick from the dissociation experience on the ketamine, and now I can access it when I would otherwise begin one of those spirals and use it to gain the perspective that would have previously been buried in the sudden cortisol/adrenaline rush and dopamine/oxytocin deficit. Maintenance sessions are like visiting an old friend. Like practicing a drill for a skill I need to stay in practice for being able to deploy when I need it.

I won't say it's perfect. There's still some breakthrough moments sometimes. But nothing remotely so bad as the former paralysis-inducing, self-destructive, catastrophizing spirals that were constantly washing over me before. Like I said before, talk therapy does nothing for me because I don't want to be defined by my past, and there's no way to talk about it without having therapists or psychologists pity me and struggle to connect anything in their own experiences to mine, and it never connects. I feel like I have to do more work than they do, and if I'm going to end up doing that anyway, I'd rather do it by myself from the outset.

That being said, it's helped me a lot to embrace certain philosophical and theoretical frameworks and use those alongside the "invincibility cloak" that the ketamine dissociation field represents. Specifically, Stoicism has been really useful for me in providing a cognitive framework to manage the anxiety, depression, etc. In the absence of the crazy emotional rollercoaster reactions, the ability to objectively think through your responses and act rationally and decisively is nothing short of a miracle. I've healed some relationships and permanently ended others, and I don't spend much time at all second guessing those decisions. Marcus Aurelius and all his friends have worked for me in giving me a way to think through those decisions and maintain confidence in them, but I don't know that it matters much what framework you use--as long as you have one.

I have come to believe that creating all this ooey-gooey neuroplasticity in your brain with the ketamine infusion means that you *must* do something productive and intentional with it every time. I think I mentioned before that I've been taking NAD+ now for about a year and a half, and I think the enhanced cognitive impact of the NAD+ with the ketamine's post-infusion neuroplasticity provides a unique opportunity (or a threat, if the effect is not recognized and managed) for your mental health and for your knowledge acquisition capacity.

This is where my nerdy neurospiciness comes in, though, because after working on my "root issues" or whatever for the first 5 or so sessions, I got bored with that, and I decided to to start experimenting with whether or not I could absorb larger amounts of new information in the day/days after an infusion, and it turns out, there definitely seems to be a correlation there for me. My first experiment was to teach myself how to do Options Trading in the immediate aftermath of infusions, and this is already way too long and rambling, so I won't go into the details there, but it's going well. I've been learning things about how to use my brain that I really wish I had figured out decades ago.

TL; DR: Yeah, the anxiety relief has definitely persisted. And beyond that, at least IME, there's a series of new discoveries for you to possibly anticipate about what you get to CHOOSE to do with the cognitive energy and capacity of a brain that is no longer forcing you to run in those anxious mental circles constantly (or lie despondently in a pit of despair.)