One Woman on Societal Expectations, Psychedelics, and Never Taking This Life for Granted
written by Stacey Lindsay
“I don’t want to squander whatever time I have left.”
On the one hand, Anne Kiehl Friedman's new book, Higher Love, is beautifully straightforward. It's a memoir that encapsulates the story of a woman—Friedman, an author, scholar, and entrepreneur—and her life wins and losses of epic proportions, including profound academic and professional achievement, love and heartache, yearning and loss. Friedman writes with such stunning wit and honesty that holding her pages makes you feel like she's sitting beside you, baring her soul and inviting you to do the same.
All this considered, Higher Love also works on an even deeper level. The book encapsulates so much of what women today still face, including societal expectations and stigmas. A swell happens with women, often around a certain age. There’s a universal yearning to be ourselves and find our truth. The fact that Friedman bravely shares her story of such is an invitation to us all.
"My hope for this book," she tells me, "is that it will do for other people what some books have done for me in the past, which is that they’ve made me feel less alone and given me a lifeline and a source of wisdom."
In our conversation here, Friedman and I talk about societal expectations, how she stays truthful to herself, and her reverence for psychedelics and the potential they hold. Her book and words offer a reminder to let go of others' ideas and lean into ourselves—wholly and without apology.
Chatting with Anne Kiehl Friedman
Woven throughout your book are many implicit obstacles that countless women face, one of which is this sense of expectation and people-pleasing. This is palpable in your experience and words, like the sentence, “he pulled the barrette out of my hair because he preferred I wear it down.” I’d love to dig into this and what you have learned.
In putting it out into the world, I'm learning even more about this because it’s a particularly salient point. In people pleasing or chasing societal expectations, I have learned that it never feels the way I thought it was going to. It never gave me the peace, comfort, relief, or self-confidence that I thought it would. If you're not showing your real self, any love you receive won't feel real or like it adds up to very much. I never got that deep sense of I'm okay that I was searching for by trying to achieve and get external validation.
After making the commitment to being myself, as cheesy and cliche as that may sound, I found that the people who really get you will gravitate to you even more, and the people you will never be enough for will move away—and that's gratifying. It makes the people who stick around and those relationships even more worthwhile.
I get emotional hearing you talk about this. All these societal expectations affect how we feel we should do things. Stemming off that, you are honest with your happiness today, writing that you are happy but not all the time. How do you stay true to yourself, especially in a world that can be harsh and expect us all to be happy and perfect?
I have two answers! One is deeply personal and involves a family member getting diagnosed with cancer. We never know how much time we have left. Even if we have a very long human life, it is a very short amount of time to love all the people we want to love, to experience all the experiences we want to have, and to be ourselves in the world. It took me so long to believe that myself was okay to be. I don't want to squander whatever time I have left.
My other deep and true answer, and I struggle with this all the time, is that I remind myself that I would be out of touch with reality if I were happy all the time. We talk about depression and anxiety as “mental illnesses,” but when you're living in a society with deeply oppressive forces that hurt us all–climate change, civil war and genocide, and so many things–the only way to be untouched by that is to be mentally unwell. But we can't get stuck in despair. So it’s about knowing that every day has beauty for us, and the more time we spend in gratitude, the better this life is.
Psychedelics have played an important role in your life, which I’d like to ask you about with reverence and clarity, as this is a topic that often gets misconstrued. You are an advocate for funding research toward the therapeutic use of psychedelics. If a woman is curious to explore more about psychedelics, be it for her personal journey or to gain general knowledge of the topic, where would you point her?
There are multiple possible meanings of “explore” in this question. My main driving factor in writing this book was to speak to women, and to that curiosity and fear. Without being self-serving, I would point women to my book because I think it's important to have a sense of what you're getting into and the range of experiences you can have. I'm concerned by the way people talk about psychedelics as a silver bullet or a cure or as totally safe with no concerns. I think there's a dearth of women's experiences heard in the mainstream. So, for me, reading about other people's experiences with psychedelics has been so helpful.
Now, if you want to go into the neuroscience of it, there are great resources. I have a list of resources available on my website on the Higher Love page, so that people can kind of choose their own adventure for research. There is no single recommendation I feel comfortable giving anyone interested in having a personal experience with psychedelics, because of all the questions of substance, legality, location, dosage, your history with trauma, mental illness, and your family's history with that… This is why we need more research. This is why we need a more educated conversation about these topics, and a less stigmatized conversation. To make it a timely issue, the Advisory Committee for the FDA recently recommended against the FDA approving MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. I don't know that their decision would have been the same had the conversation about psychedelics in the mainstream been happening in a more nuanced and intelligent way. We have to get past fear and misinformation to have a real conversation about who these substances can help and how, so that we save lives and minimize risks.
Why do you feel there is a need to speak to women about psychedelics?
I wrote my book to speak to women because we're the ones missing from the conversation and from the advocacy. Not completely, but in many ways, including being told that these substances are dangerous and unfeminine in subtle, weird ways. You have a lot of tech bros talking about the benefits but fewer stories of women.
Women experience PTSD, depression, anxiety and eating disorders at multiple times the rate of men and do not partake of psychedelic therapy at nearly the same rates. So, we are having this conversation about [psychedelics helping] veterans, but women veterans are getting lost in that conversation. Psychedelics are a women's issue, and I think we need to start talking about them that way.
You get raw in your book and talk about intense things, from your psychedelic journeys to your self-doubt and heartbreak. Now that it is out in the world, what have you learned?
When I started writing, I started writing as a project for myself to keep on my computer that I thought nobody else would ever see. When that changed, I always had a kind of future reader on my shoulder. I thought, oh, gosh, how am I going to feel about my dad reading this, my sister reading this, my grandmother reading this. Then I showed it to the people that I was most scared of reading it, and they embraced it. I realized that strangers can have any opinion they are going to have, and that's okay. There's never been a piece of art universally liked or reviled. So, all I control is my choices about what to reveal and how to reveal it. But what I never expected was to feel as comfortable being judged as I am right now.
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Anne Kiehl Friedman is a multifaceted writer, Interfaith minister, and entrepreneur. She co-founded the Psychedelic Communications Hub, a pioneering initiative aimed at educating the public about the therapeutic potential and risks associated with psychedelic use. You can learn more about Anne and order her book here.
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