Seeking Asylum
After my breakup, I became a psych-study guinea pig.
by Rev. Jen Miller
May 6, 2008
When I last left Hooksexup readers, I'd just tried tantric sex for science with a new lover named "Alex." As is often the case when two people bone nonstop for hours, we fell in love. This was a variable I never expected, but one that's not surprising given the amount of fucking required to write a monthly sex column.
Alex was shyer than my previous lovers, and wasn't comfortable with me sharing the details of our sex life with the internet. Because of this, and the fact that there are only so many stories one can write about masturbation, my editors decided the column had run its course. They asked me if I wanted to file one last dispatch, to end on a bang. I didn't. I was tired. I wanted to have sex for the sake of sex again. After all the experiments I'd tried, all I really wanted was to lie down in bed and fuck the man I loved. I'd done so much weird shit that a penis and a bed seemed like a novelty.
The fact that I was now jobless and broke hardly mattered, because I had Alex, and together we had New York in the summer. We rode the Coney Island Cyclone and climbed trees in Central Park. We made love from dusk till dawn, and each time we boned it was as if the mists of Avalon had risen and we were suddenly in elfland. "You're like an ambassador to the otherworld," he said to me as we lay in bed, bathed in sweat and female ejaculate.
At the Met, we lay down on a bench in front of Picasso's "Gertrude Stein" and kissed. "I want to feel you kiss my cheek forever," Alex said.
Forever, as it turns out, is forty-eight hours in dude years, because two days later he dumped me.
"It's not about you," he said.
"It's not about you" is code for, "It is about you." It's code for, "Can we still be friends because I don't think I EVER WANT TO HAVE SEX WITH YOU AGAIN." It's code for, "Remember that awesome blowjob you gave me last week? I don't want one of those EVER AGAIN." It's code for, "You are not good enough for me for whatever reason, so I'm throwing you out like the used condom I filled with seminal fluid after penetrating you last Tuesday."
This kind of rejection is known as heartache.
I dealt with my heartache by drinking Budweiser and listening to tragic country music while wearing the extra-large wifebeater Alex had left draped over my door. It held the last vestiges of his scent, along with a tiny marijuana burn hole over the left breast. Inhaling the fabric deeply, I longed for some kind of Proustian reverie of his body against mine. Instead, it seemed everything reminded me of the space Alex wanted — the vast, cold, empty space outside of my hot, pink, tight, nurturing, squirting, multi-orgasmic vagina that had never asked him for a fucking thing.
Because the Lower East Side is a small town and because Alex and I are both borderline alcoholics, it wasn't long before we ran into each other at a party, got drunk and fucked. This led to more fucking coupled with romantic dates, and I entered a delusional state wherein I believed he had let me back into his heart. But I knew pain was on the horizon. I was learning to sense heartache the way elephants can sense a tsunami.
We were invited to a friend's wedding in the Catskills, which I saw as an opportunity for a romantic getaway, and which Alex saw as the perfect opportunity to dump me one final time with one final clichˇ: He "loved" me, but he was not "in love" with me.
I wasn't sure I was "in love" with him either, but I didn't see why this should interfere with us "fucking for hours."
With the open bar at close proximity, I downed several Budweisers and wandered into the dark forest in five-inch heels. Moments later, I found myself splayed on my back in the bottom of a ditch. For a minute I thought about taking a nap, but a concerned wedding attendee noticed me there and lent me a hand. I emerged from this indignity with a lump the size of a baseball on my coccyx.
"Maybe you're finally growing the tail you always wanted," said my friend George.
It hurt to walk. It hurt to sit. It hurt to lie down. But even worse than the pain in my ass was the pain in my heart. It hurt to be conscious. So it's no surprise that the following day, when I returned to the city, I had a nervous breakdown.
It started as a panic attack. A panic attack is what happens when your fight-or-flight reflex acts as though you've just met a bear in the woods, even though you're just sitting in front of your computer eating a sandwich. Not everyone experiences the same symptoms, but the most common are rapid heart beat, numbness in the hands and feet, shortness of breath, choking sensations, depersonalization and a sense that you're losing your mind. As a result of this shitstorm, sufferers often think that they're dying. I'd had a couple of panic attacks before, mainly after my botched appendectomy, which I covered in my nude-housecleaning column.
Those panic attacks lasted for only a few minutes, but this one lasted for almost two hours. Convinced I was having a stroke, I lay in my roommate's bed with my feet elevated and commanded him to call 911. When the police showed up instead of an ambulance, it began to dawn on me that they had come to "take me away."
"Where are the doctors?" I asked, my panic doubling in severity.
"You're not having a stroke," the policemen said.
Finally, two EMTs did arrive and immediately started to complain about my sixth-floor walkup.
"Do you want to go with us?" they asked, according to protocol.
I knew they wouldn't take me anywhere nice like Promises, but instead to a terrifying city hospital where they would drug and abuse me.
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes."
"Okay, well, if you call again, we're going to take you," they threatened.
Armed with the knowledge that if I went insane again I would be institutionalized, I decided that it might be time to try therapy.
Problem was, I couldn't get out of bed without having a panic attack. I also couldn't afford therapy. Instead, I spent entire days on the phone with my BFF, Faceboy.
"I just want to drink coffee again," I said.
"You will. Trust me."
"And alcohol."
"You will."
I missed coffee and beer. I wake up in order to drink coffee and beer, and now my Hooksexups were so shot, I couldn't drink either. Something had to be done. As I lay in my sickbed perusing the Village Voice, an ad jumped out at me: "Do you suffer from panic attacks?" Test subjects were needed for a study at Columbia University. The payment: three hundred beans and six months of free therapy. Frantically, I dialed the number.
A guard at the front desk gave me a sticker that said "New York Psychiatric Hospital Visitor." Now everyone knows I'm insane, I thought, affixing it to my jacket. He directed me to the fourth floor, where a kindly admin named Brendan handed me a stack of forms containing questions about my mental health, family history and lifestyle. As I checked off the variety of substances I've put into my body throughout the years, I wondered how I'd managed to stave off a trip to the psych ward for so long.
I met with Dr. Sullivan, the psychiatrist in charge of the study. After talking to me for half an hour, he diagnosed me as suffering from panic disorder, which I'd already figured out for myself. He also told me it's not unusual for a person to develop this disorder after an emotional upheaval, specifically a loss or a breakup. I told him about the injuries to my ass and my heart.
Finally, I was given a series of blood tests, which revealed that I was healthy enough to be a test subject, along with the even more shocking news that my liver is functioning normally.
The study was broken down into two parts. I would undergo both a PET Scan and an MRI so that doctors could look at my brain and try to determine why people have panic attacks. I signed up.
For the PET scan, they inserted a catheter into an artery on my wrist — possibly the least therapeutic experience imaginable for someone who's suffering from a panic disorder. The doctors, aware of my fragile mental state, handled me like a newborn baby chick. They brought me lunch and hooked up a DVD player so I could watch movies while they poked and prodded. I'd brought along HBO's Rome, hoping a little gladiatorial man-ass might quell my anxiety. It worked, until the doctors injected me with a radioactive compound and told me it would soon start emitting nuclear gamma rays through my skin. The smell and taste of it were horrifying, like a pen had exploded in my esophagus and was leaking ink into my bloodstream. But terror soon gave way to another emotion: sorrow. What am I doing here? I wondered, remembering all the fun sexperiments in which I'd participated as a pretend lab rat. Now I was a real guinea pig in an actual lab.
I wanted to go back to being a slut who cavorted at orgies and dove headfirst into giant balloons half-naked, all in the name of magazine journalism. But I realized I could never be that girl again. Falling in love had been a mishap that obliterated the voluntary guinea pig in me, leaving a blob of need, heartbreak and mental disorder in its wake.
Tears rolled down my cheeks and onto the soft foam of the PET scan machine. It was the first time I'd cried since being dumped.
I returned a week later for the MRI. While encased in the giant beige hard-resin coffin, photographs of people making scary faces were projected onto a screen in front of me as the machine read my mind. Then I had to play a matching game involving the images using a tiny keypad attached to my hand. I imagined this was what being abducted by aliens feels like, and waited patiently for the anal probe.
But there was no probe, and when all was said and done, I was given pictures of my brain and my choice of two types of therapy: drug therapy or cognitive-behavioral therapy. Figuring I do enough drugs already, I chose good old-fashioned behavioral therapy.
It was work. I had to keep a journal of symptoms, learn new breathing techniques and drag my ass up to 168th Street once a week for therapy with Dr. Sullivan. But somehow it must have worked, because after about two months, I began to feel sane. Or at least sane enough to go to Dunkin' Donuts and order a large coffee.
"Where have you been?" the Dunkin' Donuts barista squealed, practically throwing her arms around me.
Drinking coffee led to other normal activities like going to the grocery store and the post office, only now I didn't take these things for granted. I cried with joy while wandering Staples looking for envelopes.
And eventually, the panic disappeared. I stopped going uptown for therapy and instead focused on painting. It was the one thing that got me through my existentially angst-ridden teen years, and now it helped get me through my existentially angst-ridden thirties. I hadn't painted in years, and now it was just flowing out of me. Most of the paintings depicted my Chihuahua and me floating around on the astral plane. My friend Jason called them an interior decorator's worst nightmare.
I had fully expected to be bitter and angry for pretty much the rest of my life over having taken a chance on love only to end up in a psychiatric hospital. But I soon realized that having my heart broken was the best thing that ever happened to me. The space Alex had insisted on giving me was now filled with art, and for that I felt nothing but gratitude.
n° ©2008 Rev. Jen Miller and hooksexup.com