Growing Up Is Fun
Two weeks before I moved from New York to LA, I lost all feeling in my face. It happened in a snap, crackle, pop. I was sitting in a café and then, bam, everything went numb. My first thought was that I’d overdosed from the Roxy I took an hour earlier. Most of my twenties were spent abusing painkillers, with one particularly bad year of “destroy your life” addiction, but I decided to put an end to that nonsense in January 2012. I came clean to my friends and family, I deleted the numbers, I stopped going to the very bad doctor. Sometimes though I’d forget the reasons why and just remember the warm gooey feeling opiates gave me — like the insides of a Betty Crocker cake — and five hours later, or maybe five days later depending on how difficult the dealers and/or doctors were being that week, I’d get to feel like a slice of my favorite cake again.
So that’s clearly what was happening. My palms were drenched. My heart felt like it was going to Alien its way out of my chest. Yep, this was definitely an overdose. I called my friend and told her that I needed to go to the hospital because I’d taken too much Roxy. My friend asked me what that was and I told her, “It’s kind of like diet heroin.” Then there was a silence because this friend didn’t know my life was like that. A week earlier, we’d gone to Five Guys and had hamburgers and drank Cokes and then came back to my house to watch YouTube videos. One can’t possibly be like the other, right? Wrong. Drugs go with anything and everything. They go with a hamburger and a Coke, a great job, a beaming smile, and a happy family. They’re very versatile. “Drugs: you can dress them up or down!”
For some reason, I decided to go home instead of the hospital and when I sat down on my bed, my friend was there. She’d Googled “signs of painkiller overdose” and read them off to me.
“Has your breathing slowed?
“No, it’s faster.”
“Let me feel your heart.”
She put her hand to my chest and said, “Your heart rate doesn’t seem to be slowing down either. In fact, it’s kinda going a mile a minute. “
My friend looked me up and down and said, “I don’t think you’re overdosing. I think you’re having a panic attack.”
I laughed. But the joke was on me because I never felt normal again.
The next few weeks I couldn’t catch my breath or feel my face. I went to the very bad doctor because I didn’t know any good ones and he told me that I was, indeed, suffering from anxiety. He then gave me an entire bar of Xanax in his office and demanded that I swallow it immediately.” Um, no.” I thought to myself. “I’m not going to take a bar of Xanax at 2:30 in the afternoon in fucking Soho, of all places. I’d pass out in a barrel of $4 clementines at Dean and Deluca.” To placate him, I put the pill under my tongue and opened wide. “See? All gone.” The doctor smiled, wrote me a prescription for Xanax and sent me on my way. I saved the wet, crumbly Xanax for later.
I wondered if the drugs opened a door in my brain that needed to stay closed. I thought I knew myself and what I was capable of feeling but it turned out I knew less than nothing. My brain could go places without a permission slip and I had no choice but to surrender. I remember feeling vaguely suicidal — a first for me — and that if this is how things were going to be for the rest of my life, then count me the hell out.
Amidst all of this terror, I moved out of my apartment. The original plan was to Airbnb a place in Nolita for a week, then go to Provincetown for one last gay hurrah before flying to California. I made it to Provincetown and California but I never made it to Nolita. The thought of living alone for a few days was an American Horror Story so I went to my sister’s in Park Slope and slept on an air mattress in a room with no air conditioning. I called my parents crying and asked them to come to New York. Then I changed my mind. I researched anxiety and “does it get better?” My face had been numb for almost two weeks now and I could barely recall a time when I didn’t feel like this. The door in my brain was wide open and now I needed to figure out a way to close it.
When I moved to LA, the door slowly went from being wide open to slightly ajar. My brain didn’t have to work as hard in California so I had less anxiety. I regained feeling in my face. I landed a great job. I became thirty pounds overweight. I struggled to finish my book. I drank too much…
Fuck. Life is an inconvenient narrative, isn’t it? There’s always some kind of spill over. If your life were a watercolor painting, there’d be all of these beautiful details surrounded by a bunch of smudged, fucked up edges. Nothing’s clean or perfect. You can be at your best while also being at your worst.
Now get ready because I’m about to say something that’s TRULY THE WORST: Things didn’t really get better for me until I started exercising.
Don’t make fun. Listen, I’d never exercised a day in my life. “Sorry, not my journey.” I’d say. “I love that for you but I HATE THAT for me.” But getting fat made me so depressed that I finally had no choice but to try and fix things.
So I started working out at a gym, and hon? It changed everything. As a writer, I lead a very sedentary lifestyle. I’m constantly attached to my brain. I overthink. I suffer from analysis paralysis. I never think about my legs, my arms, the small of my back. I ‘d never even met my body before. Occasionally it would text me to hang out but I’d be like, “Can’t. Too busy feeling stuff.’
But now that I was exercising daily, I was becoming aware of all of me, not just the above the neck part. For an hour each day, I could take a step back and focus on something other than my stupid fucking thoughts that were driving me insane. Finally! I was addicted to something that wouldn’t destroy me! And, wait, this thing could also make me look good naked? SHUT UP!
Exercise has given me many gifts beyond weight loss. It’s forced me to be accountable for my actions because if I do bad things to my body, I have to face the wrath later. It’s also given me the belief that if I want something, I don’t have to stew about it. I can actually go out and get it! Anything is possible if you put the work in. With health, career, and relationships, you need to be proactive. Complacency will rob you of everything — including your right to complain about how shitty your life is.
But, best of all, exercise has quelled my anxiety. It doesn’t make it perfect but at least everything is manageable now. And you know what else helps with maintaining a Namaste vibe? Sex. I’ve made the rookie mistake of going through long dry spells before but since I’ve started hooking up (semi)-regularly I’ve vowed to never go back to the celibate life. Everybody needs to be letting the world know that they’re DTF. It’s so important!
Working out regularly, eating healthy, weekly blowjobs: Wow, if this is what growing up looks like, then fuck me for not doing it sooner! JK. I know that the only way I could make such a positive change in my life is by spending years feeling like a pile of dog shit on I Hate Myself Road. When you’re in the throes of self-destruction, you always hope that one day you’ll get a moment of clarity that will snap you in the right direction. That didn’t quite happen to me — it’s been more of a slow burn towards adulthood — but one thing that did change my life overnight was my panic attack. Because I realized then that my life wasn’t something I could fuck with. I had to take care of myself. I had to do not-fun things to ensure that my future wasn’t going to be bleak.
Once you understand this lesson, you can start understanding yourself and start actually having some fucking fun. And it is fun — growing up. A lot more fun than being a hot mess.
Ryan is a writer for MTV’s Awkward and also wrote a book called I’m Special, which will be out in June. He likes watching YouTube videos of Mary-Kate Olsen trying to speak.
