For the first couple of days I couldn’t catch my breath. We were driving through the mountains, and I had never been at such high altitude before. As a matter of fact, the Rocky Mountains were the first real mountains I ever saw. When they came into view, glimmering on the horizon like a huge jagged set of teeth, my mind went blank. There they were. I had imagined them, I had seen pictures, I know that they exist, but I had never seen them. And there they were, pretty much just as they had existed all along in my mind. I’m a Rhode Island girl. I grew up at sea-level. We do not have mountains in Rhode Island. All we have is 812-foot Jerimoth Hill. When I first saw the mountains, I almost heard grandiose symphonic scary-sounding music in my head. Beethoven at his angstiest. The mountains left me wordless and stunned.

In Colorado, we traveled to see his friends in the mountains, and that’s when I first noticed the weird feeling high altitude gave me. Because it was an unfamiliar sensation, I didn’t know how to name it. My breath was caught in my chest. I couldn’t inhale. Things looked different up there. There was a clarity to the vistas I found almost upsetting. Why was that stone wall two miles away so clear I could see the rough texture, a golden field gleaming through the cracks where the stones did not meet? Why could I see a dark brown horse on the field in the distance flicking his tail? I wanted to shut off the stark and vivid vision, let things blur out again. My eyes watered for no reason. I thought I might be sad, or maybe having some sort of prolonged anxiety attack. I was not doing well then, so this was possible. Eventually, I got acclimated to the altitude but those first couple of days were disorienting. I would lie in my sleeping bag in the van, breath heaving in my chest, watered-up eyes staring into the darkness, wondering if I was finally going crazy.

We rattled across highways, the horizon blasting off on either side of the road, the Rockies shining in front of us … They looked like death. They were beautiful but they would kill you if you did not respect them. We were really into the B 52s at the time, and we kept playing “Roam”:

I hear a wind
Whistling air
Whispering in my ear

Take it hip to hip
Rocket through the wilderness

There’s a blasted-open echoing energy in the song, meant to be joyful and transcendent. “Roam” was that for us, but there was a dark underbelly, as though we were at the bottom of a well, and we could hear it playing way way up out in the world, at some happy party we could not get to. Our response wasn’t about the lyrics (although looking at them now, in retrospect, they express perfectly our external experience). We lost ourselves in the song and in the wide vistas. That way, we didn’t have to talk to each other. I hear “Roam”‘s opening chords now, and am immediately in the front seat of our van, my eyes watering up, squinting at the fields and mountains, trying to catch my breath, trying to ignore the fact that my boyfriend and I were breaking up.

Heading up, up, up, to his friends’ ranch, I did not feel up for company. This was bad time for me, the dissolution of personality, the cessation of language … I shied away from meeting new people. I would look away when I shook people’s hands, ashamed to have this new person see me. I was not well. I lost my voice. Anyone who has ever lost the ability to speak will know the paralysis. “Fake it til you make it” does not apply. I’ll put it bluntly: I should have been in a hospital, being cared for, no demands made on me. Instead, we were going to spend a couple of days with people I never met. My soul cringed back from the exposure.

We rattled up the driveway in our bug-spattered van, the windswept family – Ruth the matriarch, and two grown 20-something kids – Jessica and Chris – on the front steps, waving at us, whooping and hollering a welcome. Jessica’s small son cavorted around like a tumbleweed.

Their energy was so open I relaxed. I didn’t have to put on an act, or be sociable in a polite way. If socially acceptable behavior was required, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. These people were expressive and nuts, in the best most eccentric way. The kitchen overflowed with food and alcohol. The house was freezing. Ruth gave us the grand tour, barking out comments in cynical asides. She referred to her ex-husband as “Asshole” (you could hear the capital letter). “Asshole left me diddlysquat. This ranch is MINE.” She ushered us into her huge bedroom, saying, “It’s a great room even though you could hang meat in it.” Her humor was so irreverent I found myself crying with laughter within ten minutes. The tears in my eyes, a constant for a couple of days, were tears of laughter.

Chris, a fire fighter, was one of the sweetest men I had ever met. A big guy, wearing a tight T-shirt, jeans, and boots … Quiet, not forthcoming … but obviously sweet and sensitive. He was very kind to me. I don’t know if he realized his friend’s girlfriend was not in a good way, but he was very nice, specifically, to me, making sure my drink was filled, cracking jokes, talking to me about actors he loved since he knew I was an actress. Thank you, Chris, wherever you are. His kindness was random, he would have been kind to any guest who traveled up the mountain to his mother’s ranch. But oh, how I needed it.

Jessica was glamorous, with thick black hair, gleaming in waves, glowing skin, and huge brown eyes. Meticulous makeup, thick mascara, but tromping around in jeans, a big sweater, cowboy boots. A high-altitude mountain girl.

The house was so chilly inside I could not get warm, and outside was the frigid mountain air. The atmosphere inside, though, was warm and rambunctious. These weren’t “nice” or “polite” people. They swore. They shouted at each other. They bitched about Asshole. As a repressed girl in the middle of a crack-up, living out of a van and losing language, easy anger expressed was revelatory. Anything too positive grated on my raw nerves then, reminding me of Tennessee Williams’ famous response, when asked his definition of happiness: “Insensitivity, I guess.”

The ranch, its staircase with wooden railings, thick plush rugs, massive stone fireplace, drafty rooms, gargantuan kitchen, did much to protect and soothe. My boyfriend and I sat on the couch, being entertained by this lively family, still not able to speak to each other, or acknowledge that … we were done.

I whispered to him at one point, “I can’t catch my breath.”

“It’s just the altitude. The first couple of days are hard, but it’ll get better.”

He and I had been living out of our van for months at this point. We cooked outside, did our laundry in a bucket, slept in sleeping bags, splashed down in various camp sites across the country. But here we were, in civilization again. We both took steaming-hot half-hour-long showers. When we emerged from the steaming bqthroom, we were back in the house’s teeth-chattering air, but at least we were clean to the bone. We came downstairs, and the food was out, beers, a fire going. Somewhere along in here, I forgot my neurotic shyness. I could look these people in the eye.

Ruth took us on a tour around the ranch. We went to look at the horses. Jessica, an equestrian probably since birth, leapt onto her horse, galloping off across a field, shouting and whooping. The barn was shadowy, the scent of horses pungent and overwhelming. Out of the small square barn windows you could see the jagged peaks of the nearby mountains. I had never been in such a place. I kept thinking, Those are real mountains. Just like I’ve dreamt of. The mountains looked like a backdrop. I couldn’t realize they were actually there. This devastated me. Later, when I got really nuts, and had completely dissociated from reality, I would make us leave Teton National Park abruptly because I “couldn’t see the mountains”. My boyfriend kept saying, “They’re right there. They’re right there.” “But I can’t see them.” We left. I said, “I’m going to have to come back some other time. I can’t see them.”

I stood on the ranch’s front stoop as the sun went down, hearing guffaws of laughter inside, Jessica shouting at her terror of a son. I stared at the peaks, determined to see them. My eyes tearing up, my hand over my chest. I was pissed. I could see the mountains, obviously I could see them, but I couldn’t see them. My brain had split off from the physical world. Nothing got in. It was really upsetting to me. I wanted to feel the mountains.

The only thing I could really feel was that I could not breathe, and my eyes were always full of tears.

Ruth took us to see the big barracks-like building on the other side of the barn where the ranch hands used to stay, or maybe they still stayed there, seasonally. You could smell the musty mildewy mattresses. Bunk beds lined the walls. There was a small wood stove at one end. Everything was cold and still.

Ruth said, lighting up a cigarette, “This place is haunted.”

I thought maybe she meant haunted by the ranch-hands. I could feel their ghostly presences. Turns out, Ruth meant actual specific ghosts.

“The people who built this ranch back in the 30s had two little kids, a boy and a girl,” said Ruth. “And the kids apparently used to sneak out here in the middle of the night to have pillow fights. This place is haunted by those two kids. You can even hear the slapping of the pillows, and their screams as they beat the crap out of each other.”

My breath was high in my throat. “Have you heard them?”

“I camped out here one night just to see if they would visit me.” (This is why I loved Ruth. She was in her 60s, with short grey hair, blood-red lipstick, she smoked like a chimney, wore jeans and cowboy boots, called her ex-husband Asshole, and slept out in an old abandoned building hoping to be visited by child ghosts.)

“And did they visit?”

“You bet. I woke up, and I heard these tiptoeing feet. I could hear them burst into giggles. There was nobody there, sweetheart, but they were there. And then came – wap wap wap! The sound of the pillow fight. Wap wap wap!”

“You were right there?”

“Yup! Sittin’ right over there. Hearing their giggles, and the Wap Wap Wap!”

“Wow!”

“They’re friendly little ghosts, nothing to be scared about. Just two kids fuckin’ around.”

I squinted through the altitude-tears into the shadows, trying to see them, with a sudden yearning, yearning so deep it pushed out of my chest. I yearned. But for what? To see the mountains? To see the ghosts? Sure, I wanted to see them. But why did this make me so sad? I squashed down inappropriate yearning with a mallet. I was always doing things like this in those days. I never felt fit for company because out of nowhere I would be ambushed by intergalactic yearning and have to leave the room. Ruth was so casual about the ghosts. As we walked out of the building, she laughed to herself, and said, “Wap wap wap!”

Chris and Jessica took us to see a swing on the property, put up by Asshole in happier days. Behind the house, the land fell away abruptly into a deep ravine, a virtual cliff of dirt. A tree stood on the edge of the abyss, and from one of the branches hung a wooden plank swing. You could kick yourself off and swing back and forth over the abyss. Jessica leapt on the swing and pushed herself off, flying out into the empty air, laughing out loud. I felt uneasy. I didn’t want to go on the swing. I didn’t want them watching me. Jessica lay back so she was a flying horizontal girl, floating over our heads, and back out over the abyss.

I didn’t trust my hands to hang on. All I kept seeing, over and over and over, like a flickering newsreel, was me letting go, and falling, falling, cracking my head open on a boulder. I kept seeing it. My boyfriend jumped onto the swing, and took a running leap off into mid-air. I watched him fly up and back, up and back, I watched him stand up on the wooden plank, gyrating his body so he kept momentum going. I was in awe of him. A daredevil who deserved to be with someone who wasn’t such a fraidy-cat head case. I watched and saw: my body falling … hands grasping thin air … scream snatched out of my throat … my head smashed open … my brains on the rock … the jolt of panic as I let go … and then … nothing to hold onto … I thought of my parents. How sad they would be. I tried to physically brush the images away. chopping my hand in the air, saying to the newsreel: “Begone.” My boyfriend was laughing out loud. He deserved a girlfriend who would have fun on the swing. It was unfair.

At some point, Chris came over to me, putting his arm around me, squeezing. He grinned down at me with such intimacy and kind knowingness. He knew nothing about me. I have no idea what Chris saw in me, if he saw anything, but I believe he saw something. He was like a dog, sensing something unheard by the normal human ear. He just grinned down at me, never looking away. My boyfriend careened over our heads. Chris’ attention was not invasive or inappropriate. I felt seen. He said, “You go next, okay? Don’t be scared. You won’t fall.” Somehow it didn’t embarrass me he guessed.

My boyfriend got off the swing, and handed it to me, saying, “It’s so great – it’s like you’re flying!”

It wasn’t my boyfriend’s words that made me brave. It was Chris’ grin. I could do it because Chris said it would be okay. I got on the swing, Chris grabbed hold of my waist and pulled me back … I held on for dear life. Chris said, “You ready?” “I’m ready!” Chris let go, and off I went over the cliff. I didn’t look down. I held onto the rope so hard that my hands were chafed later on. There’s a picture of me on that swing.

The photo is hard to look at, because all I can see is the whole circumstance around it. But I look okay. I don’t look like I’m having a bad time. I don’t look like a weird neurotic person who couldn’t speak or couldn’t see the Tetons. I remember hearing Chris shouting: “YEAH! YEAH, SHEILA!” It says a lot about my state of mind how much this moved me.

The newsreel of catastrophe stopped the second I was airborne.

Chris and my boyfriend made a feast for us on the grill: burgers, chicken, steak. Jessica made frozen margaritas. Ruth and I played with Jessica’s son, who was adorable but demonic. He wreaked havoc. Jessica kept moaning, as she put ice into the blender: “I just don’t know how to control him … God. STOP WHINING. Mom … what the fuck … ” Ruth, cigarette dangling from her lips, would bark at the kid, “Time out. You’re being a pain in the ass. Go sit in the corner. Read your book.” The child would open his mouth to start to SHRIEK, but the look on Ruth’s face stopped him cold. “Kid, I love ya. But your voice is ugly when you whine. I can’t take it any more.” Strangely enough, this kind of chaotic disciplining seemed to work. They weren’t unloving, they were open honest statements of frustration. The child sat quietly in the corner, reading a book, playing with his toy train … until he was ready to join civilized society again. He’d walk back over to us, tentatively. Ruth would glance down at him. “Are you done with that whining?” He nodded solemnly. Ruth did not hold a grudge, except against Asshole. She’d say, “Okay. Let’s play with that train then.”

We sat around the huge table, eating and drinking. These were casual big-hearted people. My boyfriend and I had been shivering in a soul-chill – and an actual living-outside chill – for two months. Here were people with a lot of problems, yes, but they didn’t stop them from laughing. Ruth told us bluntly, at the table, with the child right there, “It sucks being 60 and single. I’m dying for sex.” She then bellowed: “DYING! But I’m 60. Nobody picks up 60 year old women. I’m losing my mind.” Jessica was abandoned by her husband (fondly referred to as Asshole Two) and she had a difficult wild child, but she kept making the margaritas, riding her horse for hours every weekend. Chris was a lonely-heart single guy (unbelievable to me. As far as I was concerned, he was the Catch of the Century). He lived out in the middle of nowhere, he didn’t like pick-up bars, he had a hard time meeting people. These people had problems, but they were loud and funny, they loved each other, and they welcomed us. We could sit there with them, and we didn’t have to pretend our problems didn’t exist.

Night fell. I got the sense of the enormous spaces stretching out around us. I’m from New England. You don’t get big vistas in New England, unless you go to the ocean (never farther away than a 25-minute drive). The horizon in New England is always around a hill, behind some trees. You can’t see that far in New England. Even in the ranch house, with all the lights on, a fire crackling in the fireplace, music playing, all of us dancing around barefoot on the rug, sipping beer as we danced … even with all that lively light, you could feel everything drop off immediately outside the door. You could feel the darkness pressing in, you knew the mountains were there overshadowing everything.

The night slowly wound down. The child was put to bed, after a shrieking fight which left Jessica in a shambles. “He’s so wild … dammit … the kid is out of control …” Ruth said, “Jessie, you gotta be firm. That kid is DYING for limits. He may not want ’em but he needs ’em, and you’re weak. Tell him to shut the fuck up and go to bed, because he’s five years old, and that’s what five-year-olds do.” We could then hear Jessica in her son’s bedroom, giving it a good shot, albeit weakly, “You have to go to bed. Okay? I love you …”

My boyfriend and I had been sleeping in our sleeping bags for months. It was strange to be inside. I almost didn’t like it. In a strange way, even though we were on top of each other in the van, we also could get away from each other. We weren’t domesticated. There weren’t four walls closing in. Nature was right outside the door. We fell asleep to the sound of coyotes howling. Mating elk made anguished hooting sounds 50 feet away. Being inside a house, and having to be a “couple” was not right for us. Our relationship was over, we just hadn’t admitted it yet. It was easy to deny this reality when we were out in the wild, wearing long johns and hiking boots, collecting fire wood, sipping scotch while we watched the aurora borealis … Things were going to get worse before they got better. Being inside a house only made the wrongness between us more evident. I didn’t feel this until it was time to go to bed. I wanted to be back out in the van. Would it be weird if I slept out there, even though there were plenty of bedrooms inside?

The family went off to their respective rooms. My boyfriend went off to the guest room. I lingered in the bathroom for a long time … brushing my teeth … washing my face …

Something was going on. The sad yearning expanding in my chest. My own emotions were unbearable. I wished I could fucking catch my breath. I wished the light-headed clarity would fade. I wished I would feel like myself again. I could never be her again. She was like the Tetons. I could see her, but I couldn’t see her. She was a backdrop. She had nothing to do with me.

I was still in my sweater and jeans. The house was settling down, the human noise ceased. The child slept, filled with visions of evil plans to thwart the orderliness of the universe. My boyfriend lay in the pristine guest room, under a huge down comforter, reading, wondering where I was, but not wondering too hard. He probably needed a break from his wild-eyed dissociated girlfriend. Maybe Chris lay on his back in his bed, staring up at the ceiling, wishing he had a girl in his arms. Maybe Jessica curled up on her side, trying to get through another night by herself, trying to hang on until tomorrow, tomorrow would be another day. Maybe Ruth lay in her king-size freezing bed, treating herself to a panoply of luscious sexual fantasies in which she was the X-rated star.

And what about me?

I tiptoed down the stairs into the dark house, feeling like a criminal. I tiptoed to the front door, and put my hand on the cold doorknob, certain that at any second I would hear my boyfriend’s voice from the top of the stairs, “Babe? What you doin’?” His voice didn’t come. Biting my lip, I turned the doorknob, willing it to be silent … my thoughts streaming into the doorknob like a command: “Quiet. Quiet.” The night air hit me like a frozen wall, a freezing blast when I stepped outside. I wasn’t wearing a coat.

I was alone, high up in the Rocky Mountains. It was a cold moonless night. I have never seen such bright stars. The stars are bright in remote places in Rhode Island, but they were nothing like these stars. The air was thin, my lungs struggled for oxygen, my eyes full of tears … but the stars FILLED the sky. I stepped out onto the lawn, the dry grass crunching under my feet. I stood there for I don’t know how long. Wheels of constellations circled overhead, a dizzying array, an ethereal ceiling. The tall dark mountain sentinels, with the softly glowing white peaks, would kill you if you did not respect them. We were up so high the stars seemed to go behind the mountain peaks, the mountains blocked out the Big Dipper. I didn’t recognize the constellations. The stars were different.

Vincent Van Gogh didn’t think his Starry Night was “impressionistic”. He saw it as realistic.

That was how a starry night actually looked to him. I never really understood this concept until that night out under the stars in Colorado. Astronomers of old saw the heavens as a ceiling circling above. The earth did not move. The stars moved. I understood this perspective that night up in the mountains. I watched the stars move, a massive cyclorama spiraling by overhead. I watched the stars go behind the mountains and emerge again.

I didn’t know any of those stars.

Then came a sensation so distinct it can only be described one way and I never had this sensation before or since. I felt like I was going to fall up off the earth. I felt as though the stars, wheeling by overhead, would sweep me up in their motion. Gravity would no longer hold me down. I would go up, “without wings, without wheels“, into the abyss of unfamiliar Rocky Mountain constellations. I felt this imp of the perverse, as Edgar Allan Poe called it, as another newsreel, with an opposite trajectory: instead of falling into the abyss below the swing, I saw myself falling up into the air. The stars were a moving entity of one-ness with their own insistent pull. The sensation that I would fly up off the earth into the ether became so strong I sat down on the ground, grabbing chunks of dried wintry grass to hold me down.

Only if one was up that high, near the ceiling of the world, would it be possible to just fly up off the earth and join the stars in their heavenly circling.

The sensation did not last. I have no idea how long I sat huddled on the grass, trying to press myself into the earth so that the heavens couldn’t pull me up … but it must have been half an hour. This was not psychological, it was physical, an overwhelming bodily rush of vertigo, a sense of flying up, looking down, so far down, a sense that those mountains all around me would never stop my ascent. There would be nothing to grasp onto when I left the earth. In New England, I could grab onto a tree as I flew up into the air … but here? There was nothing between me and the stars, my hands grasping thin air. Thinner and thinner and thinner air. I guess I didn’t belong here. I was too much of a sea-level kind of girl.

I finally knew why I had come outside. Of course.

The vertigo settled down. I trusted myself to be able to stand up without flying up into the starry heavens. Up I got, slowly, shakily, and nothing bad happened. I was still subject to gravity. I still took up space. Like the Tetons. Maybe I wasn’t real yet, but matter is real. I was real in that sense. I could walk on the earth. I tiptoed across the lawn, glancing back at the house occasionally, wondering when my boyfriend would notice my absence. It would be soon. I didn’t have much time.

I hear a wind
Whistling air
Whispering in my ear

Shivering, I started to run. Suddenly I really felt the freezing air, it cut me to the bone. I ran over behind the barn. The horses were all asleep but I could still smell them.

I got to the barracks building where the ranch hands slept once upon a time. I said to myself, “Don’t be silly. They’re just two little kids. They will not hurt you.” But the night was pitch-black, there were shadowy darkened buildings all around me, and I was terrified. The yearning from earlier was back.

Blood throbbing in my veins, I opened the barracks door, my eyes straining, trying to see, terrified that the ghosts would turn out to be not so benign, due to the fact that it was me calling them up. I shrank from the possibility of their rejection. They would know I needed something from them. They would shrink away from me. I felt, then, everyone shrinking from me. Why did these high-altitude children need to be called up by a hyperventilating sea-level girl? Just let them be.

Convinced I was about to be murdered, I slipped inside the barracks. I didn’t move past the inner door, I didn’t have the guts. It was too dark. I stood right by the door, and waited. I could hear my breath in the silence. The blackness pressed against my eyeballs. If I held up my hand in front of my face, I wouldn’t have been able to see it.

Eventually, anything can become normal. Huddling in a dark empty barrack in the Rocky Mountains was normal.

Silence rushed in and everything washed away, including my conscious awareness, the thinking part of me. I was my muscles, my throat, my eyes, inner impulses cut off, a survival thing because consciousness was unbearable. In the barracks, acute aliveness poured back in. I was my heart pounding and my heaving breath. And then that anguished yearning, like a hot molten sword in my side. What the hell was I even yearning for?

I waited. And waited. I waited for those ghost kids to show up. I invited them. I tried to cleanse myself of the yearning. Maybe they would shy away from that yearning. I waited to hear the “Wap wap wap” of the pillows, I waited to hear their mischievous giggles, tiptoeing feet, hissing whispers.

Of course they did not come.

I waited until it was obvious nothing would happen. I walked back to the house, deflated. I remember how everything was flat again. I was suddenly blind to the stars, the mountains. I felt the gravity. I was on the earth, in no danger. I crawled into the dark bed in the cold room, and quietly cried, holding it all in as best I could, the tears scalding my cold cheeks. I so wanted to meet those ghostly little kids. I thought they might have a message, and maybe it was something in me that held them back. I was the wrong thing here.

Or maybe my sleeping soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend was right. All of this was just the altitude.

2026 thoughts: I barely remember writing this but my memory of the night in the mountains is vivid, as is the horror of what it was like inside me back then. I am a little shocked I put this out there, but (I guess?) I’m glad I did. Hard as this is to believe, just two months later I flew to Chicago to start a whole new life. I break down that whole journey in another personal piece, written during a difficult month during the pandemic, when the past was on my mind. Starting over in Chicago is all wrapped up in what came before, the months of living off grid with a man I could no longer talk to. The yearning and wordlessness vanished once I chose my own destiny, started off on my own path, coming down off the mountain to the shores of Lake Michigan. A mere three months later I attended a fund raiser for the theatre where I had just been cast in a production of Golden Boy, my first show in Chicago.

The cringing girl on the swing in the mountains was just three months prior? That CAN’T be right! (But it is.) The Sheila in the second photo wouldn’t be scared of a little ol’ swing.

Just three months before, I was lying on the grass, hoping I wouldn’t be sucked up into the air. The source of the yearning I felt up in those mountains, that hot unbearable sensation, wasn’t mysterious, after all. I yearned to be three months ahead on my own timeline, nails painted red, 15 pounds lighter, wearing a dress I bought for $8 dollars at a thrift store, drinking cheap white wine. Probably had a date later that night with some random guy from my acting class. Or the following night at 11 p.m. I was with another date on the train to the South Side to go to some secret rave in a warehouse. It was a busy winter, and I was as anti-relationship/conventional-dating as it was possible to be. I wanted to be free. Guys were into me and I hurt their feelings by accident because I had no idea what I was doing, and, frankly, I wasn’t believed when I said, “I don’t want a boyfriend. Like, at all.” I couldn’t have been more clear. At this point, I’d seen M. in an improv show, but hadn’t yet met him. I was still anti-relationship, and continued to be, but somehow we connected (in our own way). At the time the second photo was taken, M. is in the wings, about to make his entrance.

All this happened in three months.

How does someone even LIVE at that speed?

The only time I ever did drugs started with a letter from my ex-boyfriend.

We broke up a year before, and it was one hell of a separation, leaving us battered, but unwilling to sever the connection.

The ex-boyfriend was in San Francisco, a lawyer in a corporate law firm, and I was there for two months, and in L.A., before I moved to Chicago to start a new life as an actress. Chicago was a hubbub of theatre and I flourished immediately upon arrival. It was a youthful energetic environment. I began to work right away. Chicago was the right choice.

Historically, I was never a date-r, or a fooler-around-er. So let’s not soft-pedal the situation. I went insane those first months in Chicago. I made out with guys I never saw again. I gyrated at dance clubs, sandwiched in between two Lebanese cousins vying for my attention. I went to raves in abandoned warehouses where you needed a password to get in. No regrets. Loved it all. My main Chicago flame coalesced fairly early. He was a grumpy black-haired guy who wasn’t inclined to get serious, which suited me just fine. (I have written about him ad nauseum.) In retrospect, he was a really important person in my life, but at the time he was an escape into no-strings adventure and also an outlet for the, ahem, feral quality of my sex drive – all new experiences, which is why I ran towards him at lightning speed, and why he was happy to basically do whatever I wanted. You don’t find a proper playmate every day. When I was with ex-boyfriend, I was on the pill, which muffled my libido. The second we broke up, I went off the pill, and suddenly I was a wild animal and M. was the beneficiary. “I’m barely keeping up with this,” he said once. lol We stayed up all night, ordering takeout at 4 a.m., watching movies in the middle of the night, wrestling, knocking over furniture, laughing hysterically, wild sounds echoing through the apartment, irritating his long-suffering roommate who had an early audition the next day. Sometimes M. would then drive me directly to work, where I was answering phones in some corporate office or whatever, and so I’d show up to my corporate temp job having had zero sleep and … wearing the same clothes I wore the day before. So disreputable. But so fun.

All of this activity was interrupted by bouts of lying in bed sobbing, because I missed my old boyfriend. He was my first boyfriend. We got together when I was a senior in college. He was 8 years older, and courted me with gentleness and humor, blah blah, whatever. I was a virgin, and neurotic about my freckled plump lack of beauty. Blah blah. We connected on an emotional and comedic level. But it was not RIGHT, we did not CLICK the way you need to click. Even though I cried about him, never once did I think we should have stayed together. There was something not right in our dynamic, something insurmountable. We stayed in touch through letters and phone conversations. I would see a movie and have to talk about it with him, because he was the one I still wanted to talk to. He would have a question about an author or a book he just read, and the only person he wanted to ask was me.

He was ready to settle down, but trying to get me to settle down was like wrestling a typhoon.

Unfortunately, I did not have enough of a sense of self at the time to say to him, “I’m too young for all of this settling down business. I just got out of college. I am not ready to pick out silverware.” Instead, I internalized his displeasure and impatience, and let myself be overwhelmed by how wrong I was. To be truthful, I still grapple with the anxiety left by that relationship. Something is wrong with me, was the message.

The whole “wrong-ness” thing has to do with the story of the day I did drugs.

Every time I do anything, I do it wrong first. This is true of big things (relationships, career choices) and also little things. For example, when I go to make my bed, I always end up with the sheets upside down and backwards first, with the tag up. I have to go and turn them over. This is also true of driving somewhere for the first time. I always drive by the street I am searching for, and then have to backtrack, sometimes two or three times. Perhaps it is because I am impulsive and impatient, starting something without setting myself up properly. This is okay when it’s just a new printer I am trying to install but disastrous when it comes to my personal life. When I’m in a self-pitying mood, it feels like the universe is slapping my hand, saying, “No, no, no, you don’t get to do this right. Other people do, but not you.”

At that point in Chicago, I had a bunch of new friends, and I was living with Mitchell, an old dear friend from college. Our new friends were a lot of fun, and they had “x” parties where people gathered at an apartment to do ecstasy. Mitchell and I were curious about it so we decided to join them one night. Why not? We gave the dealer the money for a couple of pills for the following week.

A word about drugs. I have never been a “why not?” person about illegal substances. I guess I was always afraid of losing control. There was also the Go Ask Alice factor to consider, which cannot be overstated. I read that book when I was eleven and it scarred me for life. (I know now that it was propaganda, but at the time, I took it as gospel. It was HIGHLY EFFECTIVE propaganda.) I smoked some pot in college, everyone did, but I never liked it. It didn’t do for me what it did for others. It didn’t mellow me out. On the contrary, it made me feel like I was a hollow nonentity whom everybody secretly hated and scorned. In retrospect, it’s probably a good thing I never tried cocaine, because I feel like cocaine and me would have gotten along GREAT. Cocaine could, potentially, be the answer to my problems. Heroin terrified, way too unrecreational. I never did any of the hallucinogenics either, mushrooms, LSD, because I watched one too many movies-of-the-week and ABC Afterschool Specials in my childhood, and I knew, in my heart, I would be one of those morons who would leap through a plate glass window 80 stories up because “the sky looked so pretty”, or I would try to stab my best friend because I suddenly saw Beelzebub gleaming redly out of her eyes.

I felt safe with these new friends, however, and Mitchell would be there.

One thing I think might have been a factor in my “wrong” reaction to ecstasy later that night was I was flirting with anorexia at the time. Not full-blown but definitely a serious eating disorder. I was addicted to how thin I was. I couldn’t believe it! I was running five miles a day, devoted, even when it was freezing cold or raining, out I went, pounding down the Lake Shore. I lived on a diet of sunflower seeds and Snapple. Sometimes I would have Lipton’s Cup-a-soup to shake things up. My body fat dissolved, as I was simultaneously getting hard contours due to all the running.

And then there was the letter from my ex-boyfriend.

It arrived the day of the party. He informed me he was moving in with a new girlfriend, and our correspondence/phone calls would have to stop, and I probably would have to stop sending books and newspaper clippings to him. He was not callous. In fact, he was thoughtful in giving me the heads up, but it killed him. He didn’t think we should have broken up in the first place, we should have fought it out, and come out on the other side, still together. But he did what he needed to do, and found someone else.

I guess I knew it was coming. I knew he was dating someone. By that point, too, I had moved on in a significant way. I was in shows, I had new friends, a guy I was shmecking on a regular basis, and some wild card adventures to make sure all was light and frivolous. My life had a structure. I hadn’t slipped off the rails without him. I flourished! I remember reading the letter in our kitchen, Mitchell standing nearby. I put the letter down, saying to Mitchell, “Wow. It’s really over.” I felt nothing. No sadness came up, no familiar grief. I was calm and cool and quiet. I felt grateful for the letter, and amazed that I came so far. When I was in the breakup’s maelstrom, it seemed like it would never end and I would always be the tragic-eyed girl. But of course, time moved on and I healed. I got better. The letter was evidence. Look at me. I am finally okay.

We set out for the party. It was a hot summer evening. Chicago swelter. We waited for the cross-town bus. I had no idea what I was walking into, and I was excited, I felt shimmery and light. I said to my two friends as we stood at the bus stop, “You know what? I am fine about that letter! Can you believe it? I am fine! I cannot believe how fine I feel about that letter!” [Denial is the strongest drug of all.]

An ecstasy party is a friendly and compassionate environment, even as the collective spinal fluid is compromised drop by drop. Jellyfish was playing when we walked in. There was pizza. Our friends greeted us rapturously. Most people were out on the wooden back porch, so typical of Chicago apartments. There was booze in the kitchen, but not too many people were drinking. They were listening to music, dancing, and watching I Love Lucy, reciting the lines in unison. Never saw a party like that in Go Ask Alice, did you? Not a hippie gang-bang in sight.

We downed our pills in the kitchen, and waited to see what would happen next. I had a beer. I felt a little buzzed, but that was probably because I only ate ten sunflower seeds in the last 10 hours.

The three of us ended up on the back porch. The music was soft, and people were chatting. Everything was lovely.

Until suddenly I started to feel very “off”.

First came a dizzying sense of vertigo so strong I hung onto the railings of the porch steps. The moment my hands gripped the bars, the porch detached itself from the house and began to fly around in a circle, leaving me holding on for dear life. It was like that last scene in Hitchcock’s Strangers On a Train where there is no way to step gently off the runaway merry-go-round. I closed my eyes, trying to breathe through it. Obviously, the fact that I was clutching a stationary porch railing, huddled down against a hurtling imaginary wind, called attention to itself and someone said, hesitantly, “Sheila?” Which was my cue to lean over the side of the stairwell, and vomit up my sunflower seeds.

I have an almost pathological embarrassment about vomiting in public (one of the reasons why drinking to excess is such a rare occurrence. I can count on one hand). Vomiting in public makes me feel like I will not be forgiven for my transgression. I am wrong, and wrong for good. This will be a mark against me for all time.

I was paralyzed with horror on the porch. My friends, high on ecstasy, were full of love and support for me and my vomiting. They hunched over me, rubbing my back, getting me water. Dammit, why did the porch keep flying around? Couldn’t it stay still? I threw up again. And again. (My starvation diet was obviously a huge culprit in what was going on.) I started crying at some point, and my friends helped me stagger up the steps and took me into the bathroom.

I was “that girl” you see at parties: weeping uncontrollably, a sloppy mess. I have lived my life trying to avoid being “that girl”.

We stayed in the bathroom for probably an hour. The vomiting finally ceased, which was a blessing, seeing as how my non-diet didn’t leave much to come up, but once the crying started I could not stop. One friend sat on the closed toilet seat, Mitchell perched on the edge of the tub, as I paced around in my cut-off shorts sobbing about my ex-boyfriend, how much I loved him, how sad I was, how my life was over, how I would never love again, how angry I was at him, and how tragic it was that I would have my great and only love at such a young age. It was a monologue of Aeschylus-ean proportions. I went through two rolls of toilet paper, mopping the tears off my face as I ranted.

Now let me talk about the nature of my tears, because I haven’t cried like that before or since. At first, yes, I was sobbing, but eventually the tears became like any other bodily function: sweat, a sneeze, the flu; they happened whether I did anything about it or not, whether I FELT sad or not, the tears could not be stopped. Once the first hour of hysterics had passed, I could carry on conversations about things other than my lost love moving in with his new girlfriend. I could talk about I Love Lucy, music, food, but the tears kept falling. They fell and fell and fell. I was like Alice in Wonderland, drowning in a pool of her own tears. The tears were unconnected to me, somehow. I didn’t feel convulsive sadness. Inside, I felt 100% normal.

I finally removed myself from the party’s action. I didn’t feel like people were embarrassed by me. As a matter of fact, an entire cottage industry of Sheila-Nurturing activities had cropped up, people racing to get me food, or water, or a cold cloth. Remember: this was an X party. I needed to go lie down. I went into the empty front room. There were windows on three sides, long curtains touching the floor. There was privacy, but I could hear the party going on down the hall. I piled couch pillows on the floor, lay on my back in the darkness, and let the tears flow. I cried years of tears in that dark living room. I cried more tears than I ever would have allowed myself to if I had been in my right mind. I got four months of potential grief out in one short evening. I didn’t writhe with psychic pain. No. I was quiet, my breathing was calm and deep. I stared up at the shadowy ceiling, hearing Jellyfish blasting from down the hall, and let the tears fall. I stopped judging the tears or trying to hold them back. Out they poured.

Occasionally large groups of people would come sit around me, carrying on their conversations from the kitchen, letting me feel included. Nobody tried to pull me out of it or cheer me up. Nobody expected me to participate. Their voices flowed above my head, soft, giving, benign, and it was considered completely normal that they would all be chatting about Ghostbusters while a girl lay on pillows below them, tears rolling down her face like the flooded Yangtze.

If only every wounded person could be surrounded by such a crowd.

I had now been crying for three hours.

People came and went. They hung around, standing over me, then meandered back to the kitchen, drifting in and out.

The guy whose party it was came into the front room. Nobody else was there. I lay alone in the dark. I didn’t know him all that well. He sat down cross-legged behind me, gently picked my head up and put it in his lap. I was completely passive. A limp rag of tears. We didn’t speak. No words passed between us. He was dating my good friend. This was not a sexual thing, he wasn’t making a pass. He was taking care of me. I lay there with my head in his lap, eyes closed, and as the tears fell – and they came slowly (but persistently) – one by one – he would brush them away. A tear fell. Gentle hand brushing it away. Another tear fell. Gentle brushing it away.

This went on for an hour.

We never spoke. He never asked me to explain myself. It was just accepted that I was on drugs, and sometimes when you’re on drugs, shit like this goes down, and you need to take care of a person like that. His hands, soft like wings, on my cheek, brushing my tears away. For an hour.

I will never forget him for that.

Years later, our paths crossed again. He’s now an Emmy nominee many – many – times over. Randomly, we ended up working at 30 Rock at the same time, on the same floor no less, and I ran into him regularly. So strange. We never mentioned the ecstasy night … but our time in the dark living room, his wing-like hands on my face, was there between us. Because I know that that tenderness and care is in him. It’s not in everyone, make no mistake. Not everyone would choose to sit quietly for an hour like some Franciscan monk, and wipe the tears off the face of a girl you don’t even know (let alone not turn it into some sexual thing, taking advantage of the situation, which would have been highly unethical, and yet so common as to be almost boring. He didn’t go there. I was safe and cared for).

A crowd of anxious hovering people came in to see how I was doing. My friend K. stood in the doorway, saying in a tremulous chorus: “Sheila … how are you???”

I pulled my head up, squinted at them through swollen eyes, and said softly, “I am having such a good time.”

And I fucking meant it. Everyone burst into laughter.

Finally, it was time to go. Mitchell helped me get up and walk to the door.

Then there is a jump cut, and it is now the next morning. I have no memory of getting home, of going to sleep. I was at the party, and then suddenly it was the next morning. K. slept over on the couch. We woke up, still high. The tears were over. I woke up fresh in the bright day. The four-hour crying jag was something I experienced, but that morning it felt like it hadn’t left a trace. I woke up ravenous. I didn’t want to dole out sunflower seeds anymore; I wanted to eat a steak. K. and I bumped around the apartment together until deciding to walk to the diner down the street and get some breakfast. As we walked to the diner, K. said to me, “I feel so skinny right now.” One of the blessed side effects of ecstasy, especially for a borderline anorexic: you feel lithe and skinny, you flow through space without leaving a ripple. I said, “Me too.” K. said, “I feel like a prancing gazelle.” I was swimming in my clothes, my hipbones sharp picture hooks keeping up my jeans. We were gazelles leaping across the savannah of Ashland Street.

K. and I sat down at the table, drooling and ready for breakfast. We ordered everything on the menu. Eggs, bacon, home fries, bagels, lox, fruit cup, coffee, juice, Frosted Flakes, bring it all! The stacks of food arrived. Ohhh, we were so excited. But then … we could not eat a thing. We tried, but we choked on the crumbs, pushing our eggs around, washing it down with sips of burnt coffee. Mortified, we asked for the check. We slunk away, embarrassed gazelles.

It took us the rest of the day to get back to normal.

We started talking about my “wrong” response to the drug. Why did everyone else get to be so happy and loving, while I went on a world-ending crying jag? What happened? Was it my anorexia? Was it the letter from the ex? Was it something in me different (read: “wrong”) than others? I am sick of not having the regular experiences. I didn’t “get” to have the experiences other people had. I have to be careful. Everyone else can let loose, but I clearly cannot. Instead, I had to make an absolute spectacle of myself. K. and Mitchell’s ecstasy experience was by-the-book, a golden-lit feeling of warmth and love towards everyone they saw. I got to cry for four hours in a dark room.

Mitchell said, “I don’t think ‘ecstasy’ the word actually means ‘ happy’. It’s not just about being ‘happy’, Sheila. I don’t think it’s that literal.”

Naturally I dragged out my dictionary.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, “ecstasy” is defined as follows:

A state of exalted delight in which normal understanding is felt to be surpassed: allay thy ecstasy: “In measure rein they joy” (Shakespeare)
A state of any emotion so intense that rational thought and self-control are obliterated: an ecstasy of anger
The trance, frenzy, or rapture associated with mystic or prophetic exaltation (Mid-English extasie, from Old French, from Late Latin exstasis, ecstasies, from Greek ekstasis, from existanai, to displace, drive out of one’s senses).

The first definition was what I expected, the traditional response, but #2 and #3 come close to actually expressing my experience, #2 especially with its “emotion so intense that rational thought and self-control are obliterated“.

I was the only one crying for four hours, it is true, but the surrounding warmth, the feather-light-brushing-off of my tears from that kind guy, helped me to feel that whatever I was going through was part of their experience as well. I was not an anomaly. I was not wrong. My tears, although excessive, were indeed an event where “normal understanding is felt to be surpassed.”

I never did ecstasy again. There is only so much “frenzy and rapture” one person can take.

I never cried that intensely again, either, about my ex-boyfriend, not even when he went ahead and married that new girlfriend the following year. My crying jag was a condensed and necessary catharsis, leaving me totally purged of the leftover ghosts.

So.

If you want to know who I am, you can just ask. I’d probably answer something like:

I am the type of person who does ecstasy, and afterwards looks up the word in the dictionary in order to verify the etymological roots of my experience.

2026 COMMENTARY
I had to bite my tongue multiple times re-reading this, wanting to inject present me into this. I’ll save that for end-notes. The majority of my personal posts (well, everything I write is personal, but I mean story-time posts like this one) were written pre-2013-diagnosis, a life-changing and life-saving event. And so I was pouring out these stories without a crucial piece of the puzzle, and the missing piece explains so much (in retrospect). I chalked up my ecstasy response to basically starving myself for a year, while also running multiple miles every day … and of course this was part of it. I assign my exploding libido to going off the pill, and of course that was part of it … but all of these things probably have to do with what I now believe was a year long – truly glorious, honestly – manic “episode”, after a year of in-and-out dissociation and anguish … I busted out of what I considered to be the chains of a monogamous relationship, my first, and the freedom launched me up, up, up. Anyway, this is one thing that comes to mind when I read this piece, and so many others. Like, I have no idea what I’m actually going through. At the time I wrote the piece in 2010, I just knew I had periodic “bad times” (my name for them since I was in high school – the first “bad time” was 7th grade), and I knew I just had to make it through the “bad time” (they usually lasted 3 months). I didn’t make the connection in 2010 and neither did my lazy-ass therapist. So re-reading this, I can see what I was actually struggling with in the past and I feel sad for my oblivious younger self. Hard hard times are ahead. You can’t believe how hard it’s going to get, younger Sheila. Sorry about that.

Last summer, I reconnected with the ex-boyfriend who wrote the break-up letter as described here. We had an epic 6-hour meetup at a local seafood place where we had had multiple dates back in the day. I hadn’t seen him since 2011 when our mutual friend Brett died. He reached out in 2025, wanting to get together. After all these years, I hesitated but then was like “fuck it” and so glad I said “fuck it”. A process of reclamation and post-mortem discussions has been going on, and we are fully back in touch, I’ve been to his house for dinner, we met up halfway between our abodes and had drinks, like it’s been totally unexpected and surprisingly great. I realized: Well, there’s a reason we put each other through so much torture back then. We really loved each other as friends. We were saying goodbye to a friend. And so I forgive my younger self. I wasn’t stupid or overly attached. He was a good friend and I was going to miss him. Valid. ANYWAY, during our 6-hour slightly soused conversation, in the sun, overlooking the beach, I told him the X story, and the role his letter played in it.

And we DIED laughing. Me saying, “Wow, I feel NOTHING when I read the letter, I am FINE”. Cut to me clutching the porch railing and crying for four hours, high as fuck. It struck us as absolutely hysterical. Oh, and he told me HIS story of the first time he did x and, of course, he had a by-the-book golden-lit-warmth experience. Typical.

I could never have predicted the full-circle moment of it all when I wrote this piece in 2010.

And finally: I still love Jellyfish. I wish they were still around. Every song is great, and every song launches me back into this very specific sliver of time, when I was free as a bird careening around in space, living exactly as I wanted to live, with nothing tying me down. Where having fun was priority #1. At last. Jellyfish was the soundtrack. Resurrecting this post inspired me to listen to Spilt Milk again, start to finish. It holds up.