How to Lose Everything in 10 Days

When I was about six years old, I started having dizzy spells and breathing problems, and I would get tired easily. At first our pediatrician thought it was asthma, but after the usual remedies didn't help, I went to a few specialists. Eventually, I was diagnosed with a relatively mild blood disorder. It's not really life-threatening as long as I take my medication and stick with the other parts of treatment. The main inconvenience at this point is that I have to avoid getting too much iron in my food, which especially sucks if you're a fan of almost any popular "fortified" breakfast cereal. Unfortunately, it does leave me with a somewhat compromised immune system.

Several months after I moved to Brooklyn in 2017, I started feeling tired again, but I also started to feel... kind of hopeless. I began to have trouble getting out of bed in the morning. Soon the world seemed bleak, and I felt useless and deeply, inexplicably sad. I would start crying at odd and inconvenient moments, including while I was waiting tables.

I had been doing exactly what I always said I wanted -- making a life on my own in the big city, steeping myself in avant-garde culture, trying new cuisines, and using a fake ID to go out on weekends with new friends and meet boys in bars (while putting most of the cost of my new life on a credit card so it could simmer while I caught up on the rent debt to my landlord and paying back my mom).

But something was now whispering directly into my soul to tell me that my life was pointless, and there was no reason for me to keep going. I started canceling dates, begging off nights out, using one friend as an excuse to another to deflect concern. I called out of work often enough that the restaurant's manager wrote me up. When I wasn't wallowing I was angry, but as soon as the fury died down I would go right back to the depths. I just kept putting one foot in front of the other without feeling any joy at all, and not for a second stopping to think that there was anything I could do about it.

One night after leaving the restaurant a little later than usual, I got on a Brooklyn-bound A train and sat down with my head in my hands. The next time I was aware of what was going on, two police officers and an MTA conductor were standing over me trying to get me to respond to them. I was crying hysterically and unable to stop, or to talk. It turned out I'd ridden the A train several miles past Shitsville, all the way to the last stop at Lefferts Boulevard in Queens, bawling the entire way.

The two officers took me to a nearby emergency room, where I was sedated and admitted for the night. The next morning I felt terribly embarrassed, insisting that all this trouble had been over nothing, but the doctor wouldn't discharge me without a psych consult. Several hours later, I had my second-ever official diagnosis -- Major Depressive Disorder -- and a prescription for what the doctor called "first try meds." He also insisted that I find a therapist for weekly sessions.

If you've never been on antidepressants, you may not know that they often take a few weeks to kick in. They also don't always have the desired effect, and can sometimes cause severe side effects. It's not unusual for a newly diagnosed depression patient to have to try several different meds, or combinations of meds, before they land on one that's right for them. I was no exception.

A month into my "first try meds," the depression hadn't improved any, but the anger-to-depression ratio had tilted dramatically toward angry. I was also suffering a fair amount of nausea. The next try helped stabilize the swings a bit better, but it flattened out my mood and dulled it instead of allowing it to improve, plus I started gaining weight and lost most of my interest in sex. And so on, until somewhere along the line, a particular combination of meds seemed to give me the space I needed to return gradually to who I was supposed to be.

I was able to enjoy myself again, look forward to things, feel genuine optimism, and find pleasure in my work and in spending time with my friends. I didn't have any nausea or additional weight gain this time, and I even found that my sex drive might have increased a little, unless it just seemed that way relative to the dip. My doctor and my therapist were happy with the results, and I was mostly happy as well.

That lasted for a few years until early 2021, when I ended up in the hospital again -- this time in the ICU on oxygen, fighting COVID-19 (a story for another day). After a couple of weeks in there alone, I was overwhelmed with fear, exhaustion, and isolation just from the reality of the situation. My family was almost a thousand miles away, and they wouldn't be allowed to visit me even if they flew to New York. My body's systems were horribly unstable, and the nurses (who were otherwise absolutely amazing) fumbled balancing my existing medications with some new ones. I crashed hard past depression into despondency. I just didn't want to live anymore. I felt like I was probably close to dying anyway, and there was no point in fighting anymore. If the coronavirus and my body wouldn't finish the job for me, I would take things into my own hands.

But I couldn't figure out how to kill myself in an ICU bed, and believe me, I had plenty of time to think about it. There was nothing sharp enough to slit my wrists, and they were monitoring my blood stats anyway. If I pulled out my IV, an alarm would go off and someone would come in and fix it. There didn't seem to be an obvious way to strangle myself, and I couldn't very well smother myself with a pillow, especially while I was on oxygen. And I didn't have access to my own medications to take too many of them. So I needed help, and I waited until the right shift change came along so I could ask the sweetest, most empathetic nurse I'd met in there, because I knew how hard she was taking all the suffering around her. Help me end my own suffering, I would ask. She would have to help, right? I was crying constantly already, and I would beg if I had to.

In the cold light of day, I do realize that asking that poor woman to help me commit suicide -- asking her to kill me, really -- was the most selfish, cowardly, and hurtful thing I've ever done in my life, and I hope I never stoop that low again. I also know now how lucky I am that instead of doing what I asked, or even dismissing my request in a way that might leave me an opening to ask someone else, she immediately restrained me and reported the incident to her boss, who reported it to the division chief. That night an ambulance took me to a different hospital.

For the rest of my time battling COVID-19, I was in an ICU connected to the psychiatric unit of a larger hospital, and they kept me on suicide watch. It was humiliating. On the plus side, they prioritized stabilizing my medication. As my body recovered, they were determined to find a better combination of psych meds for me.

By the time they sent me home --almost six weeks after the first ambulance had whisked me away from home -- I was on my latest antidepressant, plus a new mood-stabilizer, and another pill that's in a class of drugs called antipsychotics (even though both the hospital and my original doctor assured me that I didn't have to be psychotic to benefit from it). I wasn't exactly happy, but I was far from suicidal, and I had at least a little bit of real optimism about life after COVID-19. Plus I didn't seem to have any new side effects from the new combination of meds.

Until the night I woke up shaking and soaked in sweat, so desperately and overwhelmingly horny that for a few confused, delirious minutes I thought I might literally die, like actually lose my life, if someone didn't immediately fuck me as hard as possible. I had enough presence of mind not to run out into the hallway and start knocking on apartment doors until I found a suitable dick, but only just barely. I put my vibrator through its paces that night for longer than I'd care to admit, and once I finally got my body to calm down I cried myself back to sleep.

I woke up feeling fine in the morning and, but for the condition of my sheets and some dead batteries, I might've believed the whole thing was a bad dream. I dismissed it as a random fluke, a funny story to tell the girls next time we had a Zoom happy hour. Then it happened again a few weeks later --more than an hour of sweating, crying from desperation, cursing God that I was single, and frantically using my toy and my fingers to quell the bizarre sense of doom.

When I had a televisit with my psychiatrist about it, he said that a further increase in sex drive was "unusual but not unheard of" on some combinations of meds, but something as dramatic as what I was describing was an anomaly to him. Great, I thought, I'm unique. He theorized that it wasn't just the new regimen of psych meds, that some interaction between the psych meds and my blood meds might also be causing it -- as well as the blood disorder itself contributing, potentially. But he recommended strongly against changing meds at this point, especially given my suicide attempt -- because in every other way, this approach was a success.

I'm not proud of what I did next. I was upset, but that's no excuse. I screamed at my doctor that if this was what success looked like, if he didn't want to experiment further with my meds to get rid of this side effect, the least he could do was fuck me himself.

He avoided taking televisit appointments with me for a while after that.

I was already used to the higher baseline sex drive as just one of those things, though it was awfully inconvenient when I was single and locked down by myself month after endless month. As for the future, being a reasonably pretty girl in a place like New York City isn't a bad situation if you're looking to get laid regularly, even if you're kind of short and a little chubby like me. I was sex-positive already, so maybe someday when it was safe to get back out there, my behavior would reflect my increased desire.

And a pattern quickly started to reveal itself with those horrible, desperate nights: they were most likely to hit within the first two or three days after my period ends. It still happened now and again at other points in my cycle, and milder waves of extreme horniness occasionally hit me in the daytime as well. But mostly I knew when to expect it, and being prepared did help a little.

I would never minimize the suffering of people who have sacrificed some or all of their sex drive in the name of balancing their brain chemistries. But there were times during those nights -- when I'd lost all rational thought, and I was overtaken by the instinct to find the nearest functioning man and demand that he penetrate me immediately and forcefully, lest the torment kill me-- that I would've seriously considered trading places.

Most of the time though, I accepted that this Samantha couldn't exist without that one. And this Samantha wasn't planning on going anywhere.

*****

I met Matt on a Friday night in March of 2019 at Jimmy's Corner, one of the few remaining old-school dive bars in New York City. It was my 21st birthday and I was out with friends, and my sister Dina and her girlfriend Cassie had even come in from Chicago for the occasion. Jimmy's was our fourth bar of the night, and I was pretty well lit by then from all the free drinks. Matt wasn't even the first guy that night to take my friends' singing as a cue to buy me a birthday drink so he could make a pass at me, but he was the cutest. And the tallest.

So when the time came to head for what we'd planned to be the last bar of the night, I asked Matt if he wanted to join us, and he was happy to tag along. Our merry band walked over to the Stinger, a much swankier place in a swanky hotel on the swanky side of 8th Avenue. The idea had been to finish only steps away from the subway trains that I would need to get home to Shitsville, Brooklyn, but it made me smile to think that maybe I wasn't going directly home after all.

We had a quieter, fancier drink at the Stinger, which allowed others to get to know Matt a bit, too. Dina poked me lightly in the ribs at one point when Matt said something she liked -- I don't remember what it was, but the message was that she approved. I wasn't really looking for a boyfriend at the time, but I filed her opinion away for later. Then I said a silent prayer of thanks that she and Cassie had gotten a hotel room instead of trying to crash on an air mattress in my shoe-box-sized studio in Shitsville.

When the party started to break up, Matt asked me if I wanted to have one more drink with him before I went home, and I knew what he meant. I reassured my sister that our plans for Saturday and Sunday were still on, then Matt and I watched as everyone gradually made their way out the door. I turned to him and asked, "What do you have to drink at your place?" with all the confidence of a drunk 21 year old, and he grinned with all the confidence of a guy who knew he was about to bring a drunk 21 year old home with him.

He lived in Alphabet City, so it took us a little while to get over there by cab, and we took advantage of that time by making out in the back seat. I might have even had my hand down his pants before we got there. He had a one-bedroom apartment to himself, so we were barely in the door before I started undoing his belt. But he quickly took control and took my jeans off instead, and playfully pushed me down onto his overstuffed sofa before kneeling in front of me.

He slid my panties off and went down on me for a while, and he definitely knew what he was doing. When we decided to switch gears he went for a condom without my having to ask. Then he lasted several minutes as we tried a few different positions. Each of those things moved him up a bunch of notches in my mind. After he came (and made me cum for the third time), we lay there sweaty on the couch just quietly breathing, until he finally said, "We should do that again sometime."

"I'm down," I agreed, thinking we would just try to hook up at some point. I needed more good sex in my life.

"How about dinner on Sunday after your sister and her girlfriend fly home?"

I wasn't sure I heard him right. "You mean like a date?"

He laughed. "Is that so weird?"

"I didn't think you were interested in that way," I said. And if you hooked up with a hundred different New York City boys on a hundred different nights, the odds would be overwhelmingly in your favor to be right if you always assumed they weren't interested in that way.

"I wasn't looking for it, but you make me smile," he said.

I shrugged. "I wasn't looking for it either."

He slipped a hand between my legs and started playing. "Crazier things have happened," he whispered, and I closed my eyes and leaned into him.

Why not be optimistic? I thought to myself, and felt his fingers slide into me.

There were some good times over the next several months. I don't think either of us ever mistook the other for "the one," and it's not like we were together every night -- we didn't live close enough for that and our schedules didn't mesh well. But when we were together we had great chemistry in bed, there were a lot of laughs, and we had some shared interests. I'm not even sure I can point to a single moment where it became clear we weren't going to last. It was just a gradual shift, a progression of small changes.

Like the first time we went away for a weekend together that July, and Matt kept picking fights with me over little things, as if he was annoyed just to be trapped in one place with me for so long. Or when he told me he didn't trust Dev and his friends -- the guys who hung out on a corner in my neighborhood -- and I should stop spending time with them. Or the night he showed up at my restaurant and nearly started a fight with the bartender because he saw me lingering at the service station and laughing with him. Or that time he stopped returning my texts, then didn't explain or apologize when he popped back up on the grid a few days later.

But the day I knew something had already gone wrong was in February of 2020, after we'd spent the night at his place. When I awoke that morning, I rolled over to see him already awake and watching me. "We should have sex with another girl," were the first words out of his mouth.

We had already had all the usual conversations about each other's experiences and fantasies, so he knew I wasn't into girls at all -- and after one drunken threesome a while back with two men I didn't know, I wasn't too thrilled about threesomes in general. "I might be okay with bringing another girl to bed with us, but only if you don't expect me to have sex with her," I said. "You'd still get to have us both, though."

He shook his head. "It doesn't even count as a threesome if you and the other girl don't go down on each other. You should want to do this for me," he added as I tried to imagine what dictionary he got that from.

"If we had sex with another man, would you give him a blowjob? Should you want to do that for me?" I posed.

"That's different and you know it," he said, raising his voice to an uncomfortable level given that we were still in bed together. "Your sister does it all the time, you should be totally used to the idea."

That made me furious. I got out of bed and stomped off to the bathroom muttering, "That's not okay." We dropped the subject afterward, but things were tense for a few days. He had no right to use my sister's sexual orientation against me, and I decided to draw a hard line in the sand mentally; if he did that again, I would have it out with him.

But it was only a couple of weeks later that the world quickly started changing around us. We'd been hearing about the coronavirus -- COVID-19 -- pretty much since the new year began, but we had no idea how bad it was going to get, or how quickly. And it didn't take long to realize that New York City was likely to become ground zero for the pandemic in the United States. Then came the most surreal week and a half of my life, at least up until that point.

On March 11, 2020 one of the fashion houses for which I'd done some freelance seamstress work called to cancel the order I was already working on. When I asked them how they wanted me to return the material to them, they said they didn't need it back, which seemed weird.

I woke up to an email on March 12 from the company I worked for doing merchandise sales in midtown theaters. Broadway was officially and completely shutting down, until April 12 -- an entire month! I'd only been working matinees lately because I was full-time at the restaurant, but that was work I needed if I was going to pay rent and still stay afloat atop the consumer debt I'd accumulated.

That same day, about an hour before I would've left my apartment to go work a dinner shift, the manager of the restaurant called me himself to let me know they were shutting the whole thing down proactively just as a precaution. It would be temporary, of course, this whole thing would blow over in a month or two, Memorial Day at the outside, and we'd all be back to work. But they had to lay all of us off in the meantime. At least the good news (he said) was that as layoffs, we'd be eligible for unemployment benefits after a one-week waiting period. After I hung up the phone I was pissed. Unemployment might get me $400/week, and even that would be taxable as income. How was I supposed to pay for anything now? Why would they shut down if they didn't already know they had to?

As upsetting as that news was for about 18 hours, it turned out not to matter much once my Hematologist called me on Friday the 13th. "If you don't absolutely have to leave home, I highly recommend you don't. Your blood disorder suppresses your immune system, and not only could that make it easier for you to catch the coronavirus, it could also result in a far worse case if you do catch it, perhaps even a higher risk of fatality. It's simply not safe for you out there right now."

My heart was pounding at this revelation. "All right, but is it still okay to have my boyfriend come over as long as I stay home myself?"

I already knew the answer before I finished the question, and the doctor's cringe was practically audible. "I would caution strongly against it, unless he takes significant steps to isolate himself from others anytime he's not with you."

After I hung up the phone I texted Matt that I was now completely unemployed and essentially under house arrest. He called and I repeated what the doctor had told me about staying home and how I was even supposed to avoid contact with him unless he made a serious effort. His response surprised me. "If that's what it takes, I'll do whatever I can. I'll wash my hands, wear a mask, keep my distance from people, all of that. If you can't leave your apartment I'll come to you. I'll be there after work tonight, and everything's going to be fine."

I ended the call and stared at the phone. Why not be optimistic? I allowed myself to think, almost exactly a year after the first time. Life was presenting Matt with an opportunity to step up and be a man, and it sure sounded like he was going to rise to the occasion, or at least try. And I didn't know if I could do this alone.

Matt came over after work that night and stayed the weekend, and he really did help calm me down about the situation. We tried to figure out the best way for me to handle staying in for a month, or even two months if that's how long it took. We couldn't get a delivery slot on FreshDirect or any other grocery delivery service because everyone else was panicking too, and the lines at supermarkets and even bodegas were insanely long when Matt tried to go. But eventually we managed to stock my apartment with a decent amount of food that didn't need to be refrigerated, along with a couple dozen extra rolls of toilet paper for reasons I didn't really understand.

That Sunday happened to be my 22nd birthday and the first anniversary of the night we met. Matt kind of made a big deal of it. He cooked me a simple dinner in my pathetic little kitchen, and lit a candle in a cupcake to sing me "Happy Birthday" afterward. It felt special and intimate. By the time he left for work on Monday morning I actually felt like the whole thing might bring us closer together. I spent a large part of that day reading news stories about the pandemic on my laptop and wondering just how bad it was going to get.

Late Monday afternoon, Matt texted that his company was shutting down on-site operations and telling everyone to work from home until further notice, so he had to get everything together and bring it to his place. It just wouldn't make sense for him to try to come to Brooklyn after that, so he would plan to come over Tuesday night after putting in his first full day of working from home. Even though I'd spent the majority of nights on my own over the course of the year we'd been dating, I felt especially alone trying to fall asleep on Monday night.

I was halfway through Tuesday before I even remembered that it was St. Patrick's Day, which any other year would've meant dressing up in green and going out on the town for what a lot of New Yorkers call "Amateur Night." I wondered whether any of my friends from the restaurant or from Broadway were planning to go out despite what seemed from news stories like an increasingly ominous mood in the city -- and I wished I could join them, but not at risk to my life.

It started getting dark at 6:30pm, and I hadn't heard from Matt yet. I forced myself to wait until 8 o'clock before I texted him, and I still didn't get a response until about 9:15pm when he texted back, "Sorry babe, just swamped! Don't want you to have to wait up for me. I'll be there by sundown tomorrow." I didn't sleep much.

Wednesday I had trouble getting out of bed for the first time in months. I felt isolated and confused, unable to understand why Matt had continued to stay away despite being there for me so convincingly over the weekend. And as the hours crawled by and there was still no word from him, I swore I wouldn't be the first one to reach out yet again. I didn't. Neither did he. I went to bed at midnight and fought off tears for hours.

When I woke up on Thursday, there was nothing left but to assume that Matt and I were no longer together. He had ghosted me at the worst possible time, and after giving me higher expectations than ever. I didn't eat anything, I just opened a bottle of cheap Merlot and started drinking. I wrote and deleted about a dozen different emails to him, none of them striking the right balance between betrayal and defiant independence that I was looking for.

Just before 5pm my intercom buzzer went off, and I went to answer it wondering if I'd forgotten ordering food. "Yes?"

"It's Matt." My heart stopped. I buzzed him in. It took him eleven years to climb the four flights to my apartment. When he finally got there he grabbed me and kissed me hard, pulling me into his body even as he pushed us both into the apartment and kicked the door closed behind him. He ripped off my pajamas like they were made of crêpe paper, and threw me on my bed so he could undress. I was speechless and my mind was going everywhere at once, but Matt was here in front of me, and he wanted me. Well he could fucking have me. And boy, well, he fucking had me.

And had me.

The sunlight snuck onto my bed through the mostly closed blinds, and I smiled before I even opened my eyes. Friday was a brand-new day, and Matt was here, maybe even for the weekend. I rolled over onto nothing. I finally opened my eyes, and Matt was dressed and sitting at what passed for a dining table in my shoe box of a home.

"I've gotta go," he said, "but first you need to know something. I didn't mean for anything to happen."

"For what to happen?" I said quietly.

"We met on Tuesday night," he continued. "And everything just clicked. It's like we've known each other our whole lives. I'm sorry Samantha, that's just the way it happens sometimes, fate stepped in. You and I had fun but I think we both knew it wasn't a forever thing. I have to follow my heart."

I sat there stunned as my mind pieced together what he was telling me. When my mouth finally opened again I was shaking. "You... you went out on Tuesday night when you told me you were swamped and working late... and met another woman while I was trapped here by myself? You exposed yourself to other people in the middle of a pandemic when you promised me you would limit your contact, you apparently fell in love with this other woman within a day or two of meeting her, and then you came over here and you fucked me anyway?! And now you're breaking up with me?"

"Sam, I -- "

"Have you already fucked her?" I shouted.

He lowered his head and sighed.

I stood up and started yelling. "You couldn't just cheat on me and let that be the end of it, right? You couldn't just decide you were done with me and break up with me like a man? You had to stick your dick inside someone else first? You had to have one last go at my pussy for old time's sake before I learn that you've already completely fucked me over?"

Matt stood up. "I'm sorry Samantha, I am -- but I didn't even think it would be that big a deal. It's not like we're engaged or something!"

"That's not the point!" I screamed, grabbing his shirt with both hands, slowly pulling his face closer and closer to mine. "Do you not get what's going on out there? Do you not understand why you made me that stupid, empty promise that it took you all of four days and a single random fucking skank hookup to break, how vulnerable I am? You could be carrying the coronavirus right now! You might have given it to me last night! I might get sick in a week, and there's no cure! You might have just killed me!!"

He stammered, "She -- she's not sick, nobody was sick. I'm not sick!"

"You don't have to be sick to give it to someone else, you fucking moron!" I yelled, then I let go of his shirt and took a deep breath to try to calm myself. "Get the fuck out. Now."

He started to say something, then changed his mind and turned to go. He had just opened the door when I thought of something.

"Matt, wait!" I said. He turned around in time for me to send my knee crashing upward into his crotch with every ounce of my strength. He crumpled onto the floor wailing in pain, and I let him lie there whimpering for a moment. Then I gave him several shoves until I had rolled him awkwardly out the door into the hallway.

"Now she can have you," I said, and slammed the door behind him. I listened with my ear to the door for several minutes, until I heard him pick himself up and walk slowly down the stairs.

I expected to start crying again, but for some reason I couldn't even summon enough emotion to do that. Instead I was numb. I looked around my shoe box of an apartment, and I saw emptiness. I had no main job. No weekend job. No side hustle. No man. No freedom. No safety. No money. No plan. No future.

No life. No hope.

Nothing.

I opened the kitchen cabinet, and let out a little, hollow laugh. For a girl with nothing, I sure had a lot of goddamn boxes of Honey Smacks.