Unpacking my third suitcase in our new West Hollywood home, a sharp pain shot through my chest. I felt dizzy and short of breath before sprawling out on our mattress, which was still covered in plastic.
“What’s wrong?” David asked.
An hour later, on a gurney in the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai, I waited to be admitted overnight. What a great start to our new life — back in L.A. after seven years in New York City — David sleeping alone at our apartment while I was to keep close to the paddles and operating room in case what had just happened was a heart attack.
I was 33, practicing yoga and exercising almost daily. A few months earlier, my New York doctor noticed I had high blood pressure, and I was feeling terrible, so something clearly was going on. Was an artery blocked? Nope, the tests revealed; physically, I was fine. What had happened was a panic attack.
“Your health will be better in L.A.,” David had promised before returning to L.A.
Now I took no pleasure in his being wrong.
After growing up in Temple City (hardly L.A.), I went on a high school trip to the Big Apple and knew it was where I needed to be.
Exactly five years later, the time to escape California arrived after a miserable breakup from a three-year relationship with a guy that I hid entirely from my family. I was desperate and depressed, down 15 pounds from not eating much, my diet consisting largely of cigarettes and red wine. At the Archstone, my Studio City apartment, I did ecstasy alone on a Wednesday. One has to take a good look at himself when he’s in his bedroom, by himself, rolling, and so I decided it was time to start over in New York.
On the other side of the country, I thought it was normal to hook up with a new guy every third night. Which I suppose, for a gay man who’d spent the first 27 years of his life denying his sexuality to a family he feared wouldn’t understand, it was. My self-esteem was in the gutter, though you wouldn’t have known it from the outside.
After a three-digit number of hookups on Grindr, I met David, a guy who lived on the same Manhattan corner as I did. We did what people do on Grindr and hooked up a couple of times.
But one morning, we bumped into each other on 9th Avenue. I left our short chat feeling uplifted by how smiley and polite he was in daylight and while we were sober. That night, we went on our first date, and the rest is history. But I hid what I assumed wouldn’t be well-received.
“Let’s move back to L.A.,” he said after four years of life together in New York.
“I’m really not ready,” I said. I loved living in New York and never, ever expected to leave. He understood, but he wanted to return to “the coast.” I knew that in a healthy relationship, it couldn’t be just what I wanted. So eventually, we packed up and moved to an apartment on North Flores Street in West Hollywood.
And now, I was in the hospital.
After having to cancel the welcome home party our L.A. friends had planned for us, and being released from Cedars, my life fell apart. But being the one who kept everything together, I kept it together better than most would, at least in the presence of others.
I’m fine, I told myself, but I worried my heart was broken, and there was something medically wrong with it. To heal it, I’d need to accept truths that I didn’t want to.
Growing up was devastatingly hard for me. Being gay and misunderstood, with the unacknowledged pain of it kept inside, was quite literally eating me alive. Being back in L.A. meant being near my past. I told my mom I was gay before leaving for New York. She said she still loved and accepted me, but to this day, the struggle has never been discussed or acknowledged. I knew I was a disappointment to my family.
I went to Westwood what felt like 70 times, and after visiting a bunch of UCLA’s specialists, I found myself in the office of a neurosurgeon who took one look at me and said, “You don’t belong here. What you’re suffering from is plain old anxiety, and you’re going to have to work with your therapist on this.”
“I have been,” I said, “and it’s not helping.” But before I finished, he had walked out the door.
Before long, the panic attacks got so bad, I could hardly drive. David chauffeured me, under the palm trees and bright sun, around as much as his schedule allowed, and when he couldn’t, I made the best of it, lugging my laptop with me for the hour-long trek to yoga-teacher training at Equinox in the South Bay, using that extra time in the back of an Uber to write.
For almost my entire adult life, I’d been in therapy, but it was couples therapy with David where I felt supported enough to admit, first to myself, that I’d been terrified of being fully myself. I was afraid he’d leave me if he saw the real me. Secretly I had been keeping a lifetime of pain bottled up inside because of fear — I didn’t want to risk losing him by being too emotional or having too many feelings.
Three months after that therapy session, the pandemic arrived, and being together 100% of the time for the next year, I let him in fully. He didn’t run — instead, he proposed.
It’s been eight years since that neurologist, and six since I’ve been able to fully drive again. And here in L.A., in a city characterized by its distance, I have, with David, built a close chosen family that supports and fully understands me.
Now, I feel “at home” at our Spanish-style Hancock Park house, the one we bought because we wanted to start a family of our own, only after L.A. allowed me to heal and live peacefully, and now, anxiety free.
Had David not dragged me back, I wouldn’t have learned what I did about myself, my story of origin and living a life that’s so beautiful and that’s so true to me.
And certainly, we wouldn’t be bringing our baby daughter, Lucy, named after Lucille Ball (who’s more Hollywood?), home in mid-July by way of surrogacy.
The author is a writer and coach who helps established business owners build lives that feel as good as they look. He lives in Hancock Park. He’s on Instagram: @iammattgerlach.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email [email protected]. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.