The Sheila Variations

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.