How Seek Treatment Helped Me Deal with a Breakup (Twice)
A year ago, last May, I was dealing with a breakup. Well, not really a proper breakup — it was the kind of thing you feel guilty calling a breakup, because you were never in an official relationship to begin with, just a weird two-month thing that got increasingly emotionally intense. The kind of thing where your pain feels silly, which only makes it worse.
I often think about early 2019, a time when I remember feeling distinctly happy. I was becoming really close friends with my roommate. I’d let go a little of my expectations when it came to romance and sex. I was learning a lot at my temp job. And I’d met her. Growth is such a gradual process that it’s rare to experience a moment where you can see, in concrete terms, how you’ve grown as a person. But this was one of them. I was different than I’d been a year before.
I was in such a rare happy state, content to just live my life. So in May, three months later, I felt frustrated with myself. I’d been happy months ago, when I was single. And then I’d been happy the next couple months, when I was sort of with someone. So why was I feeling so horrible now? Why couldn’t I go back to that February state of mind? How had this ‘breakup,’ if you could call it that, demolished my stability and patience?
Of course, it wasn’t just that. 2019 and 2020 have been a transitional period for me, in a lot of ways — my temp job ended, so I’ve spent so much time going to soul-sucking interviews and just waiting. That summer, everything felt in flux — I could tell the next year could be a formative one for me, both professionally and personally, but I was still existing in a strange period of stasis. Often in these transitional periods, though, even if you know good things are coming, it doesn’t feel new and exciting. Things might be changing a lot, but it feels like the opposite: like everything is moving too slowly, somehow, like nothing is happening.
And so, for a while in the late spring and early summer of 2019, when I got on the train in the morning, I’d feel vaguely depressed and lethargic. I didn’t feel like reading. I was sick of listening to music.
But I did have Seek Treatment, a podcast I’d started listening to that March. It was hosted by Pat Regan and Catherine Cohen, the latter of whom I’d discovered in an episode of High Maintenance. Over the course of that very first episode, I got to know the two hosts. Both were incredibly open about their sexuality, though their experiences differed: while Cat was proudly sex-positive, Pat described himself as sex-negative: “I think that sex should be shrouded in guilt and shame, but I’m also irreparably horny.” They asked their guest about her relationship status and her attitude towards sex. They moved to heavy, life-defining personal questions, like “who were you, who are you, and who do you want to be?”
Over the course of that spring, I listened to every episode of Seek Treatment. I was drawn to Cat’s gift for bracingly relatable statements like “Sometimes I wake up, and I think, I am the most beautiful woman on Earth. Sometimes I wake up and I think, Anyone who’s ever fucked me should be shot and jailed.” And I was frequently moved by how immediately honest Pat was about his vulnerabilities, particularly his body dysmorphia and his stress around the experience of sex.
While I was angsty from the breakup and the job and everything else that year, I felt comforted listening to Cat and Pat. I’d think about how awful I was at getting over things, how in some ways I was still haunted by a romance cut prematurely short three years ago, how a month or two later I shouldn’t still be thinking about this recent one so much. And then there was Cat, saying, “I wanna be clear that I’ve never let anyone go, and I’ve never gotten over a single person in my life.” And it felt like she was saying it for me, to assure me I wasn’t that much of a psycho.
Here’s the thing: that wasn’t the end of my relationship with her. Later that year we started talking again, and eventually we were dating. It felt real this time. I can’t tell you for sure whether I was in love, but often I’d find myself thinking the words I love you, and that felt like as good an indicator as any.
Just like last year, the first few months of this year were great. And even when the pandemic hit and widespread grief set in, even though it was hard not being able to see her, I felt mostly safe and secure, thinking that in a couple months, things would be back to normal with us and better than ever (even if that wouldn’t be the case for, like, America).
And then, this May — last Friday, only a couple weeks after the anniversary of the initial breakup — she broke up with me again. Different circumstances, slightly different reasoning, and our two-month quarantine-caused separation probably didn’t help things, even if it wasn’t the actual cause. But I had the same feeling, that night, of being both weightless and incredibly heavy, gravity both nonexistent and multiplied tenfold. Everything had that same nightmarish quality I remembered, like reality and dreams were swapped.
“It’s just hard how people affect me so deeply and color all my experiences,” Catherine said in one episode of Seek Treatment, and every day it feels so true to my experience. Last summer everything felt so tied to her — how to have a dialogue about Jordan Peele’s Us without remembering who was clasping my hand in the theater? How to spot a subway rat without remembering that one late night she shrieked at a rat on one side of the platform, turned and saw another one on the other side, and pressed her forehead into my chest so she didn’t have to look at either of them? And once again, this year, everything feels so tied to her — how to read Riverdale news without thinking of all the times we watched it together? How to listen to the new Carly Rae Jepsen album without thinking of her early-morning DM from just last Thursday telling me to wake up and listen?
I am constantly haunted by spaces and associations. Memories can be suffocating.
Like this time last year, everything feels in flux, except now also on a global scale. Yes, it sounds laughably self-involved to compare a deadly pandemic to my own trivial problems, like a particularly offensive case of pathetic fallacy. But I can’t help seeing eerie reflections in my experiences of the past two years, strange and unpleasant symmetries in the push and pull of glorious aliveness and depressing stasis. Everything is happening all over again.
Of course, there’s always so much extra baggage that makes failures feel worse than they would otherwise. When I go through a breakup, I often think, Well, if this wasn’t the person I was supposed to have a serious relationship with, who was? I’ve long been insecure about my relative lack of experience when it comes to long-term relationships.
But last year, listening to Seek Treatment, as I heard Pat gushing about his new relationship — this was his first serious boyfriend, at 30 years old — I felt solace, like it would happen for me sometime. And sure, maybe all my insecurities wouldn’t magically disappear once that happened, but maybe some of my past worries — my paranoia that I’d never find someone who liked me enough to stay with me for a sustained period of time — would feel trivial, disproven.
Feeling a connection like this to hosts on a podcast can be a weird thing. They start to feel like friends, but it’s such an unbalanced dynamic, because they know nothing about you. It’s like watching a TV show or reading a book and really connecting to the characters. You pick up on their dialogue patterns, start adopting them yourself. You start to think of them either too much like fictional characters — wow, it’s so cool watching Pat’s character development over the past two seasons! — or too much like real people — wow, I’d totally be friends with Cat and Pat if we knew each other in real life!
In the end, podcasts aren’t a substitute for real friendships. And, to be fair, my friends have helped me through all my toughest periods, whether it’s explicitly talking me through things or just being around. Keeping busy with the people I love — going out for drinks, lounging in the park, seeing a movie or a show — has kept me feeling productive. But, conversely, friends can’t always be there for you — you’re going to have to be alone with your thoughts at some time, whether it’s a subway ride home or when you’re brushing your teeth late at night. And that’s truer than ever right now, in quarantine.
Last year, in the moments when I felt down — when I had a long, lonely commute to work ahead of me, or I couldn’t fall asleep — what kept me feeling sane and productive was Seek Treatment. And maybe it’ll help again this time.
To Cat and Pat, it might sound ridiculous to hear that their silly podcast has helped me. It’s a common recurring joke between the two of them that the podcast is actually unhealthy to listen to — as Pat said in an Instagram post last year celebrating the anniversary of the recording of the first episode, Seek Treatment is “undeniably detrimental and emotionally harmful to ourselves, our guests and our listeners.”
But last summer, and now again, there’s one thought in particular I’ve kept having, something encompassing more than a breakup or a job ending or a lease running out or even a fucking pandemic: how long will it be until things feel normal again?
And when I listen to the podcast, things do feel normal. Everyone talks about their day — what food they ordered yesterday, what plans they have for the weekend, who they’re crushing on. And no matter what else is going on in my life, for an hour and a half each week I know things will feel like they always have.
The night of my breakup — the second one — I listened to the Adam Rippon episode of Seek Treatment. As I brushed my teeth, I suddenly burst out laughing — Cat had pointed out Pat’s typically article-lacking sentence formulation of “What is it like dating Finnish person?” “My favorite podcast where the hosts speak English as a second language,” Adam added. I skipped back 15 seconds and listened three times, then finished the podcast as I lay in bed. Once it was over, I set my phone down and slept as best as I could.
