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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s wrong?\u201d David asked.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 back in L.A. after seven years in New York City \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Read more:<\/b> L.A. Affairs: Could a close friend who always ‘got’ me become something more?<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cYour health will be better in L.A.,\u201d David had promised before returning to L.A.<\/p>\n Now I took no pleasure in his being wrong.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s in his bedroom, by himself, rolling, and so I decided it was time to start over in New York.<\/p>\n 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\u2019d spent the first 27 years of his life denying his sexuality to a family he feared wouldn\u2019t understand, it was. My self-esteem was in the gutter, though you wouldn\u2019t have known it from the outside.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t be well-received.<\/p>\n Read more:<\/b> L.A. Affairs: Would taking a trip with this new guy finally push us out of the ‘polite’ phase?<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cLet\u2019s move back to L.A.,\u201d he said after four years of life together in New York.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m really not ready,\u201d I said. I loved living in New York and never, ever expected to leave. He understood, but he wanted to return to \u201cthe coast.\u201d I knew that in a healthy relationship, it couldn\u2019t be just what I wanted. So eventually, we packed up and moved to an apartment on North Flores Street in West Hollywood.<\/p>\n And now, I was in the hospital.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n I\u2019m fine, I told myself, but I worried my heart was broken, and there was something medically wrong with it. To heal it, I\u2019d need to accept truths that I didn\u2019t want to.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Read more:<\/b> L.A. Affairs: The rocker guy I dated bragged too much. But he taught me a big lesson about myself<\/a><\/p>\n I went to Westwood what felt like 70 times, and after visiting a bunch of UCLA\u2019s specialists, I found myself in the office of a neurosurgeon who took one look at me and said, \u201cYou don\u2019t belong here. What you\u2019re suffering from is plain old anxiety, and you\u2019re going to have to work with your therapist on this.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI have been,\u201d I said, \u201cand it\u2019s not helping.\u201d But before I finished, he had walked out the door.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t, 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.<\/p>\n For almost my entire adult life, I\u2019d been in therapy, but it was couples therapy with David where I felt supported enough to admit, first to myself, that I\u2019d been terrified of being fully myself. I was afraid he\u2019d leave me if he saw the real me. Secretly I had been keeping a lifetime of pain bottled up inside because of fear \u2014 I didn\u2019t want to risk losing him by being too emotional or having too many feelings.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t run \u2014 instead, he proposed.<\/p>\n It\u2019s been eight years since that neurologist, and six since I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n Read more:<\/b> L.A. Affairs submission guidelines<\/a><\/p>\n Now, I feel \u201cat home\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Had David not dragged me back, I wouldn\u2019t have learned what I did about myself, my story of origin and living a life that\u2019s so beautiful and that\u2019s so true to me.<\/p>\n And certainly, we wouldn\u2019t be bringing our baby daughter, Lucy, named after Lucille Ball (who\u2019s more Hollywood?), home in mid-July by way of surrogacy.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s on Instagram: @iammattgerlach<\/a>.<\/p>\n L.A. Affairs<\/a> 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 LAAffairs@latimes.com<\/a>. You can find submission guidelines here<\/a>. You can find past columns here<\/a>. <\/p>\n Sign up for The Wild newsletter to get weekly insider tips on the best of our beaches, trails, parks, deserts, forests and mountains.<\/a><\/p>\n This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n