Writer and comedian Sara Benincasa travels the world speaking about her struggle with agoraphobia — which is funny, since her condition often gives her an intense fear of traveling. Her story also touches on family, addiction and why having a terrible day doesn't mean life will always be terrible.
Back from Broken is a show about how we are all broken sometimes, and how we need help from time to time. If you’re struggling, you can find a list of resources at BackFromBroken.org.
Host: Vic Vela
Lead producer: Luis Antonio Perez
Editor: Dennis Funk
Producers: Rebekah Romberg, Jo Erickson
Music: Daniel Mescher, Brad Turner
Executive producers: Brad Turner, Rachel Estabrook
Thanks also to Hart Van Denburg, Jodi Gersh, Clara Shelton, Matt Herz, Martin Skavish, Kim Nguyen and Francie Swidler.
On Twitter: @VicVela1
Transcript
Vic Vela:
Hey, it's Vic, with a quick note. This episode contains strong language and discussion of suicide. Please be advised.
In three, two, one.
A lot of times when we're making “Back from Broken,” we look for lighter moments, you know, funny stories, because we deal with some really heavy stuff on this show. And today's guest is a great example of this.
You're a comedian. What's the funniest thing about agoraphobia?
Sara Benincasa:
The funniest thing about agoraphobia for me is that I have spent much of my adult life traveling internationally and domestically to speak about a fear of travel and strangers. That's ridiculous. It's beautifully ridiculous.
Vic Vela:
Sara Benincasa is a writer and sometimes-comic and today on the show: how Sara figured out how to manage her agoraphobia, why she can laugh about it now, and how overcoming severe anxiety helped her to conquer other struggles.
I'm Vic Vela, I'm a journalist, a storyteller and a recovering drug addict. And this is “Back from Broken” from Colorado Public Radio — stories about the highest highs, the darkest moments and what it takes to make a comeback
As you might've guessed from my introduction, Sara Benincasa for most of her life has struggled with something called agoraphobia. It's a mental health issue and the connective tissue in so much of her story. Someone with agoraphobia may feel anxious or afraid in crowded places or places without a clear exit. But as Sara will explain, when it first shows up, you don't necessarily understand why. The first thing she noticed when she was just eight years old was a sense of anxiety and even some panic attacks. She remembers that sensation vividly.
Sara Benincasa:
So a panic attack, I often say, feels like— it feels like the moment right before you throw up when you're really, really sick, especially for those of you who've ever had the stomach flu or been really hung over. It's this moment of pain, anxiety, and desire for release, except with a panic attack, the release doesn't come. I also sometimes refer to it as the exact inverse of an orgasm, in that it's terrible, and you never want the feeling to keep going at all and you never want to have it again, but it is a full body experience.
You go into fight or flight — fight flight or freeze. So your heart starts beating extra fast and your rate of respiration increases and your quadriceps muscles and your arms instinctively tense, so that you're actually ready to spring into fighting or running away. Your pupils dilate a little bit to let in more light and I've read, theoretically at least, that that's so that you are better able to perceive what's around you, if, say, you're running in a forest where sometimes it is dark as much as it is light or some sort of environment where that would be necessary. You go primal, you go into this primal fear state, and that is very disconcerting when you're in a grocery store or sitting down in a movie theater. When you've been triggered, I think a panic attack is a misfiring.
Vic Vela:
Can you tell me about the first time you experienced a panic attack?
Sara Benincasa:
You know, it's hard to remember the first time, but I do remember a distinctive time, certainly, in my memory, when I was eight years old. And I remember I wasn't feeling well at some kind of family wedding, at the reception afterwards. And I went to the bathroom, and I remember being in the stall and starting to feel trapped and starting to think, what if I can never leave this stall? So I just kept calling for my mom and somebody figured out who that was among the 18,000 cousins and second and third cousins.
I remember the moment where it tipped from, let's say, “rational” or what I would characterize as for a child — we don't want to be too judgmental of how a child thinks and feels. But I remember in my child mind the place where I started to go from, okay, I am rationally afraid cause nobody likes to feel sick, this is a yucky feeling, to, oh, I'm living in some kind of big story where I'm not permitted to leave this place that I’ve voluntarily gone to. And so that's the first one I remember. And I remember the increased heart rate and the increased nausea. Of course, a panic attack generally doesn't settle down your stomach.
Vic Vela:
That just sounds so crippling. And at this time you were only eight. Did you have any sense of familiarity or a name for it at the time?
Sara Benincasa:
No. No, and it happened— as I grew up, I came to associated it with places, which is how my agoraphobia began. I associated it with things like going into New York City and I grew up out in the country, in New Jersey. So I would, that would kick in when I was going into the very different environment of a city, when I was going to the airport, if I was getting on a bus that was not my school bus that I was used to, basically anytime I was in a place where I began to feel really out of control. And so I started to, over the years, think, Oh, I guess I shouldn't go to a grocery store if this is how I feel in the grocery store. There must be something wrong with the lights in the grocery store or the environment in the grocery store. Or I guess I, I'm just not a person who likes parties. I just won't go to parties. So, as a child, that slowly started to happen for me.
Vic Vela:
Wow. So you're already removing, you know, basic human events from your life at eight years old.
Sara Benincasa:
Yeah. I used to take breaks from— when I had to go to family parties, I would go and sit in the car if I could and read, or I would go to some small room, some kind of safer, to me, enclosed environment. It was hard for me to be around big groups of people. I, oddly enough, even as an eight year old as a little girl, I did enjoy, I was never very good at dance class, for example, but I enjoyed it and I enjoyed the performances, even though I was very anxious ahead of time. Things that you might ordinarily think would provoke a lot of anxiety did, but less so. I mean, I suppose when you're a child who gets frightened by seeing tall buildings, sometimes, even as a kid, you know, some part of you knows you're different. So I came to cherish experiences where it was normal to feel anxious, right? It's normal to have performance jitters. I was nervous before I started this interview with you. That's quote unquote normal. That's the accepted, I think, understanding of what normal is. So I sort of started to actually enjoy those moments because other people had anxiety as well, so I felt a part of something.
Vic Vela:
Sara's parents were supportive and especially considering they didn't really understand what was going on with her, but they did try to get her some help. She went to therapy and was prescribed some medications. And by the time she finished high school, she started to feel like things were okay. She attended college in Boston, a smaller city that felt more manageable to her than New York.
Sara Benincasa:
Boston’s kind of a starter city. You know what I'm saying? Like, it's cute. Like they think they have a city and that’s sweet, but the sun set on that empire a hot minute ago.
Vic Vela:
In her book, “Agorafabulous!”, Sara talks about how things really started to feel good for a while. She went to the Netherlands as part of a college study abroad program and didn't have a single episode the entire trip. When Sara got back, she said it felt like her panic disorder was a thing of the past.
Sara Benincasa:
I thought maybe the worst of it had passed me by. I thought maybe I had finally quote unquote grown out of it. I was still on the medication I'd been put on when I was 16. And when I came back from Europe, it was halfway through my sophomore year. So I was 20. And I think I thought, maybe I'm okay now, maybe this is, just, it's okay, I grew out of it. I turned 20 and I grew out of it.
Vic Vela:
Okay. So what happened when you got back?
Sara Benincasa:
When I got back, there was some readjustment after that fun, exciting time, far, far from home. And to my disappointment, I found that I still experienced depression that is so severe as to interfere for an extended period with the living of daily life. And so the fact that those things came back was very disappointing, and I just finally got tired. I got tired of fighting it. I got tired of going to places and not knowing if my body was going to flip out or not. I got tired, I got, I was exhausted. And I thought, well, if this time away from, from the States, if that time doesn't fix it and this medication still isn't really doing anything, other than making it harder to achieve orgasm, that's about it, and giving me a headache, if I forget to take it one day, I don't— what's the point here? And I, I could not, at that time, get it together to be in therapy on a steady basis and actually build a therapeutic relationship with an adult. So I didn't have the supports that I needed that I think would have helped me.
Vic Vela:
Sara was convinced that she wasn't going to get any better. And the only way she knew how to manage her agoraphobia was to avoid the places where she felt triggered. She had this mental map of Boston and she started to draw an imaginary X over the places where she felt anxious. As the months went on, she crossed off the Virgin Records store up the street, big supermarkets, the movie theater, and eventually even her classrooms at Emerson College. Sara's world just got smaller and smaller and she left her apartment less and less, until finally, she couldn't go anywhere.
So how bad did it get?
Sara Benincasa:
So it got really bad. I eventually just confined myself to what I felt was a safe space where I wouldn't have a panic attack, which was my bed, pretty much. And my appetite took a vacation, so I lost enough weight that it was disturbing. I was scary looking, I think, in my opinion. And in that, it wasn't being slim that was the scary thing, it was just that haunted look that people get when they are able to feed themselves but won't for whatever reason, whatever is going on. This sort of dark, haunted look, the dark circles under the eyes, the glaze on the eyes, because you're not feeding the brain. So your mind can't function appropriately. That, I think, that was scary. And so yeah, that was a very dark time. And certainly thoughts of suicide were omnipresent.
Vic Vela:
Well, Sara, what did your days look like? I mean, you're painting a fairly devastating picture, but what did a day in the life of Sara look like when it was really bad?
Sara Benincasa:
Oh, I would do my best to sleep 16 hours a day. Now, I generally wasn't fully asleep—
Vic Vela:
16 hours, wow.
Sara Benincasa:
Yeah, I wasn't fully asleep the whole time, but I would wake up and sort of be dimly aware of what was around me and then fall back to sleep. I had very little energy because I wasn't putting much food in my body at all. So it was not hard to sleep for long stretches at a time.
Vic Vela:
And so you're just alone in this small square footage not really leaving your bed. I mean, did you go to the bathroom? I mean, how did these things work?
Sara Benincasa:
Well I was in a studio apartment, so it was teeny tiny. It was on Newbury Street, of all places, which is Boston's Rodeo Drive. Oh, Boston. But I guess it was, I mean the place was probably 450 square feet and maybe? Tiny little airplane bathroom with a little shower. And I think there was a hot plate and a mini fridge and I mean, it was real, real small in this brownstone.
I wasn't really showering. I sometimes would urinate in the toilet. Sometimes I would urinate in bowls or jars and like put them under the bed, just so I didn't have to get out of bed and go to the bathroom, because that was too far. And also because I wasn't eating, because I wasn't getting sunlight, because I was very unwell, yeah, I was anxious about so many things and including sometimes… It’s the feeling that you get when you come out of a nightmare and you're irrationally afraid to get out of bed, or you really are shaking off the nightmare and feel that it's real — it felt that way a lot of the time in my waking life. Also, it just didn't matter. And I think it's, in some ways, physically, urinating into something and looking at it was, to my mind at that point, it was some kind of evidence that I still existed. Like, okay, well I pissed in a bowl. That's real. Look at that. That came out of me. I know this is, I'm sure this is a very traditional portion of your interviews, talking about pissing…
Vic Vela:
The peeing in the bowl part of the interview. Yes. We had it with the Senator recently. Yeah.
Sara Benincasa:
Everybody who listens to Colorado Public Radio says the best part of Vic's interviews are the urination portion.
Vic Vela:
We have a Slack channel. Yeah.
Sara Benincasa:
[laughing] It's a really cool Slack channel. But yeah, I think that I just was not functioning like a healthy adult. I was not a healthy adult. In some ways I was childlike, and in some ways I, I was not even childlike. I was something else altogether. I felt like some kind of monster and I certainly felt undeserving of life or of love. And so I isolated very intensely.
Vic Vela:
Sara says it only took a couple of months for her agoraphobia to spiral out of control, but as bad as things were, Sara was actually pretty lucky. She had a couple of friends who would check in on her from time to time. And one of them alerted her parents. Eventually Sara's mom drove from New Jersey to Boston in the middle of the night to take her home. Sara remembers listening to the same Dave Matthews Band song over and over in the car ride.
Sara Benincasa:
Repetition was quite comforting to me at that time.
Vic Vela:
Sure.
Sara Benincasa:
And the soothing aspect of a very familiar song over and over again, you know, remember I'm agoraphobic, so I'm afraid — I'm deep in my agoraphobia — so I'm afraid to be in a vehicle for four hours. So at times I have my jacket over my head, I'm contemplating jumping out of the car, which I do not do.
So she gets me home and I do remember getting out of the vehicle. I remember it was cold. I guess the sun came up, so hazy in my memory, but I remember that it was cold and I sort of felt— I remember the smell, and it was a good smell even though it was in New Jersey, it was a good smell out in the countryside, and the sort of frost on the grass. I don't think we had snow. And I just felt, okay, I'll be okay, I'm home now. This'll be okay.
Vic Vela:
Things didn't get better right away. That took some time. Sara left school, started going to therapy again and switched medications. She remembers that at first, it was hard to take a walk to the end of her parent's driveway and back. She worked on taking longer walks and pretty soon she was able to start driving again.
Sara Benincasa:
Thank God I was able to get into cognitive behavioral therapy, which is incredible.
Vic Vela:
Well talk about that. What is that, for folks who don't know what it is, and how did that help you start to overcome your anxiety?
Sara Benincasa:
CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, is a form of talk therapy, of psychotherapy, in which you work on different issues with sort of practical tools and homework, but where you look at your fears in sort of a very measured way. It's great for phobias, and you work with a therapist who's trained in CBT. And you learn new ways of behaving, and so the way that you think helps direct the way that you behave and the way that you behave, helps direct the way that you think. And it's great. I mean, I love homework. So working on specific things, and how does this feel in my body? I walked to the end of the driveway today, how did that feel? What was that like? It gave me a sense of control. It gave me a sense of power, not, Oh, I'm cured, but wow. I have a toolbox that I can go to, to manage these things, to manage these experiences and, Oh, I'm not alone.
Vic Vela:
As you got better, Sara, was there a moment when you felt that you really turned the corner?
Sara Benincasa:
I got a job working at a coffee shop and juice bar inside a gym, and that was so fun. But the job at the gym, getting to work with other people, was such a joy and getting to just be another person making smoothies and talking to human beings and providing them with something that brought them pleasure, if not joy, and just talking to people, not being isolated inside my own brain, or even just in my family home, but getting to talk to humans, seeing how humans are, getting to feel a part of something. And the very simple satisfaction of when I would come in early at 5:30 in the morning and brew the coffee and the way that smelled and making sure I cleaned up the coffee grounds and making sure the espresso machine was ready to rock. And I mean, look, why is there an espresso machine in a gym? I don't know, but [laughing]
Vic Vela:
Sara was feeling great. And she was just about to discover a new passion in her life, something therapeutic, but this pursuit would also create new problems for Sara. More on that after the break.
Life was feeling good again for Sara, now that she was comfortably back in the world. She returned to school, finished her undergrad and eventually pursued a teaching degree at Columbia University in New York. She also had aspirations to be a writer. And this is the moment where Sara discovered one of her passions in life. A friend at Columbia named Caroline had a previous career working with comedic talent. And she saw something in Sara.
Sara Benincasa:
Caroline said she thought that I would like to do stand up. And I thought, that's wild. Why would you say that? And she said, you're just funny in class. And I can just tell, I can just tell that that's— I can tell that you would love it. And so I started doing standup.
And I was 25. I enjoyed it. It was a way to get my writing on stage. I'd always wanted to write books, always. That was my big thing. I really thought that if you published a book or hosted a radio show that you were a millionaire. Which, we both are millionaires, so we get it. [laughing]
I really thought that if you were on, if you booked one commercial, if you were in a Burger King commercial, or if you were on “Days of Our Lives” twice, like you were, that was it. And that's not how it works. But standup was a way to get my writing on stage. And it was another way to meet people, to meet creative weirdos. And it was, it became a part of my career for many, many years. And I still do it once in a while.
Vic Vela:
She also wrote comedy. And at one point hosted an interview show with actors, writers, and comics from her bathtub.
Sara Benincasa:
[Archive audio] Hey, everybody, welcome to another edition of “Getting Wet with Sara B.” I'm Sara Benincasa. This person is a famous star...
Vic Vela:
One time she even had Donald Glover on the show.
Did the stand up help you manage some of the mental health issues?
Sara Benincasa:
Absolutely. I always say that comedy does not replace the work of therapy, which I believe is sacred to the act of committing to caring for yourself. And in therapy, in recovery, this is a sacred and bold choice. So comedy, dance, yoga, whatever the hell it is, does not, long haul trucking, whatever it is, this can be therapeutic, but it does not replace the work of therapy. It does not replace the internal work. It can be spiritual, but it does not replace whatever your spiritual practices may be. It can be meditative, but it does not replace the practice of meditation.
Vic Vela:
Sara had to learn that lesson the hard way. After getting control of her agoraphobia, she was dealing with another problem, when she realized she was an alcoholic.
Sara Benincasa:
Alcohol is an interesting former BFF of mine. My dear frenemy, alcohol.
Vic Vela:
It happened slowly. Her family had a history of alcoholism, something she knew about as a kid. And she generally avoided drinking until she was about 23. She started dating a guy who liked tequila, and sometimes she would share a drink with him. And her relationship with alcohol just grew from there. Then as she got into performing comedy, her drinking increased. Comedians are often paid in drink tickets.
Sara Benincasa:
This is the kind of environment that I came up in as a comic. And we got paid— one drink ticket was good, but two drink tickets. Wow, that's really cool. Thank you so much. It's the equivalent of what, like, I don't know, 10, 14 bucks at that time.
Vic Vela:
By her mid-thirties, Sara began to realize she was becoming dependent on alcohol to ease her lingering social anxiety. She started thinking about her family history with booze, and she witnessed friends who got sober and seemed happier as a result. So she quit drinking cold turkey and started seeing an addiction specialist. Sara had a year sober without being part of any kind of recovery community. But the story of how she found one really amazed me.
You have this moment at a beach in South Carolina.
Sara Benincasa:
Yes, that was after I was dry. I was on the beach early one morning in the low country in South Carolina where I've spent a lot of time since I was a kid, since I was about, I want to say nine or 10 years old. And I was there by myself and I was walking on the beach. It was so beautiful. I hadn't been able to sleep the night before because I was about to hit a year with no alcohol. And I knew that I still needed help with something.
So I was walking on the beach, and it was just so beautiful. And I started to cry because it was just so gorgeous and I— there was hardly anybody else there. It was the first time I ever got to see the sunrise. It was important to me to see the sunrise on the beach finally. And I, and I did — first time in my whole life. And it was as glorious as I had been informed it would be. And I was looking around to see if I could see any loggerhead turtles, which are beautiful and gigantic and sometimes prone to laying eggs in front of people and it's a very beautiful spiritual experience.
And this woman came up to me, this older woman, and she said, excuse me, I took a photo of you. And I was wondering if you would like it. I was just trying to take a photo of the sun or the sunrise. And I realized you were in the photo. And she gave me this photograph, which was so beautiful just on her phone. She was like, I can just text it to you. And I said, Oh my gosh. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. And I thought about saying to her, this is very meaningful because today I have a year without alcohol, but then I thought, why would I tell this woman, why would I tell this woman that? That's creepy. So I didn't say it. She was an older woman and lovely. And I learned she had had a place on the island for a while. And so then I went home and I got the text and it was such a lovely photograph that I always cherish. And I thought, I'm just going to tell her. And so I said, I don't know why, it's not something you typically say to strangers. So I said, you know, this is very meaningful to me. Thank you so much. I have a year without alcohol today. And she called me and I was like, Oh boy, what is this going to be? She called me. And she said, I am so proud of you. And she said, both of my children are sober. And my oldest child just got out of rehab and I work with an organization through my church. And she said, I run a program that helps recovering addicts, especially people who've just exited the prison system to access their first jobs back.
Vic Vela:
Wow.
Sara Benincasa:
Yeah, and I was like, What? What?
Vic Vela:
Wow. I mean, I know a lot of listeners may not understand, but like as some— this kind of thing happens all the time in recovery, and it's amazing. It's absolutely amazing.
Sara Benincasa:
It was wild. It's what, in my program, we call it a God shot. There are different programs out there. Some people would call it a higher power shot.
Vic Vela:
Yeah, whatever you call it, exactly. Yeah.
Sara Benincasa:
Yeah, whatever you call it. Something that's a coincidence that has something more to it or feels like it does. And you can look at it as supernatural or not, but it is special.
Vic Vela:
It's bigger than us.
Sara Benincasa:
Absolutely.
Vic Vela:
Yeah.
Sara Benincasa:
I was just so moved and she sent me some photographs of some cross stitches that she had done for her son with little, you know, recovery phrases. And I said, this is so profound. Thank you for the work that you do. And I said, you know, I've been seeing this addiction therapist and she's awesome. She said, you know, are you working a program? And I said, well, no, I'm really nervous about going to meetings because I'm afraid that I'll see somebody and they'll recognize me. And I know that's silly because that means that's, they're an alcoholic too. You know, I see somebody and it's a friend or a friend of a friend or somebody friend's parent, like we're in the club, you know, it's all right. We're in the crappy coffee club. And, and she said, Oh, Sara, you have to go to meetings. You're going to love it. She was like, you're going to love it. And it's going to change your life.
Vic Vela:
And you had to, because of that moment, you just had to.
Sara Benincasa:
I did! I absolutely did. And it was such a gift, so.
Vic Vela:
Wow.
Sara Benincasa:
Found a meeting of, of my people in Charleston, South Carolina, and what an entertaining place to really go to your first meeting. But they said to me that — I don't think it breaches any kind of confidentiality to say that I was told numerous times that the best drinking cities have the best sobriety stories and they did.
Vic Vela:
You're crying right now.
Sara Benincasa:
Yeah. I'm a real human with all the emotions. [laughing] It's exciting.
You can have a terrible day and just, it's a terrible day, but there are layers of terrible, and there are moments you realize, when you're present for it, Oh, this, this is less terrible than the previous moment. Oh, now this is more terrible. And you also know that my terrible day or my terrible hour does not mean my life is forever terrible. It may forever change my life, it may forever change my life. And it may make my life more difficult, with certain horrific things that occur. But it doesn't mean that I can't experience happiness or joy or contentment ever again.
Vic Vela:
Do you think, Sara, the tools you learned in your first recovery from agoraphobia were able to help you have this moment?
Sara Benincasa:
Oh, a hundred percent. Absolutely, because they gave me a familiarity with the concept of being okay with managing something, not expecting to cure it. If I don't stay on top of my stuff, what my mom calls “your recipe,” proper sleep if you do meds, do meds, your spiritual life, what you eat, whatever, whatever your recipe is, right. Being of service to others is something that's now a part of my recipe. That doesn't mean my recipe is always going to look the same. It's just, you know, it's, it's there. And that helped me understand different tools that help me manage my alcoholism.
Vic Vela:
Sara Benincasa continues to write and speak openly about her struggles with agoraphobia and alcoholism. Occasionally, she still performs stand up and she hosts a podcast called “Well, This Isn't Normal,” where she invites guests to talk about things like meditation, comedy and nonprofit organizations.
“Back from Broken” is a show about how we are all broken sometimes and how we need help from time to time. If you're struggling with mental health issues or addiction, you could find a list of resources at our website, backfrombroken.org.
Thanks for listening to “Back from Broken.” Please review the show on Apple Podcasts. It helps other people find it. “Back from Broken” is hosted by me, Vic Vela. It's a production of Colorado Public Radio’s Audio Innovations Studio and CPR News. Our lead producer today was Luis Antonio Perez. And you can find a list of everyone who helped make this episode possible in the show notes. This podcast is made possible by Colorado Public Radio members. Learn about supporting “Back from Broken” at cpr.org.
