In this week’s episode, both our storytellers are seeking what all scientists are looking for: validity. If you want to check the reliability of this episode though, we suggest listening to it more than once.
Part 1: Adrian Demeritte struggles to find a reason to stay in science after he loses his biggest inspiration.
Adrian Demeritte is a fourth year PhD graduate student at Emory University from Nassau, Bahamas. His research focuses on combatting fungal and antibiotic resistance, and he hopes to continue his work to help bolster the chemical industry in the Caribbean one day. In his free time he enjoys writing, hiking and experiencing whatever hidden gems Atlanta's melting pot of cultures has to offer.
Part 2: After years of a chronic disorder make Becky Feldman feel like she’ll be single forever, she finds acceptance from an unusual source.
Becky Feldman is a writer, performer, and podcast host. Originally from New Jersey, she is an alum of the UCB Theatre and the Ruby LA. In addition to being a staff writer on children's animated shows, her TV appearances include "Community", "Broad City", and "Brooklyn 99". This story is an excerpt from her solo storytelling show "Tight: Sexy Stories About Pelvic Pain", which debuted in January 2020.
Episode Transcript
Part 1: Adrian Demeritte
As a child, tinkering was like my specialty. I could take the top-of-the-line RC car from Toys “R” Us, a hammer, a screwdriver and just a little bit of hope that I wouldn’t break that one motor that I wanted from it and flawlessly waste $50.
What’s interesting is that if you’re a parent who had recently invested a lot of money in an expensive toy for your child’s happiness, you would have probably gone ballistic at the fact that it didn’t make it more than a week.
If you were a preschool teacher like my godmother, you would have probably sent a child home who continuously dismantled toys and electronics to combine them into these weird, Frankenstein‑like contraptions that you could have bought for just a few dollars. Not mine, though.
Rather than discipline me, my dad and my godmother they let me lose myself in my scientific curiosity. Interestingly enough, that impacted me for my entire life. It ultimately led me to science, which led me to chemistry and I desperately wanted to make them proud.
Nothing quite reassured my ability to change the world, like going to college and receiving a whopping 35% on my first chemistry quiz. Rather than let that deter me, I actually opted to master it. That led me to mentoring 12 underrepresented students in science and then I squeezed my way into a research lab. And then, for some reason, fueled by this weird desire to establish myself in the chemical field, I applied to grad school.
Adrian Demeritte shares his story with a limited audience at Waller’s Coffee Shop in Atlanta, GA in December, 2021. Photo by Rob Felt.
Grad school was exactly what I thought it would be. You come in, you set up a reaction in five different conditions. You do it for a different step or substrate. You cross all those conditions off because, literally, none of them worked anyway. And then you just repeat. That monotony was broken up by some pleasant calls from my mentees that I mentioned before, and that was kind of nice. But sometimes there were these calls that weren’t so nice.
My mom would call me and tell me that my dad wasn’t doing so well. She’d tell me that I have to drive ten hours to go be with him for his next chemotherapy session and she’d tell me that my godmother wasn’t doing so well either. Then one day, she called me and she told me that I needed to come home.
So much had happened in such a short period of time. One day, I was here in Atlanta, trying and failing to get a moisture-sensitive reaction to work with the humid Atlanta weather, and the next day I was home in the Bahamas, burying the person that quite literally shaped my foundation in terms of science and knowledge.
In my entire life I’ve only seen my dad cry twice. Once was seeing his sister, who had been there for his entire life, go on to leave this mortal plane without him. The second time was when I stood next to his bedside, just a few short weeks later, and I told him that I would continue to make him proud just before he went on to join her.
Life in the Caribbean is a little weird, that’s especially if you’re in the Bahamas. The reason for that, essentially, is because if you want to do something, you have to put in a tremendous amount of effort to effectuate whatever it is that you’re trying to accomplish, and that includes being present or calling several times. So immediately, I was called to not only be present in many different places, but I was forced to be this person that had all the answers to all these random questions. I had to step up into these shoes that I wasn’t quite ready to fill. And then the calls came.
“Hello? Adrian? Demeritte, right? I'm calling regarding some upcoming payments for a 2018 Nissan Titan XD. Could you, Adrian… Demeritte, right? Perfect.”
“Ah, I'm calling from Family Guardian Life. Could you come down tomorrow to…”
“Adrian, hey. Could you come to the firm tomorrow so we could discuss writing over…”
“Hey, Adrian, we still have to talk about where this is going to happen and what we're going to do and what colors we need. We're going to meet at your house tomorrow, right? Make sure that you have enough space and seats and food for 35 people.”
37. Within a week I had made 37 calls and trips all to return home to a mother that was crushed on losing her husband. Not only that, but looking at my sister who’s grieving over the loss of her best friend and her father.
I was broken too. I really was broken too but I couldn’t allow myself to be too broken. I was still highly functioning. I mean in three weeks I was able to handle post-financial logistics and set up everything for the funeral and be this emotional rock and levelheaded leader that I thought my family needed at the time.
I cried, but I can only cry so much. I grieved, but I only grieved when it was convenient. Because I thought if I could handle it all that meant that I was okay because I felt like I didn’t have any other choice.
The science. You know, during that whole time I was able to work on grants and work on assignments that I was missing and grade all these papers from the lab section that I so abruptly left. I had to be okay, because I was this model brother. I was this model son, cousin, friend. I needed to be there for everybody.
Adrian Demeritte shares his story with a limited audience at Waller’s Coffee Shop in Atlanta, GA in December, 2021. Photo by Rob Felt.
So three weeks. It didn’t matter if I had to come home, work on all these things, go to bed at 5:00 a.m., wake up at 7:00 a.m. and start the cycle all over again. Three weeks. That’s how long I gave myself to go home, prop my family up, handle everything that I needed to and head back to grad school to make sure that I did make them proud.
Back home, people didn’t really respond to that super well. People were saying, “So soon? I thought he would give himself a little bit more time in here.”
My friends would respond as if they were walking on eggshells and they would look at me and they would say, “You’re not quite the same. More quiet and more in-my-head.”
Of course I was. I was using all my energy to make myself want to be somewhere and of course I was. The one person that I wanted so desperately to be proud of me was gone. And one of the people who quite literally shaped my scientific inquiry and went on to inspire others metaphysically, it was gone. There was a huge fissure in my foundation for wanting to do science.
So, Taylor, a former mentee ended up calling me up and she said, “Come down to where I am. Spend Thanksgiving with me and my husband.” And she wanted to do that to take me away from everything that she thought was distracting me. Everything that was making feel like I was okay.
And when I went there without grants, without family that I felt like I needed to take care off, I steeped myself in the emotions from the months prior. I thought about whether or not I really wanted to go back to graduate school. I thought about whether or not the reasons that I wanted to do science were good enough anymore, but I still didn’t cry.
She came to me and she said, “Hey, you know I think it would be a good idea if we actually went to the nearby mall and did some people-watching.”
And there was something that was actually kind of nice about it. Seeing little kids run around, putting up their contenders for best‑smelling soap at Bath & Bodyworks is kind of comforting. I can almost experience the joy of all these jubilant shoppers darting from store to store, carrying whatever deals that their arms could muster, knowing that they would make a son or a daughter or a relative extremely proud.
So we sat and we smiled and we joked and we stared for hours.
We got up to leave and we noticed that there was a fight starting to break out a nearby PacSun. So we turned our backs to the mounting tension and we were headed towards the exit that was outside of the food court when, suddenly, the gentle hum of those jubilant shoppers was cut short by a forward sentence. “He has a gun.”
Hundreds of people started to run in every single direction and the gentle hum was erased by the stampede that screamed, “Get out as soon as possible.”
Taylor grabbed my arm and she threw me behind a trashcan. And she said, “Shh. Don’t worry. I got you.”
As that individual ran past us, she threw her body over mine to make sure that I was safe and I sat there and I wondered why. Why would this person that I mentored for only a couple of years in college literally risk her life for me?
But she knew I was incapable of responding in that situation. She knew I wasn’t mentally there. She knew that I thought that it was par for the course at that point in time and whatever happened just was going to happen. She knew, Taylor knew I wasn’t okay.
The police ended up showing up pretty quickly and they apprehended the individual and there were no casualties, so we walked back to the car. We sat for a long time in just silence.
Then Taylor turned to me and she said in a joking manner, “Probably shouldn’t go to malls for a while, right?” and immediately I started to cry profusely.
There were no grants, there were no papers, there were no assignments, there were no family members that I feel like I had to be okay for. I let every single iota of emotion just pour from me and Taylor did not even have to ask why I was crying. But it was for so much more than she possibly could have known.
I was crying for every single instance that I didn’t in the months before. I was crying to mourn those I so desperately wanted to be proud of me. I was crying because my reasons for doing science were all wrong. I cried because there's validity. There's validity in existing in the moment in itself. Those tears were because I didn’t realize how much I impacted others. And I didn’t realize how much impacting others in science meant to me.
And I don't mean science. I'm talking to a lot of scientific people right now, so let me be clear. I don't mean science for papers. I don't mean science for reactions or notoriety or grants or glory. I was crying because I was doing what I wanted to do, what I should have been doing all along, impacting others just like how my dad and my godmother impacted me. Thank you.
Part 2: Becky Feldman
Throughout my adult life, I have struggled with a condition called vulvodynia, which is basically a form of chronic pelvic pain. Sexually, while I could always feel pleasure and have an orgasm clitorally, intercourse itself was excruciatingly painful. It was this stabbing pain that felt hot and cold at the same time. It felt like I was being fucked by a barbed wire bat. That’s what sex felt like to me.
I know some people are into that. I'm not saying they have sex with a bat. I'm just saying that I don't like that. That type of pain for me is unbearable.
So at the end of college when I started to have sex and when I would be having sex with someone, I would be in pain, so I would be like wincing. I think the look on my face, it looked like I was eating something gross but not spitting it out. Who does want to have sex with someone who’s grimacing in disgust?
So we would stop and it would be so awkward and embarrassing and uncomfortable. I would always apologize a thousand times and I would always be like, “Um I think this is happening because of medication that I take. Anyway, isn’t the movie Garden State amazing?”
I did go to various doctors, various OB-GYNs and they weren’t helpful. A lot of them just brushed me off. They wouldn’t even examine the area. They would just say, “Oh, you’re anxious. You just need to relax.” Or, “Just have a glass of wine before sex.” I even had one doctor tell me to date someone with a small penis. That was a doctor’s advice.
Emotionally, it just wrecked me. I felt like my body was broken and I felt frigid and just sad. So in my early 20s I gave up. I stopped dating, stopped being intimate with people and I was just, “Well, I guess I’ll be a sad, lonely cat lady,” who is even sadder because I don't even have a cat. My building doesn’t allow pets.
But after I had turned 30 a few years later, I was getting into bed one night and I sleep on the left side of a full-size bed. I noticed the right side of my bed and I was just like, “Oh, my God. No one has ever been on that side of the bed.” Like a man’s head has never lain upon those pillows. I was just like, “Am I really going to spend the rest of my life this way?”
So I started seeing all of these different specialists that help with female sexual dysfunction. As I was doing that, emotionally I was starting to panic. One, because I'm a neurotic person. But also, it had been so long since I had been intimate with someone and I was like, “Oh, God, do I remember what to do? Does my body remember what to do? Do I even remember how to kiss?”
Becky Feldman shares her story with a limited audience at a Black Box Theatre in Los Angeles, CA in November, 2021. Photo by Mari Provencher.
Then I started thinking, “I wish I could just get that first hook-up out of the way where I didn’t feel any pressure to please another person. I could just focus on myself.”
So I decided, as part of my medical treatment, to book a night at the Sheraton in Pasadena and hire a high-class male escort for two hours.
In the days leading up to the encounter I was freaking out about everything. Like what do I wear? Do I eat before or do I eat after? I was googling what’s the best Chapstick for kissing.
One thing I was freaking out about was paying the escort, because you do have to pay in all cash, but I was like, “Oh, my God. It's a high-class escort. How do high class people pay escorts? Do they just hand them a brick of cash?”
I decided that the classy thing for me to do was to put all of the money in a Thank You card. So I found a Thank You card that had a phrase on it that I thought could encompass his services. It said, “Thank you for your awesomeness.”
The night of the encounter, I meet my escort at the bar in the Sheraton. This guy, he's a man. He's a beautiful man. He's a very attractive, fit, sexy man. He had high cheekbones, brown hair. He's wearing dress clothes. He looked like the high-class male escort version of Clark Kent who left his glasses at home.
So we're sitting and we talk at the bar. I'm so, so, so nervous. We have our usual small talk that we usually have in Los Angeles where you talk to someone and they're like they always want to be an actor but have a lot of side hustles, and that was this escort.
We make our way to my hotel room. We're just continuing with this small talk and I am even more nervous. As we're talking I was thinking like, “Okay, when is the kissing and the stuff going to happen?” Then I realized, “Oh, he's waiting for me to be the one to initiate this.”
So I awkwardly whisper, “I want you to kiss me now.”
Becky Feldman shares her story with a limited audience at a Black Box Theatre in Los Angeles, CA in November, 2021. Photo by Mari Provencher.
He smiles so seductively and we start going at it and it delightful. It's amazing. My body remembers what to do right away. I remember how to kiss. It's awesome.
He offers to go down on me and I say, “Great, but there's one thing you should know.”
So during the times that I did have painful sex, I still managed to get HPV, and it's the high‑risk kind that can cause cervical cancer. I tell him this. Then I kind of misspeak and I was like, “Yeah, I guess I just don’t want you to get cervical cancer in your mouth.”
Then he gets kind of confused and was just like, “Well, I don't have a cervix in my mouth.”
Then I don't know what came over me but then I just blurted out, “Not yet, you do.” Honestly, I'm thankful to this day he thought it was funny.
Before the occasion, I had researched dental dams and I ordered these mint-flavored dental dams off of Amazon. I swear to God I think we used it upside down because for two weeks afterward it felt like my vagina was sucking on an Altoid.
After I have two orgasms in the course of, at most, a minute-and-a-half, it felt like I was in a different reality. I didn’t feel like a sad, lonely, cat-less cat lady. I felt like a normal woman with a working body and I was just elated.
So when he asked me if I wanted to have sex, I hesitated because I wanted to so bad, but this voice in the back of my head was just like, “Becky, if you try, you are going to ruin this night.”
So I tell him that I can’t. And instead of blaming it on non-existent medication, I tell him the truth. I tell him that I have this chronic pelvic pain disorder.
And then he gets this very inquisitive look on his face and he grabs his phone and he was like, “How do you spell it?”
I see that he's looking it up on a physiotherapy database and he starts giving me all of these suggestions on how to manage the pain because, as it turns out, he has another side hustle and that is being a physical therapy assistant.
When I think about that night, that’s usually the moment that I think about. It's just this image of this escort sitting on the bed, looking at his phone, biceps bulging as he's trying to educate himself about female sexual dysfunction.
You know, out of all of the partners that I’ve had and out of all of the doctors that I’ve been to, it was the escort. It was this two-hour long fake boyfriend who was the one who finally validated my pain. And because I have that validation, the next month I started dating again.
So at the end of the night, I handed the escort his Thank You card. I'm sure when he talks shop with his peers, he's probably like, “One time, a little weirdo gave me a Thank You card.”
But you know what? He deserved it. So thank you for your awesomeness.