In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers share stories about moments in life where they chose to put themselves and their wellbeing first.

Part 1: When Yves Jeffcoat is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, she isn’t sure how to manage this new normal.

Yves Jeffcoat is a writer, a podcast host and producer, and a yoga teacher. Her writing has been in The New York Times, Paper Monument, Lapham’s Quarterly, Art in America, The Bitter Southerner, and elsewhere on the internet and in print. She has hosted and helped create podcasts with iHeartRadio, Afropunk, and Hulu that reflect her interests in Blackness, history, healing, and resistance. She is currently the co-creator and co-host of On Theme, a podcast about Black storytelling in all its forms.

Part 2: Jameer Pond keeps ending up in relationships he doesn’t want to be in, so his therapist suggests he take a sex sabbatical.

Brooklyn, New York born award-winning storyteller, director and interviewer Jameer Pond has spent his whole life walking in his passion; engaging with people through diverse storytelling. Throughout his career, he’s created viral series such as Buzzfeed’s Black People Try, co-hosted BET’s first morning talk show Black Coffee, directed several cover videos across Condé Nast’s array of publications, including Sir Lewis Hamilton and Simone Biles, and has won a Shorty Award. You can currently catch him traveling the world, telling his dynamic stories with The Moth.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

One day, I'm upside down in a headstand. I practice yoga at home all the time. I've done dozens of headstands, so this isn't anything that's abnormal. But there are two things that are abnormal and that's, one, that my partner and I have gotten into a fight and he's gone away for some undetermined period of time to get some breathing room. And as to that two, my vision in my left eye is abnormally blurry, but I'll come back to that one in a second.

One, I'll start with the fight, and that happened after we watched a documentary at the Plaza Theater. I don't need to go into the details of that. That's not important. But what you do need to know is that I blew up and I yelled, like yelled a lot, like enough to get semi‑permanently furrowed eyebrows and a dull, persistent headache.

Yves Jeffcoat shares her story at Waller’s Coffee Shop in Atlanta, GA in March 2024. Photo by Rob Felt.

So, he goes away and I'm at home alone. I'm having to deal with this eye thing. I'm noticing that the vision in my left eye is weird and I'm like, “What's going on?”

So I'll rub my eye and I'll blink my eye and I'll close one eye than the other and it's not going away. I tell myself, I'm like, “Okay, I'll go to sleep and then I'll wake up, and if it's not better by the morning, then I'll know that something really serious is going on and I'll have to go get it checked out.”

So I wake up in the morning and it's still the same. So I'm in this headstand and usually I use my vision to find my steadiness, to find my balance, to find my gaze when I'm in headstand, and I'm realizing it's not working. My eye is still off so something's wrong.

My husband comes back and I'm holding back this information from him because we're not on good terms. But I'm like, “Okay, this is serious, so I have to tell him.”

We do make peace, but that peace and reconciliation, it doesn't last long because I tell him about my eye. I'm worried and he's worried and he's worried that I'm worried, so we decide that I need to go get it checked out.

That's when I skip work and the flurry of doctor's visits and tests and all of this other stuff starts to happen. First, I go to an optometrist. The optometrist is pretty stumped by what's going on.

So then after that, I go to a neuro‑ophthalmologist and the neuro‑ophthalmologist is like, “You have this thing called optic neuritis, and that's the thing that's happening with you eye.”

But that still doesn't solve my problem, so I go to the neurologist. And the neurologist is like, “Okay, you gotta go do some more tests. I'm gonna order them.” And they're tests that I definitely know I don't want to do.

I'm scared and I don't know what's on the other side of this. It seems like nobody knows what's wrong and that scares me even more. It feels like I'm this lab rat running through this maze that is the US medical system. But that doesn't matter because I have to continue on these tests.

But in the process of doing these tests, I learned that MRIs and their abnormally unusually loud beeping and buzzing is something that's really easy to get my anxiety up and my feelings of claustrophobia up. And I also learned in this process that getting stabbed in my spinal canal with a needle as part of my lumbar puncture is something that freaks me out but is something that I can get through. I'm being poked and I'm being prodded and the anticipation of being diagnosed by something devastating is exhausting.

But I continue with these tests at the behest of my neurologist. This is something that I haven't gone through before. I'm not used to this. I'm 23 and I haven't been in the medical system like this. I'm not used to these serious medical enigmas and I'm not used to these prying hands and expensive machines and insurance approvals, but I have to go through it.

I end up going back to the neurologist. At this point, I feel a little bit better because my doctor is a black woman, so I'm a little at ease and my partner is there with me. That gives me a little bit of comfort, too. But, still, my stomach is churning and my hands are clammy and I'm sitting there waiting on her to say something.

She pulls up my MRI, my doctor, and she shows me the lesions on my brain. I don't want to understand this. I'm not a doctor. I can't read these things. But I see light gray blobs in a sea of darker gray.

She tells me that I have multiple sclerosis, also known as MS. MS I have the relapsing‑remitting kind. That's like the first stage. And she tells me that it'll never go away. It's chronic. Basically, what happens is I have flare‑ups of symptoms that come and they go, but there is the possibility that I will have this thing forever. And it will do things, like give me loss of vision, loss of cognitive function and loss of mobility.

My stomach drops and things quickly go from emotional to clinical, though, because she hands me this packet of information and she tells me that I have to take medication and she tells me about new normal. I don't know how to handle this. I feel like I don't really know how to deal with new normals and what that means, but I have to.

I'm not able to cry then, but later at home in the comfort of my partner's arms, I'm able to feel held enough to cry.

But meanwhile, my eyesight is still getting worse. So I do go get an infusion of steroids to be able to help me deal with this problem and, hopefully, hopefully I'll wake up one day and my eyesight will be better. But at this point, I'm wearing an eye patch because my vision in my left eye is completely pitch black.

I do have to go back to work. I get to work and I'm met by my colleagues who are like, “Oh, my God, Yves, what's wrong? You're wearing an eye patch.”

And I'm like, “Yeah, I'm diagnosed with MS.”

And they're like, “Oh, my God. That's terrible.”

And of course, of course, I feel their care and I'm so grateful for it. But they're constantly transporting me back to this real‑time trauma that I'm really trying to block out to be able to do my work.

But anyway, through all of this, I have to take this medication and I have to do this thing called a first‑dose observation. That's what it sounds like. Somebody comes to your home and watches you take your first dose.

I call the nurse and she picks up and I get worked up over the course of this conversation.

She tells me, "Calm down." And you all know I don't like that. I don't like that. But you know what? I have to give it to her because she's right. I do need to calm down. I've gotten a little bit worked up and stress is the reason I'm here in the first place.

So, she comes to my home and she comes and sits in my windowless living room in my apartment. She sits on the folding chair in the exact spot where I practice yoga every day and watches me do nothing for hours as she prepares for something terrible to happen that doesn't happen.

At this point, I start to put the puzzle pieces together. I realized that before I had had optic neuritis, but nothing came of that optic neuritis, nothing came of that MRI, and I was able to move on. But at the same time, the MS was still there. And I started to feel like the MS was this sleeping beast. I kind of thought of it like Smaug in The Hobbit, where he's just laying on this bed of gold, ready to wreak havoc at any moment.

And in my head, I was just like, “Oh, you know, maybe the MS would have stayed dormant had I not smoked or had I not shouted or had I not eaten processed foods,” or all of these and this and this, but the reality is nobody knows what causes MS.

So, I definitely don't know what causes MS, but there is one thing that I know, and that's that what triggered my exacerbation was stress. And so more puzzle pieces start to emerge from beneath the couch.

I start thinking about the idea of self‑care and how everybody at the time is like, “Yeah, self‑care is a revolutionary act.” You know, it's not bubble baths, and it sounds kind of gimmicky sometimes, but I realize, “Yeah, that's actually true.”

The way that stress has materialized in my life is that it is something that's feeling very negative and very potentially dramatically lifechanging. And I start to see the cause‑and‑effect relationship here. So, I realized that I have to manage my anger and my stress and my frustration in a different way.

That's where yoga comes in. See, before yoga had been this vigorous and physical practice for me, but it started to expand. I started to document my process of yoga as something that could show me what the capability of my body was in every moment as the MS threatened to change me.

I realized that I had to move on. I had to figure that out. And so I started to let go of the guilt and the shame, and I started to think of the MS as more of a foil in my story than as a villain. But at the same time, my MS remained and my body still remembers.

So, I've regained my vision by this point. I've regained my vision. It's been many years since this has happened, but I still do this thing where I'm startled in the middle of the night because my body involuntarily transports me back to that place where I thought that I might never have my vision again. I wake up with a start, my heart is beating and I'm scared.

And I'm closing one eye and then the other, trying to search for a sign of light in the darkness. Then in a moment, I'll see some, and I'll see like a sliver of moonlight peeking through the blinds and bouncing off of the wall. Then I'll see the dim orange glow of the numbers on my alarm clock by my bedside. Then I'll look up and I'll see the green indicator on my smoke alarm and I'll find some relief. The panic will start to dissipate and I'll fade back into the darkness of sleep.

I have symptoms but I haven't had any more relapses, and still the MS remains. But, now, I think of those puzzle pieces and how at first they seem crooked and useless, how they actually fit together to form this bigger meaningful picture.

And I think of the things that do lie dormant and how they have the capacity to ravage us and to make us whole.

Part 2

When I was a teenager, I really wanted to have sex, like, bad, despite not knowing my own body. I remember when I was like 13 and I saw some pubic hair coming in, I was like, "Oh, no, I'm getting old." So I grabbed my mother's straight big razor and trimmed the pubic hair off, raw dog, no cream, nothing. I was startled a week later when these pusy, red, itchy bumps came back and I convinced myself that I had genital herpes despite being a virgin.

Jameer Pond shares his story at Caveat in New York, NY in April 2024. Photo by Erica Price.

That's how much I knew about my own body. The only things I really knew about sex came from the LeBron James of Black porn, Wesley Pipes. And if you don't know about Wesley Pipes, Google on your own time. But, like, I will watch this dude on movies, like Ghetto Booty 2 and All Dat Ass 23, and I would be enamored. I mean, he could be anybody he wanted, a doctor, a lawyer, a basketball player, a pizza delivery guy, and it was the same constant. He would be having sex with the most beautiful women.

And I knew at 13, that's exactly what I wanted to do with my life. He exemplified everything I thought about manhood. He was a sexual conqueror.

I remember watching him and, by the time I got to college, that became a part of my personality too because I figured out that I could have sex pretty fucking well. That became a part of my personality. I didn't know how to fight. I wasn't good at sports. But I could fuck. And that became my preferred method of communication. I might not be able to tell you how I felt about you, but I could show you.

And this worked. This worked, it was fun, it was fun, it was fun, until it was no longer fun. It stopped being fun in my 20s when I learned two important words that would change my life: emotional intimacy.

Stupid, right? I started learning about emotional intimacy in a decade on‑and‑off long relationship with my ex‑partner. You know, going into the relationship, it was very much, again, Wesley Pipes‑esque, right? The prodigal son of Wesley Pipes. But, about six years into the relationship, that started to change. My comfortability with my ex‑partner started to grow and I started to leave my ego at the door and become more present in sex. And I realized how much I liked that I didn't know I liked.

For instance, like looking at the person, that's my shit. Y'all like that? Like, that's my shit. Like kissing and cuddling and all the things I couldn't tell my homies I love to do with my shorty. But when we broke up, I took the attentiveness, the comfortability, the safety, all the boyfriend dick things into the streets and started to form, again, those casual sexual relationships, but they were disastrous this time. It was not fun. I couldn't establish my boundaries because every time I would say, “Hey, no, I don't want to get in a relationship. That's not what I want,” my penis would say, “Marry me.” We were not on the same page.

So this came up in therapy, of course. I keep talking to my therapist, like, “Hey, you know, I kind of keep getting in these pseudo relationships where I'm intending not to be in one but my body is saying something totally different.”

And my therapist, she looked at me and said, “Well, you know what, Jameer? You should probably take a sex sabbatical.”

I'll be honest, around this time, that probably was the cherry on top that made me kind of disgusted with therapy. “How dare you try to change me for the better,” is what I was thinking in my mind.

Sex for me was like Superman with his cape on. What's Superman going to do without the cape? I did not know who I would be and what I would do without sex in my life at that point in time.

So my therapist was like, “Well, you can continue to have sex and keep running into the same cycles, or you can give yourself a break, recharge, and think about this.”

And begrudgingly, begrudgingly, I decided to take a sex sabbatical.

And I realized I liked it. So that throughout the pandemic years, I'm taking periodics of time. I'm just going on sexual sabbatical residencies. I'm taking myself out the game for load management for all my basketball fans in the building because I needed to recharge and reevaluate, and I enjoyed it.

I mean, I wasn't worried about getting in a relationships. I wasn't worried about my ego getting in the way of how I felt, about sending mixed messages. I was doing a juice cleanse. I was feeling really good about myself.

But then sometimes you get horny, right? Sometimes as humans we just get horny. I remember this particular time when I got horny. I had been texting another one, that’s another ex‑partner on mine. The thing about her and I is that we have a lot of different chemistry. Like, we got really good sexual chemistry but we also have really good intellectual chemistry as well. Like, word alliteration when we're talking nasty to each other.

I let her know it was tank time and she said, “It's tank time?”

I said, “It's tank time.”

So we schedule her coming over and, I'll be honest, like in the process of her making her way over to my place, I was having second thoughts. I hadn't had sex in a while, like I couldn't remember the last time I had sex. I wasn't masturbating or anything like that and my confidence was fucking with me. I didn't know if I could sexually perform like I used to. Would it be like riding a bike? I don't know. I hadn't been abstinent ever in life like this.

But when she comes over, that confidence and that comfortability came right back. We began to engage in sex. That’s right.

Now, I'll be honest, I was full, so I arrived at the station a little early. And when I'm about to pull out of this station— follow, follow the pun. There we go. Follow the metaphor over here. When I'm coming out of this station, just like Wesley Pipes, I'm preparing to give this wonderful stream of artistic validation from my body, and this beautiful, powerful pool of dark fuchsia‑colored liquid shot out of me. Oh, yes.

It's a silence. I'm not saying anything. My ex is speechless.

The first thing that came to my mind was beets. Right? I had been doing a juice cleanse. And I know this game because the first time I had beets, I had to get a prostate exam because I thought I was bleeding out my ass. And that's another story.

But the point is that there was already a hypothesis in process. But as I examined the dark, fuchsia‑colored fluid, I realized that it was blood. I went numb, and I went deaf a little bit. Whatever my ex was saying, I couldn't hear. In my mind, I was going through like my dick highlight reel, my best performances. Because I, for sure, thought like this is the last time I'm going to be able to have sex.

And the words from my ex pierced through the deafness and it was, “You gotta go see a doctor.”

I was like, “Fuck, you're right.”

So I went to Costa Rica. No, I'm playing. I'm playing, I'm playing. I'm playing. I definitely wanted to throw my Costa Rica hat in there, though. But I'm playing, though.

So, her and I go to Urgent Care. I leave the lobby and I go into the doctor's office. I'm trying to keep it cool on the outside but, internally, I don't know what's happening. I'm thinking I might die. Is my dick going to die? I don't know what.

And so the doctor is like, “Okay, Jameer. What's going on?”

I said, “I'm gonna be honest with you. I jizzed blood, Doc, and I don't know what that means. And I'm scared, but this never happened to me before.”

He sat back and he was like, “Are you in pain right now?”

I was like, “No.”

He said, “Did it hurt or was anything sore when you were ejaculating?”

I was like, "No, it felt normal."

So he sat back and he had this smirk on his face and he said,

"Well, you know, Mr. Pond, "this is actually more common than you think." He said, "Doc, I'm menstruating out of my dick right now. "There's nothing common about this for me,

at least, for me." And he said, "Well, if this is the first time it's happened "and there's no pain, you might have suffered what is called hematosphermia,

which is a pop blood vessel in the urethra of your penis. I was like, a pop blood vessel? He said a pop blood vessel. And so he started to go over the symptoms.

Like, you know, it's built through sometimes some rough sex, you know, painful sex, or large build -ups of abstinence, and I was like, "The fuckin' abstinence,

God damn abstinence got me." And so, like, he was like,

"We're gonna test you "and make sure that you're good and you're clear, "and that you'll be all right." And I started to get frustrated because, like, as a man, I'm 35 years old,

this is the first time I've ever heard of Himata -Spermia. And I asked, I said, how come I've never heard about this? How come I've never heard about this discussed in medical circles or anything like that?

I haven't seen any studies. They ain't talk about this on Bill Nye the Science Guy. Like, I've heard nothing about this. And he said, well, Mr. Pond, frankly, a lot of men are embarrassed. Like,

one in 5 ,000 men are diagnosed with, like, hematosphermia. But I suspect that it's a larger number of people, but nobody comes to get checked.

So you're one of the rare ones that does. And I said, "Bloodshot out of my dick." I don't think you understand. But they test me.

I'm clear. And he says, "In three days, Max, you should be Good to know. And I thought about that. I was really proud of myself. Like,

my idea of like manhood kind of changed. It wasn't like I was looking at Wesley and I'm like, yes, that's a man. I'm just glad I spoke up when I saw an alarming sign. You know,

my first method of communication is sex, but I'm glad I used my second with speaking the fuck up about my body.

Thank you.