Why Did I Suddenly Feel Homeless in the Middle of a Perfectly Happy Day?

Sad Nipple Syndrome. Childhood wounds don’t always arrive like a storm. Sometimes, it’s just a birthday party.

Photo by Europeana on Unsplash

I was walking through Washington, D.C., with one of my closest girlfriends. I had a talk at an embassy the next day, so we had come down early, eaten at PLANTA Queen, and, for a few hours, abandoned work, travel logistics, and everything else that usually required our attention.

We talked about ex-boyfriends, sex, the types of men we used to like, and what we were wearing. We considered walking toward the Washington Monument to catch the sunset.

It was, in other words, a very good afternoon. Then, without warning, the trapdoor opened. The bottom fell out of the afternoon.

An estrangement washed over me. It was a homesickness, though I had no idea what home I was missing. A moment earlier, I had been enjoying my friend’s company; now I found her irritating. I wanted to leave, go back to the hotel, get into bed, and look at my phone until I no longer had to participate in the day.

At least adulthood has given me one useful skill: I can occasionally recognize when my feelings are lying about their source.

This wasn’t about my friend. She hadn’t done anything. Nobody had. Still, the sadness was there. I stopped and tried to explain it to her. I described the sensation in my body. I described the sudden estrangement from everything around me. None of this helped.

“What do you actually feel?” she asked.

So I invented a story.

“Imagine this,” I said. “You’re walking down a street in New York and you run into somebody you went to school with. She’s homeless now. She has three dollars she got from begging, and she is delighted to spend it buying you a coffee. You’re doing well. You have a career. She is genuinely happy for you. She even invites you to visit the shelter where she lives. Then you say goodbye on the sidewalk. You turn around and walk away, and you know you may never have a chance to see her again.”

I looked at my friend. “That,” I said. “That’s how I feel.” She looked at me as though I had just pitched her a melancholy scene from one of my so so scripts. We let the subject go. A little later, she asked, “When was the first time you remember feeling this way?” That turned out to be the better question.

The Emotional Trapdoor

To answer it, I have to explain something I wish I had known about before I gave birth: a phenomenon people sometimes call Sad Nipple Syndrome.

It is not a formal medical diagnosis, and there is very little research on it. The closest well described phenomenon is dysphoric milk ejection reflex, or D-MER, in which some lactating women experience an abrupt wave of sadness, dread, agitation, or other negative emotion around milk let-down.

I knew none of this at the time. I only knew what happened to me.

One night, my husband tried to initiate sex. My favorite Korean drama was playing on Netflix. It was an entirely ordinary evening. Then he touched my breasts, and I started crying. He was alarmed. For a while, he thought I no longer loved him. I couldn’t explain why I was crying, because I didn’t know.

It felt as if somebody had pulled a plug inside me. One second I was myself; the next I felt emptied out and oddly estranged from my own life. Then came irritation at myself, at the room, at the fact that I was suddenly behaving this way.

The closest description I have is childish: I wanted my mom to cuddle me. Not necessarily my actual mother. I wanted the idea of a mother that belongs to childhood, the place you return to before you have learned that security is temporary, adults are complicated, and eventually everybody has to take care of herself. My thoughts would become slow and wooden. The sadness would then migrate outward. I would dislike the room, the situation, sometimes even the people around me. They were innocent.

When I was a child, my family sometimes spent weekends at friends’ houses. In the afternoon, the children were sent to nap together. Naturally, we rarely napped. We whispered, laughed, kicked each other under the blankets, and tried not to get caught. Everybody would be having a wonderful time.

And then, occasionally, I would not be.

Without warning, the room would feel foreign. My friends would seem very far away, although they were lying inches from me. I would turn my back on everyone and announce that I was going to sleep. Then I would pull the blanket over myself and lie there with a sadness I couldn’t name.

As I got older, life became busier. Work helped. So did routine. Family life became more stable. The feeling visited less often. Eventually, I assumed it had gone away.

It had not. It was waiting for me in Washington.

The Birthday Party

My friend’s question brought back a birthday party from elementary school: One of the girls in our class had recently started wearing a bra. We were at that awkward age when bodies begin changing before anybody has acquired the language, or manners, to discuss what is happening to them. At some point, she suggested that we all lift our shirts and compare. Nobody objected. It took perhaps two seconds:

Shirts up.

Shirts down.

Laughter.

Then everybody moved on.

There was cake. There were games. We sang happy birthday. By every reasonable measure, nothing had happened. Except that for the rest of the evening, I felt miserable. I didn’t know why. I remember shame, but sadness even more. Everyone else remained inside the party, while I felt as though I had somehow left it without leaving the room.

Looking back, I think this may be the earliest version of the feeling that I can remember. Nothing about the little game was dramatic. Nobody forced me. Nobody humiliated me. We were children being foolish in the ordinary way children are foolish.

But my body had become public for a second.

Perhaps that was all…

Or perhaps, somewhere along the way, my mind began storing certain things in the same drawer: female intimacy, physical exposure, the friction of clothing against my body, a sudden aversion to the signs of femininity in my own body, lowered defenses, and the peculiar vulnerability of being extremely happy among other people. I can’t prove that. But the resemblance is hard for me to ignore. Nothing terrible happened at the birthday party. For many years, that was exactly why I never thought it mattered.

What did my breasts have to do with a childhood birthday party? Maybe nothing. But once I learned that nipple stimulation could trigger hormonal changes, the feeling became less mysterious to me. I had already learned after childbirth how powerfully the body could alter the mind before the mind had any chance to explain itself. So I began to wonder whether that sudden sadness was sometimes simply the body arriving first.

That thought was strangely comforting. It did not make the feeling less real. If anything, it made me trust it more. I no longer needed to search the room for a reason, or blame the person beside me, or ask what had suddenly gone wrong. Sometimes nothing had gone wrong. Sometimes my body had simply changed the weather.

I had been here before. The sudden emptiness, the urge to withdraw, the strange homesickness for somewhere safe. The birthday party did not explain the biology, and the biology did not explain the birthday party. But they seemed to share the same emotional language.

The Allergy

I now think of the feeling as a kind of emotional allergy. The comparison is imperfect, but useful. Certain situations seem to bring it on: intimacy, physical vulnerability, close female friendship, etc. Once I could put the homeless woman from my ridiculous Washington story beside the little girl at the birthday party, the sadness lost some of its authority. It was still unpleasant. It was simply no longer mysterious.

If the feeling arrives at a crowded dinner, I can become quiet, or go outside, or cry in the bathroom if that’s what happens. There is a difference between fleeing a feeling and giving it somewhere to sit.

For years, when this happened, I thought the sudden desire to leave meant there was something wrong with the people around me. Then I thought it meant there was something wrong with me. Now I think it may mean something much less dramatic. My body has remembered something before I have. The feeling still comes occasionally. But it no longer feels like falling through a trapdoor. It is more like a brief change in weather. I know this weather now. I don’t have to go home just because it starts raining.