Our Journey into Wellness: How My Sugar Baby Taught Me Holistic Health

I took five deep breaths before sitting down to write this piece.

And that’s a sentence that a year ago, I would never have thought that I would utter in seriousness. But that was also before I had a small stress-related health scare that changed my whole perspective.

Let’s rewind to the fall of 2023.

I was two years away from retirement at a company that I had been working for the better part of a decade. The pay was great, the benefits even better, and I genuinely liked my coworkers and my boss. But to say that it was a stress-free work environment would be laughable.

I constantly had nightmares about getting fired or showing up to work late. I took my work home with me most nights. I missed my niece’s sweet 16 birthday party so that I could practice for a sales pitch. But hey, I grew up in a generation that didn’t complain about stuff like that.

Of course, at that time, my family begged me to start dating, something that I had never been good at and had long since given up on. They said that it would calm me down, since I seemed so high-strung all the time. They wouldn’t let up, so I started sugar dating just to have someone I could bring to family events and get them off my back.

Wilma (I know, what 28-year-old is named Wilma, right? She went by Mimi for short) was one of those “let’s see each other for Thanksgiving and then I’ll tell my family it didn’t work out” kind of arrangements. The plan was to pick her up around 3, head to my sister’s house, stay until 7 pm at the latest, and then bring her home.

Okay, well, there is something that I haven’t mentioned yet, here, and that’s that I was drinking pretty heavily during this time. It helped with the stress. So, I noticed right away when we got to my sister’s house that Mimi refused the beer I had brought her from the fridge.

I wondered whether maybe she was some sort of recovering alcoholic or something, but she seemed totally at ease about the whole thing. I pushed her about it a bit (okay, maybe that was wrong of me, having just met her), and she said that she felt better in her body when she didn’t drink. She had never been a big drinker, but had decided to give up officially a few years before.

“Okay,” I countered. “Then what do you do to blow off steam?”

Luckily, we were out of earshot of my family when she gave me her answer, because she said, “There are a million other ways to deal with stress: dancing, exercise, meditation, being in the ocean, therapy, having sex, either alone or with a partner, cooking…lots of things.”

Instantly intrigued, I raised a glass to her. But that seemed to rub her the wrong way.

“Look, giving up substances is actually one of the hardest things to do. A lot of what we’re taught from a young age is to numb our pain with alcohol, painkillers, work, or relationships. But being actually healthy in your body is not easy. It takes discipline.”

I was on my third beer, so I think I made some kind of crass statement about Buddhism and how I’ve always wanted to visit Thailand.

By the time 7 rolled around, Mimi was nudging me to go. I think she also maybe had a hunch that I had become too drunk to drive, so I could see her pulling up a rideshare app on her phone. Basically, she told me to have a nice night and call me if I ever wanted to do anything that didn’t involve alcohol.

I doubted that I would call her.

A week later, I was in the hospital for what the doctor described to me as a severe panic attack. It had been brought on by a particularly stressful project at work that I had absolutely botched. And I was facing termination.

Right before the attack, I was at my desk and really wishing for a cold beer or, better, a strong shot of whiskey, and then I had an intense pain in my chest that felt like a heart attack.

At the hospital, I didn’t call my sister or any of my colleagues to pick me up. I called Mimi. And, I was crying on the phone to her. Really, I expected that she would be totally put off by it and hang up. But she said she was on her way.

She drove me home, put me in a hot shower, and then took some cash out of my wallet to go get take-out (I remember, hot soup and BLTs.) She sat with me in silence until I was ready to talk about it. I told her about the failure at work, my fear of being fired. The pressure from my family to just find someone so that they wouldn’t have to worry about me. And, now, their worst fears had come to life: I was about to lose my job, and I was alone.

“So what?” She said. I was stunned.

“What do you mean, so what?”

“So, what then? What would you do if you lost your job? What would your next step be?”

“Probably drink myself into oblivion first.” I was joking, but only a little bit.

She nodded, “Yeah, that’s one option. Then what?”

I could tell she was serious.

“I guess, then, I would start looking for another job. Or, I don’t know. Maybe I would try to work out early retirement. I’ve always wanted to travel more. Maybe I would take a remote job, a part-time job. Spend more time with my niece.”

As I was saying this, Mimi had her hand on my shoulder. It felt nice. I was starting to relax. The muscles around my neck and shoulders, I realized, had been clenched.

“You know what you just did?” She said, smiling, adorably smug. “You just dealt with stress in a healthy way. You didn’t numb it, you faced it head-on. It’s called visualization. You should be proud of yourself.”

In the end, I didn’t lose my job. But I decided to take early retirement anyway, because I was done with the stress and the pressure. I looked to Mimi for what to do next, but she wouldn’t give me any answers. She said that she would be happy to share some of her hobbies and activities, but that I would have to create the kind of healthy lifestyle that worked for me, not just jump onto hers. So, I took up tennis (okay, I know, tennis is like the most stressful of stress-relieving activities) and I started going to yoga.

I very, very slowly changed my relationship to alcohol so that I could drink as a way to enjoy myself, not to cover up any uncomfortable feelings.

And I apologized to my niece for missing her birthday and many other big moments in her life. I made it a point to be there for her graduation with the biggest bouquet of flowers I could find, and I was with her mom when it was time to drop her off at college.

As far as Mimi and I go, she came to Thanksgiving at my family’s again this last year. And then, at 7 pm, we left together, headed to the airport, and took a trip to Thailand.