"Have you ever thought about doing stand up?"
Or...is being funny worth it?
If my friends are to be believed, I am one of (if not) the funniest people they’ve ever known. I keep myself laughing. I keep my friends laughing, even when they don’t fully understand the content of the joke I’m making or the bit I’m doing (saying something in the cadence of a joke can get you really far). I’ve been asked by uncountably many people if I’ve ever considered doing stand up.1 When I tell my friends, “I want to find a guy that can at least keep up with my humor if not be funnier than me”, the response is always, “That’s gonna be hard to do.”
I am funny. And when people tell me I’m funny, I preen and smile in smug satisfaction.
I’ve had two doctors appointments in the last two weeks (I scratched my cornea) and found myself sitting in a plastic chair cracking jokes about my health and unable to stop cracking jokes about my health.
“How’s your nutrition?”
“Oh, I’m cheffing it up.”
“How did you respond to your prescription?”
“It didn’t make my migraines worse…” (implied flat affect)
“What brings you in today?”
“I’m worried that a spider crawled into my eye and laid eggs while I was asleep and that’s why my eye is goo’d shut. Or that I have pink eye.”
The problem is not that any of my comments were lies; I have been “cheffing” it up. The prescription didn’t make my migraines worse (it also didn’t make them any better). I was worried about a spider crawling in my eye while I was sleeping. The problem is not in the delivery; the two practitioners laughed, or at least chuckled.2 The problem is that I’m forfeiting however much of my paycheck to health insurance, spending however much money on gas and parking or bus fare, taking hours out of my day to hurry up and wait at these clinics, and then paying a “definitely not a surprise” bill to crack jokes with people who are just trying to get their job done.
The problem is that I couldn’t stop myself from cracking jokes. I couldn’t augment my tone of the words I was about to say to not be delivered in the cadence of a joke or reference some internet meme that makes people laugh. I couldn’t turn it off.
And maybe that doesn’t matter. After all, I’ll probably never see the urgent care practitioner again and my migraine clinic cycles through practitioners frequently enough that I haven’t seen the same person twice. Who cares if I made some jokes? Who cares if I wasn’t vulnerable in the way people expect you to be at the doctor’s office?
Except…I find myself refusing to be vulnerable with everyone around me, especially at first. It freaks me out when people are “overly” vulnerable with me “too quickly”3.
This isn’t to say that I’m completely not-vulnerable with people. I do have friends, I even have close friends. I talk to them about how I think about dying while I fall asleep, or how I wish I had a boyfriend who could make me food when I’m flying home from a trip because I can’t do it for myself (or at least go to the grocery store before I get back), I tell my friends that I tried not to cry during their jiu jitsu belt promotion.
Otherwise, I largely, rely on myself to meet my own emotional needs. Feeling over extended and exposed because I committed to too many engagements and no longer have time for myself? Time to say no and stay in. Wound up and off kilter because my house is a mess? Say no to going out, stay in and clean up my house. Vaguely agitated with the world? Eat something. Drink some water. Listen to music or read a book or go to jiu jitsu.
I’ve spent years working to become the self sufficient champion of my own needs. I unlearned looking to others for emotional regulation. I learned how to regulate myself, how to check in with myself, how to let something that feels pressing wait until the morning. I don’t need another person, or people, to do those things for me. I don’t want another person to do those things for me. The very idea makes my skin crawl.
I spent years trying to find someone else to do all emotional regulation for me: wake up and have them coax me into an optimistic outlook, keep my thoughts from racing on the walk to class or to work, keep me even keeled when assignments and deadlines loomed, bring me back to center when my interpersonal relationships wavered. My emotions were so erratic that the effort it took to bring myself back to a place even close to center was gigantic. It was easier to spend time looking for someone else to do it. And far easier to deal with the emotional pendulum swing with someone got close to me and saw how off-the-rails I was and eventually ran for the hills.
Now, because I learned how to keep my pendulum swings small, I only have to do minor adjustments throughout my day. When bigger adjustments are needed, I’ve already built a really strong habit of caring for myself, so they aren’t as daunting. After all of the effort it took to get here, this is by far the easiest way to live and I wish I hadn’t waited so long to start.
I don’t want to do big adjustments for someone else. Not only will it not work, it’ll throw off my own ability to keep myself in line. I’m not willing to forfeit that. And I don’t trust anyone else to attempt to do that work for me.
I am happy to answer the phone or grab a coffee or make a reservation for brunch where the floor is open for titanic sized bitching. I want to my friends to know that I’m in their corner if they need time to blow off steam or be reminded that nothing has killed them yet.
I don’t want to endlessly prompt others to check in with themselves. Checking in is a muscle that’s built by repetition. I do not want to pull time away from what I’m prioritizing to constantly remind someone else to drink water and take a lap and try to get good sleep and “have you eaten recently?”-d them. (If you’re my friend, there’s a 10/90 chance I’ll ask if you’ve eaten or if I’ll offer to slash tires to remind you that I’m in your corner.) I sure as hell don’t want someone else to do that sort of thing for me—all that achieves is a weakening of a muscle that took years to build.
Surrounded by friends and family that give a shit, that enjoy my company, that think I’m blindingly brilliant and hot and amazing, I accidentally became a very funny island.
And I want to scream from the rooftops that I’m okay! I don’t need to be vulnerable all the time. (Or even some of the time!) I can live my life being vulnerable in short bursts with people who’ve proven their worth.
I am happy on my island. I have everything I need. I have (almost) everything I want4. I have no idea if my refusal to be vulnerable is robbing me of opportunities because I’m not looking around to see what I’m missing out on. My life is so full of concerts and fantasy football shit talk and opportunities to show off how smart I am at work and cute clothes and good books and delicious food and people that laugh at my jokes and ask if I’ve ever considered doing stand up. When I call my life long friends, we talk for hours about everything, who we are, where we’ve been, if we know how to guess at where we want to go next.
My life is so full that I have to say No more than I ever imagined. Who cares if I don’t practice earnestness? I’m not any less sincere just because I’m making a joke!
Who cares if I’m on an island?
The idea of standing on a stage and doing interwoven bits for strangers does not feel compelling to me, even in a “tight five” format. Even if I know I could spin a yarn that leaves people wheezing with laughter. It seems too ✨vulnerable✨. What if no one laughs? What if the crowd heckles me and I don’t have anything good to say back to them? (I do have a working title for a Netflix special I won’t ever do and the concept of a stage design that would do absolute numbers. I will not be sharing these because I don’t want people to steal the ideas I won’t use…just in case.)
I’ve been told recently that people will laugh even when they don’t get my jokes because they know I’m making a joke and don’t want to make me feel awkward. If you’re at a stand up show of mine, please keep doing this. It fuels me. If you know me in real life…at least let me know like 10% of the time otherwise I won’t ever learn.
The initial impetus for my last post was how deeply uncomfortable someone else was making me because they were being so forward and open with their feelings and I decided not to write about it because it a) felt to personal and b) felt like I was sub-tweeting them on a platform they don’t know about instead of just saying, “Hey, you can keep that to yourself”.
I did end up asking that soup guy if he was ever going to ask me out and he apparently lives two hours away so I gave up.
In no specific order: the pasta press attachment for my stand mixer, a pastry board, another enameled cast iron pot, tickets to the Bruins alumni game in December, a boyfriend, a raise, no student loans, a Toyota equivalent to the 2-door Jeep wrangler (or better yet, infrastructure that eviscerates my need to own a car), to drink enough water in my day AND not have to pee all the time, to erase my home address from credit card companies data bases, for canvasing/scam texts and calls to feel pain when I block them, to live in the same neighborhood as my gym without making my commute worse, to win at least one more week in fantasy football, to find my missing copy of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, for my freezer to stop doing whatever it is that’s making giant ice blocks on the bottom drawer, pants that fit, a big iced coffee.