My New Year's resolutions were to stop drinking and start dating. I’m doing well on both, but one has given me much more difficulty than the other. Dating requires being funny, or at least it does for me. I’m convinced people only like me when I’m making them laugh.
I recently saw someone I unblocked hadn’t heard from in a while. He was surprised I hadn't become a standup, which he immediately followed by saying he had sworn off standups. He really knows the type because that’s a great piece of material. Obviously, I see the appeal— it must be nice to have a hot girl make personalized jokes in the convenience of your own home. They’re also really fucking sad, and self destructive, and, while fun as hell, always some degree of existentially tortured. It must be nice to watch someone self-destruct and think it’s solely from the pain of an existence without you.
There’s a Lucy Daucus song I started listening to a few years ago that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about recently, in which she pleads she doesn’t want to be funny anymore. I relate to all of the lyrics, but I think my current phase of life is most similar to this one:
I don't want the joke to be on me
Yeah, I'll buy the clothes and I'll be the best dressed
Yeah, I'll read the books and I'll be the smartest
I'll play guitar and I'll be the artist
What am I if I’m not this? What is this in the first place? Does anyone know how to become a completely different person?
Old me was a lot of fun. She was also a terrible person to be. She wasn’t funny because she wanted to be; she was beating her bullies to the punchline. I didn’t know I was actually funny until I got to college. I was just doing my best to deflect attention until that point. But when I started to get admiration in the form of laughter, it was like ok, finally, something I’m good at! Maybe there is a reason people want to be around me. Instead of taking that newfound confidence and moving forward, I buckled down on getting laughs at all cost.
I think I forget that about her, that my endless quest to amuse wasn’t hedonistic to begin with. I was scared and eventually I was frozen. I didn’t know how to sit alone in a room with myself, and I genuinely had no idea why other people would want to. I laughed at myself because I didn’t know there was another way. When you want to find out how to treat yourself, look at the ways your friends treat you. For the first time, I realized I didn’t want friends that talked to me the way I talk to myself, because I did not like the way I talked to myself. It’s exhausting to hate yourself so much. It’s like when you go too far down a snark Reddit and you can only pour over the ugly details, no matter how small. Who the fuck wants to get stuck like that? It can be fun, in small doses, but it’s no way to live. It’s especially no way to bond together a group of people and expect good relationships. Everyone sits on the edge of their seats, waiting for the latest opportunity to smell fear and pounce.
Why do we make jokes at our own expense, or others? Usually as a desperate attempt to attract attention. No one who punches down truly loves themselves. I was convinced I wasn’t capable of growing to fit the room, that my ability to weasel my way in was solely because of my looks. I didn’t realize not taking yourself seriously is a vicious cycle. I started making jokes in a desperate attempt to stay, and then I made more because I was so aware I had to. For a long time, I laughed at the disappointment I felt for not being enough because it was easier than changing. It’s fine to be a mess if you’re laughing too. Who needs emotional stability when you have teary, mascara smudged post crying selfies?
At some point I tried to make the conscious decision to stop being funny-- to stop providing myself on a platter. It was too difficult when people took the pieces home with them. Also like, stop stealing my fucking pieces. Get your own personalities! I have so little and yet you constantly steal from me. I’ve grown resentful of my audience. The problem was them, except not actually them, but rather the person I was becoming to please them. I grew tired of playing different characters for different people as a desperate plea for them to want to spend time with me. For the first time in my life, I felt too good to beg for affection.
It’s difficult to suddenly decide you have value. Am I attractive enough to take up space? Am I over-appraising my value in the marketplace of humanity? How will I fill the vacuum left by my ability to make jokes? We’re constantly deciding our worth in relation to others in a quest to find out where we fit into our rigid, institution filled society. Finding the humor in a situation is great, but it’s not learning to code, and hot + funny girl is only effective if you’re smart enough not to let your date know you’re smarter than him.
There’s a deep loneliness in being able to read people well enough to bring them joy but not enough to understand how to be one. What starts out as an easy way to earn some good old social capital becomes difficult to do it over, and over, and over again. Paying attention, learning the ins and outs of human behaviors, refining their behavior for the pleasure of others to cope with the pain of their existence is how funny people get funny. It’s why rich people are only funny if their parents are horrible and only children never are; they’ve never paid attention to anyone else. Boring people don’t tell good stories. At best they are able to curate a taste and at worst they perpetuate some of the worst atrocities mankind’s ever seen (Chris Pratt, Colin Jost, all those weird Mormon Youtubers) and we all suffer for it. The internet fried our brains and popular culture is pushing mediocrity down our throats. We’re all laughing constantly and everyone is fucking miserable. Do you know how much it sucks to have to pay close attention to this clusterfuck of a world, to try to make people feel good about something overwhelmingly shit? Especially people who are not fucking funny!!!! Who have nothing to offer you in return other than willingness to let you sit by them and create all of the fun.
It’s difficult now to continue to try to be funny when I keenly remember my constant resentment at my former post as a jester. I like myself more when I try to stop my immediate urge to find the humor in a situation. I’ve committed myself to forcing myself to be present in this moment of discomfort, to refusing to see a silver lining in man made horrors. It has made me significantly less enjoyable to be around. I like that too. I don’t care about diffusing the tension anymore, and I certainly don’t want to ease your discomfort at the sake of mine. I don’t need to provide a service to you to justify taking up space. Life shouldn’t be transactional. At the same time, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be willing to give something of yourself at all. You should be generous and trust those around you to do the same. In an age when it’s so easy to record someone and ruin their life via internet (seemingly unsuccessful for the wealthy but successful for lower parts of the food chain) it’s incredibly difficult to trust the people around you not to shame you for cheap points. We are all using each other as tools to create a narrative arc. It’s fucking weird to pretend there’s a delineation between who the main characters and the side characters are. It really is. It requires an incredible amount of self absorption. We’ve confused our right to boundaries and peace with a failed new age enlightenment that is simultaneously passively conflictless and ready for violence at a hair trigger. I don’t know what the solution to this problem is, but I know it isn’t giving into the urge to keep emotional intimacy at arm's length.
The threat of narcissistic brain worms doesn’t mean you should stop the quest for self reflection altogether. With any luck, you’ll get to the place where only half of your interactions aren’t constantly inundated with moral quandary. You have to chose the do the right thing, one little action at a time, and then you have to learn to trust yourself that you do the right thing most of the time. It requires becoming an active participant in your own life. The best and worst part of waking up is when hope comes back— when you begin believe that you are valuable enough that something good might come to you, no matter how someone made you feel 10 years ago. When you hate yourself, it’s so difficult to believe you deserve to have the things you want, if you’re even brave enough to admit to yourself that you do. I wasn’t even brave enough to think about it.
I spent so long using humor to avoid the emptiness inside that I’m skeptical that I can love myself and go back to being funny. It feels too slippery a slope. I’m scared I haven’t earned enough points in current form to really be different now, that I might set a boundary I don’t deserve. I recognize this is irrational. Everyone deserves boundaries, and the right to change them as they go. That’s what society is. It’s just a constant reckoning about how we want to treat each other and therefore ourselves. Telling a joke can also be a way of holding yourself accountable, of proving you have moved on enough from the person you used to be that you can laugh about the hardship it took to get here. You just have to be willing to admit you may have done something wrong in the first place.
I never wanted to fix myself. I didn’t feel as if it was worth the effort, the humiliating ordeal of attempting to put back together something you never realized was falling apart in the first place. But I’m going to die anyway at some point, so I might as well spend the time I have here trying to do something I enjoy and might one day become proud of. It’s hard and I hate it and honestly it fucking sucks. I don’t want to laugh it all off, but sometimes you have to. Luckily, I can laugh about it with moi. I’m grateful for that. She is really fucking funny.
Ok, you guys try maintaining a cult classic niche blog when your therapist randomly stops practicing. Not easy! Anyways, I found the perfect cucumber soda. You should get a digital Vogue subscription so you can pour over collections like you used to magazines. Maybe buy a bunch of paperbacks from the 80s on Thriftbooks. Give up on finding the perfect denim shorts and just buy the damn OV 5 inch bike shorts, which they absolutely made more expensive. Ugh.
See you again, whenever.