You do it to yourself, you do / and that’s why it really hurts
– Radiohead, “Just”
I’ve spent the past week or so preparing for a taping.
What that looks like: running a ten minute set again and again and again, trying to fold it in on itself like a Hattori Hanzo sword so it becomes razor-sharp. Knocking out all the air bubbles.
What it also looks like: me having a bunch of B-minus sets, being too mechanical and robotic on stage, not feeling free to be myself. I keep finding myself sticking to a script instead of treating my plan like an outline, the way I like to do comedy best.
This has happened three times in a row this week, and the third time was, indeed, the charm. (Yes, that charm is a bad luck charm.)
I am at the Comedy Store, running the latest iteration of this planned set, and it is going okay. “Okay” is a tough word for comics, right up there next to “nice.” If someone says a comic is “nice” it usually means they're unfunny. Saying your set was "okay" usually means that you are bubbling with resentment on the inside because they didn't laugh at the right thing.
This is the third okay set I’ve had in a row, and something is starting to feel really wrong. I leave the stage, my brain already starting to go into triage panic mode. This is where the bottom falls out.
I spend the next several hours kind of floating around in a daze, not fully there, more in my head than amongst my friends. After a while where I am mostly silent and probably looking very concerned, I talk to the other comics I see about how I'm feeling (BAD!) and what's going on (I THINK MY OPENER MIGHT BE COMPLETELY WRONG!). I get assurances that I’ll crack the code, commiseration from those who have experienced or are actively experiencing the same thing, and then I leave.
Now I’m freaking out because all of my fears and resentments are bubbling up, which means I need to talk to someone in recovery. So I make a few phone calls to Al-Anon fellows. Neither of them answer.
Then I go get too many slices of pizza (3) from Prince Street because I intend to eat my feelings. The cost of eating my feelings tonight is just over $20.
As I walk to my car with the pizza in hand, I call someone who has a long time clean and sober, someone for who most of that time came from working an NA program.
For everyone out there who isn't in a 12-step program, NA has a reputation for being hardcore and no-nonsense. And people who really work an NA program – people generally kicking opiates and the like – tend to be pretty hardcore and no-nonsense themselves. This friend is no exception. She gives me the kind of laughing-at-my-problems, tough-love talk that leaves me stunned into silence as I drive home, then reheat my pizza.
"What's the last time you wrote a gratitude list about your career?" she asks.
"I don't know," I say. The garlicky odor of rewarmed red sauce fills the kitchen.
This is a great question: all of my fears in this moment are career-related. That I will bungle this taping, that I will be exposed as a fraud, that no one will think I'm funny or book me ever again, that I'll lose the respect of my peers, that I will forever be on the fringes of “the system” despite all my self-assurance that I am okay with not being an industry darling.
"You've got it pretty fucking good," she says after I tell her this. "And as much as you might think you're outside the system, you're not. You write for TV! That's the system!"
I don't like hearing what she has to say. But I also know she's right.
The conversation continues so long that I have to reheat my pizza once more. Before we wrap up, before I eat too much pizza and remember that eating too much pizza is actually something that makes me feel bad, she recommends I go hit an open mic and fuck around. "Get out of your head," she insists. "And trust your skills."
So I do.
One of my most obvious alcoholic traits is people pleasing. The way this manifests for me is in being a chameleon. At my least recovered, I have no real sense of identity; I am whoever I think you need me to be. Combined with an obsession over validation, it becomes a one-two punch of obnoxiously self-seeking behavior.
It’s why I allowed myself to be the punching bag for the popular kids in elementary school, just so I could sit at the same lunch table as them, slagging off my actual friends who I would have sleepovers and play video games into the wee hours with.
It’s why, my senior year of college, I spread myself between three distinct friend groups – my frat brothers, my non-Greek friends from freshman and sophomore year, and my classmates from the creative writing department – shifting myself subtly every time I’d hop parties.
It’s why I got bent out of shape when I found out that people would dismiss me as a “Roast Battle comic” then not book me for their shows, and tried to swing my artistic pendulum so hard to the other side that I neglected to work on what was working.
It’s why, at the beginning of last year, after spending so much time feeling free and loving where I was headed with my crowd work and improvisation on stage, I let one comment from the host of a show I was doing about how shitty they thought crowd work was turn my world upside down. One offhand remark kept me from feeling good about doing crowd work for months despite knowing it’s a valuable part of my comedy tool belt.
I have spent a lot of my time in recovery trying to sift through all of the noise to figure out what I actually think, value, and care about. To me, this is one of the core tenets of recovery, as close to a dictionary definition as you can get: my 12-step work is, in some part, designed for me to recover the real me that has been buried under a lifetime of other versions of myself that I invented to fit in.
Years ago, in the back of the Comedy Store, the summer before she made her debut as a cast member on Saturday Night Live, Leslie Jones was holding court, giving advice to young comics.
“Writing stand-up isn’t about trying to create something new,” she said. “It’s about pick-axing away at yourself, trying to find what’s really underneath.”
But just because I have eight years and change of working to keep the real me from getting buried under another pile of emotional and spiritual rubble, doesn’t mean that I am invulnerable from falling again.
On the drive over to midnight mic at Third Wheel, I make one more phone call, to my Al-Anon sponsor.
He and I talk through what's going on, and he arrives at roughly the same answer, without the curbstomping of my ego.
"You just need to trust yourself and your abilities. You're there for a reason. Go have some fun."
And he's right.
I go to the open mic and I wait for about 45 minutes before getting up. There are three young dudes on shrooms who come in and disrupt things for a while, but they leave before my set. So does the couple who has been dutifully watching the whole show.
But I am not here to worry about how many people are in the audience. I am here to have fun.
So I do. There are about 4 minutes of new material that happen, and I am happy with how it goes. Some of it might wind up in the taping. We'll see.
I am reminded how much of all of this is just a construct that I put on myself, stakes that only exist for me, a level of pressure I am only putting on myself. And sometimes it's okay to recognize that you're cracking under the pressure.
As I write this, it occurs to me that the more I think about it, the less accurate I think “chameleon” is as a descriptor.
There are some benefits to being a chameleon. Chameleons are good at things. Chameleons can sense danger. I think there are benefits to being comfortable enough in my own skin now that I can move between places with ease and not worry about having to shift who I am – instead, I can be a part of wherever I am as me.
What my unrecovered self does, really and truly, is turn me into a contortionist.
A chameleon’s change is inadvertent. What I am doing, goaded by the dry, unrecovered version of myself, is deliberate and painful. And even though I am learning it again the hard way, it is better to learn than to remain unaware.
It’s one thing to be flexible, it’s another thing to bend over backwards and be who you think you need to be in order to fit in.
I stick around Third Wheel for a little longer. After I thank D’Angelo for throwing me up and say I’m taking off, he thanks me for coming.
“So many of these new guys show up with their ‘ums’ and ‘uhs,’ and they need to see guys like you really working on stuff. It’s good for them.”
“It’s good for me, too,” I reply. “Thanks for the time.” Then I leave, run across the street at 1 AM to my car, and drive home.
I do some 10th Step journaling about the whole situation, hop in the shower, read a little. It is just shy of 2 AM and I am in a better mood. The nice part about bottoming out: there’s nowhere to go but up.