You and I Are Too Old For This: A Lesson in Mastering What Embarrasses Us the Most
Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society
On turning our worst moments in our funniest… at least sometimes
Fair warning, this is going to start out a little dark and end up happy. Bear with me.
Addicts are angry people, said a friend of mine this week. That hit home in ways I didn’t see coming, because I’ve dealt with plenty of addictive behaviors in my life. Still do, frankly, but nothing at the level from years past which nearly cost me my life.
I come from a family of people addicted to alcohol and drugs. My downfall was sugar, mainly. That morphed through designer duds, makeup, exercise, sex…oh hell. The flavor of the week.
The worst, though, were eating disorders.
Truth, I WAS angry. Deeply depressed because I couldn’t seem to get the decades and decades of eating disorders under control. Somehow it’s easier to quit drinking, at least for some, than it is to quit the eating compulsions.
You do have to eat. You don’t have to drink.
Any serious alcoholic can attest to how insultingly simplistic that sounds, but it’s still true. I grew up with two lifelong alcoholics and can attest. I don’t mean to minimize the challenge but there is a difference.
Over the course of forty years, during a time when there was zero awareness, there wasn’t an eating disorder clinic nearby and plenty of resources for the afflicted, many of us stumbled through alone, hating ourselves.
If you’ve ever had such a compulsion, you already know the extremes we will go to in order to feed the beast, whatever the beast may be. Addicted people will often lie, cheat, steal, hide, do anything to deny or mask how much trouble they’re in. Over the years I did my share of denial.
Anything to hide my stash of donuts, cookies, pastries, cakes, whatever. The shame, combined with the heartfelt belief for years that I was the only person in the world with that disorder, was overwhelming.
And that’s where we’re going: right into the shame.
You and I Are WAY Too Old to condemn ourselves to being angry at life, for life.
None of what I write here is intended as medical advice. This is what I did and why it worked.
Some fifteen years ago I was an active member of the National Speaker’s Association, Colorado Chapter. Best chapter in the country then and now. We had a seminar put on by two brilliant people based on their book, Your Seventh Sense, How to Think Like a Comedian.
The seminar was intended to help us speakers find more comedy fodder for our speeches.
Funny people get paid more. Good reason to be funny.
My biggest takeaway: we were to take the single worst moment we could imagine and “hand it over” to our favorite comedian.
Then we were to imagine what that favorite comedian would do on stage with our horrible awful terrible shameful moment.
I took the worst situation I could recall from all my years of eating disorders, all those decades of shoving my face into toilets and all the other variations of that awful compulsion, and in my imagination, “handed it over” to Robin Williams.
Williams made a career out of taking his worst moments, driven by alcoholism and coke addiction, and crafting them into gut-busting comedy.
I couldn’t possibly have anticipated what would happen.
Here’s that story:
Upper East Side, Manhattan, July 1979. I was living in a small apartment in a rent-controlled building on 434 East 58th Street, one block from Christine Onassis’ house on the river.
It was hot as hell, no air conditioning, miserably smelly. I hated, hated, HATED Manhattan.
I was in the early grip of my eating disorders. I’d morphed from anorexia to bulimia to chewing food up and spitting it out. Of course that’s gross.
I was horribly ashamed of the habit and horribly ashamed of what it was doing to me and quite unable to stop. Many of you can relate.
I had just left the Army the year before. Five years, during which four different senior officers had assaulted me. In once instance I was gang-raped. I had even been assaulted by the psychologist assigned to help me with the assaults. You can understand the body dysmorphia.
My favorite food at the time was Wheat Chex, with mountains of sugar and half and half. I could go through umpteen boxes. Trouble was, my apartment had no garbage disposal.
I’d pour my supersized Slurpee cup full of chewed-up Wheat Chex into a supersized black garbage bag until the bag was bulging. Then I’d hoist my fifteen-pound bag to the garbage chute and send the bag skidding downstairs.
That bulging bag full of chewed cereal, milk and sugar hurtled five floors, picking up speed with each successive floor until it exploded like a massive wet-Chex water balloon on arrival.
Mid-July. No air conditioning.
Bag after bag after bag.
Garbage pickup was once a week. You do the math.
I was blissfully unaware.
Unbeknownst to me, the super, who was Polish-Bronx and wore a dingy wife-beater with chest hairs growing through the cotton, had begun going door-to-door trying to find the culprit.
After all, that poor bastard had to clean it up, and all the poor sots on the first two floors were treated to the smell.
I’m sure being close to garbage room when the bag landed was quite spectacular.
This went on for weeks. It got hotter, the residents were getting madder and I continued to send my fifteen-pound black balloons of masticated Wheat Chex hurtling down the garbage chute. Sometimes several times a day.
If the folks downstairs were desperate, you can imagine how irritated the supe was.
Finally one Saturday, I was in the kitchen doing my thing. A loud, insistent bang at the door jerked me out of my sugar-and-Chex-induced reverie.
There was the super, stinking mad (and stinking) in the hot hallway, holding a little baglet of the foul, stinking evidence of my crime.
In an accent that only someone born in the Bronx can muster, he said, pushing my mushy Chex in my face,
IS DIS YOUSE’S???
Horrified, I blurted out the only thing that I could think of:
COOKIE RECIPE!!!!!!!!!
To which he nearly screamed,
NO MORE COOKIES!!!
And slammed the door in my face.
When I pictured Robin Williams on stage delivering that story, I nearly couldn’t breathe, I laughed so hard.
Finally I could see the absurdity. Holy shit.
Robin Williams’ imaginary version of my horrible awful terrible shameful moment wasn’t just hilarious, it turned my life around. Once you’ve used this trick to rewrite one event, you start looking for others.
I was effectively re-framing my shame into an ongoing comedy highlight reel. When I could do that, forgiveness, joy, grace and delight washed away the sting. Now I was just human. And hilarious.
After a while, as the authors of Seventh Sense promised, I started seeing things from an oblique, comedic angle.
Not all the time. But I got better.
The real skill is to accordion the time closer to right now. That old saying that “comedy is tragedy plus time?” The shorter the time before you find the joke, the better.
I’m not there, but getting close. I’ve learned to ask “What’s funny about this?” That can change everything when I invite my inner Robin out to play.
These days I’ll spew coffee through my nose at the most inopportune times. Invariably either I’ve done something monumentally stupid, or I’ll see something that reminds me of something I’d done that was equally stupid.
I’m not laughing at others, I’m laughing at myself.
The ability to reframe what shames us is a superpower.
It has on occasion royally irritated friends who can’t understand my hilarity when I’ve hurt myself. They don’t get what’s so funny about coming home on a gurney.
I do. Because I’m already writing the story, and I’m the punch line. Sometimes it’s the only thing I have left in my quiver to deal with what I’ve been handed. It is also the most powerful coping skill I have.
Recently I recounted a series of events about a really serious injury (a story I’ll tell at another time) to a friend while driving home from Portland. I was in stitches.
The other end of the line was eerily silent. At one point, she intoned, which complete and utter sincerity,
“I don’t see what’s funny about that.”
I laughed so hard I nearly drove off the road. I succeeded in snorting a loogie onto my right hand. She failed to get the punchline.
The absurdity IS the punchline.
This same person has often told me that she admires how I can laugh in the face of damned near anything, including horrific injuries, bankruptcy, divorce, the love of my life being killed in a plane crash, multiple surgeries, and and and.
And and and.
It’s just life.
Being able to re-frame life doesn’t remove the pain, the losses, the deep hurts. It does allow us to, when it’s appropriate (and it isn’t always appropriate, don’t misunderstand me), to stop the internal shame, blaming ourselves for being imperfect.
Our imperfections, our failures, our flailing, falling, flopping around and utter and complete f*ckups can become prime comedy fodder. If we let them.
Not too long after that seminar, I ended my eating disorders, a horrific habit that had gripped me for nearly forty years, forever.
I lost my teeth to eating disorders. These days, once a year, I’m pretty grateful. Every Halloween, when the kids come to the door, I take my teeth out and grin. They run, and I keep the candy.
What I laugh at and with, can’t hurt me. What I make fun of, doesn’t own me.
Doesn’t work for everyone. But if the response to the funny-at-my-expense stories I’ve shared recently are any indication, the laughter is worth it. So is the truth that we all do stupid shit, the permission to stop taking ourselves so very seriously.
Stupid shit is funny shit. At least at my house.
Let’s play.
I hope you got a good laugh out of this, because I sure did. There’s great power in turning tragedy into comedy. I respect not all of us can do it, but it’s available. If this story gave you either hope or ideas, please consider
If you know someone else who might benefit from this perspective, please also consider
Either way, there’s such wonder in finding our funny. It’s worth the hunt.
Julia, you nailed it. Not to brag, but I employ this superpower on a consistent basis and it has helped me through a prison sentence, breaks ups, relationship Hindenburg disasters, financial difficulties, deaths of loved ones.. .you name it. I am so grateful to have found this. I also have been dealing with an eating disorder since I was in my teens. Such a toughy. But the humor pulls the rug out from underneath the guilt and shame like nothing else. Glad to meet you.