Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation
Page 1
Dedication
DEDICATED TO MY PARENTS, ROBIN AND JAMES,
WHO RAISED ME TO BE BRAVE.
MAYBE TOO BRAVE.
Contents
Dedication
Preface
Introduction: What, Exactly, Is a Self-Inflicted Wound?
Prologue: Why Am I Doing This? Why?
(1)
The Time I Cut Myself in Half
(2)
The Time I Almost Set Myself on Fire
(3)
The Time I Was a Human Maypole
(4)
The Time I Got Boobs Way Before Everyone Else
(5)
The Time I Foolishly Tried to Trade Vegetables for Meat
(6)
The Time I Almost Seared My Flesh to My Dad’s Motorcycle
(7)
The Time I Peed on Myself and My Surroundings
(8)
The Time I Asked a Boy on a Wildly Inappropriate Date
(9)
The Bunny Fiasco
(10)
The Time I Desperately Wanted to Get My Period
(11)
The Time I Actually Got My Period
(12)
The Time I Snuck Out of My Home in the Night Like a CBS After-School Special
(13)
The Time I Got Drunk the Night Before Taking the SAT
(14)
The Time I Puked All Over the Car of a Boy I Liked in Broad Daylight
(15)
The Hot Wasabi and the Infinite Sadness
(16)
The Time I Was in an A Cappella Group
(17)
The Time I Danced Tragically in Front of My Entire College
(18)
The Time I Created My First Sketch Character
(19)
The Time I Killed a Hobo
(20)
The First Time I Did Standup
(21)
The Tenth Time I Did Standup
(22)
The Hundredth Time I Did Standup
(23)
The Time My Worst Standup Nightmare Came True
(24)
The Time I Wore That Awful See-Through Dress
(25)
And Had That Awful Two-Toned Hair
(26)
All the Times I Did Those Terrible Corporate Standup Gigs
(27)
The Day the Comedy Died
(28)
The Times I Spit on Someone from the Stage While Doing Standup
(29)
The Time I Broke My Arm at Sundance, and the Ensuing Meltdown
(30)
The Time I Broke My Foot, Alone, in a Hotel Room
(31)
The Time I Fell Asleep on the Patio Furniture at a Birthday Party
(32)
The Time I Vowed to Stop Drunk Tweeting
(33)
The Apologia; or, Shut Up Aisha—a Far From Comprehensive List of My Verbal Gaffes
The Coda: Stop Doing It to Yourself
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Aisha Tyler
Praise for Self-Inflicted Wounds
Copyright
About the Publisher
Preface
Despite the fact that much of what I write about in this book has been cribbed from my life experiences, this is not an autobiography.
I am self-involved, but not so self-involved to think that my life merits comprehensive documentation. I will wait until I am an old and tragic drunk for that. (Or until I make the terrible mistake of cheating on my husband with an appallingly young backup dancer. I absolutely do not intend to do this, but it would surely merit some pompous and tearful introspection.)
I talk about real people in this book, and real occurrences. That being said, everything here has been retrieved from the annals of my spotty and highly unreliable memory, and for all I know, may be complete fabrication—due either to severe retrograde amnesia (the early throes of which the Internet assures me I am in), or, more likely, my intense desire to have lived a life more thrilling than the one I’ve shambled rather aimlessly through thus far.
For that reason, please do not take this book as any kind of documentarian portrait of my life, or try to use excerpts from this book to judge me, my family, my childhood, my friends, or as example of the broad and inexorable decay of Western civilization. All names have been changed or omitted, both to protect the innocent, and because I can’t remember who the fuck most of these people are anyway.
Furthermore, it would be spectacularly futile to try and use this as an evidentiary document with which to convict or exonerate criminals, figure out what happened to the Lindbergh baby, uncover the truth about the Kennedy assassination, or divine where Jimmy Hoffa may be buried.1 If you take this as gospel, you will be sorely disappointed. This book is not a salacious tell-all full of celebrity secrets and tearful confessions. This book is just a book; one I hope is serviceably funny and relatively free of grammatical errors.
My hopes and dreams for this book: I hope it will be amusing. I hope it will be entertaining. I hope it will make you laugh, and maybe make you think. I hope that it will be the only book you ever read by an African-American comedian/actress/television host/podcaster/gamer/intense lover of pancakes with such a lush and heady surfeit of fine curse words.
I hope this book will inspire you to be yourself. I hope this book will encourage you to follow your dreams. I hope this book will impress your friends when you display it prominently in your home, preferably on a coffee table or in the bathroom next to that dog-eared (and unread) copy of Mensa Magazine that you put there to intimidate your guests as they pee.
I hope, all else failing, that this book will provide a stable surface upon which to place a refreshing beverage when you are watching television.
Above all, I hope that you, like me, will embrace your fears, learn from your failures, celebrate your victories, and run headlong into (metaphorical) danger. Get up, go out into the world, and do awesome shit.
I’ll be here on the couch if you need me.
Introduction: What, Exactly, Is a Self-Inflicted Wound?
“It is through being wounded that power grows and can, in the end, become tremendous.”—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
“Holy crap that fucking hurt.”—AISHA TYLER
I am not a psychologist, but I do know some shit about people.
This is not a boast. This is just the truth.
If you were to question why the hell I think I can write a book about human failure and its power to transform people with the strength of its sheer awesomeness, I would have to plead no contest. I am uniquely unqualified to pontificate on the behavior of others and its significance. My undergraduate degree is not in psychology, or human behavior, or sociology, or even anthropology. My undergraduate degree is in government, with a double minor in environmental studies and drinking shit.
I have no letters after my name.1
I possess no qualifications to indicate I have any special or unique insight into the human condition. I have spent no amount of time studying socio-cultural norms or human behavior. I’ve never even gone through therapy.2
What I have done is been a person—for quite a while now, in fact. I think of myself as an expert on being human, especially as I have never been anything else. So while I cannot speak to the experiences of others, I can talk a whole hell of a lot of shit about myself. And since I am human (last I checked, anyway; it’s entirely possible I’ve been body snatched or am a blissfully unaware assimilate of The Borg),3 I am more than willing to extrapolate wild
and totally unscientific conclusions from my personal experiences and apply them to the human race as a whole.4 Whee! Science!
So, upon this ill-considered and alarmingly flimsy foundation, let me present the concept of the self-inflicted wound—its origins, nature, structure, and subsets.
To commence, there is an axiom that applies pretty universally to the human psyche when it comes to spectacular failure. For expedience, and because it sounds awesome, let’s call it The Tyler Fuckup Principle.5 It goes like this: when something goes terribly wrong, the human mind instinctively casts about for something other to blame. The mentally unpalatable concept that we might have massively screwed up is so difficult for the mind to grasp, so utterly cognitively dissonant, that we immediately decide—no, recognize—that there is no way this could have occurred without negative outside influence.
As a result, our own failures are always, by their very nature of being “failure,” someone else’s fault. When one is undone—sprawled across the cold tile of a public bathroom in a pool of one’s own vomit, or shivering in the back of a taxi in a pair of urine-soaked skinny jeans with no money for cab fare and a dead cell phone battery—much like a wobbly toddler or an unhinged politician, one immediately looks for someone else to blame. God. Your parents. Ex-girlfriends. Undocumented immigrants. Marvin in Human Resources. China.
This is natural. This is the way the mind works. “I know I am standing in a pool of milk and broken glass, but that is because someone pelted me with milk bottles. I could never have spilled this milk myself! I am living perfection!”6 We do not take responsibility for our actions, not because we are weak willed or devoid of character, but because we are just not wired that way. Even tiny children know it is much wiser to point at that other kid rather than step forward bravely when asked, “Who ate the cookie?” Children are not taught this, and contrary to the claims of the Parents’ Television Council, they do not learn it by watching cartoons or interacting with atheists. It is just something they know. Deflection is in our genes, much like a predisposition to retain abdominal fat and a love of crunchy orange foods. It is just how we are.
We are born this way.
With a self-inflicted wound, one is clearly both perpetrator and victim. The damage is so severe and spectacular as to be unavoidably apparent to others, and when one casts about for someone to blame, one finds, to one’s great chagrin, that there is no one to blame but oneself. The self-inflicted wound, whether physical or (much more common) psychological, is a demon entirely of one’s own making—a self-conjured gorgon pulled from the netherworld, if not voluntarily, then at the very least unbidden. Eventually one has to wake up and smell the metaphorical blood; you did this to yourself.
Sometimes the self-inflicted wound is entirely of your own making, and sometimes others empower or hasten it along, as if adding accelerant to your fast growing pyre of self-immolation. Everyone enjoys a spectacular meltdown, which is why we are so addicted to shows about people who extreme coupon, dress their children up like hookers, or live in a hoarder’s paradise of vintage magazines and Ziploc bags of cat poop. It is supremely fun to point and laugh at the foibles of others, and if we can stick out a foot to trip someone into a murky puddle of their own damp mistakes, all the better.
But in the aftermath of a self-inflicted wound, when you sift through the embers for the arsonist’s tool, the propane canister or half-burned lighter, much like the nameless narrator in Fight Club, you discover that Tyler Durden is just a figment of your fractured imagination, that you blew up your own apartment and burned your life to the ground, and you’ve been punching yourself in the face like an idiot the entire time.
Don’t fight it. Accept it for what it is. You screwed the pooch. All you can do now is try to turn it into a learning experience.
Or, at the very least, into a killer story you can tell your friends.
Prologue: Why Am I Doing This? Why?
“I’m a little wounded, but I’m not slain; I will lay me down for to bleed awhile, Then I’ll rise and fight again.”—JOHN DRYDEN
“Just give me a second to get my wind back. Who the hell put that pole there?”—AISHA TYLER
Comedians love a good story. Unnaturally so. So much so, in fact, that we will subject ourselves to any amount of self-torture and humiliation to get it.
I have often heard a comedian tell a story of such abjection, such pure and unadulterated shame, that any normal person with even a modicum of self-respect would do everything in his or her power to first forget, then make others forget, it had ever happened.
Burn every photo. Kill off witnesses. Bribe law enforcement. Change names, addresses, phone numbers, entire lives, to make sure no one will ever, ever repeat that story to others.
A comedian, however, cannot wait to belt that story out in front of strangers, replete with sound effects and wild gesticulations. The most crushing and humiliating of these stories will send a comedian barreling into a party with sweaty palms and a jelly jar full of bourbon, screaming, “Holy shit, you are not gonna believe what happened to me Saturday night! I am such an asshole!”
It is a sickness.
Why are comedians like this? Being a comedian requires an extremely high threshold of psychic pain. You must be able to tolerate humiliation, learn to resist it, defy it, crave it even. You must make love to embarrassment, tongue kiss abjection, clasp emotional injury close to your heaving breast. You cannot fear the mocking of others; you must face it as a brave, if utterly doomed, Roman soldier. Because the truth is that sometimes the audience may actually be laughing at you and not with you. And that needs to be okay. For the comedian, laughs are much more important than one’s own psychic comfort—the goal is to entertain, not cultivate a prayer circle. You must be immune to bloodshed, even—no especially—when the bloodshed is your own.
You must give the people what they want.
Pursuant to this, you will find, almost universally, that we comedians have no shame. This critical internal trigger, one that makes others behave in discreet and proper ways in the company of others, just does not work in us. We do not have it. We do not need it. Much like people born without a spleen or tibia, this is just the way we are built.
Do not pity us, however. Much like Daredevil, who turned his blindness into a crime-fighting tool, we have turned a shortcoming into our greatest weapon. Lack of shame is our superpower. Comedians feel nothing when dumped, snubbed, fired, or told off. Or if we do, we shove those feelings deep inside, down by where we keep the memories of that time we peed ourselves at show and tell, right alongside our big burlap sack of lifelong rejection. Every terrible experience is fodder for discussion, subject to dissection and examination, foundation for a joke, a rant, or other exploitation, whether it is on stage or in the corner at your brother-in-law’s barbecue, when you would really rather us shut the hell up.
I suppose a more accurate description would be that we do feel, but not in the way a normal person does. When shamed, we actually feel two things: the feelings we should be feeling at the moment—sadness, rage, disgust, dull ambivalence—and a second, stranger and more singular feeling, which is: man, this is going to make a killer story.1
Humiliation is fuel for art, and there is nothing more strangely satisfying than exploiting our own cringe-worthy experiences for others’ enjoyment and our own itchy brand of self-satisfaction. Much like picking at a scab or pulling a hangnail to the quick, there is a prickly pleasure in telling others that you urinated on yourself just steps from your front door due to an overindulgence in German wheat beer, or that you screwed up the courage to feebly punch a guy you believed to be sleeping with your ex-girlfriend, only to find out that not only did you punch the wrong guy, but the “Taylor” your girlfriend left you for was a girl.
It hurts at the moment. Man, does it hurt. It burns like a mouthful of napalm on an empty stomach. But then, doesn’t hurt also taste just a tiny bit like winning?
This book is about those moments. Those massive fa
ilures that are yours, and yours alone, to claim. No one made you do it. No one cheated you, tricked you, forced you to be a dunce, a chump, a klutz, a butthead, an asshole. You did that shit all to yourself.
And by you, of course, I mean me. And by yourself, I also, of course, mean me. This is not a collection of my triumphs, my best moments, my gilded seconds atop the winner’s podium, my halcyon days in the metaphorical sun. No.
This is a collection of stories about all the times I shit the bed.
I can’t wait to tell you all about them.
( 1 )
The Time I Cut Myself in Half
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”—RUMI
“This is gonna need ointment.”—AISHA TYLER
When I was about five years old, I stabbed myself in the chest.
Well, not exactly stabbed. More like sliced. Yes. I sliced myself nose to navel, as if conducting a frog dissection in science class. Only without the relatively sanitary tools, face protection, or pursuit of scientific truth.
And, also, on myself.
I could say it wasn’t my fault. I could protest that it was an accident—unforeseen, unpredictable, unkind, unfair. None of that would be true. I did this on purpose. I knew exactly what I was getting into. The entire debacle was calculated, focused, and gleefully headlong.
Before you gasp in horror and thinly disguised pity, this was no suicide attempt.1 I was not trying to gut myself. At the same time, I can blame no one else for the bloody vertical striping that occurred.
I courted that stabbing, poked at it with a metaphorical stick, taunted it like a rangy pit bull behind a wobbly storm fence, mocking and laughing as it slavered in captivity—right up to the moment the dog leapt, snarling against the wire, knocking the fence to the ground like a structure of drinking straws and me face-first into the dirt. Or, more accurately, face-first into the hot, abrasive summer pavement.