Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation

by Aisha Tyler

  This seems counter-intuitive, I know. Girls are meant to get boobs. Hell, they are dying to get boobs. An entire literary career has been built upon the concept of preteen girls praying to some busty unseen deity for cleavage.2 Middle-schoolers get training bras far before they need them, when the only things filling out the cups are house keys on one side and a very sweaty Android phone on the other. Adult women purchase more boobs than they can ever hope to carry or their husbands hope to handle, and then assault the rest of us daily with the human equivalent of a steel plow soldered to a Smart Car. Boobs are all we ever think about. Honestly, if we as a culture put a quarter of the mental effort into world peace and sustainable energy that we put into thinking about, talking about, touching, fantasizing about, visualizing, augmenting, and trying not to stare at boobs, we’d be Klingon—a planet with no hunger, no violence, and no war.3

  So it seems silly that I would be sad about getting boobs. Much like Lorraine Baines to Marty McFly, boobs were my destiny. But when you are already a giantess, have cornrows and glasses and wear clothes from the free box at the Goodwill while everyone else is rocking inky Jordache® jeans with the contrast trim, one more thing that makes you stand out is not what you pray for under the covers while feverishly trying to finish The Silmarillion by flashlight. No, you are praying for a cloak of invisibility, even though the Harry Potter series hasn’t been written yet. And breasts on a third grader are like a cloak of “Hey everyone, check out the mad rack on that gigantic eight-year-old!”

  When my boobs came in, they came in fast and furious. There was no budding growth, no hint of décolleté. One day I was a slightly masculine preteen, and the next I was a slightly masculine preteen with huge boobs.4 This was alarming, as I felt no different. I was still obsessed with the Scholastic newsletter. I still liked to feed mud to my Baby Alive doll. I still hid in the cubby room so I could eat my lunch uninterrupted while poring over Martian fiction, and possibly eat portions of others’ lunches as well (more on that later). I was still very much a kid but, suddenly, I had the body of a teenager. This is like waking up one day and finding out that your golden retriever puppy shoots lasers from its adorable puppy eyes. Someone is bound to get hurt.

  Most likely, it will be you.

  I did not know what to do with my newfound anatomy. They were unexpected and unwieldy and wholly unmanageable, and they made all my favorite tee shirts too tight. Despite all my best efforts to control them, which included crossing my arms supportively and wearing multiple shirts at once, they wiggled and waggled and were entirely disobedient. I was at a total loss as to what to do.5

  I definitely did not want to close the door on my rapidly receding childhood by purchasing a bra. A bra was for old people and white ladies like Jayne Mansfield and strangely white black ladies like Grace Jones. A bra was not for little kids who dreamed of being astronauts. What are you gonna do with boobs in space? Unless they are currency for some far-flung civilization, all they’re going to do is interfere with proper oxygen flow inside your space suit. I was not interested in having boobs, and I was definitely not interested in giving them support, moral or otherwise.

  The awesome thing about getting boobs when you are a little kid is that people tend to ignore them. There is something weird about a little kid with breasts, the way there is something weird about a little kid in a suit and top hat, or a little kid who is too precocious and articulate. You can’t help but feel that the time-space continuum has been gruesomely ruptured in order to make this little human strangely adult, and it is better not to look directly into his eyes for fear of being mesmerized and sent stumbling into a cornfield to your death. Preternaturally mature kids are either instruments of the devil or speeding toward a ripping drug habit. They are best avoided.

  So thankfully, no one really noticed the boobs, or if they did, they didn’t say anything. My parents, angels that they are, kept telling me, as they always had, that I was perfect in every way.6 And as I became more comfortable with these new members of my inner circle, I decided that I did not have boobs at all, but rather interstellar communication devices that would, at any moment, turn on and connect me directly with an alien race in a neighboring galaxy.

  I was very into Ray Bradbury novels at the time.

  So there I was, clinging as desperately to my childhood as my ever-tightening clothing clung to me. I staunchly refused to accept what was happening. I was cultivating the kind of denial construct normally reserved for alcoholics and politicians’ wives.

  Until one day I was slapped, painfully and directly, back to reality.

  When someone wants to humiliate you, they will say something cruel. When they want to decimate you and throw you into a psychological tailspin, they will say that cruel thing loud enough for everyone in the vicinity to hear it, and with such dismissive derision that you have no choice but to curl up into a tiny ball and blow away.

  And so it was that a little girl in my third grade class, whom I’ll call Ashley,7 walked up to me, and with a tone better reserved for speaking over a pile of steaming shit or freshly puked vomit, said, “Ew! You’re getting boobs! They’re huge! Yuck!” And then she walked away, giggling in the way that only third grade girls can, emitting a sound that is at once delightful and depressing, a combination of soap bubbles popping, flower petals opening, bells tinkling, and golden retriever puppies plopping tiny plops of ploppy puppy poop.

  That sound was the soundtrack to the end of my innocence. It was time to face the facts. I had boobs. I was not a woman, but I was certainly not an ordinary third grader anymore. And it was highly unlikely I was ever going to get to travel into space. Not with those bazongas in the way. I was who I was, and who I was was an insanely stacked third grader who wore tight tee shirts and loved science fiction.

  I can’t say that my boobs were self-inflicted, at least not in the active sense. I mean, I did actually grow them myself, but that would have happened with or without my consent. The body does what the body does unbidden, growing wide hips or stork legs or ears that could double as badminton rackets while you howl in protest, dismayed and powerless. You have nothing to do with it, and you can do nothing about it. But my frantic discomfort with my changing body, and my refusal to accept what was happening, empowered others—namely a super-mean third grade harpie with a tinkly laugh and a heart made of carbon—to turn what was a natural human development into a prickly psychological weapon. That, and I needed to suck it up and get a training bra.

  What is the moral of this story? Nature will deal you a mixed hand, and in all likelihood, you’ll get something you didn’t ask for—large boobs or small ones, big feet or freakishly long fingers, buckteeth, a giant head, a laugh that can strip paint. Be proud. No one in the world can open a jar, use their giant shoe to drive home a nail, shade others from the sun with their cranium, or laugh wildly at a joke quite like you. These may not end up being your favorite traits, but they are yours and yours alone. So don’t be ashamed. Rock what you got.

  And know that—with the boobs, as with everything else—it will definitely get a whole hell of a lot better.

  ( 5 )

  The Time I Foolishly Tried to Trade Vegetables for Meat

  “How poor are they that have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees?”—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  “I would literally do anything for a slice of bologna.”—AISHA TYLER

  Throughout one’s life, one often attempts a feat that one knows, in advance, will be an exercise in futility. Tying a sheet around one’s neck as a cape and leaping from the garage roof. Asking the hottest girl in school to the prom when the sum of your previous contact was bumping into her in the line for pierogies on Ethnic Food Day. Exposing one’s breast on national television in the hopes of kick-starting one’s career. It is a critical and fundamental component of the human psyche that we believe unwaveringly in the fantastic, the mysterious, the transcendent—and the wildly improbable.

  And so it is that when I was a child I be
lieved blindly, hopelessly, that someday I would be able to convince one of my classmates to trade their lunch for mine.

  This would prove to be utterly naïve.

  As previously lamented, for as long as I could remember, my family had been vegetarian. My earliest memories are of vegetables. And fruit. And carob. And tears.

  We were vegetarian at a time when vegetarianism was neither cute, nor fun, nor hip, nor even particularly nutritious. There were no gourmet veggie restaurants, no hipster gluten-free bakeries, no meatless patties that tasted eerily like industrial hamburgers, not even a single celebrity vegan with a come-hither smugness and a fancy cookbook. Soy was something you used to feed cattle or thicken industrial adhesives. Almond milk was just a glimmer in some infant hippie’s lactose-intolerant eye. We were early adopters, trailblazers; we were completely on our own.

  My parents weren’t even particularly meticulous vegetarians. We still ate eggs, milk, and cheese, but refused dairy butter.1 We ate a lot of vegetable casseroles and buttered toast, but would then voraciously devour the occasional twenty-pound ling cod my father would bring home from his deep-sea fishing trips (including the eyeballs, a favorite move of my father’s that never failed to gross out my mother and completely delight my sister and me). Their approach managed to be inconsistent yet draconian at the same time; I was denied meat, but also fruit juice and processed foods. I could order a Filet-O-Fish at McDonalds, but the rest of the menu was completely off-limits, as if the fish sandwiches took some circuitous and altogether more virtuous path toward their paper-wrapped end. And I was not allowed to have sugar, which as far as I could tell, was just plain mean.

  To top it all off, at this time, my father worked as a meatcutter at a massive beef plant in Oakland. This irony wasn’t lost on even my young, developing brain. I may not have understood cognitive dissonance yet, but I did understand unfair.2 My dad had access to an unlimited supply of delicious steaks, and yet was making me eat bricks of tofu and fermented wheat gluten. This was injustice on a high order. This outrage would not stand.3

  There was no reason for me to lust after meat so badly, other than the fact that it was forbidden. Kids always want what they can’t have, and in my case, meat represented something more than just a foodstuff. It symbolized my intense desire to fit in. All the other kids at school were eating bologna and American slices on white bread, softly slicked with neon smears of yellow mustard, a sandwich that embodied everything that was mainstream and wholesome and normal in the world, while I was picking alfalfa sprouts from between my teeth. Meat meant normalcy. Meat meant belonging.

  I was vaguely aware of the fact that meat was bad for you, but the whole “meat is murder” meme had yet to be coined, and no one had thrown blood on a creepy old fur-festooned rich lady yet. There was not much known in the mainstream about vegetarianism, and it certainly was not cool in any way. Whenever I would have furtive access to a television,4 they would flash that nutrition pyramid during Schoolhouse Rock, taunting me with that tantalizing block of meats and proteins. The entire world was aligned against me.

  Making things worse, I couldn’t think of one good reason for us to be vegetarians, other than to make my life a living hell. As far as I could tell, we didn’t eat meat because meat tasted delicious and gave me happiness, and my parents’ goal in life was to deny me all human joy. This was the motivation for our abstemious lifestyle: to ruin Aisha’s life and destroy whatever modicum of normalcy remained to me.

  And so I was a vegetarian along with my parents, but with a deep and abiding reluctance. And since I did not make money, purchase groceries, or prepare meals, I really had no choice.

  There were meals my mother made that I really did love: big piles of spaghetti (what we called it back then, before the heady days of pasta), blanketed in that chemist’s excuse for cheese shaken from a big green canister; omelets filled with sautéed peaches and strawberries at the height of summer and doused in maple syrup (I was a fan of the savory-sweet trend long before it became hip); grilled cheese sandwiches broiled to bubbling and stuffed with thick slices of juicy tomato; carrot cakes packed with raisins and walnuts and piled high with real, homemade cream cheese frosting. It wasn’t that my mother couldn’t cook—she was a fantastic cook. It was just that I felt I was being put through a childhood-long test of some kind, training to prepare me for a long adult life of discipline and deprivation, perhaps as a missile silo operator, an international spy, an Antarctic research scientist, or (I still clung to hope) the first black astronaut to make Mars landfall.5

  This training extended to my time away from home, when I was forced to enter groups of normal, carnivorous kids, and act as if I was one of them. I approached this like an ongoing sociology project, a series of experiments in early espionage and infiltration. Could I act like them? Could I persuade them I was one of them, blend in and fade away, like the last living soul in a world of flesh-eating zombies? I assigned myself this task each morning, like a tiny agent of a vegetarian sleeper cell, or an alien occupying a freshly body-snatched human. Act normal.

  This worked for most of the morning. But as soon as the lunch bell rang, the tofu salad hit the fan.

  You remember what a big part of socialization trading lunches is when you’re a kid—exchanging the food you don’t want in your lunch for the stuff in your buddy’s lunch, of which he or she is equally disdainful, but which to you looks like ambrosia sent from Mount Olympus in a tiny golden chariot. This is a big part of making friends, keeping friends, and, if you refuse to trade, sending friends into a shame spiral of self-hate and dejection. You can imagine how desperately I wanted to be included in this sacred ritual. You can probably also imagine how frustrated I felt that the only thing I had to trade were foods that, while edible, could easily be used for industrial doorstops and NHL-strength hockey pucks. It is hard to convince someone to give you their container of Jell-O squares or extra Ring Ding when you cannot even muster up adjectives to properly describe what you offer in return. I struggled to make my case, but had very few descriptives in my arsenal: chief among them “soft,” “bitter,” “slightly acrid,” and “doesn’t taste as much like dirt as you might expect.” I was woefully outgunned.

  This did not deter me from trying. I was one against an army, a wrench in the machine, and I would fight until my very last breath, or until I was forced, once again, to eat my avocado sandwich and date-coconut rolls alone on the tetherball court. Each day was an opportunity to try anew, to get back behind that rock and roll it incrementally up that hill, to prove that I, all respect to Glengarry Glen Ross, could always be closing.

  I tried everything. Seduction. Subterfuge. Threats. Bribery. None of this was even remotely successful. In a world of carnivorous A-Rods, I was a vegetarian Adam Dunn.6 No, I was worse than Adam Dunn. I was batting a perfect zero.

  I don’t know when it was that I resorted to supplication. It was truly dismaying to realize that in a world ruled by extortion, bargain, and leverage, I was weaponless, without enticements of any kind. I had nothing anyone wanted. When you have nothing to bargain with, you resort to what honorable yet impoverished people have done for centuries—alms-seekers, ne’er-do-wells, freeloaders, and bums—you beg.

  This was as pathetic in practice as it sounds in retrospect. To be a little kid, roaming at recess, begging for scraps of bread like a Benedictine friar at the tail of the Plague is tragic on a very high order. But desire and hunger soon overcame any shreds of pride I had left, and wolfish bites of a crème-filled golden cake can sweeten even the bitterest dregs of shame. Fortunately, kids have as much capacity for extreme generosity as they have for dead-eyed cruelty. And when you fling yourself upon their mercy, and maybe promise to organize their cubby or do their homework, they will give you their castoffs freely and with open hands. As easily as they can be cruel, kids can also be kind; a direct appeal to that buried bit of nice can tease it quickly to the fore. All I needed to do was drop the wheedling and manipulation and ask for what I wanted
—a practice that has served me countless times since. Sometimes the most effective path to a destination—be it boardroom, bedroom, or lunchroom—is a straight, direct, unabashed line. The only thing someone can do to you when you ask for something is tell you no. But ask enough times and someone’ll finally say yes, if only to get you the hell out of their face.

  I lived through most of fifth grade on half-eaten bologna sandwiches, orange Skittles, Dorito dust, Twinkie heels, and those weird-shaped Boston Baked Beans from the bottom of the box.7 And I learned that every once in a while, if you ask for what you want, you’ll get it. Or at least, a third of it. Maybe with a few bite marks.

  I have not always depended on the kindness of strangers. But for one long and delirious year, I cast my fate, and my awful hippie lunches, to the wind. And the wind blew castoff pizza crusts back into my face.

  It was a fair exchange.

  ( 6 )

  The Time I Almost Seared My Flesh to My Dad’s Motorcycle

  “A wounded deer leaps highest.”—EMILY DICKINSON

  “Holy crap I’m on fire. Again.”—AISHA TYLER

  For many, childhood is about puppies and cupcakes, running through meadows chasing kittens, candy, dreams, rainbows, and puppies again.

  I say childhood is about tragedy. Crushing, tear-stained tragedy.

  For me, childhood isn’t something you savor so much as something you survive, a litany of tragic episodes and cosmic insults, birthday letdowns and social rejection, skinned knees and heartbreak compounded exponentially and punctuated only briefly by wee slivers of cake-induced joy, until one day you wake up and you’re twenty years old and you got so drunk the night before that you passed out on your best friend’s futon in your underwear, slept through midterms, and will probably flunk out of college and be forced to manage an all-night diner or park cars for a living.