Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation

by Aisha Tyler

  On this fateful day in late spring, despite all my training for the apocalypse, I had miscalculated terribly. In my haste to start that day’s adventure, I did not pee before I left school. On the three bus rides home, separated by long waits at transfer points, I ignored the pressure building in my lower quadrant, telling myself I was stronger than my body, that I could hold it, I was no little girl, I was a Jedi, a ninja, a bushido warrior. Peeing was for suckers. And peeing in one of the many locations available to me on my trip home wasn’t just for suckers, it was for people who liked touching surfaces that in all likelihood were saturated with the pee of strangers, the Bubonic Plague, or, even worse, the Bubonic Pee of Strangers, which was about the worst thing my little mind could possibly conjure, and even now sounds pretty fucking awful.5

  So, true to my life philosophy, I held it in. But on the third bus ride, as we jostled and bounced and jiggled and skittered along Telegraph Avenue on a bus that should have been condemned to the junkyard a decade prior, my resolve began to weaken. Or, more accurately, my ten-year-old pelvic floor began to weaken.6

  I was no weakling, I told myself. I thought of Luke Skywalker on Dagobah, trying to raise that infernal x-wing out of the swamp. He didn’t give up, and neither would I. I turned all of my mental power inward, on whatever muscles would keep the most terrible of tragedies from happening to me on this bus. And I believed. As Yoda admonished Luke, not believing is why we fail. So I would believe that I could make it, believe that I could get to my stop before the trickle became a torrent and I was reduced to a sad little lukewarm puddle of a girl on the bus. I would believe that my mind was stronger than this ever more urgent, more pressing matter. And—as liquid is wont to do when affected by the inexorable pull of gravity—man, was it pressing.

  I stumbled off the bus at my stop, eyes pressed shut against the building internal storm, and started jogging up the hill. Never had my trek up Kilimanjaro seemed more insurmountable. The once welcoming blackberry patches were now dark and haunted thickets, the plum trees mocking me as I half-ran, half-bobbled past, legs twisted in agony. My destination quavered in the distance like a receding mirage, every mailbox a toilet, every patch of grass offering sweet relief. But still I pushed on, believing that I could make it.

  At least my mind believed. My body was calling bullshit.

  About two-thirds of the way home, I started to realize that perhaps I required additional Jedi training (or any Jedi training at all) before I would be ready for such a herculean task as carrying a full bladder home with my person unmoistened. This was the real world. I could not raise a spaceship with my mind. I could not lift a pebble with my mind. And I certainly could not hold this pee in for very much longer. I began to sprint. It was too late.

  I made it as far as my front porch, and that infernal x-wing went crashing back into the swamp, sending water sloshing everywhere.

  Yes. That was a Star Wars–urine metaphor. Welcome to the Fortress of Blerditude.7

  After I cleaned myself up, and the landing, and the stairs, and a little bit of the living room floor, I took thin solace in the fact that I had made it all the way to my front porch. That was almost as good. With practice, I could do better. Like Kyle Reese in The Terminator, I didn’t make it back home, but there was honor in the effort. And, much like Reese, in defeat was spawned new hope for the future.

  Mental toughness is all fine and good. But when you gotta go, you gotta go.

  ( 8 )

  The Time I Asked a Boy on a Wildly Inappropriate Date

  “It takes a lot to wound a man without illusions.”—ELLIS PETERS

  “My illusions are all I have.”—AISHA TYLER

  I have a sneaking suspicion that my father wished I had been born a boy.

  I don’t have a problem with this. People want lots of things they can’t have. Unlimited wealth. The ability to fly. A magical bowl of soup that never empties no matter how much you eat.

  Life is rife with disappointment.

  Dads want boys; moms want girls. All that dreck about just being happy the kid has all ten fingers and toes is all very well and good, and just the right tone to strike in mixed or judgmental company, but if cornered and alone with no possibility of discovery, most parents would admit to wishing for a little Mini-Me to shape and mold and railroad into doing all of the things they were too busy or lazy or terrified to do themselves when they were young.1 Of course parents love their children, no matter the gender. But they also long secretly for a child whose body and emotions are similar to theirs, and therefore easily molded and understood. Now, you may be a parent, and disagree with me one hundred percent on this. You may be simmering in outrage right now, ready to fling the book across the room. But for the sake of argument, for the time being at least, work with me.

  I definitely don’t believe my dad was disappointed. I was deeply loved and fiercely protected by a father who believed I could do anything I set my mind to and often encouraged me to try everything, no matter how daunting or outrageously ambitious. But for a parent, there are naturally a different set of fears and expectations with girls. The threats are more numerous, the potential pitfalls more abundant, and perils menace every turn. With a girl, you worry about predators and pregnancies and intolerably maudlin teenage angst, with the requisite terrible poetry and Taylor Swift on repeat that accompanies it. Girls are complicated and wonderful and messy and emotional and nuanced and delightful and devastating.

  With a boy, you just hope he doesn’t turn out to be an asshole.

  Because a girl’s life can be fraught with so much more peril, they are naturally terrifying to a father, who has never been a girl, and so can only see the dangers she faces but cannot put himself in the shoes of his daughter to understand how they might be overcome. Some fathers react by trying to control every aspect of their daughter’s life, restricting where she goes, what she does, who she sees, and turning her, inevitably, into a slutty alcoholic loudmouthed tramp with rebellion issues and a daddy complex.

  The other way to go is to mentally and physically equip your daughter to face anything the world throws at her, to make her thoughtful, tough, self-possessed, and independent. She may still turn out to be a slutty alcoholic tramp, but at least it’ll be her own money she’s spending on flavored booze and Magnum condoms.

  My father has always been about independence. From the time I was big enough to walk to the front door and open it, he encouraged me to explore the wide world on my own, and develop the skills to attack it headlong. He worked hard to raise a girl who was bold and fearless, who never felt sorry for herself and who could overcome setbacks with grace and determination. Upon retrospect, I realize that he was also trying to get me to be independent enough to get the hell out of his face so he could woo a special lady friend or watch the freaking game in peace. His approach served its purpose nonetheless.

  One of his favorite things to do with me when I was a kid was to start the day with a kind of motivational call and response. These were akin to a coach’s locker room speech before the big game, a general’s rallying cry before a major assault, or a drunken heckler’s hurled taunt. These were different in that they involved a little girl in a misbuttoned cardigan running perpetually late for school. And they were shot through with age-inappropriate language, as my dad had a daughter to raise and money to make and no fucking time to screw around.

  They often went something like this:

  Dad: Whose day is it?

  Me: My day.

  Dad: And what are you gonna do?

  Me: I’m gonna grab it by the balls.

  Dad: Louder!

  Me: I’m gonna grab it by the balls!

  Dad: That’s right! Grab it by the short hairs and twist!

  Me: Twist!

  Dad: Have a good day, baby. And remember, keep your grades and your drawers up.

  There were variants on this theme, usually having to do with telling people who doubted you to fuck off, or kicking the corpses of your defeated foes, but th
ey were all equally rousing and similarly outrageous. My dad was arming me for a world full of predators, obstacles, and disappointments.2 He didn’t have time to craft a butterfly-soft approach. He had shit to do.

  I respected it then. I respect it now.

  My dad’s approach to cultivating independence in a child was simple and straightforward: do as little as possible to make your child’s life easier. The world is terrible, people are terrible, and no one is ever going to make things easy on you, so why should your parents trick you into thinking that for the rest of your life you’ll be enjoying crust-less sandwiches and tubes of drinkable yogurt lovingly provided by others? This included stuff that most kids take for granted, like getting rides to places, or having activities planned or meals prepared. It wasn’t that he was cruel; he was incredibly kind and supportive. I was a very loved kid. It’s just that I never got a fucking ride anywhere besides school. Anywhere.

  I remember once wanting to go to a party in high school. It wasn’t in a particularly bad part of town, but you did need to go through a rather heinous area to get there. I really wanted to go to this party. It was all I could think about. I rarely got invited to anything, and certainly not anything I actually wanted to go to. But this was at a popular kid’s house, and other popular kids would be there, and I had it on good authority that there would be beer. This party needed attending.

  I asked my father about this party constantly. Weeks in advance, I primed this guy to be prepared to take me to this thing. I even worked it out so if he would take me, I could get a ride home from someone else. I couldn’t have made it easier for him. It was a night he was home; his vehicle fueled up. I had cleaned not just my room, but the entire apartment and several lengths of adjacent sidewalk. There was no reason for him not to take me to this party. Providing this small kindness would require little effort for maximum reward. This is how I saw it.

  This is not how he saw it. As he saw it, he was not a chauffeur, he did not work here, he did not have me so he could wait on me hand and foot, and if I wanted to go to a party, I could get there myself. I had money, I had a brain, I had the bus schedule, and if I wanted things in life, I knew how to get them.3 And I wouldn’t get them blocking his view of the television.

  Looking back, I realize he was cultivating initiative. I will admit, at the time though, it just felt super mean.

  His goal was to train the fear out of me, to make me someone who went after her goals without hesitation. If I wanted things in life, I would need to go out and get them myself. Better to learn that early before the world punched me in the face with it. The brazen self-motivation he instilled me with was invaluable, and has served me in every aspect of my professional and personal life to this day. It has made me brave and risk-taking in my creative life and fearlessly loving in my private life. It has also made me highly accident prone (the freakishly tall thing doesn’t help, either).

  Unfortunately, in training the fear out of me, he also trained out any shred of cautiousness, circumspection or reservation, any inner voice that might have said, “Hey, maybe you’d like to think this through before you leap headlong into a room full of armed bear traps?” I don’t have that twinge, which for the most part—minus a few dramatic injuries, literal and metaphorical—has been a good thing. For the most part.

  My dad was right. Fortune favors the bold, and he was trying to make me bold. He was almost always right.

  Except for this one time.

  When I was a kid, I liked a boy. And because I never did anything in half measures, I liked this boy a lot. Like, a lot a lot. I liked him so much it was all I could talk about, think about, do. I obsessed about this boy constantly, so much so that I was becoming a thorn in my father’s side, even more of an annoyance than I typically was. I loved this boy (I thought), but because I was a kid, and had no idea what love was, or what to do about it, I would just wail and gnash and babble about it constantly like an alarm clock of unrequited love with no snooze button.

  My father wanted desperately to smash me in my snooze button.

  Being focused on problem solving and personal empowerment as he was, he came up with an even better solution to the problem, one that he engaged in repeatedly throughout my childhood and still occasionally uses to this day. He threw money at it.4

  He decided he would give me some money, and I would ask this boy to dinner. I could pick a restaurant and pay for everything. It was a grand idea, a sweeping gesture, modern, forward thinking, feminist even. It was a very big idea.

  It was also a terrible idea, as I was ten years old.

  My dad gave me sixty bucks to execute this nefarious and dazzling plan. For weeks that sixty bucks burned a hole in my pocket, the way my love for this boy was burning a hole in my soul. But even then, I knew this plan wouldn’t work. I sensed that my father was probably the only father at my school, in my neighborhood, or the universe, encouraging his daughter to take a boy out on a date at the age of ten.5 I knew there was a terrible rift in the space-time continuum, and though I couldn’t figure out exactly why this scheme would fail, I didn’t need Velma to tell me this plan would go terribly awry, meddling kids or no.6

  Nonetheless, my father had issued a challenge, and I had both a deep need to please him, and an intense desire to buy sixty dollars’ worth of Chinese food. So after several weeks of paralysis and delay, I mustered up the tiny girl nuts to ask this guy out. I cornered him against the putty-colored stucco of the fifth-grade classroom during recess, and asked him if he wanted to go get food with me after school sometime.

  He cocked his head. Like, outside of school?

  Yeah! I showed him the money. My dad gave me this.

  His eyes bugged. Sixty bucks was a lot of money to a fourth grader, then and now.7

  It just seemed weird for me to have that much money. I don’t know what the boy was thinking, as this was pre-gangsta rap, but if he had any stereotypical rap/drug/black people tropes available to him mentally, they were bobbing wildly around his head like apples right now.

  So, like, just you and me? He squinted.

  Yeah, just you and me, and we can order and eat whatever we want. I’m going to get a huge plate of sweet and sour pork and eat out all the pineapple.8 And you can have whatever you like. My treat.

  This didn’t have the intended seductive effect.9 He just stared. So I tried to sweeten the deal.

  My dad’s gonna give us a ride. On his motorcycle. He never gives me rides, so this is a pretty big deal.

  Both of us? He was squinting more tightly now.

  Both of us, yeah! On his motorcycle! It’ll be cool.

  The amount of danger involved in this proposition was now too insurmountable to overcome. Going on a date, with a girl, without adult supervision, and our own money, and getting a ride on the back of a motorcycle? With a guy who looked like a leather-clad Apollo Creed?

  I could see him shut down.

  I’ll uh . . . I’ll ask my mom. He slowly backed away, eyes focused on some distant and suddenly interesting horizon point.

  I watched him go, that sixty bucks a fistful of lava in my pocket.

  He wasn’t going to ask his mom. I knew it. I somehow also sensed that we wouldn’t ever be speaking, or making eye contact, ever again.10

  That was the first time I ever asked a boy on a date. It definitely left a bruise.

  And while I have engaged in many wild acts of bravery in my life, including scuba diving, ice climbing, spelunking in winter, and telling jokes to rooms of intoxicated strangers, it was a very long time before I ever did anything that truly reckless again.

  I did, however, get to treat my dad to an amazing Chinese lunch. $61.37 worth, in fact. He spotted me the extra $1.37. And I ate every single piece of pineapple out of my order of Sweet and Sour Pork.

  Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

  ( 9 )

  The Bunny Fiasco

  “All honor’s wounds are self-inflicted.”—ANDREW CARNEGIE

  “Trying to do th
e right thing sucks.”—AISHA TYLER

  Despite my desire to be tough, I have always had a tender heart.

  Or maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe because I have always been an emotional cream puff, I have tried to harden myself to the inevitable knocks that life brings. But deep down, I am a giant bowl of marshmallow fluff with feet and glasses and a penchant for maudlin Korean pop.1 I have always been a softie, and I fight it with every fiber of my being.

  Sadly, my being’s fibers need to hit the gym.

  I have always wanted to save things: animals, plants, bugs, butterflies, people, hobos, rabid dogs, wayward rodents. There is no living thing for which I cannot find sympathy, no animal I cannot anthropomorphize.2 I cry at children’s movies. I cry watching the news. I cry during Nike ads. I cry reading cereal boxes.3 I am constantly welling over with heartrending compassion. I am a total and complete sucker.

  When I was a middle-schooler, my mother moved into a house that shared a fence with another family who owned a lot of animals. Their property was a veritable barnyard wonderland. And because the homes shared a perimeter, their yard was our yard, and we were suddenly surrounded by domestic wildlife. They had absolutely no business doing this shit. They lived in Oakland, not Ohio. The block was surrounded on all sides by industrial buildings, cement, cyclone fencing, and the beginnings of the East Bay rap scene.

  This was no place for chickens.

  But chickens they had, and ducks, and a goose, and probably some other animals they kept chained up in their basement, because they were weird, and clearly didn’t understand contextual appropriateness when it came to animal life. They also had bunnies. Two bunnies, in fact, that lived next to the chicken coop, and seemed pretty pissed about it, as chickens make terrible neighbors. They are rude, insensitive, and never know when to stop talking. Chickens are dicks.