Everything's Trash, But It's Okay

by Phoebe Robinson

  What Am I?

  Bitch, I’m not the one.

  Jokes aside, my team and I pushed back, and eventually, an agreement was reached. I kept my tour (only canceling one date that conflicted with the shooting schedule), and I got to stay a part of the show where, when all was said and done, I ended up being a glorified extra. Not complaining. It was my first semiregular television role, so I was thrilled to be acting, but based on how little screen time I had, it certainly would’ve been a mistake if, for the sake of that role, I didn’t do the tour, which ended up being a great success and helped me get on the New York Times best sellers list. So yaaas to everything working out perfectly. Except it didn’t.

  A few weeks prior to book publication at the end of 2016, I had been flying all over the country, bouncing between the tour, the TV show, the other gigs, last-minute meetings as a result of the book, and my podcasts back in NYC. Except for Thanksgiving, when I took the day off, I was either working or traveling or sometimes both. And I was doing this typically on five hours of sleep or less. I was concerned about how tired I was and how it was taking longer than usual to recover from being sick, but plenty of folks would’ve killed to be in my position, so I chalked up the tiredness, illness, and eating my feelings as nothing more than paying the cost to be the boss. Until early December.

  By that point, I felt the way some of Picasso’s iconic portrait paintings look: kind of a scrambled mess. All right, all right. Before any of you art heads start cussing me out, this isn’t shade, okay? I enjoy a lot of his work, and even the stuff I don’t quite understand, I’ll still be in the museum, doing the obligatory “stand in front of the artwork for the length of time it takes me to mentally recite ‘My name is Kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiid! KID ROCK!’* from that song ‘Bawitdaba’ before doing a head-nod like two black dudes who spot each other in a sea of Caucasia aka a bunch of white people.” This head-nod is, of course, the dude equivalent of the Celie-and-Nettie patty-cake from The Color Purple. Point is, I respect the man’s artistry, but Picas-cas has been dead for forty-five years. Isn’t it now safe enough for me to admit that some of his work is ugly-ish and not in a cool, artsy way but more like a “Quit Ludovico-techniquing my eyeballs with this bullshit right now” kind of way? Honestly, if I was gifted one of his ugly paintings, I would fully regift that shit the way I do when someone gives me a bottle of Victoria’s Secret perfume. Whew! I feel so much better for getting that off my chest. What I was talking about? Oh, yes, December 2016.

  My body clock was jacked up due to constantly switching time zones. Some days I woke up not knowing what city I was in. Other days I worked nonstop, returned to my hotel room, ordered two meals’ worth of food, and scarfed it down prior to passing out. So I was looking forward to being back home in New York for a few days in my old routine. Sure, I was going to be working most of the time, but at least I would be in my home and could sleep in my own bed with my own sheets. Except I couldn’t sleep, which was strange because I was exhausted. I yawned frequently; my short-term memory was shot; I asked people to repeat themselves because I couldn’t focus; my eyes alternated between stinging and twitching, which were signals that I had been staring at my laptop screen too much. Despite all this, my body refused to power down until it was 5 A.M., and it automatically woke me up at 8:30 A.M. The same thing happened the next night despite my having taken Advil PM to make me drowsy. On the third night, after a long day of work, insomnia reared its ugly head once more, and I tried everything to tire myself out. I watched a bunch of TV in hopes that would make me sleepy. Nada. I lay down in the dark. Nope, my mind still raced. I tried reading, a go-to for helping my mind slow down, to no avail. I tidied up around my apartment, and all I ended up with was a very organized vinyl collection and a floor smooth enough for the US Olympic curling team to practice on. Nothing. Was. Working. The clock struck 4 A.M., and I returned to my living room, plopped down on my couch, and cried.

  And I’m not talking that pretty-cry crap singers do in music videos where a single tear falls down their perfectly contoured faces. I mean, Carrie Underwood even has a song called “Cry Pretty,” and in the vid, her “tears” are strategically and artfully placed glitter and she’s rocking a sequin minidress while serving Pretty Woman thigh-high-boots realness. That, my friends, is not the crying I was doing. Actually, I wasn’t even crying. I was sobbing. Snot bubbles, inhaling big gulps of air, asking myself, “Why is this happening to me?,” the whole works. It was the kind of sobbing my niece does until she starts coughing, then momentarily forgets why she’s upset but feels like she should still be mad, so she resumes bawling. I was sobbing like I was doing the community-theater version of the “It’s not your fault” scene from Good Will Hunting and I was playing both Robin Williams’s and Matt Damon’s parts. I was sobbing like old black church ladies at a church event when someone brings a healthy version of collard greens aka collard greens without the bacon or ham hock. Yeah, it was that bad. I eventually fell asleep, knowing exactly why this was happening to me.

  I woke up the next day and hit the ground running with work, but I decided something, anything, had to change. Obviously, I would never shoot a television show and do a book tour at the same time again. That’s an easy fix, but the poor sleeping? Well, that continued for a little while longer before getting better, and even when it did, I rarely went to bed before two or three o’clock in the morning. Want to know what I was doing? Nothing fun like playing video games, watching classic movies, or spinning on the ones and twos (read: self-loving on my vajeen). I was answering emails, working on my never-ending to-do list, or brainstorming on “big picture” projects and ideas. Ay-yi-yi! Even after that scary bout with insomnia, I was still staying up all kinds of crazy hours. This is not to say night owls aren’t more productive once the sun sets and the moon is chilling in the sky like an on-duty Dunkin’ Donuts employee does at the counter. Sometimes they can be. But c’mon!!! It’s 3 A.M. If, at that ungodly hour, you’re not making the beat drop on your bangers and mash—#PenisAndBalls—or the OG Goop Chute—#Vagina #SorryGwynethPaltrow #SorryMomAndDad—then why the hell are you awake?!

  In all seriousness, Hollywood had gone dark, and somehow I managed to overstuff my schedule and ended up working until the morning of Christmas Eve, when I flew home to visit family. I was, as usual, very present when visiting family. And then, as soon as everyone went to bed, I would stay up until the wee hours of the morning, mapping out my one-year, three-year, five-year plans. Yeeeeeah. Four out of five planners would agree that trying to figure out the next year of my life at 1:45 in the morning on December 27 is ig AF. That’s when I finally had to admit that what was going on was beyond being passionate about my career. I was consumed, and I was finally ready to get insight into why I was doing what I was doing.

  Since December 2016, I’ve read quite a bit about being a workaholic, but the following excerpt from the article Harry Bradford penned for HuffPost.com, entitled “Why Being a Workaholic Is Awful for You AND Everyone Around You,” is not only enlightening but sums me up in a lot of ways. Bradford writes:

  According to a new study published in the Journal of Management, there is a significant difference between being engaged at work and being addicted to it. While the former is characterized by hard work because the worker is passionate about the job, the latter is often motivated by negative feelings like guilt and compulsion.

  The problem is, workaholism is the rare mental health issue that can often have positive rewards in the short term—namely, the praise of a happy boss. That’s one reason psychologist Bryan Robinson once called workaholism “the best-dressed mental health problem.”

  And not to be a contrarian, in Jordan Weissmann’s article for the Atlantic entitled “Is There Really Such a Thing as a ‘Workaholic’?” he questioned whether workaholism is an addiction or more of “a condition [that] may well have a certain social cachet.” At the very least, he is skeptical that everyone who claims to be a workahol
ic is actually one. It’s kind of like how people are constantly proclaiming how busy they are even though a lot of times we’re goofing off on social media or looking up our potential compatibility with someone based on our zodiac signs. Oh, right. I forgot. I’m the only person who has done this. Riiiiiiiiiiight. Look, whether you wanna fess up or not, I know a lot of you mofos are click-clackin’ on your laptops like you’re the court stenographer during the Bernie Madoff trial, all so you can see if it’s in the stars for you to splurge the extra five dollars to get you and your future boo’s names embroidered on his and hers towels from Bed Bath & Beyond. But you know what I’m talking about. In America, we pride ourselves on being busy and grinding all the time. But perhaps more importantly, we pride ourselves on documenting how busy we are, no matter how true that is or isn’t for us. Just look at sosh meeds.

  The hashtag #NoDaysOff is omnipresent. For every vacation post that exists, there’s one in which someone is bragging about not vacationing due to working so hard. People post Instagram videos of themselves working out with some variation of the following caption: “I got up today at 4 a.m., worked out, made a smoothie, and then went to work an eleven-hour day. What are you doing?” Old me would’ve been inspired, but the new me? By the way, new me started like three seconds ago, lol, but new me is like: SLEEP, MOTHAFUCKA. I. AM. SLEEP. ING. #JeSuisSleep. Hashtag that, bitch. For real, we place such a premium on sacrificing everything to get ahead because we are rewarded for going above and beyond what is necessary to get ahead. Whether the reward is money, respect, being exalted as an example others should follow, or simply the quick fix of a like on Facebook or da ’Gram, there’s a rush that comes along with living the #NoDaysOff lifestyle. And who doesn’t want to feel good or be admired or get a nice bump in the cashola department? But the issue is there’s danger in a sort of Pavlovian response to building your world around work because not only are you chasing the high of approval, you’re get addicted to the concept of being productive, which can turn into just doing . . . anything.

  Now, make no mistake, at the root of all of this, I love comedy and entertainment. Creating from scratch is one of my happy zones. I get joy out of coming up with a new stand-up joke or riffing with Jessica on 2 Dope Queens or with my producer Joanna on Sooo Many White Guys. It’s thrilling to make someone laugh or write a killer sentence. And I always, as Oprah would say, “set my intention,” so I was never willy-nilly just working on any old thing. However, it was clear that over my ten years in comedy, my intention was morphing like the people in Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” music video.

  First, I worked hard because I loved comedy and wanted to get better at it. Then, when I was digging myself out of my financial quagmire, my intention was just “take almost any and every job so you don’t end up on the skreets.” Next, it was about building the foundation of, hopefully, a decades-long career. Then, it was falling in love with seeing the fruits of my labor. As a results-oriented, idea-executing person, I got into the groove of doing things and crossing them off a list, which, to be honest, was never-ending because there can always be more to do. 2DQ was fascinating to create, but what if I started my own podcast where I interviewed people, which would then require me to do research? Let’s go! Why publish one book in the span of two years when I could pub two? Only doing one book is for slackers, so write away! Should I choose between being a stand-up comic, actor, author, podcaster, and producer? Hell naw, do all five, Pheebs! And most importantly, why take a second and stop to enjoy what I just accomplished before moving on to the next thing? EXACTLY! And that’s what began happening. Rarely did I take a step back and live in any of these moments; a part of me was always focused on the next goal or things that were unfinished or what I could have done better. Not that I was being negative about any of my successes; however, having a “there’s always more work to be done” mentality prevented me from fully enjoying anything I achieved, and moreover, my sleep problems continued into the next year.

  By then, I was aware of the side effects of insomnia—fatigue, daytime sleepiness, irritability, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, obesity, increase in work-time injuries, mental illness such as depression, and so on—and some of them were applicable to me. I was taking Lyfts to meetings just so I could squeeze in a midday nap, and as I’ve documented throughout this book, I was packing on the weight, which I didn’t mind all too much except for the fact that none of it went to my boobs and instead migrated south to my stomach, hips, butt, and thighs the way New York Jews move to Florida during the latter years of their lives. And as a lifelong member of the 34A club, I could have used some of that extra fat in the tatas department. I don’t mean anything spectacular like upgrading to a C cup. I just would’ve liked . . . Look, here’s the deal. My boobs don’t move. Not when I run, not when I dance, not when I’m startled. Nothing. There’s no jiggle to be found. My chesticles just remain still, standing at attention like the Queen’s Guard outside Buckingham Palace. Meanwhile, my newly expanded lower half was just jiggling and sliding all over the place like the cast of Star Trek whenever the USS Enterprise would get struck by enemy forces. It wasn’t fair, y’all, but those were the cards I was dealt! Anyway, the point is, I gained weight, was working around the clock and running on fumes with the occasional nap sprinkled in to help me through the day. Still, because I wasn’t sleepless like I had been in 2016, I convinced myself that my workaholism was cured (despite making zero real changes because that’s the American way) and I was now getting around seven and a half hours of sleep a night.

  Natch, this estimate was way off base, and I soon learned that when I, out of sheer curiosity and to solve this exhaustion mystery, downloaded a sleep app and used it for a couple of weeks. Now, yawning nonstop and constantly saying, “I’m sleepy,” should’ve been all the evidence needed during the ongoing case of Robinson v. Her Tired-Ass Body That Is Slowly Morphing into the “Before” in a Shaun T Fitness Infomercial. But ever since cell phone apps were invented, I’ve put my brain on low-battery mode and have not allowed it to process the simplest information without the help of the trial version of an app that runs a Final Fantasy VIII ad every ten seconds because I’m not about that “pay full price for an app” life. Hence, needing an app to show me how little sleep I got. The results came in. Turns out I was only sleeping, on average, four and a half hours a night. What in the Serta-Counting-Sheep-jumping-over-a-wooden-fence hell?!?! Four and a half hours? You can’t even get the veggies for a beef stew all the way soft in a slow cooker in that amount of time, yet I was carrying on as though four and a half hours was all the fuel I needed to function out in the real world. It made zero sense. What did make sense, however, is that my feelings of exhaustion were now accompanied by feelings of unhappiness. And this was kind of a new-ish scenario for me.

  Of course I was bummed when I didn’t book an audition or had a bad stand-up set, but that sadness was fleeting, and even during the salad days of my career, I’d maybe be down for a week or two. What I was going through now was much more in line with what Spence and Robbins wrote about in a groundbreaking 1992 paper for the Journal of Personality Assessment called “Workaholism: Definition, Measurement, and Preliminary Results.” In it, they argued that people who are workaholics work not only compulsively but also without enjoyment. Ding, ding, ding! That was it! I was in the zone of creating and doing, but I had lost that loving feeling a little bit, and in its place was a stench of “meh” funking up the work. You know when you go in a public restroom, and there’s a general pee smell, but also you’re thinking, Yeeeeeeeeeah, but someone doubled down on the asparagus, and now that scent is overpowering everything? That’s what many of my jobs felt like. Wait. No. That’s not right. I don’t mean to say that my career was basically like urine accented by a cloud of asparagus-pee odor. Ya know what? When you’ve been writing a lengthy book, this can happen. The analogies start out like . . . and then by the time you’re elbow-deep in the process, the analogies end up like
. . . See?! #TheyCantAllBeGems #TheyCantEvenAllBeCostumeJewelry #SometimesTheyAreDentedEarringsFromClairesWithTheBacksMissingBut70PercentOffAndWhoAreYouToPassUpADeal.

  Anyway, the bigger point that I’m attempting to make here is that my workaholism had become a joyless exercise. I’d go out of town for stand-up gigs and only leave my hotel room to perform and not to explore whatever city I was in. My to-do list became so backed up that I would go from one project to another, but more often, I was working on multiple projects at once. And then there was the social aspect. I wasn’t calling home as much, always putting it off because I was swamped and saving the phone calls for another day. I was constantly canceling plans with friends. Stating that I had no time to date because there were more important things on my plate. I was burying myself in a mountain of tasks and wasn’t particularly excited about any of them. So how the hell did I get there?

  It’s not something I learned from my parental units. Sure, they have a great work ethic, but for every memory I have of them working their tails off to provide for their chillrens, I also distinctly recall them being physically and emotionally present for my brother and me, whether it was helping us with a school project, reading to us, or teaching us how to cook and do laundry. They absolutely put family first. And like I explained earlier, I was a high school slacker, and even in college, when I got my act together, I fully enjoyed each and every one of my weekends. Trust and believe that I routinely spent my Friday-to-Sundays reclining on my twin bed with one hand down my pants, Al Bundy style, channel surfing premium cable. You could’ve called me Philippe Petit of Man on Wire fame because I was nailing the work-life balance. However, once I graduated and made the leap into stand-up comedy, everything kind of changed.