Waiting for the Punch

by Marc Maron

  Marc

  I think a lot of what I felt when I used drugs is that it made me excited. It turned off the “I’m an idiot,” or “I’m fucked,” or “I don’t want to go out,” or “I don’t want to do this.” It was actually relaxing. I did a lot of coke and it would actually have a calming effect on me to some degree. I’m already intense.

  What I started to realize, and this is with depression as well, is that at some point you’re going to have to figure out that addiction is a disease and it has a lot of effects. If you feel like you have that, I found it’s best to just look at that as its own sickness and some of the symptoms are depression, self-centeredness, complete lack of empathy, or too much empathy. Basically anything in your personality that drives you to say, “I got to get high. I got to eat. I got to go lose all my money. I got to fuck everything.”

  Anything where the voice inside of you says, “The only way I can feel better is by doing that,” introduce yourself to your sickness because that’s your guy.

  MENTAL HEALTH

  “The Wound Is Still There”

  It seems there are people who talk about mental health and there are people who really don’t talk about it at all. I’m a talker. Or at least I was. I’m not as much as I used to be, which I can see only as an indication that I am getting better. My mental health when I started the podcast was probably the worst it’s been my entire life. Some of my feelings were justified; deeper issues exacerbated some of them. There was no doubt I was in psychological and emotional trouble. It was a dark time. I was at the edge of who I thought I was. Nothing was working out and I couldn’t see a way out of it.

  I’ve been to therapy for long periods of time at different points in my life, different cities, and different therapists. My experiences have been pretty good. I can look back and say I learned something from all of my therapists and some of them got me through bad times. You pay them to listen, to be there for you. Generally, at the very least, they do that. They hold your feet to your own fire if they are worth their salt.

  I became aware that I had anger issues, food issues, substance abuse issues, intimacy issues, self-esteem issues, and an anxiety problem. I was selfish, self-involved, narcissistic at times, emotionally abusive, and full of dread.

  I was also smart, funny, and charming. When those are loaded up with issues, it’s a pretty good package. It’s a living. It was who I was and who I still am.

  I’ve always been on to myself enough to stay alive and not do something so stupid that I’m dead. It was that manifestation of selfish fear that kept me alive. I credit the podcast for getting me fully on to myself. Because I was in such trouble when I started it I really needed to talk to people. I needed to hear them. I needed to engage and grow my empathy. I needed to listen. I needed to see myself in others and also hear of struggles that were harder and deeper than mine. People like Todd Hanson, who spoke in detail about his suicide attempt, or Maria Bamford, who manages an obsessive-compulsive disorder, or Aubrey Plaza, whose anxiety issues led to a stroke. Their stories helped put my own problems in perspective.

  After years of talking to people, I can honestly say that I have learned to accept myself for who I am and accept my issues and problems for what they are. If you learn to shut the fuck up and listen and empathize with others, your emotions start to regulate a bit, your problems became manageable, and your issues become tedious to you and maybe you can let them go for a while, or temper them.

  Also, the feedback from having conversations about mental health, and how those conversations helped others with mental health issues, helped my mental health. Look, I’m still pretty fucked-up, but I’m not as dangerous to myself or others and I can choose what I want to live with and how much I want to work on change. Sometimes you just have to be okay with who you are.

  DAVE ATTELL—COMEDIAN AND ACTOR

  I’ve been to the hospitals for the troops. You go to Walter Reed, which is where they bring them after they go to Germany, the troops that are wounded. You see a lot of guys going through vicious, hardcore rehab. They’ve lost arms and legs.

  They’ve got a dog there, which I thought was like a Seeing Eye dog, but he’s really just there to be their friend. When they’re feeling down, he can sense it, and he’ll come over to them and they’ll use him to lean, to stand up, and to start doing their exercises, and walk. He’s like a friend.

  I went to the hospital, and this dog that can sense pain would follow me around the whole day. This guy’s there with no legs, but the dog’s like, “No, that guy’s going to make it. This guy? I don’t know.”

  AUBREY PLAZA—COMEDIAN, ACTOR

  I do a thing where I listen to my hair. I do a loop and then I scrunch it inside of my ear. I’m usually freaking out when I do that. My therapist said it’s a soothing thing, a defense mechanism. I’ve been doing it since I was a kid. Then I play with my lip. I do both of those things because my parents would always yell at me for doing them. They would just bat my hand away.

  LENA DUNHAM—ACTOR, WRITER, DIRECTOR, PRODUCER

  I used to be a huge hypochondriac. It’s really shifted for me in the last year or so. One time, I was so sure I was pregnant, I told my producer Jenni that I thought I could feel my baby crawling up and down my spine, and she was like, “That’s not what babies do.” At this point, they’re not big crawlers. If you were one month pregnant, your baby wouldn’t be doing a little dance. It’s not the dancing baby from Ally McBeal.

  DAVE ATTELL

  My mom has a hoarding problem, so I got to scream at her about having three hundred pairs of socks. Then she throws back, “Well, if you had heat in here, I wouldn’t need all this.” She’s not a dirty hoarder. It’s all folded neatly and nicely, and it’s in boxes. I’m like, “Who’s this for?” She’s like, “Oh, I want to give this to…,” like, somebody who’s already dead. I’m like, “Just get rid of it.”

  JENNY SLATE—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR

  Sometimes people think that because I’m cheery or whatever, it means that I’m silly or repressed, but honestly, I just think it’s the opposite. I am occasionally sad. I’m not paralyzed with fear, but I would say that I feel very lonely often. When there are no people around I feel sad, like a puppy, like a dog looking out the window.

  NORM MACDONALD—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR

  The problem with laughing is it will build to a hysteria sometimes that I have to crank a couple of benzos to prevent a panic attack. I start laughing and then it gets out of control, like hysterical. I still have extreme sensitivity to things. Not to life things, but literature or art or something like that. I have incredible sensitivity. I kind of have to stay away from it.

  Like paintings. I don’t know anything about art. Nothing at all. But I have had experiences that have been so hard on me. Like one time, I was in New York and somebody dragged me to a fucking art museum. I hate art. I was looking at this picture of this girl, and I was falling in love with her. She was so fucking beautiful, this fucking girl in this fucking picture, and then the guide was telling me the fucking thing was drawn in the sixteenth century. Obviously this lady was dead, long dead, and here I am fucking in love with her, and so I’m like, “Ah. Fuck it.” It was so hard on me for so many days. It sounds crazy, right?

  Marc

  Not really. It sounds like that’s a very good painting.

  Norm

  It was an incredible painting, but it would make me cry and I didn’t cry at my dad’s funeral. Real life stuff seems so prosaic to me that it never really touches me much.

  AUBREY PLAZA

  I had a pretty serious anxiety issue, and when I was twenty I had a stroke. At the time, my doctors thought it was because of the birth control pill. That has since been negated, and it boils down to migraine-related stress issues.

  It was Queens actually where it happened. I was in college. It was the summer before my junior year. It really was a freak thing. I didn’t have a headache, nothing was wrong with me. I took the subway in to have lu
nch with friends in Astoria.

  I got into their apartment. I sat down. I was talking about a Hilary Duff concert that I had taken my sister to the night before. Then I looked down at my right arm, and all of a sudden, it was like my brain was telling me that it wasn’t my arm. I literally thought, “Whose arm is that that’s on my leg?” It was like my arm was just detached from my body. Then the whole right side of my body was paralyzed for a second. I remember I was hitting myself, like hitting my arm to figure out what was going on because it wasn’t numb. It was just, like, not there. Then I blacked out for a second, and then the sound got really weird. I regained all my motor skills, but I couldn’t talk. I just was making a weird sound. I was going, “Uh,” like that. My friends thought I was doing a weird bit, and they were like, “Stop it. What the fuck are you doing?” Then I couldn’t talk. I had expressive aphasia because the blood clot was in my left temporal lobe, which is my language center.

  The paramedics came. They were asking me questions. I was totally there, and I could understand what they were saying to me and I knew what the answers were, but I just forgot language completely, and I forgot how to write. It was really the craziest thing that’s ever happened.

  They took me to the Mount Sinai in Queens. I was in the ER for two hours before a doctor even saw me because I looked fine. I was so young, and I looked fine, but I wasn’t fine. Finally, when they brought me in, the doctor had me do a really simple thing where she was like, “Put your right hand on your left knee,” and I couldn’t do it because I was confused. Then they freaked out, and they were like, “Oh my God. She’s having a stroke,” because it was very obvious that I was having one. If anyone did any simple stroke test on me, they would’ve known right away.

  The second day at the hospital I started talking, and in the middle of the night I remember waking up and shouting, “Aubrey Plaza!” Then I started talking and then they transferred me to the hospital in Delaware, so I could be near my family. I was there for a little bit. There’s not much you can do sometimes with strokes. They can keep an eye on it and make sure it doesn’t get worse, but your brain has to heal itself.

  I could say some words. A lot of them were the wrong words. I remember in the hospital, they would ask me the same questions over and over. “How old are you?” Sometimes I would say sixteen. It was the only number I could get out. I don’t know why. Then Joe, my boyfriend at the time, was like, “You’re not sixteen. She’s nineteen. You know, she’s not sixteen.” Then he’d be like, “Wait, are you sixteen? What is going on?” Because he didn’t know what the fuck was going on. He was like, “If you’re sixteen, we have to have a talk.” He was freaking out. That was the first time he met my parents. We had been dating for over a year. They came to the ER. They met in the ER.

  That gives you an indication of the level of anxiety I have. Because essentially it was stress related.

  CHELSEA PERETTI—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR

  I just stare at people with small noses, and I marvel and I think, “God, your life must be so easy.” Girls with small noses, I will stare at them and stare at their profile, like, “What an easy laugh and a small nose. Your life must be so easy.”

  WHITNEY CUMMINGS—COMEDIAN, WRITER, PRODUCER, ACTOR

  Being attractive brings up a set of issues with yourself. The more attractive someone is, usually the less attractive they think they are.

  For me, I may be an attractive comedian, but I was an ugly model. As a model, I was always the ugliest and the fattest. I would get fired from jobs on the spot. I was told my ribs were too big so I couldn’t fit into a dress. It’s like I was always the ugly girl but just in a different echelon.

  JUDD APATOW—COMEDIAN, DIRECTOR, WRITER, PRODUCER

  When someone is laughing, I know they don’t dislike me. I don’t know if they like me, but I know in that moment they don’t dislike me, and that’s why I get the need for constant approval, because if you’re smiling, I know you don’t hate me. I don’t know if it’s positive, but it’s not in the negative.

  Steven Spielberg, who I used to work for at Dreamworks, was trying to reach me to let me know he liked Knocked Up, and I so wanted a letter from him. Paul Feig got one when we made Freaks and Geeks, and I was so jealous that he got a letter from Spielberg saying that he loved Freaks and Geeks, and I didn’t return the call and I told my assistant, “Can you say Judd’s out of town and is it possible that he could write a note just so I could have the letter?” I knew a compliment was coming and I’m so wounded I needed to have it forever.

  He sent me the dream letter, the beautiful letter with nothing but kindness. I have it. What happened afterward was I thought to myself, “This is the best you can do. Who else do I want to compliment me? How many of these do I need to feel good about my work and myself?” and how it doesn’t last, and the wound is still there.

  SUE COSTELLO—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR

  My therapist told me, “I bet you people have been nice to you your whole life and you haven’t seen it.” Literally it took me like five days to deal with that. Because she was right.

  JANEANE GAROFALO—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR

  Some days I’m feeling pretty good. I’m pleased with who I am. There’s other days where I literally, I’m a bad match for myself like a terrible Match.com profile. I am the worst person for myself. I’m as down as down can get. I can’t even put my finger on why.

  Usually it’s brought on by something. It can be something I see in the news or something someone says or I overhear. It’s going to sound like I’m trying to be so noble and I don’t want to come off like I’m being that way. It usually revolves around if I see somebody being bullied or if I see animals being mistreated. Animals do have advocates, but they don’t have as many advocates as humans do. They can’t speak for themselves, just like with little children. Animals don’t have the advocates in place that humans do to a degree. I can see someone in the dog park manhandling their dog and I’m done for the day. I’m so down. I don’t know, I can’t explain it.

  Marc

  You feel the pain of the animal. The vulnerability and its inability to help itself.

  Janeane

  Exactly. If I accidentally channel-surf past Animal Cops and just catch a snippet, I’m down for the count for the day.

  TERRY GROSS—RADIO HOST

  I think one of my gifts is also one of my weaknesses, which is I have an antenna for other people. My friends and my producers might disagree with me about this. I think I have an antenna that picks up on what other people are feeling, but there’s something good and bad about that. The bad thing is you’re always wondering, “Oh, I think I hurt somebody’s feelings. Oh, I think I said the wrong thing. Oh, I think they hate me. Oh, they just moved their mouth in such a way and I think they meant to say something bad and they stopped.” It’s like reading other people and guessing them and feeling what you think they’re feeling.

  But that’s the thing as an interviewer, you want to be thinking, “What are they thinking now, what are they feeling now? What do they think when they go about their lives? What’s their typical life like? What was it like for them when they experienced that trauma?” And that guides me in figuring out what to ask them, but it also makes me very nervous. A little insecure.

  BEN STILLER—ACTOR, WRITER, DIRECTOR

  To me sometimes there are days when I really have trouble making a phone call. Do you ever have that feeling where you just say, “I don’t know if I can really get it up to just engage with somebody I don’t know”?

  LOUIS CK—COMEDIAN, WRITER, DIRECTOR, PRODUCER, ACTOR

  I went to Times Square to buy a trumpet. That’s where all the music stores are. I just wanted to buy a trumpet to learn how to play trumpet. I went into Sam Ash or one of those places and there’s all these student trumpets for, like, a hundred dollars. The guy started showing me: “Here’s a nickel-plated, beautiful trumpet. It’s got a flawed bell because it was hurt, but they repaired it.” It was like fourteen hu
ndred dollars. I didn’t have any of that kind of money, but I went to an ATM and I took out everything I had in the bank and I bought this fucking fourteen-hundred-dollar trumpet without having any ability. I’d never even blown into a trumpet before.

  Then I was walking through Times Square with this fucking thing in my hands just freaking out and feeling bad and I ducked into what they used to have then, the peep shows. Next thing I know I’m in a peep show booth, those little upright coffins, looking at a chick, a tired fucking Latvian girl probably, through the window of this peep show and jacking off. It’s like a two-foot-by-two-foot room. I jerk off and I came on the trumpet case, which was standing between my legs. Once I came and I looked at this cum on the trumpet case, on this beautiful brass-buckled trumpet case, I realized if I had come to this peep show first I could have saved fourteen hundred dollars. I wouldn’t have a fucking trumpet now, which I never really learned how to play. It was an important thing for me to realize that.

  I went to a therapist for a while and he started dragging me through my past. It was exhausting. I couldn’t do it. I also didn’t see an end to it. I started saying to him, “I don’t want to do this anymore. Can you just give me some advice? Can we just boil it down to how the fuck do I get out of my own way?” He told me, “All right, well, when you do things that you regret all the time, like eating bad food or jacking off in a weird, shameful situation you wish you hadn’t, sexual compulsion behavior, eating compulsions,” he said, “the issue isn’t the food or the sexual objects, it’s anxiety. You’re having anxiety and you’re doing these things to try to deal with your anxiety. Maybe if you tell yourself that in the moment it might help you.”

  That was an enormous help. That’s sort of what I told myself with the trumpet, which is every time I’m starting to have a thing that I’m not in control of. Like I want to buy a motorcycle. This happened the other day. I want to buy a Triumph Bonneville motorcycle. I have no business buying a motorcycle. I pored over the Web site. I started reading reviews of Triumphs and trying to talk myself into it. It’s okay to spend eight thousand dollars on a motorcycle. I’m practiced now at stopping and going, “Why are you looking at that? It’s got nothing to do with motorcycles. You’re anxious. Something’s irritating you.” Just the act of doing that cuts you off. Calms you down.