Waiting for the Punch

by Marc Maron

  Will

  No, but in my head, I’ll go like, “I’m going to send that person a text tomorrow and say, ‘Sorry I didn’t get to say good-bye,’” or something like that.

  Marc

  Well, that’s a good OCD.

  Will

  It can be, but not when you’re in a relationship with somebody, and you’re taking up time with these obsessions. A lot of times, these will be people that maybe I’m not super good friends with. Even if I am good friends with them. They’re not going to care if I say good-bye. I’ll see them again. They’ll say, “Oh, you left early. I didn’t get to say bye.” They don’t care.

  Sometimes I’ll put myself in a position of, “Oh, if that person left this party without saying bye to me, would it bother me?” No, not at all, so why would I think they would care if I did the same thing?

  So in a relationship, all this energy will be devoted to spending time worrying about making sure others are happy that aren’t as important as the girlfriend should be to me.

  I’ll go out of my way to do favors for people that I don’t know very well. Somebody will say, “Oh, will you send a poster to my brother?” I spent a half hour, maybe an hour dealing with getting the tube for the poster, this and that. I have this script I’ve had to write forever, then I’m behind on that. Eventually, that’s going to come out of time that I would spend with my family at Christmas.

  MARIA BAMFORD

  I had Unwanted Thoughts Syndrome where I had dark thoughts of things like unwanted sexual violence. It sort of started when I was about nine or ten years old. That’s a real syndrome. It is a real type of OCD. A lot of people have it.

  You have one weird thought. This is a common one: people with a postpartum depression thing sometimes think of hitting or killing the baby. Then they go, “Oh my God. I can’t believe that. Oh, Jesus! That’s a crazy thought.” And then they move on to something else. Somebody who’s more sensitive or more agitated would go, “Oh my God. I can never think of that again. Maybe that means something. Am I going to kill my baby?” Then they can’t stop thinking about it, and the obsession is, “I’m going to kill my baby.” The compulsion is whatever you’re doing to make yourself not think about of it, or, like, starting to avoid your baby.

  I would think of whatever the taboo thing for me was, which could be killing my family, killing my friends, sexually assaulting people, kids, animals, that type of thing, and then I would start avoiding and avoiding and avoiding. I would be just by myself, which is the safest place to be so I don’t hurt anybody. I realized I was not having close friendships.

  WILL FORTE

  People would tell me before, “Oh, you’re kind of OCD.” I’d say, “No, whatever.” The moment that I actually said, “Yeah, I am,” was such a relief. Part of the burden was lifted.

  I went to therapy once. I hadn’t gone in years. I went through this breakup several years ago, and I finally went to therapy for the first time. It wasn’t even the talking to somebody about stuff. It was the act of giving up part of myself to say, “Oh, yeah. I need somebody else to help me with this. I can’t do everything myself,” that was a freeing thing.

  MARIA BAMFORD

  I love twelve-step groups because there was a rigid structure where you talk to people, there’s certain ways you share, there’s certain ways you talk, it was just like Dale Carnegie. Then you have fellowship and it ends. It’s not like an unending sort of “Oh, we’re just going to hang out” thing.

  SIR PATRICK STEWART—ACTOR

  I had an idyllic first four and a half, five years of my life. Born in 1940, I was probably conceived on my father’s last night in England, or last night as a civilian.

  For the first four years, I lived with my mother and my brother and we had a happy, idyllic life. This big man suddenly showed up when I was going on five and changed everything for us. I have talked publicly for a number of years now about the violence in my home. My father proved to be a weekend alcoholic. The weekends were dangerous times. Not always. Sometimes he would come back from the pub or the club or wherever he had been in a good mood and that was lovely. We could all have a good night’s sleep. Sometimes he would be ill-tempered and it could lead to blows and police. He never struck me or my brother. Just my mother.

  When I became active in the world of domestic violence issues, I became aware that in fact my father had been severely “shell-shocked” in 1940, during the retreat from France, and returned home clearly a victim of PTSD, which was never treated. In fact there was no treatment for it. “Be a man. Pull yourself together and be a man.” That’s all the help he would’ve been given. When I talked to an expert on PTSD and I told him about my father’s behavior, he said, “All these are classic symptoms of PTSD.” I resolved then to do for the memory of my father what I’ve been doing for the memory of my mother, and I joined another organization called Combat Stress, which specializes in providing care for veterans who suffer from PTSD.

  Marc

  I can’t imagine the unburdening to let go of some of that anger.

  Patrick

  Yes, and that was most important because anger is a bad thing to hold on to but yet it also left me feeling that I should find some way of making it up to him. I told these public stories about what he did and how he behaved for many years. I can now put it in context. My father was sick. He was ill and didn’t know what he was doing. Had no control over what he was doing. That doesn’t mean to say that I condone the violence. Violence is never the solution to anything. This is why a fairly recent movement in this area is saying domestic violence is not a woman’s issue, it’s a man’s issue.

  Marc

  Also, it’s weird with domestic violence because there’s this weird stigma around it that other people aren’t supposed to get involved.

  Patrick

  Exactly. It’s humiliating and embarrassing for everyone. That was one of the things I struggled with as a child, was the sense of shame I carried with me because when fights arose in my house and there would be yelling and so forth, things being thrown. We lived in a community where people were cheek by jowl. Everyone would hear that. In fact, we had a wonderful neighbor. Her name was Lizzy Dixon. Lizzy worked in a weaving shed all her life. She was a big, powerful woman. I do quite clearly remember one night, her throwing our front door open. We never locked our doors.

  My father was in one of his rages and she stood in front of him, raising her fist in his face and saying, “Come on now, Alf Stewart. You try it on me. Let’s see how far you get with that. Come on! Have a go at me.” She would’ve flattened him. There’s no doubt about that. Great, great woman. I wish I could meet her again to say thank you to her, because she often stepped in and stopped things from getting worse.

  BARRY CRIMMINS—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTIVIST

  I had PTSD because when I was very young, the babysitter’s father was coming over and raping me for a few months. It took me until I was about thirty-eight to really deal with that and face it and whatever. I was in shock most of my life. To protect myself. If people got too close to me, I wouldn’t give them anything.

  I always knew, but I never knew exactly. Then someone came forward, and then there was another person who knew about it, so it’s corroborated. We knew who the guy was. He died in a New York state prison. For raping little boys. Serving his third or fourth term.

  My parents would go out. They’ve been through the Depression and World War II, and they go out on a Friday night, like, “We beat the Nazis. Let’s go.” This guy would come over. I was like five years old, and it was life threatening. Getting asphyxiated because I was getting my face shoved in a pillow, so that was what I had to get back, to figure out. It’s funny how this stuff sticks with you because, really, the main thing I do is try to help people. Helping others, it’s promoted my healing more than anything, like AA or whatever.

  You think you’re fine for years. Well, like a month and a half ago, there was a story in the paper about a little girl in India w
ho was about three years old who had died from being raped. Then I was just sitting in my living room by myself, and I just thought, “That poor kid. Imagine, raped to death.” Then the light came on, like, “Holy shit. I almost got raped to death a bunch of times.” You know you got a couple choppy weeks after that, and that isn’t being some wimp. This stuff is serious, and you gotta wrestle every wolf-man that knocks at the door and get through it. You can’t go around things, you have to go through them, but that doesn’t mean it’s my whole identity or whatever. I’m like a million other things.

  The day I found out who the rapist was, I get a call from a social worker. She knows the guy. She says the name. “Oh my God. That’s who it is,” I said. “Well, where is he?”

  She said, “Well, he died in prison. I was involved in that case. He died in prison last year.”

  The first thing I felt was pity for the guy. Some people get really mad at me about that, but I just thought like, “What a complete waste of a life.” I tried to find out from New York State where he was buried so I could go put flowers on his grave to say, “I didn’t become you. I didn’t become what I resisted.”

  Marc

  As opposed to pissing on it.

  Barry

  Yeah. Well, that’s what everybody wants you to do. But I became a human rights activist and not someone that offends human rights.

  JACK GALLAGHER—COMEDIAN, PLAYWRIGHT

  My mom died after a long illness. She was sick for a long time with a mental illness, and she died. I had a sister who died when she was very young, forty, and my mom never got over it. It just sent her into this little pit of despair, where she was depressed and never got over it. It was really sad, she was such a vibrant person; then when Sharon died, she just lost it.

  My mom died, and then nineteen days later, my father died unexpectedly. Like out of nowhere, and when he died, he left nine hours of audiotape talking about his life, which my younger brother got him to do. We knew he was making the tapes, we didn’t know what was on them. When he died, I got the tapes.

  The beginning ones are funny. They start, “My name is John Gallagher.” At the end he’s like, “Goddammit, pain-in-the-ass son of a bitch, if I ever see him again.” Got really honest, and he talked about a lot of stuff you don’t want your dad to talk about.

  He had a nervous breakdown, and I remember the nervous breakdown because I was like eleven. I remember them taking him out of the house in his robe, shaking, and saying to my mom, “Where’s Dad going?” She said, “He just needs to see a doctor.” We were Irish Catholic, you didn’t talk about that.

  I remember walking up to his bedroom, my mom saying, “Your dad’s sick.” The door was shut. “Don’t bother your dad.” The door was shut for days, and I remember putting my ear against the door. Then I remember just thinking, “Fuck it.” Opening the door, and I’ll tell you, I remember this like it was yesterday, there was a little light coming in from the bottom of his shade, and my dad was lying in his bed, curled up in the fetal position, shaking. I shut the door and I thought, “Fuck.” I pretended it didn’t happen, then a couple days later, they took him away.

  My dad became one of my really good friends as we got older, and I would talk to him on the phone every day. I’d call him every day because he was a good guy, and when I got past the point of him being my father I realized he was just this frail guy who didn’t know what the fuck he was doing. He had five kids. He was trying to keep his head above water. He didn’t have a college education, he hustled, and he was a good guy, and we never were hungry.

  I didn’t give him any fucking credit for it until I started thinking, “This is fucking hard to do.” Then he became my friend, then he passed away and I missed him. Why did I expect my parents to know what they were doing? Because I don’t.

  BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

  I always look at my dad as, of course, he had anger and frustration and humiliation, but he was also just a guy that was lost in the wilderness. He’d never undertaken that project to find your course and steer it toward something. Of course, what I was doing looked ridiculous to him, as it might to a parent looking at their kid who’s spending ten hours in the day just whacking on the guitar in their room.

  All of those things sort of contributed to, I think, what he would have felt was an unsuccessful life, which is not necessarily how I look upon it right now. I mean, he had three children. He raised solid citizens and my mother was a fabulous partner and there was actually a lot of joy in his life. I think he was too at sea himself to appreciate it.

  On top of it, he was truly mentally ill, and that cast a shadow over everything. He certainly didn’t know it and really neither did the rest of us until we were probably into our twenties and he was in his forties.

  Your parents, you love them regardless. I was just more interested in who he was, what that had to do with me, and also how I could be of service and helpful, once I realized that I was going to be the parent and he was going to be the child.

  It happened when he got very ill and he needed to be taken care of. My mother’s relationship to him was limited as to how disciplined she could be, so it kind of fell on me to get to California. I had to get him medicated, I had to get him to the doctors. All of which he resisted, resisted, resisted, but he become a danger to himself and to others. He was paranoid schizophrenic, which is what they called it at the time.

  It was pretty intense because you’re hearing voices and you’re becoming very manic. You’re going for days without sleep and engaged in very manic behavior. At some point he became a risk to himself and to my mom and to the citizenry at large, so I had to go out and try to assist him in getting better, which we were able to do after quite a big battle.

  He had to get treatment and the correct medication, and it improved his life greatly toward the last fifteen, twenty years of his life.

  ALLIE BROSH—WRITER, ILLUSTRATOR

  I was actually really relieved when I first became depressed because that was the first break I’d had from anxiety. When I’m really depressed, I don’t have enough energy in me to be anxious.

  TODD HANSON—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR

  I often say if you’re not at least a little bit depressed you’re just not fucking paying attention. I don’t mean just about some political injustice, I mean just about the human condition in general. Just what goes on every day in the world. Man’s inhumanity to man, or more likely women, it’s just horrifying. If you pay attention to what’s happening, it’s pretty bad. But there’s beautiful things too, like this moment between you and me, so there’s some things to make up for it.

  A friend of mine was going through a hard time, she calls me up, she’s like, “I need a friend right now. Can I come over?” She comes over and we’re talking about one of the worst things that I’ve personally gone through and at the time somebody came up to me and said, “Todd, you’re looking at the world so negatively. Look at the positive things in the world. Listen to the birds in the trees. Can you hear the birds in the trees? The birds are singing. Listen to the birds singing.” And I said to the guy, “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but when I hear those birds singing, I’m not hearing the happy twittering of happy little creatures. I’m hearing the screams of territorial animals that are either competing for mates or competing for some sort of feeding territory against other competitors which will starve them out if they don’t win, and in the kill-or-be-killed, eat-or-be-eaten caldron of murder that constitutes the natural world, that’s what I hear when I hear the birds in the trees.”

  So I started relating this to my friend and my friend said, “Yeah, but you were in a really bad space at that time so you were hallucinating, you were hearing something that wasn’t there, you were hearing these frightening cries of the birds instead of happy songs.” And I said, “Well, I was definitely in a depressed state, but I wasn’t hearing sounds that weren’t there. I was hearing the real sounds of the birds.” And she’s like, “But you were wrong because when birds
sing they’re happy.” And I said, “Well, technically they’re singing because of territorial—” And she just cuts me off and she says, “Todd. Don’t ruin birds for me.” And I said, “You’re right, fair enough. I’m not going to ruin birds for you. Go ahead and think they’re happy.”

  PATRICK STICKLES—MUSICIAN

  I have moments of incredible joy. The fact of the matter is you just make the decision to be an openhearted person in general. You decide to be openhearted and you say, “I will be sensitive and I will accept all the stimuli of life and I will allow my emotions to be triggered accordingly.” When you do that, you open yourself up to very great pain and people can hurt you very, very badly if you make yourself vulnerable before them like that.

  At the same time that openheartedness will also allow you to have the greatest joys in life and feel the most love and the most real transcendent happiness. You have to accept that. You can’t let in just the good stuff. If you want to really, really love the world you have to accept the things about the world that you hate. Not accept them like “just the way it is and it’s fine,” but don’t shut yourself off to those experiences, because in so doing, you’re going to also shut yourself off to all the wonderful things in life.

  Yes, I’m able to be very, very hurt. Psychologically damaged by certain things that other people would just shrug off, but I think that that gives me a greater ability to stop and smell the roses sometimes.

  ROB DELANEY—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR

  I’ve dealt with depression, and it became very serious after I stopped drinking and doing drugs. About a year into sobriety I had my first experience with super unipolar suicidal depression.