1
I shuffled up from one of the tables in the front row. It was New Year’s Eve, I’d signed up for a short stand-up set, and almost not come. Depression hit me hard between Christmas and New Year’s, and I’d spent most of the day on my couch, underneath a blanket, crying.
At my table, I’d been sipping from a glass filled with Coke and a giant ice cube—my favorite non-alcoholic drink treat—trying to wake myself up.
In the fifteen minutes after I decided to get off the couch and go, I threw on a “festive” silver sequined dress which never really suited me (or at least in the pics taken of me in it), and was now too tight under the arms and too short to be worn as a dress. I paired it with super stretchy “pants” from a once ubiquitous, still beloved (at least in Flatbush where I live) New York City chain, V.I.M.
The pant brand called itself V.I.M. Vixen and the name alone delighted me so much, I bought three pairs—two for me, and one for my fellow pants hater, Amy. And they were comfortable in a highly-flamable way, and most importantly they fit around my stomach without hurting it. In the last couple of years—because of Lexapro, menopause, IBS, and maybe just life—comfortable hard pants with a zipper, waistband, and pockets are harder to find.
One unforeseen reality of the V.I.M. Vixen is that they are so stretchy, after an hour or so, they start to slide off.
Whatever, too late. There I was under the lights, with my stomach, in an outfit I hated that was sliding both up and off of me, without any notes, supposedly doing stand-up. The space was packed, and the two comedians before me were really funny. Why hadn’t I stayed home, wallowing on my couch?
The evil paradox of depression is that it makes you want to never do anything because you are so sad, but in order to be less sad, you have to do things. The gods really are mean, aren’t they?
Interlude, Middle, or the Stomach of the Essay
What is a stomach? One cannot ask this question enough. Google says the stomach is J-shaped and for digesting food. Sure. Google also tells me that the intestines—both small and large combined—can be anywhere from 14-20 feet long, depending on the person. The small intestines alone can measure the length of a van!
What a world! What a world it is inside of us! My stomach, intestines, and uterus have held babies, food, shit, bacteria, microbes, enzymes, bile, acid, and so many things I don’t understand. According to IBS lore, the stomach is also the “second brain” and a place where we hold our trauma.
The week before Christmas, I’d had both a regular endoscopy and a pill endoscopy. For the pill endoscopy you swallow a round piece of plastic, lyingly called a “pill” that is actually a camera. After that, you strap on an four-inch wide padded “belt” that holds a machine about the size of a walkman in place on your waist. The machine tracks the pill, makes sure it’s moving, and sends the footage back to your doctor, who no doubt, watches the journey with buttery popcorn and Sour Patch Kids (delicious treats you are not allowed to eat).
Because the belt is so poorly designed and/or no one cares about fashion when getting a pill endoscopy but me, it makes your stomach look even bigger. I ended up Christmas shopping while wearing that contraption, daring sales people to accuse me of shoplifting because it looked like I had several items hidden in my pants. I did, just not presents.
The camera pill found nothing abnormal, and eventually I pooped it out. Talk about a narrative with no plot.
Bodies unlike essays, novels, and movies, are often plotless. Some of us go for years trying to find out what is going on with our insides, and turn up nothing. There’s no big break through, no suprise ending or twist, and nothing really ever happens unless you really love going to doctor’s offices. I don’t.
Chronic illnesses don’t go away and occur over long periods of time, as in Her pain was chronic, but not acute.
Still, I wondered about the camera pill’s journey into my mysterious subterranean insides. I pictured it humming along with its little flash bulb camera and taking selfies with my shit.
Lately, I hate my stomach. It obstructs my fashion, it’s full of itself, and it hurts a lot.
I am literally full of shit. My constipation is chronic. I wish I could make that into a hip hop lyric, but I’m not a rapper. Not yet anyway.
2
The holiday depression, the slippery ill-fitting outfit, the endoscopies, my bloated stomach, and all of my shit followed me onto the stage. I guess that’s show biz.
I made my mouth start moving. “This is only my third time doing stand-up so please be nice to me.”
* I’m approximating what I said, because that’s what personal essayists do. I could get it verbatim, but I don’t want to re-watch the existing video footage, and this is blog post not a fact-checked memoir, so if you want that kind of thing, give me some money bbs. Also, I’m editing to entertain you, because well, plot.
“My kid and I watch Charlie Brown Christmas and Holidate (that’s for another post, but it’s so bad it’s good) when we decorate our tree, and we marvel at how fucking mean everyone is to Charlie Brown, like it’s relentless and unceasingy.”
I turned my back to the audience because they were freaking me out and sang the opening to Vince Giraldi’s now classic soundtrack. My pants were definitely sliding off my ass, but the dress was there mostly. The audience sang with me., which was so sweet. Buoyed, I faced them again.
“Lucy is an untrained therapist, she doesn’t have a M.S.W. or Ph.D. and her methodology is to list phobias to Charlie Brown, who is depressed because he can’t get into the spirit of Christmas.”
I did Lucy’s voice, I think. Or some voices that were Peanuts like, and I felt deeply tired.
“Lucy suggests Charlie Brown direct the Christmas play to give himself a purpose, but it turns out that Charlie Brown is really bad at directing and the Peanuts don’t listen to him. They do their wild Peanut dances and complain because they fucking hate Charlie Brown.”
I feel myself flopping, which I’ve done before in front of classrooms and at readings. Spend enough time in front of people saying things, and you will flop. So it wasn’t a new feeling, but I didn’t want it. Not this year. Not on New Year’s Eve. Not in this dress and with this stomach as my sidekick.
No matter how many times you’ve flopped, you never want to flop again, especially when you’re trying a new thing, and you’ve told yourself you’re kinda good at it.
“‘Oh no! Not Charlie Brown! He ruins everything!’ The bitch with the naturally curly hair says.”
“‘You blockhead!’ Hurls Violet.”
My friend Jason, stood off to the side of the audience, smiling at me. He and his girlfriend, Elke, are some of my closest people, and they run the space, and their mantra is You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. I looked pleadingly at him and said, “I want to quit.”
“You can quit.” He’s great like that.
But I don’t. I keep flopping. “He has to get Christmas tree, to redeem himself,” I say, boring myself even. My dumb dress is from the thankfully defunct Anne Taylor Loft, and so the lining is made from the tears of children, and I’m sweating a lot.
Flop sweat. It can stink up a whole room.
I’m rest my elbows on my stomach, and clutch the microphone with both hands. “The trees are alumimum, pink, and beautiful, and still Charlie Brown picks the ugliest one.”
I panic because I can’t read the audience. Maybe they’re staring at my stomach, I may or may not have thought. Such is the size of my stomach, or such is my dysmorphia about my stomach that sometimes I think things like this. I really don’t know because you can’t really ever know what your body looks like out in the world moving around and existing unless you are maybe a celebrity or a narcissist. A still body in a photo is not a body in motion.
Besides every woman I know hates their stomach. I’m not special in this way. What is a stomach for anyway? One cannot ask this question enough. Is it for digesting food or making you feel bad? Seems more like the second thing lately.
I try to re-focus. Choosing a re-enactment was an attmept to up my comedy game. I miss the jokes I wrote out on colorful paper, told for cheap laughs, and then tossed up into the air for more cheap laughs. I know the hardest part is coming too. When Linus gets all creepy Christian on us, and talks about the LORD for five minutes on prime time television in 1965. I can do his voice, I have practiced his voice in particular, and this re-enactment, many, many times, but doing his voice takes a lot of energy.
I go for it. I quit.
“The great thing about Delight Factory is that you can do whatever you want, even quit in the middle of your set!” The audience claps a lot. Out of pity, I think, and when I sit back down at my table, I think, Oh god, I’m going to cry, but I don’t. I watch the other comedians who are great and funny, and I just kind of exist in the moment.
After the show, everyone is super nice. People say, “You were so funny, why did you stop?” And, “That was like total self-care, you just quit because you wanted to,” and as the night goes on I have lots of truly interesting conversations about performing, writing, discomfort, quitting, and Charlie Brown. At midnight, I dance with my friends and every one hugs every one else, and then it’s time to go get my kid, who has wound up in Manhattan with friends.
Such is my masochism, that I still think I’ve flopped and am a quitter, but I also don’t care. I learned I can survive a stand-up failure, and I know it’s part of doing comedy. I also realize I don’t have to do hard things all of the time. I already do a lot of hard stuff.
As I write this now, I think maybe I enacted what it’s like to be Charlie Brown—to feel unloved and disliked, but to live in it because what else is there to do?
3
Two days later, I watch the video of me, and realize I was wrong. I wasn’t flopping. I was panicking, but none of it was visible. I was up there for six minutes and getting pretty consistent laughs. Not only were my feelings not facts, they were completely wrong.
I do decide that I hate the dress, and I ball it up and put it in the trash. It fit me better when I weighed 140 pounds instead of 170 pounds. I have no insights here, other than to record this reality. The dress may have looked really great at 170 pounds too. Didn’t I just tell you I have no sense of what’s going on sometimes?
And my stomach, what does she have to say about all of this? If I were to make a puppet out of her, the scar where my belly button used to be, forming a kind of mouth, she might say:
Bitch, you need to chill out and leave me alone.
I’m called a FUPA, and not a single partner, lover, friend, and/or child has ever complained about me. Most of those people have liked me, like a lot, A LOT.
Can you stop thinking about the brain and gut connection and live a little?
Be nice to me!
I’m in pain!
I could say a whole bunch of feminist platitudes about loving our bodies as they are and fighting the straight, cis, patriarchal culture that tells us over and over again how we have to feel and look in order to be loved. I could write about the difference between dating at 41 and 140 lbs and 51 and 170 lbs. I can admit that I had a consultation to go on Ozempic because why not? I could tell you that I grew up with a fat father, and my mother never shut up about it. I'd do almost anything to not have IBS and of all of my disabilities, it’s the one that causes me the most pain.
But you know all that because if you’ve read this far you likely have some stuff in common with me. If you don’t, WELCOME!
All I can say for sure though is, I want to incorporate puppets into my next stand-up routine.
Enjoy the typos!
xoxo
Carley
So much love for this piece! Can I say a wish? (OK, no...I want to say a wish.) I WISH that the world could hear you read this piece, too, since you are such an incredible reader. And/or maybe I also mean I am grateful that your voice is one I get to hear so profoundly on the page and off it. Also yes to recognizing the many ways we bomb in public and how as much as feminist folks are exhorted to love our bodies, we also can be totally on the outs with them (and the feeling is often mutual).
This is brilliant and perfect just like you