Hard Truth 219: Because a Part of Me Will Always Believe I’m a Piece of Shit

It’s always funny to me when I look at the MailChimp report for people who have unsubscribed from my blog.

The most common? No response.

The next most common? Some iteration of the following:

RedheadWriting used to have this edge and a real fuck-you to it. You’ve gotten soft since you moved to Chicago and the whole lovey-dovey thing doesn’t do anything for me.

Your wit used to be acerbic and I miss that. Now it’s all help-this and help-that. I don’t need a self-help book.

You kinda became boring when you fell in love.

Those are actual responses.

Which leads me to today’s hard truth: and that’s there’s a part of me that will always believe I’m a piece of shit.

A complete and totally unlovable piece of shit.

That no matter what I do, it’s wrong.

That by sharing my heart, I’m an asshole somehow.

That by realizing that there was a better way to be living than the way I was living, somehow I turn out to be the cunt in this whole karmic equation.

That by using the word “cunt,” I hate women. (I’ve been told this. I’ve also been told that kissing would get me pregnant and Mark Zuckerberg would send me some shared of Facebook for sharing a status update.)

By simply daring to have an opinion and putting it out there and someone didn’t like it and decided to stop by to tell me I should just kill myself already (happened, more than once), I’m a total waste of cosmic space.

I recently wrote about why I bother to continue writing when I occasionally get metric fucktons of shit for the stuff that comes out of my keyboard.. Mostly, it’s because I can’t not write.

But the woman powering this blog of eight years has a bit of a self-esteem problem.

A bit. Not as much as I used to. But today, let me take you on a journey that shares a bit more about me than anyone who’s followed this blog for three or eight years has probably ever known — because it’s all the reason why there’s a part of me that will always believe I’m a piece of shit.

I grew up on comedy. Red Skelton, Bob Hope, and when I was old enough (or rather, when we got cable), Steve Martin, Robin Williams, Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor (holy hell, only when my parents weren’t home), and Eddie Murphy.

I grew up surrounded by people laughing at people who made us laugh…at other people.

And let’s be honest — some people are laugh-atable. Yes, that’s a word.

And the thing I’ve always wanted most was to make people laugh because there’s nothing I liked more about growing up than the sheer delight of laughing at these amazing stand up comedy specials.

You’ll be hard pressed to convince me, though, that great comedy comes from a place other than great pain.

So to find comedy, you start looking in the darkest places — the places where the things people don’t talk about live.

Like your heart and soul.

Because on top of much humor coming from the depths of darkness, we’re taught from an early age how to not take a compliment.

That self-deprecation is a desirable trait.

And today, there’s still amazing humor that comes from watching a master comedian, screenwriter, or playwright take us on a journey where Everyman or Everywoman struggles against their greatest enemy: their own selves.

So now, we’ve got a passport filled with stamps from The Dark Places of the Heart and Soul coupled with a Master’s Degree in Self-Deprecation.

This is how I lived for 30-some-odd years. Finding the humor in the shit no one wanted to talk about, about others and occasionally, about myself.

We laugh at the mentally ill person on the subway. We ignore the homeless person asking for money. We cackle and share the images from People of Walmart (no link provided for a reason).

Because we’re better. And it’s easier to laugh than it is to admit that if we didn’t find a way to laugh, we’d drop a live toaster into a full bathtub and scrub-a-dub-zap. We have to convince ourselves we’re better and that we made it out of somewhere these other people didn’t make it out of.

All these years, I’ve played around with different ways to laugh and what I laugh at.

And 43 years later, I’ve found what makes me laugh the most: the person I used to be and the person I struggle to become.

And that’s why a part of me will always think I’m a piece of shit.

When you spend a life in pursuit of laughter, you find some dark-ass shit along the way. And some of that dark-ass shit belongs to you.

Because Fuck You, Yoga. It’s funny because it happened and there’s a part of me that thinks no one but a piece of shit could lose two yoga mats in four hours. It’s funny because I think of everything that had to go wrong in order for it to be possible to even tell that story.

It’s funny because it’s human and it’s my dark-ass shit and if I couldn’t laugh about it, I would cry and everyone loves a crier.

We’ve all got some dark-ass shit floating around in our lives.

The problem with the dark-ass shit, though is that most days, I think I’m the only one who has it. That I’m the only one who’s fucked up. That I’m the only one who’s lost something, missed something, almost had something, been hurt by someone, and otherwise ended up on the ass-end of the universe’s pogo stick.

And when we start to feel alone in our dark-ass shit, we start to think that we’re a piece of shit. Unworthy of good. Unworthy of kindness. Unworthy of love. Unworthy of happiness.

And so, we keep laughing (if we can).

And at 43 years, I’ll tell you how I get through the darkness of those piece of shit days:

I look at who I was five years ago and ask myself who I like better — me today or me then.

The answer is always, without fail, me today.

Because me today has been through some dark-ass shit and has lived to tell the tale.

Me today has succeeded more than she’s fucked up (evidenced by my ability to write this blog post my damn self instead of sending you a message from the great beyond, post-toaster-and-tub incident).

Me today fell enough in love with herself that she found a man who fell in love with her brand of weird. We live in weird together because he’s a weird-ass dude with some dark-ass shit of his own. Every now and then, we bump into one another’s dark-ass shit and we deal with it. Together.

And what I like to think is that the people who have stuck around this joint all this time have journeyed through their own dark-ass shit. We’re kind of a collective filled with assorted and sundry types of dark-ass shit.

And this place, it’s a safe place for you — and me — to lose our shit. And I know I write using a lot of “ands” and it gives me a great level of anxiety sometimes which is totally fucking weird because who sits there at their dining room table at 8:14am and worries about how many fucking “ands” they’re using and where?

Me. That’s who.

So — yes. There is always a part of me that will think I’m a bit of a piece of shit.

But I’m not as big a piece of shit as I used to be — back when I wrote at the expense of others, powered by anger and needing to shove others down in order to raise myself up.

And for anyone who misses that version of my piece of shit self — that’s what the unsubscribe button is for.

This place — it’s a nice place to lose our shit, together. And your dark-ass shit is always safe with me.

Why Part of Me Will Always Believe I’m a Piece of Shit
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or for the SFW crowd

Why Part of Me Hasn’t Fallen in Love with the Rest of Me (and probably never will)
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