Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and You Too!

by Chelsea Handler

I realized that I’d made a career of over-hydrating people with my honesty, yet I was being dishonest with myself, which left me operating in a deficit of truth.

Now that I was aware of this situation, I would have to do something about it. I couldn’t carry on the way I had been carrying on, just coasting and cashing checks for essentially being a loudmouth.

On the subject of ice—once we sort out this Donald Trump situation, I would like my social activism to focus solely on the integrity of ice.

there is an appropriate amount of ice as well. It’s called, Whatever you’re thinking—double it. If you’ve ever been to Europe, then you know what I’m talking about.

Mary knows more than I do regarding just about everything (unless of course I tell her about something—like a diet—that she dismisses and then finds out about it months later from another friend and tells me about it like I wasn’t the one who told her about it in the first place), so more often than not, I defer to her, and I had to accept these musings as cold, hard facts.

My thoughts were as follows: marine life = sea life, Marines = water army.

“it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.”

My dad used to tell me that there was always one line in every book that summed up the entire book. He also said that even if you don’t understand everything you’re reading in an article or a book, or even hearing in a conversation, try to take one piece of information away from it—that way you’ve left with something new to add to your brain.

Real generosity is also showing up when you don’t feel like it—sacrificing your own happiness in exchange for someone else’s.

I never had to care about the state of the world before. The world was a vague thought and a whimsical fancy—that was for the adults. I thought that by traveling to so many different countries, I was doing my due diligence, that by edifying myself with other cultures, and sharing my experiences on camera and on my show, I was somehow making a worthy contribution to society. America wasn’t a problem. There was no problem. We had elected a black president. Racism and feminism were fights we had already won. America was being handled by people smarter and more skilled in politics, and they took care of this stuff so that people like me could live the American dream and remain blissfully ill-informed. I had spent my adulthood on a cigarette boat going a hundred miles per hour, and now I felt like I had somehow become marooned on one of those terrible all-inclusive Carnival cruise ships.

Time speeds up as it goes by. Someone explained to me that there is a mathematical reason for this: as you age, each year becomes a smaller percentage of the life you have already lived.

This may be why I now feel an urgency to know more, to do more, to be more.

Do I have the conviction to examine myself unflinchingly, to reveal the good and the bad, the ugly and the beautiful? The answer is yes. I have a lot to be embarrassed about, and I intend to advertise it.

I wanted to break my pattern of ending friendships and relationships on a dime because someone did something that I found unforgivable. I would go to the mat for my friends, and sometimes for people I barely knew, and when it came time for them to return the favor or defend me, and they weren’t capable of the same bullish determination I had shown them, the earth became scorched, and I wrote them off forever. Everything with me had always been black and white. Life or death. I wanted more gray. I wanted to learn how to forgive.

At this point in my life, I didn’t know if anything I was saying was true or if I had manufactured all these thoughts to protect myself—I’m assuming it’s the latter, but the truth of the matter is when it comes to men, I haven’t been that impressed with my choices.

There’s too much to see, too many books I haven’t read, and too many people that need help. I do feel grateful.

“All the eights said that their hidden secret is that eights lack empathy,” Dan said. Lack of empathy. Huh. “Like a Republican?”

“Sympathy is feeling bad for someone or for their situation. Sympathy is more like pity. Empathy is imagining what it’s like to be in that person’s shoes. Thinking about what it feels like to be another person and the understanding that their experiences and outlooks may have been unlike your own. Actually, thinking about what it’s like to be them.”

Even if it’s a theory or a little astrology- or numerology-adjacent, if it rings true with you, then it is true to you, and that’s really all anyone needs in order to forge ahead and improve themselves.

Some people are just interested in surviving; doing their best doesn’t even occur to them.

You would have to be young and stupid to believe that you are going to move to Los Angeles to become famous, which is exactly what it takes to achieve a fantasy—youth and stupidity.

What a power to have to set the tone for an entire room. What a burden. To have that kind of power means you are responsible for every mood in the room. If everyone is scared of you, then you are the one in charge.

No person is just one thing.

He would always tell me I looked too skinny, which was silly because I’ve never been too skinny no matter which eating disorder I was testing out.

I don’t know if it was the best he could do, but I also don’t know that it wasn’t.

No person is just one thing. People can be filled with light and affection and also be tortured and conniving and dishonest. Happiness can coincide with great pain. One can lead while also following, the same way one can follow while also leading.

I define me. No event or person does this. I define me. I decide who I am and how I’m going to behave, and I choose to be better. To look more carefully, to trudge deeper. To think about other people’s pasts and not judge someone for doing or handling something differently than I would. To understand my limitations, my shortcomings—that is my growth edge.

For the record, I would like to state that never in the history of humankind has a woman been told to calm down and then calmed down. We don’t like that.

Whenever I have trouble standing up for myself (it’s happened), I think about whether I would tolerate the situation if it were happening to one of my sisters, mother, daughter, or niece. If it’s not acceptable for them, it’s not acceptable for me.

Only a sister knows how to comfort a sister. Period. End of story. Men can give us a hug or pat us on the back, but only a girl will get another girl off her feet to face the rain. That is the definition of sisters. There exists between us an ineffable understanding. We don’t have to ask why or how or when. We just go in.

That’s how I felt about myself. Getting better, but not quite ready.