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

by Chelsea Handler

Did I ever care? The answer is yes. There was a time when all of this mattered to me. There was a time when being famous and having this kind of success and money and having a TV show was what drove me to want more and more and more, and now I found myself exhausted and ashamed by the meaninglessness of it all.

I had become exactly what I’d always wanted to be—an elitist.

I also have the Trump family to thank for my newfound love of vaping and edibles. I had to get stoned to watch the news because alcohol and outrage don’t mix well—a hat on a hat.

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.

Meditation seems to work for some people, while medication works for others, which explains why it’s very difficult for me to sit still with my eyes closed for any length of time without Rohypnol.

I’m not into rocks and crystals and chakras and healers…I just think everyone is looking for something, and it seems like some people will settle on the first ray of sun or glimmer of hope they bump into.

When you are born into this world, you experience one of the three reactions, which sets up your disposition in life. In the Enneagram model, the reactions are located in the head, heart, and gut. Dan and his fellow researchers developed their own model, translating those three areas of the body to emotional states: fear (head), sadness (heart), and anger (gut).

“It’s the ‘everything is a possibility’ phase that I live for. I don’t ever want another person making the decisions about where I go or what I do, or to be sent down a particular runway I haven’t approved. I want to change runways all the time, and I don’t like answering to others. I don’t like feeling trapped, or having to get approval to go on a trip from anyone. I want to do what I want to do when I want to do it. I’m completely fucking spoiled.”

The people who live in sadness tend to be depressives and can struggle with that their entire lives. They typically have huge amounts of empathy for others. These people also tend to love animals more than the average person loves animals. They are sensitive to others and are typically great listeners, but again, they can also have serious issues with depression.

“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.”

Often we think we are showing up for someone, when really all we’re doing is showing everyone how great we are at showing up.

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.

I once walked into our summer house on a rainy day with a six-pack of Heineken that my friend and I stole from her parents’ fridge. “We’re going to try beer,” I told my mom, who just rolled her eyes, and went back to crocheting my father a sweater. I was ten.

Death is agony. There is simply no other way to describe it. It is getting the wind knocked out of you over and over again, and just when you think you have enough strength to take a deep breath, it knocks you down again. There is no break from the pain. It is arduous, unyielding.

I remember waking up in the morning and thinking that all deaths should happen in the daylight. All bad news should come in the morning. That way, you have the whole day to get used to your new reality, so that the first daylight you see after death doesn’t feel like a plane nosediving into the ocean with the damage becoming worse the deeper into the sea you go. In death, the aftermath is worse than the crash.

No one being home was better than anyone being home.

That’s the great thing about Molly: she knows I’m right about the things that get me in the gut. If I want to give a stranger $10,000 and she thinks they’re going to spend it on crack—just because I met that person in a crack den—I will defer to Molly. She’ll say something along the lines of, “Let’s sleep on that, and if you still feel that way in the morning, then we’ll do it and you’ll have my full support.” That means no.

I had to leave my parents to love them again. I had to move across the country to appreciate that I actually had any pull toward them—that I needed them. I had to get away from them in order to come back to them. I’d like to say that they did the best that they could, but that couldn’t have been their best. I wasn’t doing my best either, so the idea that everyone is always doing the best they can is a trope. Some people are just interested in surviving; doing their best doesn’t even occur to them.

I would never drink the type of vodka my dad would purchase, because he knew nothing about vodka, but I do remember that’s when I started loving my father again. My parents rarely drank, so for them to go to a liquor store and buy alcohol meant they had been paying attention after all. Separating my carbs from protein was the icing on the cake. They were back.

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.

Much to my dismay, I’ve seen this woman heat up orange juice. She is an enemy of ice, and therefore—in my opinion—an enemy of the state.

That’s what death is like, though. You can’t only cry for two weeks straight. You cry, and then you get tired of crying, and someone says something, and then you’re all laughing, and then it feels bad to be laughing, but it also feels so good. Without the laughter, we’d all be dying too.

“You identify the internal emotion you are feeling when something upsets you or doesn’t go your way. You stop, take a breath, and become aware of it. Then you simply modify your behavior—and/or your reaction. You may find that after you give it some space, you may not want to react at all.”

Intimacy to me always feels like it occupies a narrow space between honesty and being horny. I don’t conflate sex with intimacy. Intimacy implies trust, and if trust is broken, then the intimacy was never real to begin with. So, in my experience, there’s false intimacy and then there’s the other one, which is the best feeling in the universe, and it’s not just about being in love with someone you’re attracted to—it’s the feeling of someone who sees you and loves you right back. The way you don’t have to wear a hat for your best friends and family.”

“Feet are tricky. That’s why I like to lead with them. When I meet a guy I like, I take out a foot and show him what he’ll be dealing with if things go any further. Put your worst foot forward. That’s how I like to start a conversation.

To know I’m going through something and not try to keep circling around it hoping to avoid going through it. Sitting, and experiencing, and feeling, and not running. To understand that things take time, and to be okay sitting with my pain. To understand the only way through something is through it. Not to rush through life hopscotching over or around it. No one is fully cooked. No person is complete.

I’ve learned that many people are just bridges to someone else. Some people become bridges that you take back and forth to get back to yourself. That’s how I interpret self-defining relationships.

Don’t let other people decide what kind of mood you’re going to be in. Don’t let anyone change your life in one day. Don’t let death take you down and keep you down. Go down, but get back up. If we don’t give in to our despair—and instead lock it away—we fail to properly mourn the people we love. How on earth are we honoring the very people we are grieving if we fail to mourn them fully? We should be celebrating the people we’ve lost. I missed thirty years of celebrating my brother.

I learned that adventure is never bad, but the alacrity with which you go through life has an impact on the wisdom that life has to offer you. That slowing down doesn’t mean you have to do less. It means you have to pay attention more and catch what the world is throwing at you. That every situation you put yourself in deserves your full attention, and that each of us has a responsibility to be more aware of ourselves and of others.