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

by Chelsea Handler

opened up my sliding glass doors, grabbed my vape pen, and turned on some Neil Young. I lay on my bed in the dark, watching the wind blow my bedroom drapes around, hearing the ruffling of the leaves, and watching the lanterns that hang from my backyard trees swinging into each other, thinking, If there’s an electrical fire, I hope the dogs will at least bark to wake me up, but overall, my thought was: This is fucking awesome. This is exactly what I’d hoped adulthood would be. No kids, no husband, no responsibilities—just a TV show on Netflix and whatever else I felt like doing, whenever I felt like doing it. Not trapped, not stuck, not dependent on a single person but myself—free to be you and me. I couldn’t believe how lucky my life had turned out, how many of my dreams had come true, and also my good fortune in being alive during this time in history—the year we were going to elect our first female president.

have the Trump family and their horrifying personalities and veneers to thank for my midlife crisis.

Although, if I’m being honest, at that point in time—or at any other time during the entire Trump presidency—I would have preferred an actual rock.

I couldn’t carry on the way I had been carrying on, just coasting and cashing checks for essentially being a loudmouth. I took another hit of my vape.

feel strongly that everybody needs to get on the same page with ice. It’s an international issue, and there aren’t enough people taking it seriously.

Cocktails should be cold. Cubes. Plural. Not the rapper.

The only thing I knew about Marines was that they had a strong relationship with water—which, it turns out, they don’t. That’s the Navy. My thoughts were as follows: marine life = sea life, Marines = water army.

Theyre not?

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.

I have a lot to be embarrassed about, and I intend to advertise it.

least Tom Cruise is a good front man for Scientology, because he seems nice, even though he’s obviously out of his fucking tree.

I could handle anything. I was tough. It never occurred to me to wonder why I had heard so many times that people were scared of me.

For the record, my shower is very complicated, but I can only take a shower when my cleaning lady is home, which means we’ve showered together on multiple occasions.”

I’d like to learn how to make my point without yelling.”

gave him a skeptical look. When he asked me what I was thinking, I told him that this sounded very LA. “What do you mean?” he asked earnestly. “You know…I mean, are people really holding on to their births all these years later? I just find that a little hard to believe. Now people are going to be pissed about being born? It’s a little much, no?” He cocked his head to the side, and I didn’t know if it was meant to challenge me, or if he was sincerely confused by my Los Angeles reference. “I just have a hard time comprehending why rehashing the past repeatedly, time and time again, is beneficial to people who just need to get up and move the fuck on. Get over it. There are people being blown out of their homes in Syria. We have a president who is rolling back women’s rights, and innocent black men are getting shot and killed by police officers every day. Get out of your own asshole, and look around.”

I have seen how it has helped a lot of people to understand themselves and the people they love in a deeper way.

He went on to tell me that this default zone is the place you revert to when you feel uncomfortable, or nervous, or when things don’t turn out the way they were supposed to. 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).

What I grew to learn was that Dan didn’t want me to talk around my anger and pretend it was all about Donald Trump. What Donald Trump represented to me were things being out of control, and when things became unhinged, I became angry because that was my default zone.

Until I read Rebecca Solnit and James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates I had no idea how many women are beaten and raped every second in this world or what it means to grow up as a black person, or any person of color, in this country we call ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave.’ What is wrong with me? How could I be so self-absorbed?”

“Obviously, there are other factors, such as nature and nurture, along with all of the events that happen throughout your early childhood and throughout your life that will shape who you become as a person,” he said. “But that anger, sadness, or fear will remain deep in your subconscious, and will dictate how you react to things in your life that don’t go as planned.”

don’t like constraints or restrictions of any kind. I don’t like feeling boxed in. A one-on-one beach holiday with someone of the opposite sex is something I’d like to avoid at all costs. I’d rather be alone.”

“Do you think that you’re running from something?” “I don’t know, because that’s how I’ve always gone through life,” I told him. “I get sick of people, places, jobs, things. I’m always looking for newness. Something fresh, someone new, a stranger, the unknown.”

He told me that people whose default is fear tend to second-guess everything they do. They tend to be indecisive, and many end up leading very safe lives. They are not interested in risk or adventure—they are interested in sameness and security. They are people who typically do not switch careers midlife or go skydiving or take great risks. They are also conflict-averse.

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.

“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.”

But mostly everything and everyone, at some point, ends up annoying me. And now I know why. I’m not thinking about them. I have gone through life failing to understand why people have different reactions to things than I do.

METANOIA Metanoia. Noun. A profound transformation in one’s outlook. USAGE: “You’ll need to rethink everything. Here you’ll need to resort to old-style metanoia, to radical rethinking and alteration.” —Alois Brandstetter, The Abbey (Ariadne Press, 1998) Finding out I lacked empathy was my metanoia. I

After thirty years of bottling up the deepest injury of my life, I was ready for someone to feel sorry for me.

Chet was a man the day he was born. My dad seemed like a boy who got big.

Then he tucked me in bed—wide-awake, with my eyes closed—and turned the fan that was sitting on my nightstand to high. He was the only person in my family who understood that I was born going through menopause, and that whenever I ate soup, I had to take my top off. He always made me feel like precious cargo.

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 liked attention, but I didn’t like this kind of attention. I didn’t want pity. It was weak. My father was being weak. I remember that the word “professional” kept popping into my brain—my father was being unprofessional. How on earth was I going to be able to restore any dignity to this family I was born into? Now we were outcasts and we were victims. I could deal with being outcasts because I had Chet. He was never an outcast. Everyone loved Chet. My dad was an outcast, and now he was acting like a victim. He was making victims out of all of us. I stared at him hard with my eyes. Stop this. You’re making a spectacle of us.

From that day onward, if I saw my mother crying or heard my parents groaning in anguish in their bedroom in the early hours of the morning, I would leave the house and get on my bike. I would ride my bike for hours and cry, but I would not allow myself to cry in front of anyone else or show any weakness. I would not talk about my brother to my family. If his name came up, I left the room and went for a bike ride. I would ride and ride and cry and cry and then walk back in the front door numb, hoping no one was there. No one being home was better than anyone being home.

When I mustered up the courage, with every kind of fear pulsating through my body for having defied him, I looked back and saw he had gone inside.

I haven’t had a bowl of cereal since that night in the kitchen with my brother. My brothers and sisters continued eating cereal all the time growing up. I didn’t understand that—how they could do something that Chet loved so much, knowing what we knew.

That not everyone has your history or your past.

When the rescue presented Tammy to us, they had placed a little pink bow in each ear—the full-bodied ear and the limp one. She looked like a harlot. Once we got her in the car on our way home, we removed those embarrassing gender labels from her ears and got down to business.

How can it be that a swab of saliva can determine a dog’s genetic heritage yet there isn’t a more precise way to determine the age of a dog at this juncture in modern society?

She would immediately stiffen up, with her legs outstretched as if she were standing—making her look stuffed. She was a taxidermist’s dream.