Wow, No Thank You.

by Samantha Irby

This book is dedicated to Wellbutrin.

If I’ve put on a real bra and you pick up the phone to tell me some shit about a headache, I’ll meet you at the club with some Excedrin, bitch.

Everyone thinks I’m going to eventually die of a heart attack, but joke’s on y’all—it’s definitely going to be of secondhand embarrassment.

When is the last time an actual human interaction made you laugh more than a meme did?

And you shouldn’t feel bad for even a second for blocking that hoe and throwing her a funeral in your heart.

Apple put this new Screen Time feature on the iPhone that’s supposed to, I don’t know, shame me into putting down the drug they won’t stop peddling to me. Every time I get that notice, I take it as a challenge to spend even more time messing around on my phone. Only one hour and thirty-seven minutes of Social Networking yesterday, you say? Let me put down this informative book I was reading and try to top that.

“World Falls,” Indigo Girls (live version) What do you mean, you’re “surprised I ended up with a lady”?

First of all, why you would ask a man anything is beyond me. Also, accepting his assessment of an album meant for hyperemotional girls twenty years after it came out is bullshit. Why does he care? Was “Hand in My Pocket” even written for him?!

Rid of Me changed something in me. Yes, I tend toward the hyperbolic, but Polly Jean thrashing on her guitar while caterwauling about sex in this super-raw way seriously cracked something open inside my most shame-filled places.

I do not knock on Fiona’s door when I’m trying to have an upbeat good time; I am coming to her with the shattered pieces of my heart in my hands, setting the pointy shards at her feet, and lying very still until she stomps on them with her words. The urgency with which she growls “you’re all I need” is so visceral and great, and I have never spoken to anything that wasn’t shaped like a burrito with such fervor in my life.

“It’s Oh So Quiet,” Björk The video for this is maybe the most impactful thing I watched during my years as a sensitive teen. Okay, fine, this and My So-Called Life. They both still hold up.

My lady and I aren’t friends with any young couples because I don’t want to have to learn what the fuck “no cap” means. I want to eat my sensibly balanced meals and spend my days listening to jangly guitar music that came out in the years before I graduated high school.

I know being in love fills us with a blinding false optimism, but listen to me: he will not change. I didn’t! As a matter of fact, all my bad behavior is heightened, because where is this bitch I’m married to gonna go? She’s stuck with me now.

Back when I had feelings, my self-esteem was a toilet. It caused me actual physical pain to know that someone didn’t like me. I mean, it still does, but I’m better insulated by drugs these days.

A handy trick is to think long and hard about what the person who hates you would realistically add to your life if they were to actually be a part of it. Most people really do have absolutely nothing to offer you.

“Settling” is a coarse way of saying “adjusting my expectations,” and I think that gets a bad rap. Dude, I would rather settle than be “chronically unfulfilled due to my outsize desires.”

Am I ever going to stop writing the horror movie I have been starring in since the day I was born?

I guess what I’m actually saying is that, sure, I move this body around every day but I’m not actually in charge of it, and I have no idea and no control over anything that happens within it.

Twenty-eight years of a contentious relationship with my uterus had been long enough to come to terms with the fact that neither of us was going to change and maybe a conscious uncoupling would do us both a world of good.

hysteroscope (that’s going to be the name of my submarine when I start my own navy)

Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever wept openly while listening to Tori Amos?

Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever unboxed a bunch of shit you don’t need from Amazon, broken down the box, and gotten all that unnecessary plastic that came with it into the dumpster before your wife got home from work?

Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever cared very deeply for someone you never want to have sex with?

Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever cut a toxic bitch right out of your life?

Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever texted your lady to bring you something upstairs when she was downstairs?

Then when my hair is washed and my scalp is glistening and flake-free for five minutes, which of the 132 bottles of styling products crammed underneath my sink is the nourishing, hydrating, frizz-controlling, root-covering, volumizing, texturizing, smoothing, sculpting, shine-enhancing, color-protecting, moisturizing finishing gel-spray mousse-foam that is going to get my shit looking together?

Let’s talk about glowing skin. I don’t drink water and my blood type is pizza, but my skin looks good from a distance, mostly because I put three different oils on it and occasionally rinse off my blush before bed.

I try to wear fashionable glasses and that shit is expensive? But worth it. Because of them, people will decide you are cool, before you open your mouth and shatter their illusion.

Honestly, something could have crawled in and died in there, but I never push the issue because (1) TRULY, what is more disgusting than talking to another person about your “excessive wax,” but also (2) I feel like every medical professional I talk to is two degrees from saying “you’re too fat” no matter what you’ve made an appointment for them to check. I don’t know the correlation between gummy ears and weight, but if you give a doctor enough latitude, they will find one.

I mean, there are multiple times during the day when I can actively feel my body dying (sitting on the side of the bed after I first wake up in the morning, checking my text messages at literally any point during the day, when I accidentally catch the evening news), and if there is a cream strong enough to counteract the existential dread woven through every cell in my body, I’d buy it.

Get arm definition lifting a coffee cup.

I used to be young and optimistic and willing to shave hours off my sleep time and devote them to the preservation of my corporeal form, but now I enjoy “reading” and “lying very still not doing anything.”

I got a Brazilian exactly one time, in a cramped and overheated room in the back of an Ulta in Skokie, Illinois, and I involuntarily shit on the table when the woman yanked a giant strip of hot wax and cotton off my taint. What a fucking legend—she didn’t even flinch, just wiped it up and handed me a giant wet nap, then went back to work while I chewed a handful of Advil, dry.

The most I’ve ever been asked to do before fucking a woman is shoo the cat off the bed beforehand,

Loving yourself is a full-time job with shitty benefits. I’m calling in sick.

I am a blue-state city slicker to my very core, content to ignore the outside world in favor of convenience apps and cable television.

I am a black lady with a white wife in a Red state, and I can’t be sure that bro with the backward visor (LOL, WHY?) isn’t about to start some shit with me just because I have the nerve to show my face in public.

I mean, I talk a lot of shit and everything, but I’m a doughy creative, and I live with a lady who cans her own pickles and can’t fight. I can’t be out here defending the mainstream media against people wearing homemade “Lock Her Up” T-shirts. I mean, we just put a canoe rack on our Honda.

There’s a lot of basic shit I absolutely DO NOT KNOW as I uncomfortably masquerade through life in the body of a human adult and the brain of one of the aliens from Earth Girls Are Easy.

I thought HVAC was a slang term for a badass, like HBIC

The morning after my cat Helen was euthanized, I was in the kitchen performing some well-deserved self-care by making myself a delicious and nourishing meal (microwaving something from the Hot Pockets family of products) while drinking a diet water and minding my own fucking business,

Could a pair of my moldy underpants that had accidentally fallen behind the hamper and been lodged there for days be the cause of the fish-market smell wafting from my bedroom? Of course! But is it also completely plausible that it might be the stench left behind by a rancid cat ghost? Absolutely.

I’m not really religious and I am ambivalent about church except for the music, of which I have many secret playlists that I listen to on the regular, but I also don’t like to mess with “the devil.” I mean, he’s definitely not real, but just in case? I’m not fucking with a Ouija board or pretending to cast spells I don’t actually understand. I do believe ghosts can be real, especially because I have very little tolerance for “science” and like to leave inexplicable things unexplained. Life is just sexier and more mysterious when the flickering lights could be a poltergeist rather than a fluctuation in voltage or a loose cord.

I’m sorry, what? First of all, am I dumb? Don’t answer that. Did I ever, at any point in my miserable existence, learn how to solve this problem? The kid, a girl, didn’t even ask me to help; I just happened to glance down over her shoulder as I was walking by huffing a marker and making paper airplanes out of all my letters from the IRS, then walked right into the wall because I was so confounded by her homework.

Sometimes I think to myself, “What do I miss about my old life?” And you know what? It’s not hot dates or anonymous doggy-style sex. It’s refined carbohydrates. It’s mouth sex with a cookie I didn’t have to bake.

I am self-conscious, and I hate for anyone to be watching me, and kids notice every-fucking-thing. I don’t need these young, impressionable people out in the world quoting Mike Epps’s stand-up and saying “bitch” all the time, which are two things I very much enjoy doing, especially while talking on the phone to all my old bitches back home.

What kind of role model am I if I literally show them how you can watch TV all day and still occasionally make money and contribute to society? Or that it really doesn’t matter if you eat dessert before dinner? I’m nice to the animals and I have a lot of fun gadgets, but I listen to the classic rock station in the car instead of NPR. Am I a bad influence? I have a lot of plastic soap bottles in the shower, and I don’t always remember to compost my banana peels and eggs. Will this negatively affect the futures of two youths who don’t even know my middle name?

I am a high-functioning depressed and anxious person. I know it can manifest in myriad ways, but mine are these: (1) extreme inertia, but never at the expense of my employment, so mostly bailing on friends who want to hang out and feeling extremely apathetic toward doing “fun” things that aren’t lying very still; (2) self-soothing with food, though never in shocking amounts, mostly just staring into the void while eating ice cream over the sink, then realizing, “oops, the pint is finished”; (3) fear of trying new things or venturing out of a comfort zone, clinging to childhood demons as a means of never actually having to move forward; (4) blistering resentment for the outwardly happy and seemingly well-adjusted.

“Food is a temporary solution, but to a person with Crohn’s, it can be a dangerous one.” Doesn’t that sound like the first line of a future documentary I’m making about the time I almost fatally overdosed on garlic bread?

The only screenwriting experience I had was the pilot I had cowritten for my own optioned book, which ended up being flushed down a FOX toilet with a runaway alien from The X-Files and several unaired episodes of 24, so I was incredibly flattered and 100 percent positive that I was grossly unqualified for this job that I was absolutely going to accept. I’m not going to let a little thing like having absolutely no fucking idea what the fuck I’m doing get in the way of possibly getting a coffee enema at the same spa a Real Beverly Hills Housewife goes to; my threadbare yoga pants and I were getting on that plane no matter what.