I'm Fine...And Other Lies

I had to find the courage to start saying no to things I didn't want to do because once you turn thirty, pretending starts taking a toll on your immune system. I had to learn how to say no to others and yes to myself, and today I no longer feel ashamed for not being "fun" and being down for every draining activity I'm asked to do. I'm no longer terrified I'll be judged, abandoned, rejected, or left out. And if I am, good. Turns out it's kind of my dream to be left out of doing things I don't want to do. What this means is that unless your invite involves cheese, Netflix, Mexican wrestling, Moscow mules, or actual mules, chances are, in the words of Randy Jackson, "That's gonna be a no for me, dog.

My definition of ‘love’ is being willing to die for someone who you yourself want to kill. That, in my experience, is kind of the deal.

I had always thought crying was a sing of failure. In our culture we're made to feel ashmed of showing our feelinngs, of being vulnerable. If a woman cries, she's crazy, emotional, has PMS, or whatever the most current pejorative dismissive term is.

My dad showed me that it's my responsibility to provide my own joy, and that every moment is a chance to find lightness.

Protecting people from the aftermath of their choices isn’t thoughtful or benevolent; it just takes away their ability to grow. The nicest thing that guy could have done was to let me suffer so I could become a stronger comic.

We're brainwashed with garbage idioms like "Big girls don't cry". Guys who "cry like a girl" are told to "man up". Or "she's crying like a baby", as if only babies cry, which makes no sense to me, given babies have the fewest problems out of all of us. They don't have mortgages or jury duty, and they get the fun end of the whole birthing situation. The mother is the one who is pushing and bleeding and tearing, and the baby basically just gets to jet down a water slide. I think the whole "crying like a baby" idiom should be reversed: what we should say about babies is "Jesus, that baby is crying like a grown-up!

Adults can’t be abandoned, Whitney. You have a car. You have a house. Adults can only abandon themselves. (Vera)

I chose people who made me feel anxious and insecure and re-created my childhood circumstances of getting erratic attention. I gravitated toward people who were either physically or emotionally unavailable to subconsciously ensure I was getting a constant hit from my “internal drug cabinet.” Instead of heroin or cocaine, I used to be addicted to cortisol and adrenaline (which turns into dopamine! Yay!). That drove me to pick people who couldn’t give me safety or stability, which caused those chemicals to go buck wild on my brain. You live in London? Yes, please. You work until three A.M., and when you are available, you’re super tired, so every time we have the chance to connect, your eyes are half closed? Sure, let’s move in together. One day you tell me you’re in love with me, but then you disappear and go on a week-long bender on Long Island? Absolutely. You travel for four months at a time in places that have horrible cell service? Don’t mind if I do marry ya.

I would fall in love with someone’s potential rather than with who they actually were. I’d walk in, find a guy who was smart and funny but a complete mess, and light up like a talent agent from the 1950s. I’d think to myself, “This kid’s gonna be a star!” I’d take on a guy the way Michelle Pfeiffer took on the punk-ass kids from Dangerous Minds, seeing the best in them and pushing them to be better. And also like Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds, I had to teach a couple of guys how to read. Of course, this dynamic caused my relationships to feel maternal, making my partner resent me and making sex feel like incest. To add insult to injury, I basically ended up coaching a guy to be the best he can be for the next girl who came along. To anyone dating my exes, you’re welcome for getting them together so you could have the perfect boyfriend. Love you, girl.

People always ask me how I got funny. The short answer is: I had to figure out a way to be liked. The long answer is more complicated because humor also developed as a survival mechanism to protect myself and disarm or intimidate people when I didn’t feel safe, to make fun of myself before other people could, to avoid having to feel sadness, or to mitigate the gravity of a situation because laughter was my anesthetic for pain. Also, my last name is Cummings, so as you can probably imagine, I had to learn to defend myself from insults pretty early on in life.

Although I love all dogs—and especially mixed alien weirdo street mutts (honestly, the fewer legs, the better)—in the last five years or so, I’ve gravitated toward pit bulls because they remind me of, well, me. They have big teeth, their menacing look tends to belie their mushy insides, and they very frequently break valuable things by accident.

Authenticity is a collection of choices we have to make every day. It’s about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.” As I told more and more people, I realized that (a) they didn’t really care because everyone is too busy dealing with their own emotional problems to care about my emotional problems and (b) most had struggled with similar issues and felt relieved and inspired that I could be vulnerable about mine. When this happened, my fear of judgment lost its power over me. Maybe the road to being a decent role model wasn’t about being emotionally perfect, maybe it was about finding the courage to admit that I wasn’t.

It just baffles me how badly evolution is bombing on the fertility front; it makes no sense that when I was the least equipped mentally and financially to have a kid, I was the most able to. I've said it once, and I'll say it again: Biology is a raging, sexist psychopath.

don’t ask for a light load, ask for a strong back.

I feel like being psychic might just be the natural result of what happens when you actually just listen to someone without being a distracted spaz plotting your next Instagram post during a conversation.

It’s always annoyed me that dogs are a “man’s best friend,” but diamonds are a “girl’s best friend.” This seems incredibly unfair. Men get awesome super cute pups and we get tiny sharp stones that just make people think we’re superficial and that we have to give back in a break-up? Diamonds have been a way better friend to men than they’ve been to women; they’re a great way to get laid and make an argument go away.

Children who grew up in hectic homes often end up feeling comfortable in crisis as adults

I developed the skill of actually giggling when I was uncomfortable, and you should see me at the gyno - it's a goddamn laugh riot.

I feel we’ve evolved into a society that prides expediency over accuracy, quantity over quality, decibel level over content.

Once on Ambien I emailed a lawyer and fired him even though he was not my lawyer.

Through [connection with your inner child] you honor the defense mechanisms you developed as a kid in order to survive your family system and start to deactivate them. Essentially, you start to parent yourself the way you wished you had been parented: with patience, sensitivity, forgiveness, and butter.

Today denial is without a doubt my greatest fear in life because I know how powerful and insidious it is. It's made me do terrible things to my body and has even been the fuel on the fire of wars, genocides, racism, and trends like drawn-on eyebrows....Denial is dangerous. Make sure you don't have it.

. . a 2010 study found that when people were shown incorrect information alongside a correction, the update failed to reverse their initial belief in the misinformation. Even worse, partisans who were motivated to believe the original incorrect information became even more firm in their belief in that information after reading a correction, the researchers found.

Like a guy calling you on the phone, this is something to file under THINGS YOU DON’T GET POINTS FOR. I did the same thing with men. I constantly gave points to men for things that should be filed under “the least you can do.” My girlfriends forced smiles when I announced, “He didn’t yell at me for checking luggage! Isn’t he amazing!?” Having a low bar is a lovely place to be for a while because everything that happens is a dazzling delight. Every day is like a surprise party. He didn’t cheat on me today? He’s the one. He’s not addicted to gang-bang porn? My knight in shining armor!

The truth is, there really was nobody I could call. If I’d had a functioning smartphone, I would have bombarded a bunch of people who couldn’t do much except show up and wait for other people to help me. Stressing my friends out would just stress me out more. The only people who could actually help me in this moment were complete strangers. Maybe

Recently it’s become cool to brag about how little sleep you got, how hard you work, how many pills you take, how often you’ve been sick. It seems the easier our lives are made by modern technology, the more people need to make up struggles for themselves. As recently as eighty years ago, and still today in many Third World countries, people really were sick pretty much all the time, and now that we finally have the means to be healthy, people seem to want to brag about being sick. I blame people who regram that stupid quote “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Whoever said that is either very stupid or had awesome painkillers.

I think it’s time we all reject the glamorization of tolerating pain. High heels, waist trainers, CrossFit, staying in painful relationships—these are all very masochistic. Yes, I know relationships technically take work, but I have a job, and unless a relationship is putting money into my 401(k), I can’t make working on it my main priority.

there’s nothing scarier to me than a group of men who go to the gym a lot, wear tight shirts, and are out enjoying a “boy’s night” fueled by vodka, Red Bull, and cologne from Walgreens.

I occasionally still feel my default wiring kicking in, telling me to mirror the people around me and give more energy than I have, but I can usually course-correct before I end up injured, engaged to a narcissist, or imprisoned in South America.