LAUGH IT OFF

2 years ago, I was hospitalised for severe migraine. I was in so much pain that I couldn’t keep my eyes open and two shots of painkillers in the E.R. couldn’t take care of it. After a night of confinement, finally, the diagnosis.

Doctor: The good news is there’s nothing wrong with your brain structurally. But, functionally, obviously, there is.

Me: Am I crazy?

The doctor quickly said that I was perfectly normal; it’s just that my head decided to throw a fit that day for some reason (migraine is still a bit of a blackhole to doctors and research). 

When I got out, friends asked me about the ordeal. My response (almost verbatim): 

Well, I was a human pincushion for 3 days and 2 nights with 3 needles stuck in me — one of them 1.25 inches long. Going through an MRI must be what it’s like in the Millennium Falcon in the middle of an intergalactic battle. Also, Moves Like Jagger and Party Rock Anthem are the worst songs to have in your ears when you’re in this big cylindrical machine and you’re not supposed to move an inch. Do you know how hard it is to not move anything, even your toes, when those songs play? I was the epitome of self-control. And they moved me around in a wheelchair and I felt like Professor X. But the doctor says I’m not crazy and I don’t have a brain tumor. Yey!

Most were torn between dismay and giggles. Dorky, but to this day, it still gets laughs.

What I don’t tell many is that though I made light of the situation, I was afraid. My relief when the doctor told me that it was nothing life-threatening and I just needed rest was indescribable. I really had imagined brain tumors and aneurysms. For some time, I continued to fear that maybe I was so physiologically weak that my brain couldn’t withstand stressful situations. My thoughts were riddled with questions of whether or not I am fit to function in a world where success is synonymous with a ton of mental and physical work. What have I done to myself? Am I out of the running to be the woman that I wanted to become? Gladly, I wasn’t.

I guess anyone who’s gone through crappy times has felt that way. On days when you deliver, it’s easy to be light and cheerful. Things, after all, are going your way. Your hard work is paying off and before your eyes is proof of that. But once you fall short of your standards, when things don’t work out in spite of your effort, and you’re blindsided, then what?

A few years back, I easily fell prey to turning inwards and castigating myself (perhaps that’s why my brain decided to mimic an explosion). You could’ve done more, blah blah blah. Shoulda, woulda, coulda. A very familiar speech for anyone, I daresay. It sticks because, somehow, it assuages the fear of repeating the same mistakes in the future; and there’s something oddly satisfying about finding fault in yourself, like doing it lets you have control over a situation that suddenly is out of your hands. There’s something oddly satisfying about wallowing. Period.

And then growing up taught me that there will always be mistakes, big and small, waiting to be made. Failing an exam, buying a dress now that would be on sale days later, sending an embarrassing text message to the wrong person, investing in a guy who’ll turn out to be yet another Mr. Wrong. And career? The countless booboos there will rub it in anyone’s face that picking on yourself is the worst way to respond to mistakes if you don’t want to rush headlong into a wall.

Eventually, I found it quite exhausting to have an inner voice that seemed only to exist to either reproach me or keep me stuck in gloom. At some point, I was so spent that I snapped and said, “Screw it. I’m done with this.”

The choice was easy, but the implementation quite tricky. I had to learn how to laugh at myself and see things as misadventures instead of blunders. It was a precarious balance to be struck between my natural tendency to be serious; personal standards that, admittedly, are high (thank you, Jesuit education, for enriching/making my life harder with magis); and the awareness that nobody can inflict distress on me more effectively than myself. I am my own worse enemy. If I stumble, the first person who has to forgive myself is me. If others hurt me, I have to be the one to tell myself to shake it off.

It’s not always automatic. Hence the need to consciously activate “don’t take yourself seriously” mode. Some things really do hit close to home (e.g. loved ones inadvertently trampling on your feelings and ego). Those deserve a good sulk and take time. Luckily, time —  from a few seconds to a couple of decades — heals all wounds, and these things eventually do become funny.

With the help of smart people like Tina Fey, Mindy Kaling, my family and dearest friends, my life now is one big joke. Kidding. More like a sitcom with one character as the topic of all the punchlines: me. I write the jokes and my sole responsibility is to try to laugh at all of them, even if others don’t. 

They constantly say that you are responsible for your own happiness. I’d like to think that this is me doing that, albeit in a more literal way. If all goes well, then it’ll set me on my way to being someone who moves through every day with a disposition so at ease with the ups and downs of life that she is made fearless.

And it seems like Madeleine L’Engle agrees:

“Only when we take ourselves lightly can we take ourselves seriously, so that we are given the courage to say, ‘Yes! I dare disturb the universe.’” 

P.S. Current read: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling. Get a copy and read it. Laugh out loud and incredibly witty.