Let Them Eat Cake
Or, When It Hurts So Much You Laugh, and Vice Versa
There’s no such thing as a sad clown. There’s sadness in a clown, for sure, a clown can be sad, a clown can weep on stage for hours, and if they really mean it, a clown can make us cry by their crying, and even laugh by their crying. But they also have to embody joy when the moment calls for it, pure, unbridled joy, joy that has never been told No, joy that makes you, too, burst open at its vulnerability. And if that joy, or any other emotion, be it rage, shame, disgust, become muddied by any other—say, if that clown has a defensive mechanism to cover themselves in sadness that gets triggered any time they feel exposed (see: unsafe)—that clown has some work to do to unmuddy the message, that clown must bound over, through or around that deadening dead-end of sad to expand the colorful, shapeshifting language of rage, shame, disgust, etc., or they will never be understood and everyone will leave their show despairing that they spent twenty bucks and didn’t get to feel anything but their own discomfort and confusion.
I want to be a great clown, but I also love my sadness. Being without it feels fake, incomplete, like having left my bag somewhere; we feel lighter without the bag, less burdened, but our posture still cants from habit. There was once a bag there. There was once upon a time a bag that lived on your left shoulder that carried things that got you through the day, tied you to home, that you could turn into and grab from, whatever, an errant mint, your pouch of coins, a phone charger. There was a strap that needed the attention of your distant arm, and an arm that needed the strap to slip. It rarely matters what’s inside the bag, it’s the feeling, there’s something here weighing me down, havingness, never alone, I have a sack of things, and things to do.
I am naked skin body without my sack of things. What can I offer. Guts? I have only my guts to offer, the guts of this moment, the feeling of the tree leaves bristling and your voice stroking my brain and nerves synaptic shooting my arms out of my shoulders—for what, I have no slipping strap to save. No apologies to save me either, grief to paint my cheeks pretty. What am I without my bag of handsome sadness?
My clown teacher said I have trouble accessing joy. I wanted to puddle and slip through a crack in the floor when he said that, plainly, in front of everyone, but even more, I didn’t want him to think he was right, so easily right, me so transparent, half a day of emotional Commedia scales and a made up song called “these are the things that I love” all he needed to diagnose my life of fun shaming as if the straight-As and who-my-dad-was meant nothing. So I waited until I got home. I want to be a good clown and a better person and I knew it was weird that my mind came to lie down in my dad died fairly recently and I saw the whole thing when he said that, and so often besides, like it’s the cozy bed I tuck myself into at night, my safe space, so when my boyfriend asked How was clown class and I told him I have trouble accessing joy and he said, that’s crazy, you’re so generous with your joy, I donned my full-body marshmallow coat of look at what a sad girl I am and told him, No. No, John. I have trouble accessing joy. I have been following the road of this diagnosis and Look at me now, John, look how I weep. Isn’t it so twisted? Do you love my vulnerability? Do you soften at my sorrow?
In the song entitled “These Are the Things that I Love” from my first day of clown class, I listed “darkness” next to “squirrels,” and after I sat down, a purplish, exposed sac, the teacher turned to me, “Do you really love ‘darkness’?” “Yes,” I say. “I don’t think you do,” he counters, and before I can respond, he says, “I think your pain is just familiar to you. I think you think it keeps you safe.” Insane. Insane logic. “Someone didn’t let you have fun when you were little,” he goes on, and I felt a hurricane build in my throat. I want to tell him about the time my friend’s mom yelled at me for climbing up the walls of a Fresh Choice bathroom stall when I was twelve, IT WAS SO FUNNY WHY DIDN’T SHE LAUGH? But I hear the defense in it and know if I open my mouth I will cry, so I opt to stew instead, compiling a list of the reasons I ended up this way as I let him hold my gaze, relaxing my shoulders, suggesting I’m listening, I’m learning, thank you for your attention, teacher. There’s the time my uncle screamed at me when I played Glitter Fairy on the carpet. The time I was barred from Brownies for giggling through too many Brownie Circles. The time I was scolded for yawning too much in science class. The time I sacrificed my childhood to be the best never-crying, never-complaining, never-losing athlete wunderkind as I lost friend groups and romance and daydreaming and my body. “When did she light up the most?” the teacher asks the class. “Squirrels,” they shout, unanimously. Humiliating. My dad was a world-class scholar.
My boyfriend is the least like my dad of any boyfriend I’ve ever had. For one, he looks at me. I didn’t like it at first, it felt like pressure. He’d look at me and hold it with this kind of expectant openness, like, how are you going to entertain me today, so I told him to curb it, it makes me uncomfortable. But then I found myself doing it to him, which was gross and embarrassing because here I was now this weak and needy person wanting him to love me without letting him see me, which was obviously never going to work, to which I fessed up, okay, I’m afraid, needy, weak and afraid, and, unlike my dad, my boyfriend didn’t punish me for it. For another, he stays up too late, by which I reason there is a time it is too late to go to sleep to wake up with the sun and embark on your long list of future accomplishments, shame on you. And lastly, he drinks too much. “Too much” is an unknown quantity I haven’t measured, but there’s alcoholic “too much,” like I can’t not drink, which he’s not, and then there’s physical “too much,” too much for the liver, too much for the gut, so much that the body stops wanting to move and the heart stop feeling, which he’s also not, and there’s another “too much” that’s more like, I can’t go to work today because I’m still drunk from last night, or I forgot to pick up my child at school because time stops at the bar, which he’s definitely not, though that hasn’t stopped me from trying each one of these arguments, sometimes aware and sometimes not aware, of the dissonance between my level of fear and his actual behavior. I leap across it anyway. You see, my boyfriend is the kind of guy who likes to see where the night goes, wants to go to the next bar, wants to follow the party, for which, you can imagine, everyone loves him—he is so easy, the easiest, to love. But there’s a point in the night when it’s like, okay, dogmatically, you’re having too much fun. I am the police, just give me enough time and I will figure out what law you’re breaking.
When I get home from clown class, I tuck into my misery blanket and tell my boyfriend about it. My sadness. He’s familiar. Scapegoating, victim complex, okay, that’s one level. But it goes deeper. I have trouble accessing joy. 10, maybe 11pm is the time one must go to bed to wake up and do important things, though I can’t tell you what the important things are I’ve been doing these twenty years I’ve maintained this bedtime. I don’t feel FOMO, a trait for which I pride myself, believing it to be a mark of strength and self-sufficiency (and I think it is to an extent), but I also know that mixed into the I-don’t-care-ness is a low-grade terror that I haven’t been invited to the party, or that I’ll go and no one will talk to me. I also feel like the later you travel into the night, the darker it gets—actually dark, uncomfortably dark, which I know is a strange complaint for someone who just pranced before 19 strangers singing, I love darkness.
Perhaps it is a front. Perhaps the clown teacher was right. Perhaps I only like darkness when I can use it for comfort, to defend myself against the exposing light of joy.
“Little kids never want to go to bed, Johnny.” I tug on him, relaying what my teacher said. “Little kids want to stay up all night to squeeze all possible fun out of the day.” I thought of him immediately when I heard this in class. This whole time, has he just been trying to have fun? And I’ve felt endangered, why? To preserve my own inherited severity, knowing and not listening, for which I’m now paying money I’m not making to unlearn? I thought of the many adults and the many posturing, power-hungry bodies supposedly striving toward happiness all starved for Joy, a good so expensive we drive its value down, deride it, deny its depth—if ignorance is bliss and we all want to be smart, what must that mean?—and my heart breaks, they look so taut and tired, like sick dogs operating their own shock collars. That’s where I come from, those are my people. As I look at them now, I know I must be some distance away. I look at my boyfriend and can feel myself loving him more. At last, I have a playmate. I feel I must’ve pushed the boundary of what I can bear, the dead-end of my own sad act, a little further off.
On the second day of clown class, during the laughing activity, I was inconsolable. I couldn’t stop laughing. It took me a while to get there, I had to force it, there was nothing actively funny happening and the temptation to cry instead was immediate and puzzlingly attractive, but I was determined to laugh. And then I was embarrassed thinking of what it might mean to have claimed I love darkness and then laugh so heartily, as if I had lied, or been wrong—a horrifying thought—but then I simply looked at the guy next to me, a bigger guy, Asian, in fucking stitches, high-pitched, rolling laughter, having so much fun, and I caught it. This was the prompt, after all. Whenever I felt myself flag, all I had to do was look at him and I’d be off again, explosive, rocketing glee. As we moved onto the next activity, still, pockets of laughter rose up from my stomach like soda bubbles—am I joy now? Laughter, apparently, so said teacher, has the same source as tears, each a toxin release, same result, different sound. A sound so pure I didn’t know to judge it yet. It felt like running on the Mario invincibility star.
We seek partners and friends and jobs that possess the qualities we want more of in ourselves, and yet, so often, when presented with the opportunity to open up into a new kind of flower, we double down on our differences, our mechanisms, and the very attributes that drew us in become the basis of our hurts and resentments. Any ideal explored deeply enough will inevitably make way for the reality will lead to disappointment and friction will activate nervous system responses that send messages to the brain in base survival-mode code, RUN / FIGHT / HIDE, that we, in our more evolved, house-dwelling, phone-scrolling forms, are responsible for interpreting into proprietary language such as, “Respectfully, sir…” and “I hear you, my love, but have you considered…,” without letting my dad’s death was the ultimate abandonment suffice as an appropriate response to our partners drinking a beer on the couch at 1 in the morning if we ever want to be a great clown. As introspective as it sounds, and as accurate as it might feel, drinking beer on the couch at 1 in the morning is, by common standards, a party. Why are you pooping on it? A party with your favorite person in the world? Why poop on them? Who pooped on you?
Some people learned that a happy kid is a lovable kid. Others, like me, learned that the surest way to get the love you desperately crave is to cry. Many, many children grow up with anger as the greatest superpower. I was offered this, too, but I said no. Does anyone get to have it all? Is there one human on earth who feels safe to express every emotion they feel without restraint? Would that even interest most people, or is it the performers alone, who peddle in feelings, who find it alluring? Perhaps most would sooner classify such emotional sensitivity as a serious psychological condition?
All I know is, when I’m a great clown, my audience will crane their necks and look at me up on stage, strange fleshy sac that I am, and ask, how will you entertain me today, and I will not be able to run away. They have paid money. That they paid money suggests they do want me to succeed, though they will also make it clear when I do not. And when the schtick doesn’t work, I will have to try something else. At the least, I’ll strive for honesty. At best, I will be beautiful, and hopefully, and I’m risking it all for this, for a second or two, I will be hilarious.
Whoa, Fresh Choice really took me back. I loved reading this, Mitzi. Joy is the hardest emotion to feel, but it's worth it.