Tonight will be my second time going up on stage to do standup.

I feel how I usually feel before a performance. Excited, scared, nervous, maybe a tad squirrely and a tiny bit paranoid.

I am continuing to follow my “zero pressure” strategy. The closest thing to preparation I have been doing has been to keep the paper I used last week handy, along with a pen, so I can jot down jokes if I happen to think of them.

I am explicitly not trying to write jokes. That will come with time, but for now, I will simply capture those that occur to me.

Like I have said before, I have been writing jokes for a very long time. I have loads of them lying around this capacious noggin of mine.

The only thing that has changed is that I write them down some of the time now. And now I am doing it with specific purpose in mind.

Before now,. they were just a byproduct of being me, more or less.

Comedy is how I cope with the world.

Which explains a lot.

I am going to bring a bunch more paper and many writing implements with me when I go to the open mic tonight because I know from last time that listening to the other comedians’ jokes will either remind me of or lead me to write more jokes of my own.

I am looking forward to performing tonight. It felt real good when I did it last time, and I anticipate enjoying it again.

Honestly, I think I just really like being the center of attention, with everyone there listening to me, wanting to hear what I say.

As patient readers know, nobody paid much attention to me. One might call it my own form of attention deficit disorder. And I suffered pretty badly as a result.

In many ways, that kind of neglect is worse than actual active abuse because at least if you are being abused, your existence and to a certain extent your importance is being validated by the abuser.

I grew up feeling like I was worthless. Or worse, like I was a liability. Like the world would have been a better place if I had never been born.

In my defense, that’s how my family treated me.

Every interaction might as well have started with, “of course, you understand that you are not important and deserve nothing at all and therefore should be infinitely grateful for what you do get whenever we get around to caring for you. Your needs mean nothing and your desires even less. You shouldn’t be here, you are not welcome, your very existence is an atrocious imposition, and heaven help you if you should ever have the unmitigated gall to ask for something. I mean really. ”

And I just…. went along with that. I didn’t know any better. I still feel that way about myself a lot of the time. I’m learning to resist it but it’s still my default setting.

At least I can make people laugh.

That has to count for something, right?

More after the break.

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And now I am back, having had my sophomore show.l

Paid more attention to the audience this time. Did not get a lot of laughs. But then again, neither did anyone else.

In comedy lingo, it’s a pretty cold room. Hard to get a laugh from people.

It doesn’t help that for a lot of it we had an audience of two. Five comedians, two audience members. So most of the people laughing are comedians.

And even when we are doing our best to be supportive, comedians can be a tough crowd because we’re all super into comedy and have refined our comedy palate over the years to the point of being rather hard to please.

On my own part, I do my best to set my comedy impedence level to as low a setting as I can,. To put that less strangely, I make it as easy to make me laugh as I can.

And that’s the best I can do. I cannot and will not laugh at something I do not think is funny. That kind of insincerity is anathema to me. I simply will not do it.

I exist to express myself. Ergo, to express something other than myself is foreign and alien to me.

That could end up not being in my best interests some day, but I do not care. I am rapidly learning how to live who I am, and that’s all I plan to do till the day I die.

Now where was I? Oh right, comedy.

So no, not a lot of laughs, but I got some, and that’s not bad for my second time ever. I know that I am now moving into a phase where I think more about my comedy and do more during the week to work on it, and I am fine with that.

The point is to let this whole thing proceed naturally and without undue stress. That means minimal interference from my over-powerful but corrupt superego. But it doesn’t mean that I will suppress my natural tendency to worry and fret.

That, too, would cause conflict and hence tension and stress. The top ideal is to prevent such conflicts and minimize or eliminate instances where two forces in my mind come into direct conflict.

Tear down the walls and let the waters collide. It time, the conflicts resolve themselves if they are left free to do so. Holding them at bay solves nothing.

The resources used to support those walls are better used elsewhere.

Right now I feel that cleansing coldness all through my chest. That’s the ice around my heart melting and it feels bad, but it does me a lot of good.

Now I am going to lay down in the dark and relax my mind so it can work things out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.