Today, Thursday, I had therapy.

Therapy Thurdsay. Oh look, it alliterates.

And my therapist brought up something that he had brought up many times before to no effect, but today, I guess I was ready to hear it.

He told me that I should try to take all the deep, dark, horrible shit that I have been through in my life and all the ice cold void it created in me, and try to turn it into comedy.

And that sounds perfectly sensible on paper. Lots of people have done it before. And it’s something that is particularly trendy right now. Some of the most popular comedians and many of the bestselling authors of our time got famous by sharing their most intimate, gut-wrenching, soul-baring, shameful truths with the world in a “warts and all” confessional style that brings a sense of truth to their work and a sense of intimacy with the audience.

Why couldn’t I do that?

And yup, that sure sounds like it makes sense and is probably more or less true. There’s no reason to think I am so different from them that I can’t do the same thing.

And that’s true. On paper.

But people aren’t paper and the truth is never, ever two dimensional.

Before today, when my therapist suggested this, I would agree, but inside I felt like it was one of those “wouldn’t it be nice” things like wishing I could teleport or that Donald Trump and Mike Pence would be assassinated simultaneously. Meaning that while the statement was true – it definitely would be great if I could do that – it’s not something that I felt applied in any sense to me.Iit was something which would be nice but would never actually me an option in reality.

So it meant slightly less than nothing to me. Because it was irritating and made be sad because it was yet another example of people asking me to do something which was simple for them but impossible to me in a way I could not easily articulate.

But today, something clicked. It happened when I was doing me best to be open to the idea, and a very dark joke formulated in my head. It goes like this :

Me, as a comedian : A funny thing happened to be on the way to the theater tonight. I got really depressed and contemplated walking into traffic.

That sums up a lot of why the idea never really seemed like it would work to me. I have all this really dark horrible shit inside me and I’ve been too afraid to let it out in any way because not only did I feel it could never be funny, I felt like it could only destroy people with it toxic negativity and interstellar area level coldness.

And I would be deeply, deeply ashamed of myself if anyone were to see it. That’s not including the guilt I would feel about making myself feel better by making someone else’s life worse…. possible to the point of utterly destroying their soul.

I mean, I can handle this stuff. I’ve had to. And that means I have built in systems to handle the stuff. Long term depression forces that on you.

But when I imagine some healthy innocent who doesn’t even know such darkness can exist, never mind that it actually does, coming along and reading it and having it kill the loving light inside them, my mind shies away from it because it is too horrible to contemplate. The guilt would make me feel nauseous all the way into the core of my soul and the shame would crush me and make me want to die.

It’s all very anal-stage Freudian. Shame about your act of elimination. Fear of someone seeing it. The desire to make it go away as fast as possible and never ever talk about your dirty, horrible act.

You get the idea.

In fact, somewhere in the archives of this very blog is a story I wrote that is so unrelentingly sad and soul-destroying that I am deeply ashamed of having written in and my only excuse for unleashing it into the world was that it was the only way to get it out of my own mind, where it had lived for many, many years.

I won’t like it, or give you the name, or give you any other clues to help you find it. I’m too ashamed of it to do that. And I love my readers and would not unleash that goddamned thing on them again for anything.

So you can see why the idea of taking that stuff and turning it into comedy seems a little, well, counterintuitive to me.

Plus I found it hard to imagine anyone being interested in the story of someone who did absolutely nothing with their life for 20 years. There’s not a lot to tell.

But comedy is not necessarily biography. I could probably do stuff about poverty, failure to launch, dreading being asked what I “do”, and a lot of other stuff.

That’s my big takeaway from today’s therapy session. When I came up with that joke,that was me opening a door in my mind to let the possibly of comedy coming from my deepest darkest places and that being a healthy thing.

So now I dunno. Maybe I really can spin my nastiest shit into comedy gold like so many have before me. It probably wouldn’t be in standup comedy form. It would most likely be a book. A comedy book for very broken people like myself.

There’s lots of us out there. It’s really quite tragic. I can’t help but feel that something must be fundamentally very wrong about a society that produces us. We fucked up bad somewhere along the line.

So it would be a book, but knowing me, I would need to cloak my depressing life in metaphor and allegory in order to get it out of me in a form I could live with.

Maybe something like, “What if Superman’s Kryptonian cradle-ship had crashed on a habitable but lifeless planet instead?”.

He might just grow up a lot like me.

Sorry, Supes. But you’ve been through worse.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.