What is the most difficult thing you’ve ever given up?
What did that feel like?
Was it worth it?
—A six-going-on-seven year-long relationship that started when I was a junior in college and kept going until I’d watched better than half of my twenties disappear, leaving me with a pile of J.Crew pastels and stacked packets of double prints from Foto One. I didn’t give it up as much as it was given up for me, when he decided that he’d rather wake up beside a woman whose face looks like a catcher’s mitt.
—At the beginning, right after I peeled myself off the bathroom floor and disappeared into a prescription medication that started with X, ended with X and had self-preservation in the middle, it felt as empty as the other side of the bed, as lonely as the hastily-rented apartment where I slowly started unpacking my life. But as time passed, as pages were torn off my Dinosaur-A-Day calendar, it got easier. The morning I tossed out the picture of the Pachycephalosaurus, I woke up in the middle of the bed for the first time in years.
—I’ll say yes. While he was the one who pushed me onstage the first time, urged me to grab a mic and start a comedy career, I didn’t hit the road hardcore until I didn’t have anyone to come home to. I toured the South Pacific. I played every military base in Alaska. And every night—for half an hour or so—I made a different crowd of people forget that they felt as miserable as I did.
And hearing them laugh at my stupid jokes about camoflage condoms and CSI spinoffs, they helped me forget it too.
