Once you find something to write on, give it to your date and have them write down their answers, which you should not see. Since this game illuminates a lot about the subconscious, how about you play the game first? Yeah, now. It’s never too early to find out who you are so you can either fix it, celebrate it, or get a head start on being in denial about it.
Here goes: Write down your favorite animal. Don’t just pick an animal you think is cute or funny. Really think about it. Pick an animal you admire. Also, it can’t be an animal you know, such as your cat or the lizard from your childhood who was dead for a week before you noticed. When I first played this game, I chose a dog, but when I stopped texting and really focused on the question with my full attention, I ended up choosing a honey badger. This is one instance where I’m going to tell you not to trust your gut. Instead, overthink it a little. Once you choose your animal, write three reasons that you chose it in adjective form. This was what my quiz looked like:
FAVORITE ANIMAL: HONEY BADGER
—SCRAPPY
—FEARLESS
—DON’T GIVE A SHIT
Next choose your favorite article of clothing. It can be anything from a hoodie to a ball gown to a Windbreaker. Or it can be a leotard or your favorite tube top if you get down like that. Then write three adjectives to describe that article of clothing. Mine was:
ARTICLE OF CLOTHING: HOODIE
—VERSATILE
—COMFORTABLE
—WARM
Next up, choose your favorite body of water. It could be a river, an ocean, a glass of water, any iteration of H2O. I once went white-water rafting on the New River in Virginia. It was a terrible experience and I am very confused about why people go white-water rafting when Mother Nature has proven over and over again that she gives zero craps if we live or die, but I do remember being in awe of the river. There was just something so amazing to me about its being so beautiful, but also able to kill you at any moment, a concept very sexy to me during the time in my life where I instantly became smitten with anything that was both attractive and treated me terribly.
BODY OF WATER: THE NEW RIVER
—SOMETIMES ROUGH, SOMETIMES CALM
—FUN
—UNPREDICTABLE
The last element isn’t listing a favorite thing, it’s more about your instinctive reaction to an imaginary situation. So imagine you’re in a white room with no windows or doors. List three emotions that you’d feel. Mine were:
WHITE ROOM
—SURRENDER
—CALM
—RELIEF
Now comes the fun part! Now that you’ve written down all your answers, you can get to finding out who you really are, not who you pretend to be! If you’re doing the quiz with others, ask them for their answers first before telling them what the answers mean for maximum insight and LOLs. Here goes. Your favorite animal apparently represents how you see yourself. So according to my quiz I see myself as a honey badger: fearless, scrappy, not giving a shit. This metaphor really held up when I also discovered that honey badgers are eager to pick fights even when they aren’t hungry, their teeth can break the shell of a tortoise, and they’ll eat literally anything. I mean, that’s kind of me in a nutshell, which I would of course also eat. That said, if your date puts down honey badger as his or her favorite animal, I strongly suggest you leave immediately and fake your death. Animals that reflect well on a person: elephant, whale, lion, monkey. Animals that could be red flags: shark, snake, crocodile, recluse spider—okay, you get it.
I have a friend who did this quiz with a girl he was dating and the animal she chose was a leech. He assumed she was joking and laughed it off, but months later he found out she was gold-digging numerous guys at once. I highly recommend that when people tell you who they are, do yourself a favor and go ahead and believe them.
Now for the article of clothing. Your favorite article of clothing represents how you’re perceived by others. I love this one because it’s usually antithetical to the essence of the animal we pick—that is to say, how we perceive ourselves. So I think I’m a honey badger and other people think I’m a hoodie. There is quite an incongruity between who I think I am and who others think I am, which either means I have a self-perception issue or that I wear a mask around people and have an authenticity issue. Spoiler alert: I have both.
This juxtaposition usually shows that we’re attached to an old story of who we are and/or the role we played as a child. I realized that if I could just figure out a way to see myself the way other people see me, that my life would get a lot easier, and my self-esteem could start hovering over zero.
Now to your favorite body of water. This one symbolizes how you view . . . drumroll, please . . . sex. Embarrassing as it was, mine was right on the money. I like it “sometimes rough, sometimes calm.” Well, stranger, now you know pretty much everything about me. I’ve had a guy on a first date tell me his favorite body of water was a pond because it’s “still and peaceful.” We did not end up having a second date. It was pretty safe to assume he’s a bottom, and that would never work out because, well, I have bad knees.
The white room metaphor gives insight into how we view death. This one is just sort of fun because I personally don’t think you should judge people too harshly on how they view death, unless their response is “I like to create white rooms for other people to be in forever,” because then they may be a good old-fashioned murderer. I’ve had some friends write “annoyed.” It cracks me up to think about someone who’s annoyed they’re going to die, “Goddamn it! My flight was late, traffic is crazy, and I freaking have to go die at some point. Who has time for this shit?”
If you administer this quiz with your date and he or she passes without revealing any obvious psychotic tendencies, the second game to play to find out if there are red flags lurking beneath a charming, beguiling facade is word association. Again, Mr. Jung was big into this one. That dude knew how to party. You know the deal, you say a word and they have to say the first thing that comes to mind, which can reveal some random but often also horrifying peeks into someone’s subconscious. One time I was doing word association on a second date with a guy, and we went back and forth on a bunch of words. We were cracking up laughing because his responses were so innocent and funny. When I got to the word “marriage,” he went dark and he blurted out, “Cunt!”
Uh-oh.
A man using that word is grounds for leaving the table immediately, which of course meant I dated him for another four months.
Jung has specific words he uses which I’ll include for you cuties, but I like to make up my own list based on what I need and specifically want to know about a person. You’re probably not going to get something as clear as you saying “cheat” and your date responding “I will totally do that!” but a vague response may lead to a deeper conversation you wouldn’t necessarily have had otherwise. Again, the goal with this is to learn as much about a person as early as possible so we aren’t finding cocaine in our boyfriends’ wallets at the Cancún airport. Don’t worry, that story is coming up.
Here are the words I like to use when I play this game on dates.
Skin
Future
Write
Wife
Dad
Me
Animal
Play
Pain
Wet
Baby
Blood
Man
Fear
Want
Mother
Red
Test
Fresh
Mind
Religion
Sex
Brain
Rich
You
Girlfriend
Dead
Life
Fight
Fantasy
Give
Bitch
Work
Money
Family
Friend
Deep
Cheat
Sick
Taste
Song
Freedom
To make you feel less ashamed about your weird answers, here are mine in case you want to feel less crazy or judge me.
And here are the words Jung used in the actual test in case you want to trust a trained professional instead of a comedian.
I realize that my responses aren’t funny, and I’m very insecure about that, but the idea isn’t to be entertaining, it’s to be as honest as possible with the first thing that comes to your head. The idea isn’t to be a laugh riot, although that’s always a bonus, but the point is to look for any major red flags—for example, you say “man” and she says “castrate,” or you say “girl” and he says “poison.” And I don’t mean the band. That said, if he randomly yells out “Poison the band!” my advice is to marry him on the spot.
Now here’s the hard part of all this: Once you do spot a red flag, your job is to actually read the writing on the wall. You don’t get to pick up a pen and rewrite the writing on the wall. For most of my twenties I rewrote the writing on the wall, and frankly it’s a miracle that as a result I’m not in court trying to get custody of my seven kids from numerous very handsome malignant narcissists.
Hopefully these tests save you some time and help you weed out some weirdos. Ultimately, even if the games don’t yield poignant or revealing answers, I feel that if your date is down with being open and vulnerable enough to play the game, I already like them. Godspeed. And I better get an invite to the wedding.
But even if you don’t invite me, I’ll be fine.
THE CODEPENDENCE CHAPTER
A lot of people ask me why it took “so long” to write a book. I pretend it was because I didn’t have time or didn’t think I had enough to write about, but the truth is, I was scared. I was scared it wouldn’t be good, that people wouldn’t like it, that I’d be rejected or that you’d think I was a narcissist for writing a book about myself. I’ve felt this same paralyzing fear with every show, every joke, every performance. Even with my sexual performances. What I’m trying to avoid saying here is that I have a condition called codependence, which essentially means that for a long time I couldn’t tolerate not being liked. Down, boys! I can’t marry all of you!
I don’t trust you to look up the condition online yourself, because if you’re anything like me, you’ll end up in a wormhole Googling your ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend. So, let me save you some time; here’s a definition of codependence I remixed from a compendium of sources:
Codependents have low self-esteem and would rather focus on the needs of others than on their own. They find it hard to be themselves because they’re more concerned with appeasing others and avoiding rejection than with doing what they want to do. Codependents are people pleasers who have an extreme need for approval, feel a sense of guilt when standing up for themselves, and can’t tolerate the discomfort of others. Guys, if that doesn’t get you to swipe right on my Tinder bio, I don’t know what will.
People throw the term codependence around pretty casually these days, like “Me and my boyfriend are sooo codependent!,” basically implying that they spend a lot of time together. Spending time together can be part of it, but it’s not necessarily about proximity. You can be in a long-distance codependent relationship where you don’t see the person very often, yet still obsess over their needs and behavior, or you can even be in one with a person you’ve actually never met but that you think you’re dating in your crazy haunted house of a head.
The type of codependence wired into my brain is pretty intense and can actually be quite dangerous. For some people, codependence can show itself in ways as extreme as buying drugs for a drug addict because you think you’re “helping,” having sex without a condom due to fear of conflict or abandonment, or getting into debt because you don’t want to admit to others you can’t afford certain things. However, codependence can rear its ugly head in seemingly more benign ways as well. Some of the less extreme ways my codependence complicates my life are being late due to an unrealistic number of commitments because I have a hard time saying no, losing sleep worrying about things I can’t control, deriving my self-esteem from my productivity and achievements, and looking like a crackhead Muppet from cutting my own bangs because I don’t make time for myself given how much I overbook my schedule.
My codependent brain has gotten me into endless quagmires, from trying to get an Australian stripper a job and a visa (the only reason I didn’t is because she never e-mailed me back) to training strangers’ dangerously aggressive dogs to staying in relationships years too long because I didn’t want to hurt the other person’s feelings.
Fine, I’ll tell you the stripper story. One night my friend Zoe and I had a very random instinct to go to a strip club. It was actually technically a “bikini bar,” but I had been before and remembered that they played late-nineties hip-hop, which always makes me feel deeply understood. It’s also the only music I know how to dance to.
I’m not going to lie, I always get along very well with strippers. Maybe I was a stripper in a past life or maybe I’m going to be one in the future, I don’t know. I have what I can only describe as fantastic chemistry with strippers, maybe because we likely have very similar childhoods and assumptions about what we have to offer the world.
Zoe and I were having a blast. We watched flexible girl after flexible girl dance her ass and tassels off. My codependence first kicked in when one of the girls was flying hands-free around a pole, using only her legs to propel her in circles. It was like watching an ice skater, which for me is very stressful because I spend most of the time wincing, anxious that she might fall and shatter her dreams of winning a gold medal and being on a cereal box or whatever ice skaters do after they retire at twenty-five. I found myself wincing watching the strippers as well—praying none of them went flying off the pole and into some perverted man’s lap, or worse, my lap given I was very into wearing studded belts back then.
After a couple of girls did their thing with their things, an incredibly tan and dare I say emotionally buoyant girl stormed onto the stage to “Lady Marmalade,” the version by Mýa, Lil’ Kim, Christina Aguilera, and Pink. Maybe it was my deep appreciation for the song, or maybe it was the mostly ice cosmopolitan I was drinking out of a plastic cup, but this gal really lit up the room. She was a star, I tell you. She had a gorgeous body, but she had hardly any breasts, which made me root for her, given that most of the girls there were as buxom in the chest as they were lost in life. As Zoe and I watched this girl dance her heart out, I could tell that she was a little less lost in life and didn’t really belong in this giant box of tears. I could see this girl had potential—to do what, I didn’t know, but I had a strong magnetic pull to be the person to save her from her plight and get her on track to get her anthropology degree, which in my head was her obvious destiny.
After being hypnotized and quite frankly humbled by her dance, Zoe and I called her over to talk. She told us she was a dance teacher and had an abusive boyfriend from whom she was trying to escape. She was jus
t making some extra money until she could get back on her feet. My codependent brain sprang into action. And she’s a victim!? This was like my dream come true: someone needy and helpless who also liked possibly feminist but maybe also sexist music from the early aughts? Add to cart.
I told the stripper I’d help her out in any way I could. I’d get her a job as a production assistant on a TV show, pay her to help me around the house, whatever I could make up to get her a job. Turned out she also needed citizenship, so I promised her I could help her with whatever she needed to ensure she could stay in the country and live her best life, because my codependence told me that this was for some reason my responsibility, even though the only things that could actually help her would be years of psychoanalysis and a time machine.
I gave her my personal e-mail and prepared everyone I worked with the next day that we’d all be having a new employee on board. The only hang-up to my rescue operation was that the stripper never e-mailed me. I can’t even believe I’m typing this sentence, but I was rejected by a stripper. There I was, prepared to marry her so she could get citizenship, and she never even reached out to receive my help. But that statement epitomizes what’s so frustrating about codependence: We think we’re helping, but the truth is most people don’t need, don’t want, or feel patronized by our “help.”
My codependence caused me to do all sorts of things I thought were thoughtful and kind, yet I was blindsided by the lack of gratitude. I used to stay with guys years after I broke up with them in my head, worried I would hurt their feelings. I now understand that it’s insane and selfish to think that staying with someone for an extra year is helping him, given you’re basically stealing a year of his life. Codependence isn’t about actual altruism, it’s about being lost in the fallacy that you need to protect everyone from reality and uncomfortable feelings.
I'm Fine...And Other Lies Page 3