I'm Fine...And Other Lies

by Whitney Cummings

  When I was trying to figure out whether or not I should write this chapter, I devoured Brené Brown’s quotes. I came across one from her book The Gifts of Imperfection: “Authenticity is a collection of choices we have to make every day. It’s about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.” As I told more and more people, I realized that (a) they didn’t really care because everyone is too busy dealing with their own emotional problems to care about my emotional problems and (b) most had struggled with similar issues and felt relieved and inspired that I could be vulnerable about mine. When this happened, my fear of judgment lost its power over me. Maybe the road to being a decent role model wasn’t about being emotionally perfect, maybe it was about finding the courage to admit that I wasn’t.

  I’ve finally surrendered to the body I have, self-inflicted wounds and all. Today I’m in a place where I can have sex without contorting my body like I’m playing a sad game of Twister. I figure if a guy is turned off by whatever naked asymmetry I have, he’s in his own struggle with his body and maybe his attraction to ones that have a penis attached to them.

  Ultimately, as Stockholm syndrome-y as it sounds, I’m grateful that I went through this fiasco. I didn’t want to spend my life looking at stunted breast tissue. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life being reminded of my eating disorder every time I took my shirt off. I wanted to be free of that obsession and see what it would be like not to be in an adversarial relationship with my body. Oddly, I like my scars. They look like little smiley faces. Of course they’re shaped that way for medical reasons, not my mental health goals, but there’s something poetic about seeing little smiles every time I look at my chest and am tempted to critique it.

  Also, when I was nervously asking the second surgeon about what would happen if he cut into the scars I already had, he said, “Even better. Scar tissue is stronger than regular tissue.” This made me want to cry when I heard it. I felt like going through all this made me weak. Turns out, when we make mistakes and glue ourselves back together, we end up being way stronger than we were before.

  I don’t feel sexier or anything now, and on some level I still replaced one insecurity with another. Instead of worrying that my boobs are weirdly shaped and crooked, I now worry people will think I’m shallow and dumb for having had corrective surgery. That said, if I broke my ankle, I’d go get it fixed, so I know that if anything in my body or brain is broken, that also deserves to get fixed, regardless of how society glamorizes, sexualizes, or minimizes it.

  The whole boob debacle did make me think a lot not only about my own shame, but also about why we shame others for doing things that may seem superficial but are likely rooted in real pain or suffering. I no longer look at women who get a nose job or whatever corrective surgery as self-absorbed narcissists. I see them as victims of cripplingly low self-worth. I’m sure there are shallow people who get work done for a mess of unsavory reasons, but expanding my brain to consider the kaleidoscope of pathos that could motivate someone to do such a thing has given me a tremendous amount of compassion. The same way trying to help someone who has an eating disorder can make the disorder worse, shaming insecure people just exacerbates their insecurity. It’s like one big emotional rat king.

  It’s healthy that we’re all having a public conversation about the damage being done by online bullying and trolls, but I don’t hear enough talk about how we bully ourselves. As rough as what some people write about me in comments sections online is, none of it is as mean as the things my inner voices say about me. Trolls, this is not a challenge; I’m just trying to make a point here. If other people bully me, that’s a reflection on them and something I can choose not to internalize, but if I’m beating myself up, that’s on me.

  So, here I am, releasing my shame so I don’t have to carry it around until it turns into another weird addictive behavior like sniffing glue or obsessively ordering clothes I can’t afford online and then frantically returning them. And, look, if you have judgments about my past and my choices, it’s all good. Turns out, with or without your approval, I’ll be just fine.

  THE HEADACHE CHAPTER

  My head has hurt for as long as I can remember. As a kid I recall being at school, looking at corny posters on the walls with cartoon birds holding up vocabulary words, and being frustrated that I couldn’t read the words I could so easily spell the day before. I remember having to sit in the car at Disneyland with Mickey Mouse ears over my eyes because the sun was so painful to look at. My parents argued outside the car, trying to figure out if they would go on with the day at the most magical place on earth or go home because of me. Maybe that was the genesis of my paralyzing guilt.

  “I’m totally fine! We can stay!” I yelled, each utterance exacerbating the pounding in my skull. It tore me up that my headaches caused other people to miss out on a day of fun and spinning teacups. The only good news is that now that I’m an adult and have some perspective, I know if my parents weren’t fighting about me, they’d have been fighting about something else, so maybe I did everyone a favor by giving them something tangible to argue about.

  I spent a tremendous amount of time in the nurse’s office in middle school. Very frequently for my swollen knee and head lice, but also for my incessant headaches. Up until I was about twelve, headaches were my biggest, well, headache. My parents didn’t spend a lot of time going to doctors, and I didn’t think to question that approach. Like a lot of families headed by parents raised by men who served in various wars, my family had a white-knuckle philosophy toward pain. Buck up, man up, grow some balls. So I learned how to do two of those three things.

  My first encounter with medical specialists came once I hit puberty. I developed a problem that couldn’t be ignored: I had acne. Unlike headaches, which were in my head, hard to describe, misunderstood by others, and easily dismissed, my acne was on my face and needed no explanation. I had deep, cystic zits that I could feel on the bones of my jaw and forehead weeks before they made their way to the surface to annihilate my self-esteem. When I would feel one coming on, I was consumed with dread, knowing I’d have to spend the next three weeks trying to manage, hide, and emotionally abuse the zit into submission. Once the pimple became red and bulbous, I could not for the life of me keep my hands off it, so I’d pop it, and by pop it, I mean dig into the swollen area with my grubby press-on nails well before it was ready, sometimes cutting into the skin and of course making it much worse than it ever would have been. I’d then make that even worse by caking drugstore concealer into it, filling the hole I left with overpriced chemicals, alcohol, and oil the way most people would put caulk into a wall.

  Sometimes I had to sleep as if I were in a casket, looking straight up at the ceiling, because putting my face on a pillow was too painful. At around fourteen I discovered the Molotov cocktail of skin creams, Retin-A. It’s a topical ointment that dries your skin out with alarming speed and intensity. Seriously, I think it’s much better suited to remove graffiti from buildings or poison your enemies than to be applied to human skin. To save my life I couldn’t comprehend moderation, so I would obsessively apply it throughout the day, even though the prescription said to use it only twice a day and the number to call poison control was on the side of the box. I was so obsessed that I’d set my alarm to wake myself up in the middle of the night to apply it. Of course this insane behavior just made it look like a blind person had repeatedly put cigarettes out on my chin, but that didn’t stop me. Covering these with makeup was trickier because my skin was flaking off, so I had to develop a system: First I’d put beige lip gloss all over the charred spot as a way to sort of fill in the dried crevices, then put foundation on top of that, then concealer, then powder, then bronzer. By the end of it, I looked like exactly an Entenmann’s crumb cake.

  The pain of bad skin managed to eclipse the pain of my headaches, so I begged my mom to take me to the dermatologist. There were about
five other medical specialists I should have gone to first—a psychiatrist, a psychologist, an orthopedist, a dentist—but according to my insecure brain, those problems mattered way less than my skin. It would be another ten years before I saw a doctor for an idiopathic pain in my right foot that had bothered me ever since I was eight. Every three weeks or so, I’d feel a spastic sharp stab in the arch of my foot, so much so that I’d frantically scrunch my shoulders and punch outward around me like the drunkest person at every wedding. It’s so bad that I’ve actually hit a couple boyfriends who were in bed with me when it happened during the night, but given the type of lad I dated back then, they were probably into it. When I was twenty-four I finally went to a podiatrist, who told me I needed insoles because of my high arches. He put my foot in a box of watery clay until it dried into the molds. He told me to come pick them up in two weeks, but when I came back to the office to get them, they sprung it on me that the orthotics would be eight hundred bucks, so naturally I pretended I left my wallet in my car, left the office, and never returned. This also happens to be the least weird thing I’ve done to save eight hundred dollars.

  About seven years later, I was in a writers’ room one day and was attacked by one of my foot spasms.

  “FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK!” I screamed while falling to my knees and slamming my hand on the table. Five seconds later, the pain passed and I was back to pitching jokes. The people in the room were aghast.

  “Okay, what page were we on?”

  When a writer asked me what just happened, I said nonchalantly, “Oh, that’s just my foot thing. You know how, like, three times a week one of your feet feels like someone is stabbing a knife into it?”

  They looked at me as if I was as crazy as I actually was. I either actually thought or had convinced myself that everyone just felt a shocking amount of pain in their feet like that every now and then. The horror on their faces inspired me to get my foot X-rayed just to prove them wrong, to show them that my foot was normal. Plus, I had health insurance now, so it was time to party.

  Halfway through my time in the podiatrist’s office, I realized I was at the same doctor I had run out on seven years earlier when I heard the bill would be eight hundred dollars. I could tell he was trying to figure out how he knew me, so I immediately dropped into a bad southern accent, hoping it would throw him off the trail. I promise this was not conscious; it was like some automatic act of self-preservation over which I swear I had no control. I could tell he was onto my ruse, but he was too mortified for both of us to call me out. I felt like at that point, the only thing weirder than pretending to have a southern accent would be to stop pretending to have a southern accent.

  I stood on the X-ray machine, trying to put pressure on my foot so it would flatten out and look normal on the scan. I don’t even know if that’s a thing, but this was the same logic I used to try and be heavier at the eating disorder specialist: magical thinking. When the doctor came in after the X-ray, he looked at me with a mix of shock and respect.

  “You have an extra bone in your foot,” he said. “Haven’t you been in pain?”

  Of course I had been in pain, but my migraines started so young that I had to kind of pick which pain I was going to give my attention to. As a woman, I always have a variety of pains to manage, so I often find myself prioritizing the most debilitating ones. Between migraines, cramps, my dumb knee, my hunger pangs, tooth pain from having braces, UTIs, and blisters from shoes designed by sadistic men, I had sort of gone deaf concerning which pain to listen to.

  Because I had migraines so young, my tolerance for pain was very high. I often got very sick and didn’t notice, just grateful it was anything but a headache. At my workaholism/codependence peak around age thirty, I was forced to go to a rheumatologist because I developed a condition called costochondritis, which is an inflammation in your cartilage where the ribs and breastbone come together. I know! Yucky! I am warning you: Do not look this up on the Internet because you will think you have it, and chances are, you don’t. The causes of costochondritis are many, but my doctor told me mine was from stress and possibly from having pneumonia and not treating it quickly enough. It’s the kind of thing people get if they either don’t value themselves enough to go to the doctor or were alive during the Civil War. Yes, I felt a weird pain in my chest, but as you well know, I’m codependent, so if someone else had this health problem, I’d learn to fly a helicopter in order to fly them to the closest hospital, but if I had the health problem, getting it treated just seemed like a waste of time. I mean, I wouldn’t want to burden a doctor with my medical problems in the middle of his busy workday.

  The condition transpired after I had just come back from a stressful vacation with a boyfriend I had been fighting with for seven days. I was mentally and emotionally drained, and more in love than ever. When we landed after ten days of improvising a sequel to The War of the Roses in a hut by a beach, we got back and had a crazy guilt/shame spiral attachment bond, so I had a hard time leaving, even though I had to turn in the finale script of a TV show the next day. I had planned on writing it over the break while relaxing by a pool, but there wasn’t much time between crying and throwing the hotel Bible across the room. I didn’t want him to feel abandoned, which was of course me projecting my fear of abandonment, so I waited until he fell asleep before going home.

  I stayed up all night writing the episode. I know that because I’m an insomniac, staying up all night to work may seem like it makes a lot of sense for me, but oddly, working through the night isn’t my style. My insomnia is more about worrying over things I can’t control than actually being productive.

  By some weird miracle, I managed to bang out a version of the script. The next day I went into work and noticed that inhaling was painful. Again, as a woman, I find a lot of mundane involuntary behaviors are painful for no reason at all: sitting at a desk, having sex, having boobs, having a uterus . . . But breathing? This was a new one. I walked into the writers’ room, greeted by eight hilarious comedy writers. King idiot, dear friend, and hilarious person Dan Levy immediately made me laugh, and it felt like a wrecking ball went through my chest. Laughing and inhaling felt like I was getting stabbed by a Ninja star, so I told the writers I’d be fine as long as they just didn’t make me laugh all day. In a comedy writers’ room. Where we write comedy. Where the writers are funny. Where their job is to pitch jokes. And make people laugh. Telling comedy writers they can’t be funny is like telling white people they can’t wear plaid.

  A writer pulled me aside and urged me to go to the doctor. I was annoyed by her concern because receiving love made me very uncomfortable at the time, but this was one instance where my codependence worked to my advantage because I ended up going to the doctor solely because I didn’t want her to be mad at me or feel rejected.

  The doctor I went to referred me to a rheumatologist. I didn’t really know what that was, but the plethora of vowels in the title made me very nervous. This specialist explained to me not only that I had this rare condition called costochondritis, which sounded like a dorky dad joke about someone who can’t stop going to Costco, but also that I had a condition called hypermobility. From what I gathered and Googled, it’s a genetic bummer that results from the underwhelming DNA of Western Europeans. It causes joints to move beyond the healthy range of a joint, which you’d think just makes me super flexible and amazing in bed, but it actually couldn’t be less sexy. Us hypermobility sufferers put too much pressure on our joints, which accumulates over time and eventually causes something called “noncollision injuries.” You’ve all heard a story similar to the one where someone fifty-five or so throws his back out doing something as simple as sneezing. It’s basically the bone version of the straw breaking the camel’s back, except you can actually break your back, maybe not with a straw, but certainly by reaching for one.

  I already feel it happening: a couple years ago I strained my neck making a point in an argument. A guy
I was dating said something incredibly patronizing and I cocked my neck forward like a petulant pigeon. My head was stuck in that position for three days. I looked like that girl cocking her head who became famous as a meme and then sued Instagram and won. And who is now probably going to sue me and win. Congrats, girl.

  The doctor told me that because of my hypermobility, which is actually very common and often under- and misdiagnosed, I was walking incorrectly. To find out at thirty that you don’t know how to walk is very annoying information to have to process. I suck at relationships, I suck at sleeping, I suck at eating, I suck at liking myself, I suck at managing my time, and now I suck at walking? The one thing I thought I had in the bag. He said that people with hypermobility walk with their joints instead of their muscles, so the joints are absorbing all the impact the muscles should be absorbing. But I didn’t really have many muscles. Once I realized that, I was struck by a miraculous revelation.

  “Is this why my butt is so flat?!” I asked.

  The doc was pretty stunned that this was my takeaway, given how much harm this condition can do over time, but he also affirmed my theory. Basically, yes, it was. I was walking with my ankles, knees, and hips instead of my calves, quads, and glutes, which as far as I was concerned was stopping me from having the ass of Serena Williams. Well, honestly, fifty other things are also stopping me, but this was the one I would like to blame.