I'm Fine...And Other Lies

by Whitney Cummings

  I got through the insecurity by rationalizing that maybe it could be good for girls to see an example of someone in the media who isn’t perfect. Someone who’s human, who has a real face with real flaws and real eye bags. Maybe this was how I could be a role model. Maybe this was how I could try and crack the Beauty Myth that Naomi Wolf was talking about. I wished I had grown up with more realistic depictions of people on television, so maybe this was a gift and how I could actually contribute to a realistic physical standard. Creatively it made sense, too, given the symbolism of a character who has so much emotional baggage would also have, well, under-eye baggage.

  One night I had people over to watch the show’s live feed. I braced for having to see myself on-screen, which is always a complicated feeling. I’m grateful for what I get to do for a living, but I also think it’s unhealthy to look at yourself as much as we all do these days. I have a completely unscientifically researched theory that humans aren’t designed to look at ourselves as much as we do. From what I gather, there are no naturally occurring mirrors in nature. And no, ponds and ice don’t count, you hater.

  The show started. Another reason it is not enjoyable to watch shows that I’m in is that so much of making television is about running out of time and settling for something that’s never as good as you want it to be, so I end up obsessing over all the improvements there was no time to make. I just drive myself crazy thinking of all the better jokes that I wish I’d had time to put in, or other choices I wish I’d made as a performer. As I braced to self-flagellate, I appeared on-screen, and the negative thoughts didn’t come because my brain was too frozen in shock from at what I saw: me . . . but with no eye bags. I’d never seen myself without eye bags before. Most fetuses develop in amniotic sacs, I swear I developed in an under-eye bag.

  I had dealt with eye bags all my life, so I assumed this was the result of some weird transmogrification of what happens when humans are made into pixels and reflected back to you with some electronic magic I’ll never understand. But how could the camera add ten pounds yet subtract eye bags? Was I going crazy? Had the bags ever even been there in the first place? Had I become an insane dysmorphic actress who amplified her every flaw? Was everyone around me enabling my batshit crazy behavior? Or worse, was everyone around me tricking me, trying to make me think that I had flaws that I didn’t have to slowly hack away at my self-esteem until I turned into a less charming iteration of Joan Crawford?

  The good news and the bad news is that I later found out that the reason I looked so tired in person yet so rested on TV was because someone had been hired to “clean up” my face in post-production. The bags were so distracting that they were digitally removed. My reaction to this news was, and still is, complicated. I was relieved because I was pretty sick of getting attacked so much online for looking “tired” and “busted,” but I was also sad. I thought about the girls in the Middle East and what they said about women in America and their appearance. I wondered if Photoshop and digital retouching could be America’s version of women in the Middle East who choose to wear the hijab. Women in America may not cover our faces with scarves, but sometimes we choose or feel pressure to cover it with perfecting veils, be it an airbrush app or the most flattering Instagram filter.

  Another thing connected to my experience in the Middle East was that once the show aired, people started recognizing me. I’m not trying to get sympathy because I’m probably the least famous “famous” person, but it took a minute for me to adjust to it all, so going out in public became weird and awkward. People would come up to me and give me jarring backhanded compliments like “You look so much prettier in person!” or “Don’t listen to them, you’re great!” I started wondering who this “them” was, and why they were so mad at me. I got obsessed with the idea that this amorphous “they” behaved one way to my face and another way behind my back. This awakened and fortified an old belief system I had that everyone is duplicitous and that you can’t ever be truly safe with anyone. Like plaid schoolgirl skirts on adults, this was something that made sense in the nineties, and only in the nineties.

  What does this have to do with the Middle East? Well, I got so paranoid and skittish that I found myself doing the very thing I had judged and resented years before in Dubai: When I left the house, I wrapped my head with a scarf. I obviously did it for a very different reason than Middle Eastern women do and it wasn’t an official hijab per se, but there I was, voluntarily covering my head and face. I did it to avoid being recognized, being accidentally insulted, and getting confusing career feedback from strangers, e.g. “You’re like the female Rodney Dangerfield!” I needed a way to avoid being in a situation where people came up to me and asked “Are you really the age you say you are?” and “Don’t listen to the haters! They’re just jealous!” in a grocery store parking lot.

  People looked at me like I was slightly crazy for wearing a headscarf in 90-degree L.A. weather, but it actually worked because I stopped getting my feelings hurt in the frozen foods section. The headscarf gave me anonymity and safety, which was the only way I could protect my already fragile self-esteem. I finally understood what those girls may have been trying to tell me all those years ago. The experience had come full circle, and the symbol of oppression I felt so insulted by having to wear in the mosque I was now ordering in bulk on Amazon.

  Taking refuge in a headscarf showed me that no matter how progressive and understanding we think we are, and how noble our intentions, sometimes we can be ignorant hypocrites. I will never understand what it’s like to live in an oppressive culture like the Middle East where women are deprived of basic human rights, but at least I was able to finally understand that it could be more complicated than that, and that I certainly didn’t know more about their experiences and emotions than they did. Or maybe there’s absolutely no connection at all between these two experiences, and I’m just desperately trying to make sense of something that can never make sense to me. Obviously my going to the grocery store in a scarf had absolutely nowhere near the same stakes as a woman in the Middle East wearing a burka, but I had to be in that particular situation to finally understand what those girls were trying to tell me, which is that wearing what I thought was a freedom-denying hijab is actually what made them feel free.

  I don’t know if this situation was a lesson or a warning. Maybe those girls were showing me our natural tendency to normalize or acclimate to our oppression, even spin it as positive so we can get through the day. Maybe the lesson was to expose me to brainwashed people to illuminate how brainwashed I am. I don’t know. One thing I do know is that my generalization that all Middle Eastern women were broken and defenseless led me to commit the exact transgressions I so disdained: These women told me their truth, and I invalidated it. While thinking they should be taken more seriously, I didn’t take them seriously. While thinking their voices should be heard, I wasn’t listening to them. While wanting them to be seen, I was ignoring them. The truth is that I was wrong about a lot of things. Goddamn it, I hate admitting that. I don’t know if the girls were right either, but I do know that I was wrong to assume I knew more than they did.

  I know this is not news to you guys—you probably think I’m wrong all the time—but it was breaking news to me. I don’t know if it was being American, being a comedian, or watching too much or too little news, but my trip to the Middle East taught me that I had a very strong resistance to being wrong or changing my mind. I update everything else in my life obsessively—my phone, my computer software, my car—but I wasn’t updating my ideas. I realized that if my thoughts were clothes, they’d be the oversized flannel shirt I wore as a dress in 1996.

  I went to the Middle East with a very Anglocentric, naive idea of what these women’s lives were like. When the girls tried to explain to me that their culture is more complicated than one sweeping statement, it was a threat to my worldview to have to delete all the old files in my head. It’s like that old phone you have in
a drawer that you know you’ll never use again because your fingers are twice the size of the buttons now and they don’t even make chargers for it anymore, but you can’t bring yourself to throw it away because, well, it’s yours. You’re emotionally attached to it. The same thing happened with my beliefs. I became attached to my opinions, which live in a drawer in my dark labyrinth of a brain. My generalizations were an anesthetic that protected me from a much more complicated reality, and I was not willing to wean myself off that painkiller.

  Going to the Middle East didn’t liberate any women or instantaneously revise their culture. It certainly didn’t change the world, but it did change my world. It made me notice how my paradigm is composed of a bunch of generalizations that I used to make me feel safe and superior. Our survivalist reptile brains love to put people and things in neat compartments. For me, these compartments ended up being “all men lie,” “all police officers are good,” or “all food goes well with ranch.” If you’re anything like me you’ve learned the hard way that only the last one is true.

  From what I gather, generalizations and stereotypes were very important in tribal times, before alarm systems and locks on doors. Thinking “all noises in the bushes signals danger” was a very useful stereotype. What used to give us actual security now gives us a false sense of security. Don’t get me wrong, my generalizations served me very well early on in life; for example, when I deduced that “all kids are going to make fun of your last name,” I was pretty much right and planned a defensive strategy accordingly. I mean, I don’t blame them, but it was helpful for me to be prepared. Conversely, positive stereotypes helped me gravitate to healthy situations. For example, deducing that “all horses are awesome” and “you can always rely on MTV” ended up making me very happy because I was able to escape my real world by watching, well, The Real World.

  Now that I’m an adult, my generalizations no longer serve me. I’m no longer in an unsafe situation, so I no longer need to protect myself in the same way. When we continually compartmentalize people, cultures, and genders, we tend to find what we’re looking for even if it means projecting a mirage onto whatever you’re seeing to manifest your assumption. I found myself actually ignoring and doubting any contrary evidence and looking for proof to substantiate my theories. And as we all know, we always find what we’re looking for, whether it’s actually there or not. See what I mean? That generalization isn’t even valid because I can never find my keys no matter how hard I look.

  From what I understand, this instinct has been around as long as our survival has been threatened, so I guess forever. I’m not a neuroscientist so I thought I’d quote someone who is so you don’t think I’m bloviating about things I have no business pretending to know. Taxonomist and neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal wrote about six psychological flaws that keep talented people from achieving greatness. I would have loved to pretend that I just sit around reading old leather-bound books by famous neuroscientists from the 1800s, but I know you’d never believe me, so the truth is that I follow BrainPickings on Twitter and Maria Popova wrote an article about this. Santiago was complaining about how we look for evidence to support our theories back in 1897!

  There are highly cultivated, wonderfully endowed minds whose wills suffer from a particular form of lethargy, which is all the more serious because it is not apparent to them and is usually not thought of as being particularly important. . . . As soon as they happen to notice a slight, half-hidden analogy between two phenomena, or succeed in fitting some new data or other into the framework of a general theory—whether true or false—they dance for joy. . . . The essential thing for them is the beauty of the concept. It matters very little whether the concept itself is based on thin air, so long as it is beautiful and ingenious, well-thought-out and symmetrical.

  Yes, that’s what I was looking for. Symmetry. Something to make sense of all the chaos. Generalizations may be a way we lie to ourselves because the truth is gross and messy and exhausting. Negative generalizations for me weren’t even the most insidious. The positive ones sometimes caused the most disappointment. “All women are trustworthy” was a generalization I started making early in life as a reaction to getting the memo that all men were bad. My nascent psyche probably couldn’t handle both men and women being bad, because that would mean feeling trapped in a perilous situation, so I deduced that since all men were bad, all women must be great. I really needed to believe that to get through the day. As a result, I put women on a pedestal, gave credit where credit wasn’t due, and got hurt a lot. It was so hard for me as a woman, a supporter of women, and as fragile person looking for loving friendships that I literally would rather have gotten hurt before detaching from my delusion that every woman should be trusted with abandon.

  When I decided I wanted to detach from old belief systems, it was way harder than I thought. Gray areas make me almost as uncomfortable as watching Fifty Shades of Grey. I did some research to see if refusing to update old worldviews was a human nature thing or a me being witless thing, and it turns out the whole thing is somewhat universal. Thankfully Stephanie Pappas wrote an article called “Evolution, Climate and Vaccines: Why Americans Deny Science”:

  . . . a 2010 study found that when people were shown incorrect information alongside a correction, the update failed to reverse their initial belief in the misinformation. Even worse, partisans who were motivated to believe the original incorrect information became even more firm in their belief in that information after reading a correction, the researchers found.

  So, for example, if you know the shortest route to the airport and someone tells you they have the shortest route, chances are that will make you believe even more firmly that yours is the shortest. So apparently we Homo sapiens have some innate need to defend our opinions, regardless of how incorrect they are. I’m half embarrassed, half amused by all the times I’ve done this in arguments with guys where I’m blatantly wrong, but physically can’t admit it. Even when my brain says, “You’re wrong, Whitney, you have got to stop talking,” my mouth says, “No, you’re wrong!”

  I think I probably got this way because in our culture we’re so shamed for being flawed or for making mistakes. This seems like another one of those nasty primordial needs to ostracize the weak for the good of the tribe, back when being wrong could have meant being eaten by a saber-toothed tiger. But as long as we equate lack of knowledge with weakness, we’re all gonna remain very stupid. I saw a lot of pretending to know things growing up, which I blame on toxic masculinity and the generations before us having what seemed to be an allergy to vulnerability. My dad never asked for directions. My mom cooked without following recipes. And when people didn’t know statistics, they just made them up: “Well, most people don’t even care about politics.” I mean, that’s not a real statistic. When I bought my first piece of furniture from Ikea, it didn’t even occur to me to look at the instructions because nobody had ever told me it was okay to not know something. Trying to assemble an Ikea side table myself led to a pinched nerve, some pretty epic emotional outbursts, and a lot of splinters. Basically everything except an assembled side table.

  Maybe I heard the platitude “knowledge is power” so often that I internalized it, and thought that without knowledge, real or fake, I don’t have any power. I was so embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know something that I preferred to just defend whatever misinformation I made up than capitulate to the truth. In hindsight, it’s so odd to me that I was insecure about not knowing things because when someone asks me “What does that word mean?” or “How do I do this?” I never think, “What an idiot!” In fact, the opposite is true. I’m always charmed and impressed by a person’s ability to admit they need help. The truth is that if I had just been comfortable saying “I don’t know” earlier in life, I’d actually know a hell of a lot more. Maybe even as much as I pretended to know. Case in point: Until I was twenty-six, I thought a 401(k) was a marathon. That’s the kind of stupidity th
at happens when you’re too afraid to admit you don’t know something.

  • • •

  For the longest time I thought if I couldn’t carry on a conversation about literally everything with authority, that I was an actual piece of garbage. The irony is we pretend to know things in order to be liked, yet nobody likes a know-it-all. They’re very annoying. So why do we try so hard to be one?

  In my case, in addition to the primordial brain dynamics I’m not qualified to outline, I think it’s ego. Ego is a hard thing to explain, and there are plenty of therapists and books that are way better at doing it than I am. That said, I have a lot of experience with them, between having one and dating some big ones.

  I personally see ego as a curmudgeonly middle-aged bouncer, hair frozen in pomade icicles, leather blazer down to his knees, standing outside a nightclub. When people walk by, ego yells “You can’t come in!” even though the nightclub has been closed since 2004 and it’s three in the afternoon. But for me, my ego thinks it’s protecting me. That said, since I’m not in any real danger when I’m having a conversation at a dinner party, it really serves absolutely no purpose but to sabotage me and weird people out.

  My ego is like my hype man, encouraging me to make terrible choices. Yeah! You got this, Whit! Totally say yes to that job you don’t want just so people don’t think you weren’t offered it! Buy that overpriced ugly purse to impress shallow people! Pretend you know way more about the news than you actually know! Stay in that terrible relationship because you, my friend, do not fail at anything! Also, you can change other people with the powers of your mind even if they have no interest at all in changing! My ego is a mascot that mindlessly cheers on scientifically impossible ideas and lame bathroom selfies.