To even pursue it as a career meant that I had to have a nine-to-five and then routinely stay out until 11 P.M. and midnight performing on unpaid shows. So, in my defense, becoming a workaholic then was a necessity. And even though it was a grind, having that kind of around-the-clock schedule at twenty-four was no biggie. Other advantages to being twenty-four (or in your twents, for that matter), in case you’re in that bracket and need the reminder or beyond that age but want to take a trip down memory lane:
No hangovers! Or, if you do have a hangover, you really had to drink a lot to earn the Guitar Hero drum solo that’s going off in your head. At thirty-four, I legit will have two glasses of wine and not enough quinoa and grains for dinner, and the next day, I’m crying out, “Jesus be a fainting couch from a Jane Austen novel because I can’t stand no mo’.”
You’ll be invited to a white party and excitedly prep for it by dipping your sneakers in Crest HD whitening mouthwash or whatever to make sure you’re on theme; meanwhile, when you’re in your thirties and beyond, you’ll show up in your “I’m wearing what I’m wearing because it’s clean” outfit, and no one will be mad at you because you brought Stacy’s Pita Chips.
Dewy skin! Seriously, I once interviewed Zoë Kravitz on my Sooo Many White Guys podcast, and she has a lovely, warm, and inviting dewy glow, while my skin looks like the smudged lenses on a pair of Oakley sunglasses one might purchase at an ExxonMobil gas station.
Up until twenty-five, you can be on your parents’ insurance, which is tight AF and sort of feels like when you played the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles video game and you’d start a level by grabbing a pizza that gave you a bonus life.
You can eat a massive amount of food, take a dump, and your stomach could possibly revert back to a six-pack.
Clearly, being in your twenties is awesome, and sleep is something you can go without much of for stretches at a time and it’s all good, hence the whole doing stand-up in the evenings after putting in an eight-hour day at the office. And while I can argue that developing my workaholic tendencies during this phase of my life was virtually inescapable, I’ll also have to concede that the times I’ve been single gave me the opportunity to devote myself more fully to my career.
And I hate, hate writing that because it makes me sound like the tired trope of a professional woman we so often see in movies and TV shows and magazine profiles who is presented to us, in part, as a warning: “See, ladies, you can be successful, but you won’t be happy.” That lie is used to keep us in check and make sure being in a relationship is a high priority, but here is the thing. Finding something you love to do so deeply that also can pay the bills is rare and fucking dope. That may not be the most elegant thing to say, but it’s fact. Some folks spend their whole lives stuck in jobs that are a means to an end but don’t inspire, surprise, move, challenge, excite, or fulfill them.
Well, I’ve been extremely lucky to have found my calling, and the fact is that being single simply allows me to focus as much energy as possible on my career, and as positive results like being a stronger stand-up comedian or writer become evident, not only does it feel damn good, but it’s hard to pump the brakes. Who wants to slow down when the fruits of their labor are ripening? It’s not like LeBron James ever says, “You know, I ought to chill on all the days and nights in the gym because the result is my teammates and I are winning a lot of games lately.” Obvs, I’m not saying I am LeBron James, but I gotta be the LeBron James of something. Like I’m the LeBron James of Taking My Jeans Off Literally Fifteen Seconds After Arriving Home. Nailed it! And on the first try, which is a very LeBron James thing to do. All kidding aside, making strides due to my hard work felt damn good. What didn’t were instances like with one of my exes, who felt neglected at times during our relationship because Duty booty-called at all hours of the night. Our union, as all others, ended for many reasons, but my working all the time certainly didn’t help. So, naturally, once I was out of that particular relationship and could just be all in with work without fear of hurting a significant other’s feelings or even having to check in for the little things like what time I’d be home for dinner, my career completely took off, which was all the reinforcement I needed to remain a workaholic. But all of this takes a back seat to what I believe is the truest reason for why I’m always on my grind.
A year ago, I was hanging out at WNYC after I finished taping an episode of one of my podcasts. A host of another show and I were chatting, and she said she was interested in how people work and achieve the things they do and was curious about my process. Normally with these kinds of queries, I, like many people, would launch into prepared sound bites: “Oh, you know, I turn my Wi-Fi off when I work” or “If I’ve been sitting for too long, I’ll go for a nice twenty-minute walk to get my creative juices flowing” or, one of my favorites, “I just really love what I do and that pushes me when times get tough.” Like a pop star using Auto-Tune, that sounds good, but it’s not the entire truth. But they are perfect surface-level answers that people want to hear and I want to deliver so I can conserve my brainpower for actually working. However, maybe because this WNYC host caught me after I had been recording for a couple of hours, so I was in full stream-of-consciousness mode, I said something I’ve never, ever, ever said aloud.
“Ya know, I work so hard because I’m trying to outrun death.”
I wasn’t necessarily shocked that I said this—plenty of people feel this way—I was just surprised that I said it so casually and nakedly in conversation. Usually, this might be the sort of thing you admit after a few drinks or in a therapy session, but I was stone-cold sober and I could have been flipping through a magazine with the same intonation I have when I go, “Hmm, those jeans are cute.” It was just so matter-of-fact and accurate.
“Ya know, I work so hard because I’m trying to outrun death.”
There’s nowhere to hide in that sentence. No joke to diffuse the honesty. To my core, this is how I feel, which is partially why I loved the musical Hamilton so much outside of its blatant genius. It resonated with me in such a real way because Alexander Hamilton was also a workaholic, and while his work was far more intense than mine (he founded America’s financial system; I make jokes), the way the show presented his story made me feel like a mirror was being held up to my face. At one point in the show, there’s a lyric the other characters sing about him that goes, “Why do you write like you’re running out of time / You write day and night like you’re running out of time.”
That is so me! I’m agnostic, and I deeply fear death because I don’t know if there is an afterlife. All I have is the now, and I’m terrified of running out of time and not getting a chance to do all the things that I want to do. So I work and work and work, because when I look back before I die, if I’m so lucky to have the opportunity to do so, I don’t want to regret anything in my career. So I’ll stay up until 5 A.M. if it means I can figure the wording perfectly on a new joke. The only problem was I wasn’t happy.
Because I had no life, only work, the fear of dying became my main motivator instead of just one of them, and isn’t that depressing? Life is this big, beautiful, messy, complicated buffet, and I kept coming back to it, empty plate in hand, just loading up the same pasta I get every single time. Well, I got tired of pasta. I wanted to see what chicken parm would taste like. How yummy the salmon is. You get my point. I no longer wanted work to be the only thing, and I knew that it couldn’t be the only thing or it was going to kill me dead long before I exhaled my last breath. I needed to do something not related to my career. So I organized a girls’ trip.
Remember that Palm Springs excursion where I ATV’d? This is the trip I’m referring to. Last year, I took my second ever vacation in my adult life (my first one being a vacay with an ex-boyfriend in 2013). Since I was organzing the vacation, I wanted to arrive in the morning before everyone else got there that evening so I could make sure the house wa
sn’t doo-doo and also take care of my host duties by stocking the fridge and planning activities.
Once all that was done, I was so . . . antsy. I had no idea what to do. No meetings to go to. No phone calls to make. I went for a walk. I checked my emails. There was nothing to do but sit. So I did. I sat. At first, anxiously. Looking around, feeling as though something was wrong or that there was a serial killer hiding in a closet somewhere. Like, lol . . . but also, for real. Arming myself with a big metal spoon, I checked the house. Everything was fine. Yay, I weakly thought, and then my mind chimed in, Don’t worry. Just get through these five days and you can get back to working.
“Oh, well, fuck this,” I said aloud. I’m not going to crumble literally two hours into a vacation.
So I decided to explore the house in a real way instead of looking for the boogeyman. I went outside and saw the hot tub/pool combo. Cool! I’m not about to get my weave wet, but I can get clavicle deep in the h-tub and feel like a Girls Gone Wild lady minus the white-girl-wasted vibes. I ran inside, changed into a bathing suit, grabbed a magazine, maybe a cocktail, and then got into the hot tub. Again, my mind started drifting, but before I could let it formulate a thought, I stopped it. I closed my eyes as if to say, “Bitch, if you don’t shut up.”
After a minute of cussing myself out, I opened my eyes and noticed the palm trees. How insanely green the grass was. How the outdoors didn’t have the stinky mist that New York City has in the summers. How it was nice to take the slowest of sips of my drink instead of downing it so I could get back to working. Then I smiled. Like a big, goofy grin. And then I started laughing and truly believed that everything was okay despite my not working. I’m not running out of time; I’m making the most of it, and it changed my outlook.
Listen, there’s no perfect button I can put on this because workaholism will probably be the great struggle of my life. It has continued to get better since that trip. I’m always trying to figure out that balance. And sometimes I get it right. For instance, as the deadline for this book loomed, I might have worked around the clock to complete it—a’ight, I kind of did—but I took a weekend off from writing so that I could fly home and see my dad on his birthday and spend some quality time with him. I wouldn’t have done that a year ago. I would have succumbed to the pressure of work and stayed in New York. I would have sat in my apartment that entire weekend, writing and talking to no one except for a half-assed phone call to my pops on his birthday. I would have done all that instead of remembering, Hmm, my dad is also going to die one day. It’s not just you, Pheebs. Everyone you know and love will die, and do you want your memories of them to be tainted with hints of regret that you blew them off or put off seeing them until next time? There may not be a next time. So I got it right that time, enjoyed hanging with my dad and the rest of the family. And the icing on the cake?
When I returned to the book, I wasn’t stressed out. I wasn’t all doom and gloom about how I was going to get it done. I was actually pretty psyched about diving back in and finishing it. I was looking forward to seeing if I could make myself laugh with a crazy joke instead of keeping one eye on the word count at the bottom of Microsoft Word. And I wrote from a place of joy and it felt amazing. I’ve gotten the pure, unbridled happy back, so if it’s all right with you, I’d like to get back to work, so I can finish this bad boy and take another vacation.
How to Be Alone and Only Mildly Hate and Lukewarm Love It
Y’all, I hope you’re reading this last essay the way I assume we all want our lives to end: alone. I mean, right? Dying alone ensures some weird-ass Heaven’s Gate cult bullshit didn’t pop off. Now, I know some of you want to die surrounded by loved ones, but in my opinion, that’s low-key rude as hell. That’s just like when my family and I took my mom to see the movie Precious on her birthday and then we #JoyStruggled the rest of the day to have fun and celebrate my mom’s life. Suffice it to say, it was extremely awkward. And that’s why we now just watch The Voice and An American Tail: Fievel Goes West on Mama Robinson’s birthday. Jokes aside, even though I’m 90 percent #TeamDieAlone, that last 10 percent is down to die mid-O with the hottest possible dude. Imagine, for a second, film/TV director Cary Fukunaga (Google him ASAP if you don’t know what he looks like) putting his illustrious career on pause because he was going to have the honor of smashing me. It would be artistic, sensual, and wild—#ReeseWitherspoon—and, ultimately, too much for my body to handle, so I’m pretty sure my orgasm would just be me holding up two peace signs, telling him, “Thanks, dawg,” and then floating out of my body the way that trash bag floated in the wind in American Beauty. Side note: While writing out this scenario, I went from “lol” to “but for real though” status, so someone get on this, please! Look, I’m no fool. I know death by orgasm is highly unlikely, so I’ll settle for Electric Sliding into the afterlife solo. Now that we have my demise moistly figured out (leaving the typo because it’s clearly a gift from the Kwanzaa gods), let’s gather around because I want to tell you about a time where I wasn’t about being alone. In fact, it made me almost lose my gahtdamn mind in a way I hadn’t done since the summer of 2015. But first, here’s the tea about that summer.
After three years and eight months together, my then boyfriend and I sat down in the living room and had a sad conversaysh where I informed him that we were currently experiencing the series finale of This Is Us. Initiating the breakup was anxiety-inducing for me for many reasons, one of which is that I’d never dumped anyone before. Well, I take that back. I had done my fair share of chucking up the deuces to incompatible dudes after a few bad dates, but never had I canceled a significant relationship, let alone one in which both families were on board with the union, where marriage seemed to be on the horizon, and where the breakup would involve someone moving out.
You know when there’s inclement weather and meteorologists call it “Snowpocalypse” or some other melodramatic name to scare us into buying provisions? Well, as soon as I ended the relationship, I did a “Crymageddon” all over Brooklyn and Manhattan. It was a lovely little tour on which I sobbed on the street, in a cab to a friend’s apartment, and after I left that friend and hopped into an Uber, I cried some more, then met with a different homie for dinner in which I burst into tears as soon I sat down; then after the meal, I sobbed and snotted in a Duane Reade, while standing on a subway platform, throughout the duration of the subway ride home, and finally back at the apartment, I cried myself to sleep on the West Elm couch I’d bought mere months ago when the ex and I had been so hopeful about us a couple. And as for Crymageddon provisions? Instead of canned soups and flashlights, I rewatched the entire Sex and the City series and blew through boxes of Kleenex. Once the initial shock of the breakup subsided, I had to contend with a five-layer dip of emotions that most people deal with in situations like this.
First, your brain pumps out the National Anthem of Failure because, according to society, marriage is the end result; otherwise, why bother dating? Then, like an annoying mailing list you got placed on without your permission that you try to leave but it asks you seventeen times if you’re sure you don’t want to continue getting updates to a one-man show about being a foosball fan, regret chimes in to second-guess you following your gut instinct. This, of course, is followed by sadness aka an “In Memoriam” of all the happier times during the relationship that plays in your mind and the montage is backed by Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know.”
Next is something that you might feel guilty about, but we would all be lying if we didn’t cop to being relieved once the bad relationship is over. Not just for the two people in it but also for both sets of their friends. Much like when my niece, Olivia, made me watch The Lion King with her five times in five days, yet every time we watched it, she’d constantly ask me what was happening in the movie like she didn’t already know, I spent months prior to my ending the relationship talking ad nauseum to my friends about every problem we had, only to—on the next phone call wi
th those very same friends—be dumbfounded as to what was going on in my dusty-ass relationship.
Finally, there’s shame, a feeling we’re all too familiar with. I shamed myself into thinking I was a quitter the way that my dad shamed me for watching The Real Housewives of Atlanta. Not only did he believe it was bad television, but he felt the need to list some of the important figures in black women’s history, how they fought for their lives and for equality, and how showing black women yelling at each other over nonsense is setting the movement back. To which I responded, “Well, now that you brought Sojourner Truth into this . . .” Pro tip: If you ever start a sentence by mentioning a notable person from your race like Sojourner or Tito Puente or Malala, then the takeaway is that you need to get your CSI on and examine your life. Moving on. Over time, I began to heal.
Besides leaning on my parents and close friends, a major facet of the healing process was the decision to not date for a year. A few peeps told me I was a bowl of Froot Loops for having this rule, but I had seen too many people immediately Plinko their way down onto new D/into new vajeen and start up an oft ill-advised relationship, thus making the baggage they carry the responsibility of the new partner. It’s kind of like when you give a friend your old cell phone without wiping it clean and they’re like, “Thanks . . . but there’s no storage left because you’ve kept a record of all your text messages like you’re a stenographer for the most boring recurring court case about brunch places that are cash only.”
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