I’ve always been on to myself enough to stay alive and not do something so stupid that I’m dead. It was that manifestation of selfish fear that kept me alive. I credit the podcast for getting me fully on to myself. Because I was in such trouble when I started it I really needed to talk to people. I needed to hear them. I needed to engage and grow my empathy. I needed to listen. I needed to see myself in others and also hear of struggles that were harder and deeper than mine. People like Todd Hanson, who spoke in detail about his suicide attempt, or Maria Bamford, who manages an obsessive-compulsive disorder, or Aubrey Plaza, whose anxiety issues led to a stroke. Their stories helped put my own problems in perspective.
After years of talking to people, I can honestly say that I have learned to accept myself for who I am and accept my issues and problems for what they are. If you learn to shut the fuck up and listen and empathize with others, your emotions start to regulate a bit, your problems became manageable, and your issues become tedious to you and maybe you can let them go for a while, or temper them.
Also, the feedback from having conversations about mental health, and how those conversations helped others with mental health issues, helped my mental health. Look, I’m still pretty fucked-up, but I’m not as dangerous to myself or others and I can choose what I want to live with and how much I want to work on change. Sometimes you just have to be okay with who you are.
DAVE ATTELL—COMEDIAN AND ACTOR
I’ve been to the hospitals for the troops. You go to Walter Reed, which is where they bring them after they go to Germany, the troops that are wounded. You see a lot of guys going through vicious, hardcore rehab. They’ve lost arms and legs.
They’ve got a dog there, which I thought was like a Seeing Eye dog, but he’s really just there to be their friend. When they’re feeling down, he can sense it, and he’ll come over to them and they’ll use him to lean, to stand up, and to start doing their exercises, and walk. He’s like a friend.
I went to the hospital, and this dog that can sense pain would follow me around the whole day. This guy’s there with no legs, but the dog’s like, “No, that guy’s going to make it. This guy? I don’t know.”
AUBREY PLAZA—COMEDIAN, ACTOR
I do a thing where I listen to my hair. I do a loop and then I scrunch it inside of my ear. I’m usually freaking out when I do that. My therapist said it’s a soothing thing, a defense mechanism. I’ve been doing it since I was a kid. Then I play with my lip. I do both of those things because my parents would always yell at me for doing them. They would just bat my hand away.
LENA DUNHAM—ACTOR, WRITER, DIRECTOR, PRODUCER
I used to be a huge hypochondriac. It’s really shifted for me in the last year or so. One time, I was so sure I was pregnant, I told my producer Jenni that I thought I could feel my baby crawling up and down my spine, and she was like, “That’s not what babies do.” At this point, they’re not big crawlers. If you were one month pregnant, your baby wouldn’t be doing a little dance. It’s not the dancing baby from Ally McBeal.
DAVE ATTELL
My mom has a hoarding problem, so I got to scream at her about having three hundred pairs of socks. Then she throws back, “Well, if you had heat in here, I wouldn’t need all this.” She’s not a dirty hoarder. It’s all folded neatly and nicely, and it’s in boxes. I’m like, “Who’s this for?” She’s like, “Oh, I want to give this to…,” like, somebody who’s already dead. I’m like, “Just get rid of it.”
JENNY SLATE—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
Sometimes people think that because I’m cheery or whatever, it means that I’m silly or repressed, but honestly, I just think it’s the opposite. I am occasionally sad. I’m not paralyzed with fear, but I would say that I feel very lonely often. When there are no people around I feel sad, like a puppy, like a dog looking out the window.
NORM MACDONALD—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
The problem with laughing is it will build to a hysteria sometimes that I have to crank a couple of benzos to prevent a panic attack. I start laughing and then it gets out of control, like hysterical. I still have extreme sensitivity to things. Not to life things, but literature or art or something like that. I have incredible sensitivity. I kind of have to stay away from it.
Like paintings. I don’t know anything about art. Nothing at all. But I have had experiences that have been so hard on me. Like one time, I was in New York and somebody dragged me to a fucking art museum. I hate art. I was looking at this picture of this girl, and I was falling in love with her. She was so fucking beautiful, this fucking girl in this fucking picture, and then the guide was telling me the fucking thing was drawn in the sixteenth century. Obviously this lady was dead, long dead, and here I am fucking in love with her, and so I’m like, “Ah. Fuck it.” It was so hard on me for so many days. It sounds crazy, right?
Marc
Not really. It sounds like that’s a very good painting.
Norm
It was an incredible painting, but it would make me cry and I didn’t cry at my dad’s funeral. Real life stuff seems so prosaic to me that it never really touches me much.
AUBREY PLAZA
I had a pretty serious anxiety issue, and when I was twenty I had a stroke. At the time, my doctors thought it was because of the birth control pill. That has since been negated, and it boils down to migraine-related stress issues.
It was Queens actually where it happened. I was in college. It was the summer before my junior year. It really was a freak thing. I didn’t have a headache, nothing was wrong with me. I took the subway in to have lunch with friends in Astoria.
I got into their apartment. I sat down. I was talking about a Hilary Duff concert that I had taken my sister to the night before. Then I looked down at my right arm, and all of a sudden, it was like my brain was telling me that it wasn’t my arm. I literally thought, “Whose arm is that that’s on my leg?” It was like my arm was just detached from my body. Then the whole right side of my body was paralyzed for a second. I remember I was hitting myself, like hitting my arm to figure out what was going on because it wasn’t numb. It was just, like, not there. Then I blacked out for a second, and then the sound got really weird. I regained all my motor skills, but I couldn’t talk. I just was making a weird sound. I was going, “Uh,” like that. My friends thought I was doing a weird bit, and they were like, “Stop it. What the fuck are you doing?” Then I couldn’t talk. I had expressive aphasia because the blood clot was in my left temporal lobe, which is my language center.
The paramedics came. They were asking me questions. I was totally there, and I could understand what they were saying to me and I knew what the answers were, but I just forgot language completely, and I forgot how to write. It was really the craziest thing that’s ever happened.