What Is This For?

On its face, the reasons I chose to pursue comedy are clear: I like to laugh, I like making people laugh, and I genuinely enjoy storytelling and performance. These are all the basic, surface-level requirements for pursuing the profession of stand-up comedy. But recently I was forced to ask myself why I really chose to work in this impossibly challenging field. I’m talking beyond the hehe and haha’s of it all. Deeper than, “Because I just love it!” What kind of person yearns to be center stage and in the limelight? What does it say about me that my passion is dependent on being seen? 

The easy answer is narcissism because people don’t really understand what that is. But okay let’s go with it (the watered-down version that just means you’re really into yourself). Is every performer who pursues some level of fame or popularity a narcissist? Is this a creative passion born out of vanity? Yeah, maybe a bit. Maybe more than a bit for others. However, I think it’s too reductive to answer that with an outright yes.

A few months back, I spoke with my therapist about my frustrations with my creative projects and the pattern I keep finding myself in. I put my time and energy into something, celebrate its arrival in the world, and then it kind of just flatlines… like my Audible Original, Like Mother. Exciting for a few weeks, but now living in relative obscurity. Then my low-budget, DIY, comedy special goes online… to little fanfare, despite my best efforts to get it noticed. I post clips and reels and participate in the social media hustle, to no avail. Rarely does my work get any substantial amount of “heat”. 

My therapist then said something that punched me in the gut. This isn’t an exact quote but it was something like this: You’re always going to feel disappointed if you’re doing it for attention, and not for the sake of doing it. 

Well, he got me there. It’s like I forgot what I was doing any of this for. I’ve put myself in a state of caring more about the outcome than the product. Is making art about the response you get or is it about making the art itself? I’m not asking that rhetorically, I want to know the answer. One can argue that as long as you’re creating, that’s all that should matter. Making art is satisfying in and of itself and, in theory, that should be enough motivation for creation, right? 

Part of me wishes I was this kind of person. Someone completely devoid of needing any form of public approval. What a wonderfully secure attachment style this person (who I’m not totally convinced exists), must have.

Back to my previous question though, about whether or not art must be seen? After giving it some more thought I’ve decided that whatever your art is, yes, it does need attention to be paid, in some form or other, to be complete. 

I think our definition of attention is warped. In an age of so many people competing for it, attention has been getting an increasingly ugly reputation. It’s lumped in with the likes of vanity, self-centeredness, egotism, and narcissism. However, attention on its own, in its simplest form, is quite neutral. It can be all those shitty things, yes, but it can also simply serve as an acknowledgment of an act of creation. A way of connecting people or even a method of showing respect. It’s how information is spread. Attention is needed for change and transformation. 

One could even argue it’s more selfish to hide your art from the world because art (even stand-up comedy) is inherently communal and is designed to bring people together and create space for folks to gather and share. Its purpose is to be out there -- spreading feelings or ideas -- or to just be a fun, dumb thing that distracts you from being barraged with other, less artful, feelings and ideas. 

But in all honesty, I don’t feel like I’m always creating in such a community-minded way. I think I’ve been using some of my artistic output for more self-centered reasons. Not self-centered in the stuck-up, egotistical sort of way (well, not entirely). No, my thirst for attention is much more pathetic than egotistical, although equally cliche: I seek validation. Needing the approval of others to feel, well, valid. I desire to be a person worth knowing. I want to be seen as valuable – someone you put stock in and care about. I, and many of my peers, live in a city we can’t afford and pursue a dream that capitalism has mutated into a horrendous competition that tells us we don’t exist unless we’re famous. And if we give up on that nightmarish game, who will love us?

Not to be cliche, yet again, but I experienced emotional neglect in childhood. I was an only child living with two parents who fucking hated each other. Not a day would go by for the majority of my youth that they wouldn’t get into a screaming match with one another. My response was, in turn, to keep to myself. I could be alone in my room for hours, with my little white TV/VCR combo that I wish I still had today. While they yelled and essentially ignored me and all my needs in the process, I watched a lot of fucking TV by myself. I wasn’t always alone, though. I had school. That was my place to shine. I always wanted to be the funny one in class, the teacher’s pet, or the best at something, so I could experience the feeling of being seen. 

Now, at 35 years old, nothing fucking changed. Who am I, if not a writer? If not a comedian? Who would want to be around me, or spend any time with me, if I wasn’t impressive in any way? I am obviously simplifying very complicated feelings, but that’s the gist of it. This is the monster I need to defeat: myself. 

If I’m using my creative energy merely to fill some void within me, I am never going to be happy. And no, that’s not creating art for the right reasons. My work is never going to be enough if I don’t feel like I am enough. If likes and shares are the motivation for creating, what are you really making? If I want people to like me because they’re impressed by what I do, what kind of human connection even is that? This isn’t how thoughtful work is made, and it’s not how meaningful interactions are formed. 

I think of self-esteem as a many-layered, spiral staircase that I’ve repeatedly had to climb or fall from, only to pick myself up and begin the ascent again. At this very moment, I consider myself as getting back up from a slight fall. In doing so, I am ascending to a new tier, one that is shedding the need to be “popular” in order to be “cool”. More pointedly, I’m shedding the need to be widely seen in order to be valid. Better yet, I’m telling the little girl who so often cried in her bedroom alone wishing someone would care about her that she is, she always has been, cared for and loved -- and none of it is as conditional as she builds it up in her mind to be. 

When I was happiest writing and performing was when I was able to obtain that perfect blend of needing but not actively seeking, attention. I’m doing this work because I love it, and also because I want people to see it, but maybe making a true big-money career out of this (which requires constantly having to strive for extreme popularity) is just not in the cards for me. Lately, I’ve been circling back to the Alison I was in college and early adulthood: releasing a zine with my comedy show Loose, making VHS tapes of my Special, working with a local AM radio station to host an esoteric talk show through my day job, and acquiring new hobbies and interests that I don’t feel the need to post about…overall, embracing physical media again and caring less about social media. It feels SO good to care less about social media in particular -- the place self-esteem goes to die.  

The entertainment industry is at a very low-low right now and so many of my peers are embracing the attitude of just doing shit yourself. They’re eschewing the lengthy process of trying to “package” and “sell” themselves, only to be told, after years of a life lived in limbo, that the project is not going to move forward. Of course, a lot of these DIY efforts are also “proofs of concept” ready to be discussed at any meeting you throw at them, and yeah, that’s how it has to be I guess. While I understand that Cash Rules Everything Around Me, when it comes to my art, I’m stepping away from chasing that paper (would gladly let it fall in my lap though, should it ever choose to do that).

I want to put more effort into fostering a genuine, community-minded, punk ethic, and less of the performative crap that, underneath it all, is still desperate to be monetized. There’s a reason I create, even during my bouts of depression, and even though I rarely get the outcomes I hope for. Something about this work just calls to me, and the more I remove myself from the industry rat race, the more I fall in love with doing this simply for the sake of doing it.