Liberate, Deconstruct, Integrate, Repeat

I have this collection of jokes that I’ve been squirreling away in my mind palace in hopes that I’ll someday stumble into situations where I get to cash in on them to some raucous reception. I guess most of them are really more like one-liners than traditional jokes, and realistically, the context I’m most likely to ever use any of them is probably on the phone with my sister. But I’m patiently priming the pump regardless.

The main reason for the long, deliberate approach to stockpiling some one-liners is that I’m no natural when it comes to the witty zinger. Even so, there is nothing I love more than a pithy saying, flawlessly delivered. It’s why I regularly revisit this supercut of Bob Greene-isms with a mix of awe and jealousy.

What’s perfect about the colorful and bizarre sayings of somebody like Bob Greene is that when they hinge on jokes made at somebody’s expense, it’s mostly his own (i.e. “I got a short memory, just like when I was in the third grade—two of the best years of my life!”). As far as jocularity goes, I feel like that’s the stuff of the best and most benign humor. It’s similar, I think, to what makes dad jokes and puns pretty inclusive and broadly funny—at least among people who share a native proficiency of the same spoken language. It’s the rare genre of joke that nobody has to be the butt of.

Puns are so idiomatic that I’m sure they rarely translate across cultures and languages (however, I’ve recently been reminded of how a good cross-cultural malaprop can take on a hilarious life of its own). So I recognize there are limits to the universality of even the most perfectly crafted dad joke. Nonetheless, the wholesome spirit of the dad joke is what I’m trying for in my own repertoire of yet-to-be-debuted one-liners.

Even with this whole set of parameters around one-liners that feels pretty benign, I’ve already recognized some of the harm they can do—specifically with the jokes made at my own expense. While I’ve described myself as “my hometown’s reigning village idiot” online before, it’s not something I’ve used conversationally yet. In fact, I recently blew an opportunity where it would’ve worked seamlessly. Somebody asked me point-blank, “What’s your claim to fame?” as we were introducing ourselves. It’s THE perfect setup for an answer like, “I am my hometown’s reigning village idiot.” And yet, I passed it by. I’m not sure that I consciously abstained so much as I was just disarmed by the person I was talking to. Prior to personally introducing myself, I did know this person by their reputation—in addition to being a generous and effective community organizer and a fabric artist of some renown, they’re a Jamestown S’Klallam Tribal Elder. Inserting a self-effacing joke in that interaction would’ve just felt indulgent and presumptuous, so I’m glad I didn’t.

The day before that interaction, I had been part of a facilitated discussion with some folks I work with about a book called Blended written by a local healer named Velda Thomas. It seems like a disservice to even call it a book because it’s more like a collection of poetic vignettes meant to invite active reflection, discussion, and personal application. Structurally, it has blank pages with reflection questions between sections to encourage passage-based journaling. It’s not quite like any other bound media I’ve interacted with in recent memory, and it was honestly a breath of fresh air. There were a few major through lines in my own experience reading and reflecting on Blended. But the biggest was undoubtedly this realization that while I’ve largely disinvested in self-loathing in recent years, I haven’t truly dismantled it in myself.

In recursive, associative ways, Blended maps what I understand as these discreet but deep-seated links between self-loathing and systemic oppression. In the context of American history, it makes a lot of sense to me that the latter is predicated on centuries of building and maintaining the former. I’m sure there are numerous smart and qualified people out there who’ve written books about how the Puritans effectively poisoned the well for all subsequent generations of us who have been spawned in this racist, classist, extractive, heteropatriarchal stew that is the American settler state. And because we’ve never taken strides on any society-wide level to exorcize this damaging and censorious bullshit from our culture, we’re all programmed to pretty much hate ourselves with the main variable from person to person being where we place that hatred.

In some people, the hatred expresses itself as a self-blaming, self-annihilating, internalized hatred—I would say that’s the camp I naturally fall into. But on another extreme end of the spectrum, some people don’t recognize the self-hatred as that at all, and transmute it into blame and violence directed at others. There’s of course plenty to unpack and analyze there. But I guess what I’m trying to say is that there’s a reason that Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s book subtitled “The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America” starts with a whole section devoted to racist ideas produced by Cotton Mather and the 17th century New England Puritans. All that codified self-loathing and scapegoating in the early years of U.S. colonization has left an indelible mark. And the self-begetting cycle of hatred that it kicked into high gear is still projecting outward and devouring everyone in its path all these years later. In the same way that violence begets violence, active self-hatred never stops at ourselves. Passive self-hatred, I’m learning, is also no innocuous walk in the park.

I used to really hang my hat on my self-loathing. Like, I identified with it so aggressively that, as recently as 2019, I was sure I had a personality disorder, of which the defining symptom is an indomitable self-loathing that drives all decisions and behaviors. It was briefly liberating to think something that seemed to explain so much of my life could be chalked up to a disorder. But around late 2020, in learning more about complex, episodic trauma spread throughout early childhood, my understanding of the real roots of my self-loathing started to change. It became clear that the self-loathing was the result of a nervous system highly disorganized by trauma over time. And as my full-fledged Marxist adult plumage started to come in, I began to see it all through a critical lens as to who was making money off of this whole enterprise.

It turns out there is a whole industrial complex monetizing people’s developmental trauma by labeling them with a disorder so they can then be expensively diagnosed, treated, and medicated. In The Body Keeps the Score, a seminal book about complex PTSD that’s had kind of a meteoric rise in popularity over the past few years, Besel van der Kolk devotes an entire section to discussing the problematic nature of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)—the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) guide for diagnosing mental disorders that all American mental health practitioners, social workers, and many lawyers are obligated to purchase every time it’s updated.

The fourth edition of the manual earned the APA over $100 million and paperbacks of the DSM-5 sell for a spendy $150 a pop. The APA’s counterparts in other industrialized countries often criticize the DSM for overemphasizing the fault of biology and defective genes as the cause of psychological suffering over abandonment, abuse, and deprivation during childhood. Van der Kolk’s contention is that the DSM is serving the APA’s economic interests more than the wellbeing of the patients who get diagnosed, treated, and prescribed based upon its guidelines. I’m inclined to believe that. Like all other identifiers, I’m convinced diagnoses and disorders are only useful insofar as they empower people to heal, grow, evolve, and adapt. To me, a source of identity is only productive and healthy if it’s liberating. I don’t think the types who monetize stuff like disorders are interested in anybody’s liberation.

I’ve more or less felt that way for a while now. And I think I’ve succeeded at decentering my self-hatred in a lot of ways—at least to the point of recognizing it as a symptom of my lived experience rather than a personality trait that was somehow preordained and present in me at birth. But after reading and discussing Blended, it’s clear I’ve only taken that work so far.

Velda has this sequence of four pieces about the mammy stereotype—a depiction of Black women who work for a white family and nurse the family’s children. The effect of the mammy sequence in Blended is twofold. The pieces contextualize the trauma and indignities endured historically and still by Black women, particularly when it comes to being in roles of service. But the sequence also reclaims the stereotype in a way, showing that even in service, Black womanhood has always been more complex and multifaceted than the dominant culture’s caricature of it.

In the last section of the last piece of the mammy sequence comes this line: “The mission ahead is to completely liberate, deconstruct, and integrate Mammy.” At least in my reading, Velda’s mammy sequence models how to do that by contextualizing the roles we find ourselves in and the calculated choices we make for our own safety and survival, then transforming our wounds into something with a higher and better use. To me, the work of integration is getting to the point where our formative wounds, existential abuse, and generational trauma become a source of wisdom and power—a way of reclaimed knowing and being that can heal ourselves and others.

In personal reflection and later in discussion, it’s become evident that for all the strides I’ve made toward liberating and deconstructing, I still have a lot of integrating to do. Until I do, self-loathing is always going to find a way to sully how I understand myself. I keep thinking of this analogy where it’s like I made one big push to clear a field of a bunch of invasive, suffocating brambles. But that was a few years ago now, and because I never planted anything more productive to outcompete the brambles and restore the soil, the bad, destructive growth has slowly and quietly returned and overtaken the field again. The work of liberating, deconstructing, and integrating—I’m realizing—is non-linear and therefore ongoing. Different aspects of ourselves can be at different stages in the process toward full integration and that’s why we have to stay on top of it. This constant, regenerative, refining work is what makes healing mutual.

Reading Blended was a wakeup call. It made me realize that I still basically think of myself as this kind of pathetic and buffoonish but at the same time endearing and pensive garden variety burnout. I still think of myself as kind of a joke, so my ways of identifying myself have become a series of jokes made at my own expense. And maybe that wouldn’t be the biggest red flag, but I’m noticing that the jokes are largely a commentary on how I don’t measure up to standards lionized by the dominant culture. For example, I often think about this meme of Moe from The Simpsons, and find myself subbing in different words for “a wife” and “rash” depending on whose situation I’m comparing mine to. Below is one variation that feels eternally relevant:

There’s nothing sensational about that example. In fact, it’s quite literal: In lieu of economic mobility, I have occasional night sweats and a student loan balance that may very well outlive me. Now, I don’t think joking about my lack of solvency like that is harmful in and of itself. What I do think is dangerous, though, is when I center my struggles and forget to contextualize them. To me, that’s the deconstructing piece of the liberation work Velda Thomas maps out in Blended. When we forget the context, it’s also easy to forget that our circumstances are almost never the result of personal deficiencies. And when we lose sight of that, it’s all too easy to backslide into self-loathing.

In the case of student loans, the contextualizing and deconstructing starts with reminding myself that my position is not at all unique among millennials. Because I’ve read Can’t Even, Anne Helen Petersen’s excellent book about millennial burnout, I have some grasp of the conditions and the decisions made by people in power that have contributed to this generational epidemic of economic instability. I think it’s healthy to make jokes about it with that perspective as a backdrop because there’s definitely camaraderie in a shared struggle and clarity around who’s really responsible for creating it. The ruling class who enabled this new gilded age of wealth inequality could shore up this shitstorm today if they wanted to. All the resources and influence necessary to do so rest with them. The moral and political will? Not so much.

So the context is ever-important. And I feel like the motive of poking fun at myself shifts in a small but significant way when I remember that. Absent the context, the jokes kind of just take on this role of signaling to people that I’m aware that I look like one pathetic loser if they’re grading me against the dominant culture’s standards of heteropatriarchy and my capacity as a consumer. The jokes become more purely self-loathing, but only relative to an arbitrary set of standards that I don’t even agree with. More and more, I feel like our shared struggle is as much against the dominant culture as it is against dispossession and extraction.

When I articulate that, it makes me think there’s a vital rule I have yet to apply in building my small arsenal of one-liners and jokes. It seems to me that the best way to keep jokes squarely within the territory of self-effacing rather than full-bore self-loathing is to make sure we roast the toxic crock of shit we’re all simmering in at least as much as we roast ourselves. That is, we should have no compunction about making jokes at the dominant culture’s expense. Which is why I’m especially proud of this one-liner that I’ve been sitting on: I know corgis with legs longer than most hetero-monogamous marriages.