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Being on the other side of those stares was still alien to me. Staring out the back window of the ambulance, my wet eyes made the streetlights and headlights blur until I blinked and then repeated the process all over again before the doors opened at my overnight hospital.
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It’s now six a.m., and the nurses’ station is roaring through the shift change. A doctor comes in and turns on a very bright light and tells me that after breakfast I’ll have a sonogram of my legs to figure out where the clot originated. He doesn’t turn off the light when he leaves.
A misconception I had about hospitals was that people got to sleep as much as they wanted there. That’s not true. It’s like a competition to see how many times a person can be woken up before they get angry. I concede my loss and turn on the TV, feeling sorry for myself.
Only a couple hours later, my friends Ashley and Isha show up to keep me company. They come bearing magazines, coloring books, laughs, hugs. The heavy doses of painkillers and camaraderie almost makes me forget that a lady is literally rubbing goo onto a piece of machinery and further rubbing that machinery up and down my naked body in front of them. She does ask me if I want them to leave the room, but this is the first time I’ve smiled in weeks. If the price of happiness is my bare ass being seen by people I love and respect, so be it.
Asking for visitors, or help, or company is something I still struggle to do. My friends sensed this and just told me what time they were on the way and if I could please tell them what room I was in that would make it a lot easier for them to get in. I was grateful. I’m still grateful. I can spend my entire life alone, fearing that I’m putting someone out by asking for them. And in those moments when I didn’t know exactly if a future was a thing I needed to worry about, I needed people stronger than me to see through my bullshit and just make the quality time happen.
It’s Memorial Day weekend, and the food all follows a theme: bland and patriotic. The modestly iced red, white, and blue cookies taste like communion wafers and add insult to injury.
It’s counterintuitive but helpful to watch films more depressing than my own life at this point. I wince at Black Swan. I bawl to Amy—the documentary about Amy Winehouse. She died at twenty-seven. I’m twenty-six. Of course I draw similarities where I can. But mostly I just watch to gain perspective. No matter how bad the exhaustion, or bloating, or aches get, I am still here.
The summer solstice hits the city, and what used to be my favorite time of year feels like an eternal winter. Whatever is happening with the sun and the moon and the crops—I want the opposite. All I want to do is hide in the dark, and for Mother Nature to normalize my lack of activity.
I start a GoFundMe, because even with my savings of around $10,000, the multiple CT scans, MRIs, doctor’s appointments, and hospital bills drain that money quickly.
“Why did you post that?” my mom asks of my promoting the fund-raiser on Facebook. She doesn’t mean to, but she’s judging me. She’s embarrassed that people know I can’t afford treatment. I’m embarrassed, too. I cry.
“I don’t know what else to do. I can’t afford to keep paying for this, and I can’t work a job because I pass out if I’m up for more than ten minutes at a time.” I break down. The shame of being financially inadequate on top of being scared to death of having to move back home and give up on my dreams, or worse, dying, is too much.
But people give. They are so fucking generous. They give and give. People I admire and have never met donate hundreds of dollars. People I admire and have met give even more. The shame falls away. I haven’t held a gun to anyone’s head and demanded they hand over their wallets. I just detailed the hole that I’ve gotten stuck in, and people responded with empathy and understanding. I still feel ashamed. Maybe it’s because my mom worked so hard my whole life to help us appear less poor than we actually were, and here I am, announcing that I am now broke. You know that girl you look up to who left her hometown and is working for big companies in New York? Yeah, can you give her five bucks?
But the reality is I wouldn’t have survived that time period being even more stressed about not being able to afford rent or the variety of medications doctors kept giving me in lieu of surgery.
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Lyle, a friend and artistic partner, posted a picture of me on Instagram and I hate it. It isn’t the fact that I look bloated and my eyes do that thing where they disappear because I’m laughing; it’s the fact that I haven’t looked like myself to me in months. It’s the fact that I’m starting to not look like me to other people.
We all get used to our flaws. We learn to accept them, tolerate them, or at least find some good light and a flattering angle to hide them. So it was jarring to me to see all of my health problems reflected in a body I was already working on tolerating. Cheeks that look like they’re winning the Olympic “chubby bunny” competition, curls I’ve been too tired to tend to, and clothing that fits awkwardly—somehow both too big and too small at the same time and in all the wrong places. More than disliking the way I look, I don’t recognize myself.
That had become the theme of being sick. This isn’t happening to me. This isn’t me. Because it if it were me, I’d have to admit that I hated myself. That all of the horrible things this body was doing was me doing it to me, and rather than slaying some dragon, I was going to be cutting out a chunk of my body and hoping that all my organs could just stay chill for the duration of recovery. That’s a scary thing to absorb.
I look terrible. I will still be this person even after I pay someone to stab me in the stomach and remove some lumps. Everything that I hate right now is actually happening and it’s not happening in the past; I’m drowning in it right now.
People who mean well give me words of encouragement like:
“You’re so young. In the long run this will seem like a tiny blip in your life’s story . . .”
and
“We miss you!” shouted at varying decibels after midnight in a Snapchat from what looks like the best party ever—every time. Nothing helps. I start to realize that physical pain is less agonizing than watching everyone living out my days and theirs while trapped in a body that is giving up on me.
The only thing I regretted when I found out how bad the tumor was was dieting. I wished like hell that every birthday party I had eaten the cake, every movie I’d tried the popcorn, and every flight I took the damn pretzels, cookies, or peanuts. It was almost funny, really. I had gone from working out every day, counting calories, and comparing myself to literally every woman who passed me to realizing that regardless of if I was skinny or overweight, my ass was gonna die. I thought I was going to die. And I thought that I’d treated most people fairly and made amends for the things I’d gotten wrong, but mostly, I wished that I had been easier on myself.
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There’ve been countless nights since the surgery that I thought I might be dying. From the first night, when I rang the bell for more medicine for so long that my neighbor in the recovery room hit their button for me, too, to the night I lay awake crying while my sister and mom lay in my living room, me being too ill to use the restroom by myself.
Healing was a long process. It took me a year to be able to feel strong enough to work out again. The scar is large and noticeable, but I’m not embarrassed. I would take four or five of those scars if it meant I didn’t have to look forward to another period of my life being so horrible and isolating. But now that I know how bad it can get, I worry a lot about it happening again—the illness, the reluctant doctors, and the wishy-washy insurance. Every achievement is marred by the thought that at any moment I could feel very tired and it could be more than a cold. I don’t know if I’m a strong enough person to overcome something so painful and absolutely incomprehensible again. I don’t think I should have to be.
I’ve gone to the emergency
room a number of times since getting out of the hospital simply because I had a sharp, phantom pain that I thought might be an embolism. It’s madness, but caution feels warranted.
I don’t know how to end this essay. I’d like for you to know that I’m also taking major advantage of having energy and good health. As much as this experience scared me, it also made me want to achieve as much as I can as fast as I can, because that loss of time felt like having my wallet stolen. Literally and figuratively. I will do everything I want to do the way I want to do it, because that’s all there is.
Karaoke Is Cheaper Than Therapy
Feelings, man. We all have ’em, and we all need to deal with ’em. We could go through the tedious task of googling a doctor, setting an appointment, remembering exactly which unpopular spin-off of our health insurance carrier we have, and talking to a stranger about our deepest secrets and insecurities for upwards of five hundred dollars a pop—OR we could realize that Frank Ocean and Cher have graciously and eloquently put our feelings to music that demands to be screamed at peak volume among friends in a dingy Koreatown karaoke bar at all hours of the night for $8.50 per person per hour.
Is there even a question which I prefer?
I take karaoke very seriously. I’m not in the school of thought that dictates performers must sing every note perfectly and on beat with minimal lyrical flubs. Karaoke is all about stage presence and selling your emotions. Do you need vengeance? Are you scared to admit you’re in love? Have you been thinking sexy thoughts all day but been too shy to speak them? Maybe you sound like a dying walrus, but that’s not the point. Do dying walruses manage to make us believe they are in pain or sad or even kind of enjoying it? Do as they do. And there’s no better place in the world to sing your heart song to a room filled with friends and acquaintances than in Koreatown, NYC.
K-town is pretty easy to ID and basically the only place worth visiting in Midtown Manhattan after seven p.m. Easily accessible from the 34th Street/Herald Square metro station, each building that lines the street is stacked floor by floor with Korean barbecue houses, eyelash extension parlors, and karaoke sanctuaries for the huddled masses.
Here’s the ideal setup for a karaoke night:
8+ of your closest friends. Fewer is okay, but usually in a group that small someone does all the singing, and the rest of the people just let them put in song after song until they slink out after they “go to the bathroom.”
Alcohol. I say the more the better, but I’m not a role model.
A preestablished vibe. If you just got dumped and someone comes in singing the more upbeat part of Hall & Oates’s collection, you played yourself.
A set list. A vibe is important, but you should also know a few songs you might want to sing that you’d enjoy singing that aren’t so long that everyone wants to skip your song or talk over it. Really captivate us. Short and effective is always better than the alternative. Yes, I have a note on my phone.
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One time I went to France with Samsung to shoot a video. At the end of the week, after too many mojitos and a fireworks show on the beach, everyone was dragging their feet on what to do next. After all, we were in the south of France and the sun still hadn’t gone down at nearly ten p.m.
That was when I suggested we find a karaoke bar. There had to be one. It was the middle of their tourist season and there’s nothing tourists like more than group activities in sheisty bars. The group I went with was a little reluctant.
“I can stay for one song.”
“I can’t sing.”
“Blah blah blah, I suck.”
The protests never ended. But we followed the Google Maps instructions to a seedy Irish bar with “Don’t Stop Believin’” blaring. Perfect.
Within one hour a member of our fifteen-person-deep crew revealed it was his birthday. Shots rained from the sky. We were all in. A group of Irish tourists were digging our vibe and fell in love with me and Sasheer Zamata.
Sasheer has a KILLER singing voice. A lot of people don’t know this. So once she blew us all away with some Adele, the requests from the Irishmen started pouring in. For the final performance of the night we did one more shot and sang a duet to “I Will Always Love You.”
I lost my voice. It’s been a year and my voice is still not all the way back. The next morning I woke up with a hangover and flew to LA straightaway to VidCon. The longest flight of my life, with nothing but the memories of absolutely singing all of the most beautiful songs to a room of mostly strangers turned friends.
And isn’t that what karaoke is about? You don’t have to be good. You don’t have to know the words. All you have to do is have a little love in your heart and supportive friends to sing with.
The Sundance Kid
Traveling is my favorite excuse to look like crap in public. I travel ugly. Eye crusts, a giant backpack that makes me look like a seabound turtle, a head wrap doing a questionable job of hiding my sloppily twisted hair, and the biggest hoodie and sweatpants I can find before I get to the airport. The likelihood of dying in a plane crash is pretty low, but it’s the only thing on my mind when I take off and land, and I’ll be damned if I’m uncomfortable when my life ends if I can help it.
Also, people who think it’s important to look good for the sake of other passengers when you’re sleeping for five hours in an uncomfortable chair are truly sociopaths. This is air travel, not friendship! A good flight is defined by how few times you’re forced into a social interaction with the people who are inconsiderately coughing into the recycled air you have to breathe. A flight starts out at one hundred, and points are deducted every time someone asks you to get up for them to use the bathroom, bumps your arm on the armrest, or leans their chair into your lap.
So it was no surprise that when Lyle and I arrived at the Sundance resort, I looked like an absolute scrub. The only scheduled event for the first day was seven hours later. I could go from Ogre Fiona to Princess Fiona in that time, no problem. But as we stood at the welcome center with our bags, someone proposed we get lunch since we were so early, and oh, it’s not a problem at all, we can take your bags to your “mountain home” for you!
Sundance is a big deal. It legitimizes me in this industry far more than a viral Vine ever did. Lyle and I shared eye contact that meant “Let’s go make ourselves acceptable in the closest bathroom.” And we started off in search of one nearby.
After taking roughly five steps, we heard a motorcycle approaching behind us on the walkway.
“This is where we die,” Lyle said, deadpan, ready for the other shoe to drop on this dream trip.
We stepped into the grass as the motorcycle approached and then slowed to a stop. Atop the vehicle was a man with an American flag bandana, a leather jacket, and reflective sunglasses. He turned to us and removed his sunglasses.
“Hey, ladies,” he said so smoothly that my mouth dropped open.
It was Robert Redford. The Sundance Kid. THE MOTHERFUCKING SUNDANCE KID. I couldn’t find words, but I instinctively reached into my pocket for my cell phone for a selfie. My fingers found all the buttons quickly, but the phone stalled, giving him plenty of time.
“I don’t really do pictures.”
And with that he replaced his sunglasses and rode off.
“ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!” Lyle screamed. We ran to the bathroom, still looking like we rode in an overhead compartment all the way to Utah. The words just flew from our mouths as we sloppily shook out our hair and applied a little lipstick.
“How on earth is this our lives? Why are we even allowed to be here?” I asked, fully meaning it.
The Sundance Labs are the incubator for TV shows, film, web series, and more. Run by true badass Michelle Satter, the program finds talented writers and puts them up for a week in swanky mountain mansions (a thing I didn’t know existed) and gives them one-on-one train
ing, advice, and therapy sessions with showrunners and network executives. Imagine it like this: your project—your show or movie or whatever—is your baby. Now imagine that you’re a loving parent, hopeful for your baby’s future, and then you win the lottery and now your baby has every good chance to make it in the world.
There are multiple objectives for the Labs. Perhaps unintentionally, one is to make friends with some of the coolest people on the planet. In my Lab alone there was the lead singer of the National and his talented editor wife, the director of a major Ryan Gosling film, an Oscar-winning documentarian couple, and more. All of us in the same boat, having our writing picked apart and made better by showrunners from the biggest shows in the HISTORY of television.
Obviously what most people want to get out of it is (1) just getting in. Thousands of people submit their projects with hopes of being one of ten projects chosen; and (2) face time with showrunners. And why not? Jenni Konner (Girls) and Rich Appel (The Simpsons, Family Guy, and The Cleveland Show) and Mara Brock Akil (Girlfriends, Love Is ___) telling you that you’re funny and how to be funnier is a goddamn blessing. There’s major validation at Sundance. The whole program was started because Robert Redford found Hollywood to be less experimental and artistic than his ambition. For a person like me, who tends to feel slept on no matter how many different projects I get to work on, this was my biggest motivation.
But a lot of that excitement falls away. Not in a negative way, but in a way that makes you realize that getting in is just the beginning. The first day we watched scenes from iconic films and had screenwriters who have been in the industry for decades dissect each of them to a degree that made my head hurt. By the end of the day, I had to decompress and push away any additional imposter syndrome. The truth was I was green. Sure, I’d made hundreds of YouTube videos and racked up millions of views, but I wasn’t a film school student. There was a lot I didn’t know. I was also the youngest member of the program and I was afraid that it showed. Growing up, I always thought that once you were in your twenties, everyone would see you as an adult, but I think that people who are older than you will always see you as younger and less experienced. And they’re not wrong. I’m not even sure it really came up in conversation or anything, but if I had to choose something to be anxious about while stranded on a mountain in a very white town, that seemed like the most acceptable thing to address. A weird predicament to be in when we live in a society that prioritizes female youth but also doesn’t compensate it. If I could have frozen time and spent five years in writers’ rooms and then come back, I would have.