Tragicomedy
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Three episodes of tragedy and comedy, in (debatably) equal parts.
A Balm
At age 19, I spent a few weeks throwing up during my morning shift at a downtown coffee shop before finding out I was pregnant. This was unwelcome news, and so—in direct accordance with my age, socioeconomic status, and lack of religious beliefs—I took the soft animal of my body to Planned Parenthood to take care of the situation.
I'd opted against the "twilight" anesthesia for the procedure, and realized very quickly that this had been a mistake. Not because of the pain (though that, too, I could have done without), but because of the noise of the machine, which I will not describe other than to say it was visceral, and deeply unpleasant.
With hot tears rolling from the corners of my eyes, I turned my full auditory attention to the tinny speaker in the corner of the room. On this particular mid-spring day of the year 2000 in Washington, DC, the radio was tuned to WPGC 95.5 FM, and the station was just returning from commercial break.
While it was not the abortion soundtrack I would have personally chosen, I was in no position to argue with what the universe was providing. I gladly accepted all four minutes and 13 seconds of the “Thong Song” as a lifeboat, allowing SisQó’s angelic voice and intense commitment to the bit to transport me somewhere else entirely.
He held out his tiny hand and I took it, and we paddled to the beat in a glass-bottom kayak over clear, undulating Caribbean waters. I have not done a great job of keeping up with his career since then, but I would like to think that we are both doing very well.
Delayed
When I was growing up, my parents had one of those acrylic photo cubes on the double vanity of their bathroom. One side held a picture of me at age seven, wearing a little Epcot sweatshirt and mouse ears, proudly showing the camera a large autumn leaf. It was fall, and the Orlando air was as crisp as Orlando air was wont to get (or at least the photo suggests as much).
My only non-Kodak-induced memory of that trip is of the train ride home from Florida. At some point along the route an old couch had been abandoned on the tracks. I remember the brakes screeching as we slowed to a stop, and our very full passenger train sat, unmoving, for hours.
Locomotive vs. living room sofa—whimsical in their dissonance—and the sofa won! But how did it get there? Did it bump-bump-bump from the back of a pick-up truck as it crossed over the tracks? Or was it a prank? And was it FLORAL? I was delighted by the details (or lack thereof), and the experience stuck with me.
I brought it up recently at dinner with my parents, and was met with an awkward silence. Thirty-some years prior they’d managed to not only avoid breaking the spirit of a child on the way home from the most magical place on earth, but they’d successfully (if accidentally) instilled in her a new and decades-long wonder. They were now going to have to say out loud that the speeding train was stopped because someone threw themselves in front of it—and the couch was just the best, most gentle thing they could come up with as an explanation.
Naivety is underrated. White lies are an art. And a parent's job is truly never over.
Clang
The idea of seeing a therapist was suggested to me pretty early on in the whole Pizzagate thing, but not having had great experiences with talk therapy in the past, it took close to a year to fully warm to the idea. Let’s call it early 2021.
I'd recently moved (far) out of Washington DC, and the ensuing culture shock had been unexpected. I counted four NRA bumper stickers in the span of 15 minutes and came home with a migraine; spotting a QAnon t-shirt in the wild had required a darkened room and a meditation app. All of this to say—I wasn’t totally sure if I should look for someone locally, and so online I went.
I used BetterHelp to find a trauma therapist, and narrowed my situation down to brass tacks in the intro email: I’m dealing with the emotional repercussions of being attacked by online conspiracy theorists; I'm not doing a great job of navigating it by myself. I hit send, and felt as if a weight had already been lifted.
She wrote back a day or two later, asking for a bit more clarity about what I was looking for. As I read the remainder of the message, each sentence was like being clanged in the head with a large metal skillet:
Who cancelled you? [clang] Was it Biden voters? [clang] Black Lives Matter protestors? [CLANG] Antifa? [CLAAAAAANG] I’m not sure I totally understand, but you can explain it to me in more detail during our session.
My liberal bubble fully and finally burst, I decided to just ask around for a trusted third party referral. But I was going to need to lie down for a little while first.
“Tragicomedy” emailed out 8.13.2025 with newsletter-exclusive extras. Subscribe here.