Performing Trauma: Why my pain is staying with me

Issue No. 5: Stressed Out!
Words - Mattison Merritt

The first piece of art advice I received was to ‘create something so personal, it is universal.’ I was 18 and an older playwright had said it. I didn’t want to write plays, but if someone older and more experienced said this was the way to create, I assumed they knew more than me. For my first few years seriously pursuing comedy, I dug deep into what I didn’t want to talk about, and exposed it for crowds as cheaply as I could. I told jokes about my family falling apart, I tried to come to terms with my sexuality on stage, and I wrote things that hurt to talk about before my brain even had time to process them.

I knew that if I justified my place on stage by out-trauma-ing everyone else, I would be a “real” comedian. It didn’t matter that going up on stage gave me toxic anxiety that took days to recover from. If I was a good lady comic, I would be rewarded for stressing myself out with opportunities to headline dirty bars, maybe get paid $30, and eventually get a Netflix special.

What I was really doing was drinking enough to relive my trauma in front of an audience. Like so many female creatives, I got rid of boundaries and tried to get ‘real.’ Once, when I was four beers deep and extra sad after an open mic, this dude asked if I “really felt that way.” 

I thought of the set I had performed less than an hour before; four minutes talking about my old roommate who went to prison for assaulting a minor. How it hurt that I’d trusted him, gotten drunk with him, confided in him, connected with him, and relaxed around him. I’d tried to sort out my feelings on stage and unpack the complexity of the situation in four minutes. I’d ended my set with, “It would have been easier if he’d died.” 

I ordered another beer and started crying, because I wasn’t sure I felt that way, but I had put it out into the world anyway.

I will no longer tear myself apart so an audience can laugh for an evening, go home, and change nothing. I have no more jokes about why you should stop quoting Louis CK, and I cannot think of any more creative similes to make you understand how afraid I am in groups of men. 

There are pieces and performances that are cathartic and healing for the creator and the audience, but there are also a few plants that are still alive in my apartment. This doesn’t negate all the dead plants I’ve had to throw out, it just means I’m sneaky and I’ll spend all my money making you think I can take care of things.

In a college fiction writing class, one of my female colleagues wrote a story about an assault that felt too real to be fiction. The college campus where it took place was too similar to our own and the characters were haphazardly named so I knew they were real people. How do you even begin to critique the language choices, the arc, or if she’d ‘sat in a moment’ long enough, knowing that this was very likely her way of processing her pain?

Maybe the author needed to write this story and maybe she felt comfortable enough to share it with us. Still, I almost screamed watching our male classmates pick apart her story and ask questions about the female main character’s mental stability. I felt sick watching my classmate take notes on how to make this character more likeable, clearly struggling with the stress of justifying her experience in front of all of us.

Comedy, theater, music, art, literature, and so many other spaces that encourage women to open up and explore trauma in a creative setting are usually run by the very people who cause that trauma.They create an expectation for women to pour their hearts out, cut off the parts that are hard to swallow, make it trauma-lite, and offer our anger, hurt, and terror in an easy to digest way. And just like a beef-based casserole in the Midwest, we pretend it is healthy.

There has to be a better way to create things without hurting ourselves and adding so much stress to the process. If every joke, essay, or painting takes a little piece of us with it as we send it out into the world, we are going to end up covered in huge, open wounds all over our bodies. We’ll bleed, ooze, get infected; it’s not sustainable.

I hate seeing women who aren’t safe on stage. I can’t watch any more of my friends, desperate to get published, give away their stories about their strained families, abusive partners, and intimate secrets before they’re ready. “How can I make people understand this?” can’t be the first thing I think about when I lose someone close to me, when I experience pain. 

If the only thing we are giving an audience are bits and pieces of our fear, pain, or anger, it doesn’t feel like healing anymore. I don’t want to turn my trauma into a joke so that it is comfortable for you. I want to grieve, and be frustrated, and hate things for a little bit. And then, when I’m ready, if I’m ever ready, we can get personal.