One of the very biggest things I struggle with is that I’m tired of all the framework of a beautiful life coming crashing down…
Talking a walk down memory lane for a sec to a while ago, I felt like I had worked really hard as soon as I graduated high school to start making great changes in my life, and be the person I want to be – and then all my health issues started and lasted for a while. I had to take time off school and work and on and on and on.
It turned my life upside down, and it felt like all this beautiful stuff I had built started crumbling.
And then I sulked and cried and it was a bummer, and eventually, I was like, “well, life goes on either way, so you can either cry about it forever, or you can work to make it better.”
So I did. I worked and worked. I got my career back to a good place. I lost a bunch of weight. I moved to my dream city. I got my dream job. I got into my dream program. And it seemed like almost as quickly as we could say, “look! Growth/redemption/a brighter future is possible,” I became involved with an abusive man in my dream program and suffered a lot of consequences because of this.
And I’m trying to move forward and everything. I’m going to therapy, and doing running events, and trying to settle into my apartment and blah blah blah blah blah.
But I’m still not at the 100% moved on/moved forward/happy part…
I was sulking the other day about this concept and how “I’m tired of building such a great foundation/framework, and having it torn down!”
And then I said to myself without even thinking, “it’s like my job.”
Because we would always kinda joke at The Nightly Show (and it’s even happened already at The Daily Show) about how you spend all day crafting these great houses (your edits), and then a tsunami comes and crashes everything down in re-write.
Sometimes you will make something you and/or other people reeeeeeally liked, and sometimes it’ll be really (really!) funny. But because of a million variables (be it lawyers, or time constraints, or other breaking news that has to be covered, or a million things), they’ll cut your hilarious montage. Or they’ll cut your great political attack ad. Or they’ll cut something random that you just looooved, that people have been laughing at all day.
And sometimes you literally may not have built even one roll that goes into the final show.
And you throw your hands up in joking agitation and say, “why do they even have us do any work, when they take it all away, anyway?!”
(Obviously there’s no real agitation, as I love my work.)
But the reason why you keep building – even knowing a lot is gonna be torn down is because (well, because you get paid to do that, but that’s not where I’m going with this). It’s because you also know a lot of it is gonna get through.
You know that you’re gonna get something on the show that people laugh at, and have a good time with. You know something, at some point, is gonna make it’s way around the internet and either delight people, or make them consider a new perspective, or it will generally do something positive in a lot of people’s lives.
And you know that for every silly re-mixed Carl’s Jr. commercial on the cutting room floor, you get a Jeff Sessions takedown to write home about.
And that’s why – even if it’s exhausting/sad/tiring/a million negative emotions, to have your whole framework just kicked out from under you when you don’t want it to be, you just have to keep building, because of the magic that eventually comes from that.
(If that makes sense… I feel like I had a parallel between these two things, but I don’t know that I quite got there 😂, but I think you get the gist, I hope.)
[This is from the series on sexual assault.]