Laughing at Absurdity

A friend of mine a few years ago suggested that the best option when dealing with a new divorce filing or something my stbx was doing that made me want to scream in frustration or cry in pain was to—laugh. She said that if I could laugh about it, then I could get through it a lot easier. At the time, I was a little mad at the advice because it seemed like something that would only be possible in the future, when it didn’t hurt anymore. But it still hurt and the advice was coming from someone I *though* wasn’t hurting like I was. So it was impossible advice like, if you want to be rich, invest in property in the 1970s or invest in Google the first year. Sure, true, but not really actionable today.

I’ve thought about this a lot since then. I found there were a couple of times while things were still really hard where I was, in fact, able to laugh about something that I at first instinct wanted to cry or scream about and by taking a few breaths and then tilting my head to the side, found myself able to look at the situation with a bit more distance and could, in fact, see the humor in the situation. Almost as if I was to take myself out of the situation personally and look at it as someone who was completely unrelated to the situation might.

More and more, I find myself being amused by things that could hurt me today. My ex is moving on and remarrying. I kept expecting it to hurt. But mostly I am amused by it. Or I am choosing to be as amused by it as I can be. It’s less about what it means about either of us or our marriage and more about the reality that human beings are absurd. We are, obviously, animals and we act on instinct most of the time. We are selfish and reactive. We are scared. We like our herds. We stay in our herds. We are wounded and we lick our wounds, whether or not that helps the actual wounds or not. We eat, shit, and have sex.

Being able to laugh at other people has also, weirdly, enabled me to laugh at myself a lot more. I have been successful in certain limited areas in my life. School. Writing. I keep wanting to return to those areas instead of doing new stuff. This is very normal and also very absurd. It’s less crazy than it is simply absurdly human. Trying to transcend being human was my goal while I was a Mormon (pretty sure it’s the goal of many Mormons, but not all). Letting go of that as who I was supposed to be is difficult to do. Retraining my resets is nearly impossible. Not impossible, but incredibly, frustratingly, painstakingly long and persistent.

I find myself more able to laugh at other people, not in a rude or dismissive way, but just—oh, yes, this is how humans are. I even find myself able to laugh about political things when I find I am overwhelmed at how awful things feel. I’m not saying that this means that I don’t have to do work to improve actual life, but it helps my brain to process and not spin. It definitely helps with my suicidal ideation, as well.