Five Moments in the Life of a Storyteller

first time i'm capitalizing a title, so you know it's serious

one

In Elementary School—or at my uppity east coast academy—in Junior School, I participated in a mandated group activity on a weekly cadence in the form of a class called Library. That title always seemed a misnomer to me. A library was a passive domain, a time capsule at best—a portal through the archives, or a place to collect dust. It turns out Library can be much more action-oriented than that. You learn math in Math and history in History, and you can learn library in Library, if you know where to look. More than a place, Library is a practice, steeped in the epistemology of cataloguing and design. Some say it is the origin of epistemology itself, for to sum the contents of the global Library is to access all human knowledge thus far, at least before Twitter. In this way, the library is perhaps the most nutrient-dense public good. In the early 2000s, Library was our final exercise in the analog as we sat on the carpeted cusp of Wikipedia. Mostly, we studied proper bookmarking etiquette (corner-folding is a sin punishable by death) and how to navigate the Dewy Decimal System (never learned). It was also our first real introduction to books, about which I admit I cared very little.

Before you judge, listen, I like to read. I’ve just never been very good at it. I’m slow, my mind drifts away, if I miss a word I feel anxious. I don’t know how no one realized my reading comprehension was exceptionally poor, that my retention was profoundly slim, but I guess I was just a hard worker when I had to be and a good cheater the rest of the time. In high school I mostly got by on SparkNotes, with the exception of poetry, Greek & Roman Mythology, anything by August Wilson, and the books taught in Mr. Miller’s Modern Lit class (I have a soft spot for Chekhov I can’t explain).

In Kindergarten, Library was taught by Ms. Phyllis Guering. She always clarified that we should refer to her as Miss as in Mizz, not Mrs., to signal her broken convention from other middle-aged teachers in that she was unmarried and would respond bitterly if we were to accuse of such. Mrs. was her only trigger. Aside from that she rarely grew frustrated and was always kind.

Ms. Guering’s lessons typically preceded a homework assignment, but I was often too much of a daydreamer to pay attention to the lecture or anything else. Especially in my early years, I treated school less as a fulcrum of education and more as an incubator to keep my fantasies warm and fertile. Class played on in a distant hum as I traversed through my own reveries. When Ms. Guering asked us to read a short book and write a paragraph summarizing its contents, it shouldn't come as a surprise that I missed a couple steps in the instructions. It took an hour upon turning it in before I found myself in her office.

Shelby, we need to speak about the assignment. What you’ve written here isn’t acceptable. This is plagiarism. The purpose of the homework was to write about the book in your own words.

Phyllis, I’m sorry, but that’s absurd. You’re looking for quality here. You wanted us to write something good, and what the author wrote is good as is—I’d hate to add any unnecessary flourish.

I’m paraphrasing, but it was something close and definitely how I felt. Her face was stern.

Do it again.

That night, I repeated the assignment. This time, I reflected on the vastness and blueness of the ocean, how it kissed the sand, how the faint echos of seagulls perforated the white noise of the waves. Again, I don’t remember the details exactly, but I have to imagine I wrote something corny like that.

The next day, Ms. Guering asked me back to her office.

Oh god, Phyllis! What is it this time?

She held up my paper in disbelief.

This is incredible! Best in the class.

I remember distinctly that I was shocked.

She revealed something to me that no one had before. I wasn’t a reader, not at all. But maybe I was a writer. Not by choice, of course, as I would have much preferred to regurgitate what an already accomplished and even published author had to say. But I had to admit, I did get a little kick out of doing it myself.

I think that’s as good of an origin story as any.

two

My mom always told me that, when she ran away from home as a kid, she would escape to the cemetery and spend the afternoon plucking the dandelions from around the tombstones. I was no more than five when, after a big fight with my parents, I packed my Barbie rolling suitcase and headed where the apple wouldn’t fall far. My teary-eyed storm-off was slowed by the weight of my luggage (I had packed mostly stuffed animals) and my parents arrived to pick me up almost right away. I think they would have let me stay there longer if it weren’t for the rain. Pittsburgh isn’t known for its weather, which can get in the way of laissez-faire style parenting.

Though I lived in a mid-size city, my house sat down the street from extensive woodland park, more unique in that it was affixed to a wide and beautiful cemetery. Residents of the Homewood Cemetery are no strangers to fame, spanning from the late Henry Clay Frick to Mac Miller, or as I knew him, Malcolm McCormick, my childhood babysitter from a few doors down. I go there often—I’ve brought friends, boyfriends, even my student ballet company for an eerie photoshoot. I love it there. I have always encountered a particular serenity amongst the deceased. If you know my mother, you know this makes perfect sense.

My parents, Leslie and Steve, were big on Halloween and my favorite movie has been Beetlejuice as long as I can remember. For the majority of my youth, I was terrified to enter our basement, probably on account of not wanting to endure a run-in with Marvin, the bloodied decoy body who was nailed to a board by eleven wooden stakes and perched at the bottom of the staircase. The basement was also home to a life-size witch, her cauldron, a family of rubber mice, a state-of-the-art smoke machine, and a buffet of severed limbs. Children from the neighborhood would cower and cry as their parents guided them up our lawn each October (the boombox soundtrack of agonized shrieking and diabolical cackling certainly didn’t make for a high-spirited ambiance, either). The kids who made it to the front door were always impressed, both by the spectacle and by the fact that my parents were not known to skimp on the full-size candy bars. If you survived the journey, you’d be rewarded.

Since my brother and I fled the nest, my mom has fortified her relationship with the cemetery. Leslie and Steve frequently go biking along the roads, or rather, Leslie goes biking and drags Steve along every now and again. She has all her favorite stops. Their bike rides are often interrupted when she hops off the path to go tomb-gazing. She likes to peer inside the mausoleums, asking rhetorical questions about family history and imagining how much money the Smallman’s must have set aside to afford such prime cemetery real estate. She feels emotionally attached to some of the tenants, whom she visits and, when I join her, regales the stories of their deaths which she has been able to excavate on Google. Her favorite occupant is a former dominatrix named Amy Marie Draa. Amy died of ovarian cancer in 2019. She was only 40. This makes my mother, a physician who has lost patients to the disease, droop her shoulders with sorrow. At least she did what she loved, my mother says, stacking rocks on her stone (as is Jewish custom). I do think Leslie and Amy would have been friends.

Leslie has always said she doesn’t want a traditional grave. She wants to be cremated and immortalized by a park bench, a place for passers by to sit and find reprieve. On this, I feel the same. My most irrational fear is that I will feel the coffin. I have one serious phobia (claustro), so my mom and I are on the same page re: burial sites. Let’s stay out in the open, where the living can find us.

In the center of the cemetery, there is a lovely pond, stippled with lilies and frogs and everything my mother loves about Earth. She always bikes over, unclips herself from the pedals, hikes up to the pond and shouts down to me:

Can’t you just picture me dead here?

I can.

When the day comes, I hope my brother and I are able to set enough money aside to bear the price of a bench alongside the pond. My dead mom will be very grateful.

three

I was a strong student, but as a standardized test-taker I possessed little talent. The high school college counselor assured me that the “New” SAT would not be well-suited for my academic strengths, and I was pressured into taking the “Old” exam before it went out of commission in 2016. Among other modules, the old version had a designated section for vocabulary, which has since been replaced by a less direct method of testing one’s knowledge of useless words. With so much left to mystery on the exam, if there was something I could prepare for on my own time, you bet I was going to double down.

To this day, there is a stack of vocabulary cards in my childhood bedroom that spans from the floor to the top of my beside-table. I pull a word from time to time and am disappointed to discover that I have no fucking clue what ignominious means, and in adulthood, while I am often quixotic, I typically just opt for simp.

Concurrently with taking the SAT, I was working on a very critical lab report for my Advanced Biology class. We had spent months breeding drosophila melanogaster (fruit flies) for our unit on genetics, and our work culminated into one hefty response which accounted for a significant portion of our final grade.

Equipped with my new, state-of-the-art vocabulary, I treated the report like a runway for my tall hot words. Evidence didn’t suggest, it substantiated; it corroborated. The drosophila didn’t reproduce, they propagated. Their lifespans were transitory, ephemeral even.

My biology teacher was not impressed. Amongst her commentary read:

I can feel how excited you were to employ your flashcard vocabulary. B+

If you read my last essay, you know that a B+ was enough to make a white girl cry and hyperventilate all at once (I was always The Drama—histrionic). In my defense, I devoted my life to that lab report. How could my teacher be so draconian? Was my dedication nugatory to her?

I remember I came home from ballet that night and my dad surprised me with a special “sad” meal to cheer me up. Lodged inside Pillsbury croissants he wrapped mini hot dogs around Kraft American cheese squares. While I’ve always leaned more sweet than savory, to this day, I chalk this up as the second nicest thing he’s ever done for me.

My dad and I didn’t get along that well growing up, but he had his moments, and looking back I can see his efforts more clearly—his actions munificent, his love interminable.

four

I am certain that, in another life, I ran off to join the circus. I spent a few summers there—climbing and flipping and seducing the crowds (well, I was eleven, so I hope that’s just a metaphor). I was a pretty serious ballerina growing up, but there was something sacred about my time at circus camp. To surrender all fear and store my faith in an apparatus—I bubbled inside an elaborate dreamscape while everyone’s eyes locked, looking up.

My love of performance streams past a desire for attention; it’s also a remarkable release. It’s freeing to design and project a character, to dismiss any part of me that doesn’t serve the audience, just for a few minutes. The circus gave me so much—agency, a space to take risks, a creative conduit, and the prickled euphoria of climbing too, too high. To feel secure in the throes of the air and of childhood, to contort my body and my spirit along with it—I was lucky to twist in youth at the circus.

If comedy doesn’t work out, I’m sure the trapeze will take me back.

five

A singular event in 2003 sparked cultural uproar from Girls and Gays nationwide. I am of course referring to the series premiere of Tyra Banks’ hit reality competition TV show, America’s Next Top Model. I caught wind of the series in 2009, when I was in sixth grade. Like most viewers, I was enamored, nay, I was moved—inspired at the molecular level.

Mom, I want to be a model.

That’s interesting, Sweetie. I always saw you as more of a stand-up comedian.

Her response was shattering. I told my closest confidant that I wanted to be pretty for a living, and she squandered my dreams in seconds. What kind of mother does that?

She explained that what she really meant was, “You’re too smart for that,” (and too short and too “commercial”, but she’d let me figure that out on my own time).

Look at the SNL writers room—they all went to Harvard.

My mom didn’t want me to profit from my looks because she thought I had…brains? And wit? Radically feminist parenting if I’ve ever seen it.

(PS, I know models are smart. I have modeled and every time I’m on set, all of them are more well-read than I am. So if you’re a model, can you just…let this one go?).

Her words were hurtful and I was by no means interested in stand-up. Even if I was, I didn’t have the confidence. Cut to eleven years later, I attended my first open mic.

What made me do it? Meh, a loaded question and a good place for a trigger warning.

Aside from my mother’s unbidden advice and the acute wave of jealousy I experienced when Kim Kardashian absolutely murdered her Saturday Night Live monologue in Summer 2022 (something about Kim K nailing a tight five lit a fire in me), the real reason why I started doing stand-up is because I knew that, if I didn’t make a big life change, I would end up institutionalized.

At the onset of the pandemic, something very strange happened my body. My feet began to ache and burn any time they made contact with the ground, a symptom of an autoimmune disorder I now know to be called Small Fiber Neuropathy. For the past three years, it has hurt to stand or walk—the second I sit it goes away. Walking three minutes is uncomfortable, fifteen hard, an hour excruciating. I live in New York City, so I spend a lot of time slogging through the concrete jungle. To be honest, it really isn’t easy. Very few people in my life know about this, or the extent of it. The disease stole my joy for a long time and it’s the only thing I hate talking about. For reasons not worth unpacking here, I feel a lot of shame in being sick.

When my symptoms began, mental illness arose with an unfamiliar texture. Depression has never been foreign to me—I’ve gone through depressive episodes and periods of dissociation, but nothing compares to the looming conviction that, if I could not treat my pain, I would have to kill myself. A life in pain, to me, did not feel like a life worth living. If sentenced to suffer forever, I would elect to exit. I feel guilty admitting to this, considering that on the spectrum of physical disability, I am more able than many.

I made the mistake of telling a new therapist during my senior year of college.

Are you serious about wanting to kill yourself? Because if you’re serious, I have to report you and they’re going to send you to a mental hospital. So, are you serious?

No, I’m kidding.

I would be lying if I said I’ve overcome this. I’ve just found something to distract me and to fill my life with meaning. For a girl who can’t walk so well, it feels somewhat ironic that I found that path in stand-up comedy.

Comedy is not a space for me to make light of the disorder. Small Fiber Neuropathy is not funny to me, not yet anyway. But it is a place where I can talk about everything else. I get to write again. I get to be on stage again. I get to obsess over something that isn’t the anxiety of doctor’s appointments and failed treatments. I get to have control, which is something I lost in the first two years of the diagnosis.

I haven’t been doing stand-up for long, only nine months or so, and I don’t know if I have any future in it whatsoever—I guess that’s for The People to decide. I only know that the impact stand-up has had on my mental health is monumental. I don’t know if this is a career. It could be, one day. It doesn’t matter right now.

I don’t tell jokes for a living, but I do tell jokes to live.

backword*

I titled this piece Five Moments In the Life of the Storyteller. It’s a direct adaptation of David Sedaris’ personal essay, Twelve Moments in the Life of the Artist from his book Me Talk Pretty One Day. I considered adopting the name, but have never been sure if the word Artist is mine to claim. Sedaris is an experienced performance artist in the most avant-garde sense. I’ve never, say, asked a crowd of people to throw mayonnaise at my naked body, or assembled a guillotine outside my doorstep just for show, though I think I would fare well with either of those things. I don’t know if Storyteller is mine to claim either, but it’s the closest word I can think of to what I hope to do with my life. There are so many moments in the mosaic of a person. These were a few of mine.

Xoxo,

Shelby

*It was originally the foreword, but I decided it went better at the end :)