I should probably call this project something weird, like "Project Cognition" or "Project Ludicrous," but apparently deliberate abtruseness runs counter to my personality. I just ended up with a simple name, for a simple idea.
I do not, by and large, know how to have fun. This won't surprise my closer friends, since they've heard me patiently, half-jokingly comment, "What's fun?" more than once.
I was a very somber child, growing up. I paid most everything a sober interest, and while I certainly had things I preferred (reading, mainly), I don't particularly recall finding specific things "fun." Preferable, yes, but at least by age 7 or so, not fun. I say age 7 because I suspect I need to make allowances for the ignorance and glee of the earliest years, before I was fully aware of the world and how poorly I fit into it. I don't know what age I would have started qualifying to have my diagnosis of dysthymia (low grade, unending depression), but I would guess it was relatively young. The generalized anxiety disorder probably didn't start until mid-elementary school, but I'd need a time machine to be sure.
That was how I grew up: somber and focused. Fun wasn't really on my radar. It wasn't essential to passing my classes or spending my free time alone. It didn't even factor into personal relationships. I may have used the word "fun" in those years, but what I was describing was less actual enjoyment and more "this is tolerable." I didn't have moments where I thought, "whee!" or "yay, I like this." There were simply things that were less exhausting and less stressful than other things, and so I preferred them. My brother mocked my seriousness, probably to try and knock me out of it, or show me what I looked like. Much good it did. I knew I was being mimicked, at least after a few times, but not why or what the point was. It was irritating, which didn't cheer me up any. He never explained, and thankfully eventually stopped doing it.
It turns out that you do not, in fact, need any form of happiness or enjoyment to live for 20+ years. I do think it's probably very helpful to have those things, but clearly I didn't die from the lack of them. There does come a point, though, where I recognized I didn't have those things and stopped being able to say, "oh yeah, that's fun / I like that." I do not, as a matter of course, like to lie. If someone asks me the standard trap question, "Does this dress make me look fat?" I'll know to answer "no," thus saving their feelings, but I'll still have to think about it first. That is the case with most of the white lies civilization runs on. Another is "how are you?" when asked to a passerby. The expected answer is not, "Eh... I feel exhausted and worried. Yourself?" It's, "Oh, fine, and you?"
Required exceptions aside, I try not to lie to myself or others, so I stopped being able to respond "normally" to people hoping I'll have a good time, or have fun. I started responding instead with a tolerant smile and a half-joking question, "What's fun?" Mostly, people don't answer, they get caught up in that I'm asking at all. It's not my fault I'm somber by nature, and my life was emotionally exhausting and difficult.
I think maybe part of the somberness was that I knew, unconsciously, that I didn't fit in and had to work harder to do things than other people. I learned how to interact with people by doing a lot of personal study, and by asking a lot of questions, and by reading books. I had to work very hard, and be thoroughly attentive, analytical, curious, and studious. But studiousness is not, I think, generally a joyous or happy mental state. It's one of perpetual interest, and that I had in abundance. But not smiles.
I couldn't smile for a camera to save my life for at least a decade. I'm positive the fact that the camera flash hurt me didn't help, but it wasn't the whole of the problem. I simply couldn't smile in any way that didn't look as fake as it was. I look back now on my pictures and wince at the expressions. My eyes don't match my mouth. I have a deer-in-the-headlights expression in some of them. The only exceptions are when something was genuinely amusing quite recently, and someone managed to get a picture within 5 seconds or so.
One of the clearest examples I can remember of how utterly solemn my mindset was, is from high school. I remember going to a comedy show with my boyfriend at the time, and if the comedy wasn't the best I've ever seen, it was still pretty good. And I smiled at things. I didn't laugh a lot, but I did smile, and my boyfriend looked at me like he'd never seen me before. He asked why I was smiling so much, and confused and somewhat worried, I pointed at the comedian and said, "He's funny." I have no idea what my boyfriend took away from the experience, but after that, I vaguely recognized the situation was unusual.
That could, I suppose, have been a moment when I figured things out, realized how odd I was, and took steps to figure out what I enjoyed... but it wasn't. I shrugged off the experience. It did not, in fact, even occur to me that stand up comedy might be something I should look into, since I had been smiling so much. It simply wasn't on my mind. I had homework to finish and I'd done something to upset my boyfriend, and I was still trying to figure out who I was supposed to be (because teenagers do that, generally).
In college I continued to pursue things that interested me, and were less draining. I was comfortable with anime and with Dungeons and Dragons, so those were the avenues I used to find friends and schedule social events. But still, I didn't really smile all that much. People didn't befriend me because I was fun, they befriended me because I was interesting, or thoughtful, or because I listened and genuinely cared. I have not been, and probably never will be, the life of a party. (Except my wedding, and even then, I still really wouldn't call myself the life of the party. Just, y'know, a central point of celebration. A lot of the pictures of the reception are me frowning in focus.)
One would think, if I was truly that serious by nature, that I made no jokes and had no sense of humor. Incorrect. It wasn't that I didn't have a sense of humor. It's that it wasn't an easy sense to tickle, and so after a few jokes fell flat, people mostly stopped trying. I didn't get most of my peers' humor growing up, so I could hardly adopt it for my own.
There was one exception to the lack of practice rule for humor: sarcasm. I became fluent in sarcasm. Its premise took me awhile to understand, straightforward as I am, but eventually the concept of saying exactly the opposite of what you mean, and using context and tone of voice to convey it, became easy for me. I became proficient under the tutelage of my first friend.
I think sarcasm was probably a halfway point between actual funny humor and the dead seriousness in my nature. Sarcasm, usually, does not provoke actual laughter, and you ruin the effect if you don't look serious while you say things sarcastically. I was good at keeping a straight face, so that was easy enough.
To this day, my humor tends to be termed "dry." I don't do stand up comedy or jokes. I don't pun (on purpose). But I think maybe I practiced sarcasm so much it became infused into my ways of speaking. I do, at times these days, accidentally make people laugh because of things I say. I don't try to be funny, it just sort of happens with some people. It's sometimes confusing and startling, but it's just laughter, it doesn't hurt anything. As long as they're entertained and the laughter isn't mean, it doesn't bother me that much to not entirely understand why they're laughing.
The closest I do to jokes is absurdity. There's a lot of absurdity in life. Starting with the fact that I'm expected to hop to a rhythm and system that doesn't even pretend to understand or care about me. Though, this line of entertainment often strays into tragic and stops being funny to me quickly. There are two schools of thought to dealing with life's tragedies: laugh or cry. I usually gravitate to the latter.
Even if the whole thing falls through and I remain relatively somber by nature, I'll still have a list of worthwhile fun/funny things. Now if only I had hundreds of hours to devote to this project...
I do not, by and large, know how to have fun. This won't surprise my closer friends, since they've heard me patiently, half-jokingly comment, "What's fun?" more than once.
Somber by Nature
I was a very somber child, growing up. I paid most everything a sober interest, and while I certainly had things I preferred (reading, mainly), I don't particularly recall finding specific things "fun." Preferable, yes, but at least by age 7 or so, not fun. I say age 7 because I suspect I need to make allowances for the ignorance and glee of the earliest years, before I was fully aware of the world and how poorly I fit into it. I don't know what age I would have started qualifying to have my diagnosis of dysthymia (low grade, unending depression), but I would guess it was relatively young. The generalized anxiety disorder probably didn't start until mid-elementary school, but I'd need a time machine to be sure.
That was how I grew up: somber and focused. Fun wasn't really on my radar. It wasn't essential to passing my classes or spending my free time alone. It didn't even factor into personal relationships. I may have used the word "fun" in those years, but what I was describing was less actual enjoyment and more "this is tolerable." I didn't have moments where I thought, "whee!" or "yay, I like this." There were simply things that were less exhausting and less stressful than other things, and so I preferred them. My brother mocked my seriousness, probably to try and knock me out of it, or show me what I looked like. Much good it did. I knew I was being mimicked, at least after a few times, but not why or what the point was. It was irritating, which didn't cheer me up any. He never explained, and thankfully eventually stopped doing it.
It turns out that you do not, in fact, need any form of happiness or enjoyment to live for 20+ years. I do think it's probably very helpful to have those things, but clearly I didn't die from the lack of them. There does come a point, though, where I recognized I didn't have those things and stopped being able to say, "oh yeah, that's fun / I like that." I do not, as a matter of course, like to lie. If someone asks me the standard trap question, "Does this dress make me look fat?" I'll know to answer "no," thus saving their feelings, but I'll still have to think about it first. That is the case with most of the white lies civilization runs on. Another is "how are you?" when asked to a passerby. The expected answer is not, "Eh... I feel exhausted and worried. Yourself?" It's, "Oh, fine, and you?"
Required exceptions aside, I try not to lie to myself or others, so I stopped being able to respond "normally" to people hoping I'll have a good time, or have fun. I started responding instead with a tolerant smile and a half-joking question, "What's fun?" Mostly, people don't answer, they get caught up in that I'm asking at all. It's not my fault I'm somber by nature, and my life was emotionally exhausting and difficult.
Why So Serious?
I think maybe part of the somberness was that I knew, unconsciously, that I didn't fit in and had to work harder to do things than other people. I learned how to interact with people by doing a lot of personal study, and by asking a lot of questions, and by reading books. I had to work very hard, and be thoroughly attentive, analytical, curious, and studious. But studiousness is not, I think, generally a joyous or happy mental state. It's one of perpetual interest, and that I had in abundance. But not smiles.
I couldn't smile for a camera to save my life for at least a decade. I'm positive the fact that the camera flash hurt me didn't help, but it wasn't the whole of the problem. I simply couldn't smile in any way that didn't look as fake as it was. I look back now on my pictures and wince at the expressions. My eyes don't match my mouth. I have a deer-in-the-headlights expression in some of them. The only exceptions are when something was genuinely amusing quite recently, and someone managed to get a picture within 5 seconds or so.
One of the clearest examples I can remember of how utterly solemn my mindset was, is from high school. I remember going to a comedy show with my boyfriend at the time, and if the comedy wasn't the best I've ever seen, it was still pretty good. And I smiled at things. I didn't laugh a lot, but I did smile, and my boyfriend looked at me like he'd never seen me before. He asked why I was smiling so much, and confused and somewhat worried, I pointed at the comedian and said, "He's funny." I have no idea what my boyfriend took away from the experience, but after that, I vaguely recognized the situation was unusual.
That could, I suppose, have been a moment when I figured things out, realized how odd I was, and took steps to figure out what I enjoyed... but it wasn't. I shrugged off the experience. It did not, in fact, even occur to me that stand up comedy might be something I should look into, since I had been smiling so much. It simply wasn't on my mind. I had homework to finish and I'd done something to upset my boyfriend, and I was still trying to figure out who I was supposed to be (because teenagers do that, generally).
In college I continued to pursue things that interested me, and were less draining. I was comfortable with anime and with Dungeons and Dragons, so those were the avenues I used to find friends and schedule social events. But still, I didn't really smile all that much. People didn't befriend me because I was fun, they befriended me because I was interesting, or thoughtful, or because I listened and genuinely cared. I have not been, and probably never will be, the life of a party. (Except my wedding, and even then, I still really wouldn't call myself the life of the party. Just, y'know, a central point of celebration. A lot of the pictures of the reception are me frowning in focus.)
Sarcasm is Technically Humor
One would think, if I was truly that serious by nature, that I made no jokes and had no sense of humor. Incorrect. It wasn't that I didn't have a sense of humor. It's that it wasn't an easy sense to tickle, and so after a few jokes fell flat, people mostly stopped trying. I didn't get most of my peers' humor growing up, so I could hardly adopt it for my own.
There was one exception to the lack of practice rule for humor: sarcasm. I became fluent in sarcasm. Its premise took me awhile to understand, straightforward as I am, but eventually the concept of saying exactly the opposite of what you mean, and using context and tone of voice to convey it, became easy for me. I became proficient under the tutelage of my first friend.
I think sarcasm was probably a halfway point between actual funny humor and the dead seriousness in my nature. Sarcasm, usually, does not provoke actual laughter, and you ruin the effect if you don't look serious while you say things sarcastically. I was good at keeping a straight face, so that was easy enough.
To this day, my humor tends to be termed "dry." I don't do stand up comedy or jokes. I don't pun (on purpose). But I think maybe I practiced sarcasm so much it became infused into my ways of speaking. I do, at times these days, accidentally make people laugh because of things I say. I don't try to be funny, it just sort of happens with some people. It's sometimes confusing and startling, but it's just laughter, it doesn't hurt anything. As long as they're entertained and the laughter isn't mean, it doesn't bother me that much to not entirely understand why they're laughing.
The closest I do to jokes is absurdity. There's a lot of absurdity in life. Starting with the fact that I'm expected to hop to a rhythm and system that doesn't even pretend to understand or care about me. Though, this line of entertainment often strays into tragic and stops being funny to me quickly. There are two schools of thought to dealing with life's tragedies: laugh or cry. I usually gravitate to the latter.
Steps In The Right Direction?
Part of my life in the last few years has been trying to discover and patch up my deficits, and thus improve my life. Perhaps my first step in that regard was getting my diagnosis. But of course, a diagnosis doesn't fix things, it merely identifies the problem. It did give me the option to seek specialized help, now that the source of my difficulties was out in the open.
I was slow about seeking help. I'm very independent-minded, and it frustrated me that I would never be normal no matter how hard I tried. So I sulked privately and carried on with college publicly. I did tentatively attend a couple social groups, one of which I'm still involved with somewhat. But the organizer of that group remembers well the perpetual frown on my face the first time I attended.
Networking was one step thing, but it didn't change my perpetual gloom and lack of levity. I graduated and spent a few years throwing myself at hourly and full time jobs. They didn't help me lighten up in the slightest. Finally, I sought professional help for the depression and anxiety. LENS, or Low Energy Neurofeedback System, slowly but surely changes your brainwaves. Under the LENS, and using supplements to counter the nutritional deficits I couldn't handle with diet alone, I began to improve in stability and mood.
I still wasn't funny, though, and still didn't recognize fun when I saw it. I still didn't seek amusing things, or even really consider them. My focus was still on interesting and low-stress things. Which brings us to the last few months.
I've been taking recommendations from my friends, including the previously-shunned video recommendations, and looking into them. At present, this includes a video series, a podcast, and several comedians. The lattermost are hard; I don't think a lot of standard jokes in comedic routines are funny. To me, body humor is cheap and puerile, and so I don't enjoy it. Jokes that involve making fun of groups of people upset me rather than amuse me. I'm fond of John Pinette's work, since he mainly joked about food, exercise, himself, and his travels, and tended to portray others positively. Unfortunately, he passed away recently and so there won't be any new works for me to enjoy.
The idea behind consuming all this media is, hopefully, to rewire my brain into quicker, more powerful enjoyment of fun and funny things. And also, to expand my knowledge of those things. So far I've earmarked a few things as worth remembering, so if nothing else, this has been successful in that way. I still don't stop in the middle of a thing and go, "yay, this is fun!" But maybe that will happen eventually.
I think part of the problem with having fun in a broader context, out among people, or even at home, is that I seem to need to be comfortable to manage any form of enjoyment or fun. And as I mentioned, I have an anxiety disorder, which pointedly makes me uncomfortable basically all the time. So it's a bit of a conundrum. Possibly if I condition my brain to lots of different funny things, it'll be able to generalize the enjoyment to situations in which I'm uncomfortable. If I could manage that, I would also be less uncomfortable due to the enjoyment, thus starting an upward spiral.
Even if the whole thing falls through and I remain relatively somber by nature, I'll still have a list of worthwhile fun/funny things. Now if only I had hundreds of hours to devote to this project...
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