1602_LastThingOnTheList_Seg_Transcript
Segment A &B
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You know, I feel lucky, so lucky in getting to share. Stories about my personal
life here with you, because spinning these tales into stories, walking this
tightrope, it forces me to really examine what went down, what happened, what
did I do right? What did I do wrong? Is picking at scabs that otherwise I would
leave to fester.
And all artists use their lives as the building bricks of their art. But I think
comics, comedians, they live closest to the truth because nothing’s ever funnier
than what actually happened. And the hardest person to laugh at is always
yourself. So today, the deepest dive of all. We are so proud to present.
The last thing on the list, my name is from Washington. Believe me when I say
sometimes the applause is all you have when you’re listening. The snap
judgment
now. Today’s story takes us deep into the life of a professional standup
comedian. And of course that means humor. The very best comedians bring
their whole selves to the stage. And after years of struggling with their own
depression, years of avoiding the alpha in the room, Cassandra D decides to
name her demon and even start telling jokes about it.
And I wanna be clear that. Though this is a beautiful story, a story about finding
hope for one of the funniest persons I know listeners should be advised. It also
discusses suicidal ideation. Cassandra’s story comes from our friends at the
Love and Radio Podcast, snap Judgment. When you grow up, you think your
family is normal, and then there’s a point when you realize they’re not normal.
Then there’s like another point when you realize that not normal is normal. I
remember I was at the point when I was like, no, yelling all the time, screamingon this.
This is not normal. None of this is normal. And then Roseanne came on
and I was like, okay, we’re kind of normal. We’re like fat, white, trash,
screaming at each other.
Yeah, I’m calling you fat. Well, if that ain’t the big fat pot, calling the Colonel
Black, if they’ll give a primetime show about it. We’re not like the complete
weirdos that I thought we were. Fat, fat, fat. I don’t know, like, it’s not like I
believe there’s any like lack of representation of white people on television, but
it did feel like this was the first time that I had a specific type of person.
Looking back at me, wanna make it clear, not a Roseanne fan anymore, but.
I feel great. Probably because I got blazed before I came out here. Thank you. I
should clarify. Uh, that’s what I call wearing a blazer. You’ve never seen me do
comedy before, just so you can better understand what my vibe is. Like. The
first time I went to headliner show, the booker was like, how much time can you
do?
And I was like, uh, about 45 minutes. Oh. And he was like, nothing dirty. And I
was like, okay. Uh, about 40 minutes. And then he was like, nothing sad. And I
was like, I have one joke.
It’s about my blazer. I have always loved comedy. I dated one guy who said that
if I broke up with him, that he would kill himself and I broke up with him, but.
He’s not dead yet. When I was in high school, my friends and I were obsessed
with Margaret Chill. I don’t wanna come up and go, you know, what’s the deal?
I thought we had an agreement. I left Wanda Sykes. I don’t want no dolphins on
me. Mitch Hedberg. I like rice. Rice is great when you’re hungry and you want
2000 of something. I, I’m a person who has been made fun of my whole life for
what I look like. So getting on stage in front of a bunch of people kind of seems
stupid.
So I always wanted to write funny things for other people to say. I would write
screenplays and pilots and things like that and I would submit them to things,
but the only way to actually like get feedback on whether or not something.
You’re saying is funny is to like say it to people. So I basically forced myself to
do standup.
Honestly, dating as a fat woman is basically like going out to eat at a restaurant
if you’re on a gluten free diet. Alright? It is like we have options.There are just fewer of the.
Yeah, and a lot of them are gross.
Let me assume what I mean by that. When I look at my phone again, I will have
a match on Tinder. And he will have a sword in his profile picture.
What do I have to do to a mattress? Someone who doesn’t own a cloak?
Can anyone tell? A couple years ago I started dating women too, and I put them
in the app. So I was like, are there gonna be girls with swords?
Isn’t that a kind of person? I haven’t found one yet, but I have found a girl
equivalent of guys with swords. Anybody wanna guess what is in these profile
pictures? I’m sorry, I heard someone say something. Can you say that louder?
Horses. Horses. Horses.
It is horses.
My family didn’t talk about stuff. We weren’t very good at communicating.
Everyone just kind of had bottled up anger that would eventually like come out
in screaming. I remember one time my brother, we were arguing about
something and he went into the kitchen to get a snack and he came back out and
his snack was eating a can of chef boy Rd raviolis out of the can uncooked with
a spoon.
I’m pretty sure that’s what he was eating at the time, and he was getting ready to
yell at me. I just started basically roasting him, like congratulations. And he was
like, wait, what for? And I was like, for providing the sounds for when the
dinosaurs are eating each other in Jurassic Park. We live in a house.
Why are you eating what you would eat if you were a train car? Hobo? He was
laughing so hard, he had to go spit out his food and he kind of forgot that he
was gonna beat me up, you know? I’m sure he beat me up like the next day or
two days later, but like that day. It just didn’t happen. I don’t know if my brother
has ever finished a book that’s not about Star Wars.
We were very, very different and I feel like being funny is one of the only things
that ever connected us. Like a time that we were speaking the same language.
I remember in like second grade learning that someday the sun was gonna
explode and just going home and like. Staring out my window and like being
sad about it, like I’ve just always been sad about everything.
I was bullied a lotas a kid by both bullies and girls, and I learned something from that, which is if
bullying were a professional sport.
Girls bullying would be the one we watched on television.
They’re not meaner. They’re just really in it for the love of the game.
Let me give you an example. I was bullied by a boy in middle school. He leaned
over to me in the middle of class and whispered, you have more roles than Gino
Bakery. Barely face me, just leaned back and whispered. Gino’s doesn’t sell
rolls.
They have like cakes and pies, and so
the cream donut is delicious.
At that point, I wasn’t being bullied, but just I like to bring Yelp reviews. That
same year, I’m girl leaned over to me and whispered something I thought about
every day, four years. Girl leaned over to me in the middle of seventh grade
science and said, no one is ever going to love you.
That’s better. I became known for telling dark jokes. I became known as
comedian who talked about depression and suicide and mental health and hard
things that maybe don’t seem inherently funny. At first, I. I remember telling
another really dark joke. I told it in Boston at this restaurant where people did
not want to be at a comedy show.
There was literally a family celebrating one of their kids was moving to like
California or something, and they were having like a going away dinner. They
did not care. But as I’m telling this story, they just like. Stopped and there’s a
mom who had been like grimacing at me all night When I told these dark jokes.
I really expected this lady to get mad, and she just started laughing so much that
she was like knocking stuff off the table. She was just some woman who just
wanted to eat pasta with her son before she never sees him again. I don’t think I
went into this trying to make people laugh at dark things like I don’t think that
was originally the plan, but I do really love making someone laugh at something
they don’t wanna laugh at.
After years of trying different antidepressants, I ended up on Prozac, a children’s
dose of Prozac, and it solved everything and it was really cool.
Except it started to make me gain weight. Not all of it. I was already fat before, just to be clear.
It wasn’t like the gum from Willy Wonka,
but still, I was like, I should find out if this is okay. So I went to the doctor and I
was like, Hey, uh, is it safe for me to keep taking this medicine even though I’m
gaining weight? And he said, let’s run some tests. And it did. And he sat me
down and he was like, I’m a hundred percent sure. That you should keep taking
this medicine.
And I said, that’s great. Is it my blood pressure? He’s like, no. So I guess on my
cholesterol, he was like, no. I was like, what is it? Why should I keep taking this
medicine even though I’m gaining weight? And he looks at me and he says. It’s
because you have a twinkle in your eye. Now
I got diagnosed as jolly.
When we return, Cassandra’s comedy takes off, but everything else starts to go
wrong. Snap judgment.
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Welcome back to Snap Judgment. When last we left, Cassandra was starting to
find her groove as a comedian, even while battling her own demons. And I want
to remind you that this story addresses suicidal ideation. So listeners should take
care because even though Cassandra can joke about her struggles, that
absolutely does not mean those struggles go away.
Snap judgment.
I’ve been on and off antidepressants since I was 17, but I had had a few years.
Probably around the time they started doing comedy that it just like didn’t seem
that they were worth the side effects. There’s only one antidepressant that
doesn’t cause weight gain and can sometimes even lead to weight loss.
And I was like, yes, give me that. I started taking it. I just ended up ruminating
and then the next day, rumination is worse. I was driving and an ambulance
came up behind me, so I moved over to the right and then the ambulance passed
and I went to pull back out. A middle-aged man who. Definitely has no other
love in his life, aside from this white Corvette decided to try to pass me instead
of being like a normal human and like everyone comes out after the ambulance
in like order, I was like enraged and like just like honked my horn and like
screamed at him.
We ended up stopped at a light together, got out of his car and he came over and
opened my door. He caught me like irresponsible or spoiled or something. I was
frozen in that moment because I was actually terrified. But after he drove off, I
could not stop being angry about that. Every second for like 24 hours.
I just think my whole body is clenched and I’m just like grinding my teeth and
just thinking of all the things I should have screamed at him and I like can’t get
past it. I’m just like, how do I find him? Do I just drive around looking for a
white Corvette? Like how do I make sure that this person experiences justice?
It was like destroying me and I couldn’t get away from it, and it’s like, that’s not
normal. The next day is worse and the next day is worse. And then by the end of
that week, I was texting all of my friends that I was gonna kill myself. I wanted
to hurt myself, and I wanted to make them feel bad. Like it was just anger.
My brain was not letting me calm down. I had this thought about killing myself
in my bedroom ’cause I was living with my parents and having them find my
body and I thought, how can I make this look like an accident so that they don’t
know that I did this to myself And I remember. Having this thought about, okay,
but what if it didn’t look like an accident and I just accidentally framed them for
murder.
I left. I got out of bed and I got a notebook and I wrote it down and I kind of
just like crafted this whole bit. Then I started thinking about the like side effects
of the medicine and how I, like in the three weeks or whatever that I was on it, I
had lost like 15 pounds. And then I started thinking about that and then I wrote
this other joke.
I tried to make a, an appointment with a therapist. The first time I tried to go to
a therapist. It was really, really, really rough because I had just been suicidal and
I went to the doctor I remember very clearly and made an appointment for three
o’clock on a Tuesday, and I got there at 2 45 and I sat there and I was like, I
don’t know how to explain to this person, this complete stranger.
How no matter what’s going on in my life, no matter how other people are
treating me, no matter what, I feel alone and left out and like I can’t matter to
another human being. And as I was sitting in that waiting room, I realized
something freely important that changed my life. I realized that it was three 30
and my therapist had never shown up.
She sent me a text message later and was like, Hey, I’m really sorry I missed her
appointment. When do you wanna reschedule? And I sent her a text message
back that said, this is Cassandra’s friend.
She told herself
I was no longer in that head space. But my brain was still kind of like, okay,
well you think this is funny. You think it is funny that you tried for the first time
in your adult life to have a therapist and they forgot about you? You find that
hilarious. It was like this door had opened. If you did not like that, you’re not
gonna like where this is headed.
I’ve spent so much of my life with people telling me there’s like something
wrong with me and just kind of like being like me against everybody else.
These people are on my side. We’re in this together.
I think I had the best possible trajectory that a 30 something fat lady from Delco
with low self-esteem and severe mental health problems could have. I became
one of the most booked people in the city of Philadelphia, and then I got into
like the Boston Comedy Festival. It’s like people aren’t usually happy to see me.
Every time I went on stage, I would come home and I would have a bunch of
Facebook requests from comics, and I would have some dms asking me to be on
shows. I was having a lot of fun and getting like a lot of time to do comedy. It
was pretty awesome. So then the pandemic hits. What happened? I felt very
much at the beginning of the pandemic that it was meant to hurt me.
All of the shows that I’m scheduled for, including my album, recording,
canceled. I’m immunocompromised and I live with my parents who are older.
My dad has ms, and I just really did not have the option of getting covid. Didn’t
even think of leaving the house the second the lockdown started, my brain was
just like, okay, this is it.
I am in this room now. What happened on April 3rd where you felt you lost
your mind? I was absolutely miserable sitting in my room, ruminating, thinking,
horrible thoughts over and over again, and I was just like, I just want this tostop.
Why do you point to that day as, as the day that it kind of slipped off the
edge?
That’s just the day where I was like, I, I decided I was gonna kill myself. Like,
every time I would write a to-do list, I would put, kill yourself on there. But I
know I wasn’t that serious ’cause it was never the last thing on the list. But on
that day wasn’t the, the, like the last thing, uh, it was probably the only thing.
So I met on Amazon. I searched for and I thought about like adding other stuff
to the cart, but I was like, that might delay it. ’cause they might do that thing
where they’re like, do you want it all in one box? I looked for a good deal. I
ended up with 12 of these things. I ended up with an entire package of stuff to
kill myself because of the savings at the time when I remember looking at it,
and there was a note at the top of Amazon, I don’t know if everyone remembers
this.
They were prioritizing essential goods. Anything that people needed to live,
they moved mine to the bottom of the list. We’ll still give it to you because we
don’t care that much, but we will take our time with it. So like my brain goes,
okay, now that’s settled. Like when you submit your taxes and you’re like, all
right, it’s done.
I can relax and go do other things. Like the moment like when you feel like a
constant, constant pain is gonna be over. When I am depressed, I don’t believe.
That people will miss me, but I did believe that they could feel responsible and
that could mess up their lives. Maybe I can just live through this a little longer.
I’m not resilient enough to deal with all of this, but maybe I’m resilient enough
to make it like a month. So I was like. Maybe this isn’t the only option. I’ve tried
every antidepressant I started when I was 17 years old, so this is like over 20
years of antidepressants, and I was like, let me try one more time.
I. I emailed my doctor. He sent out a prescription immediately to the CVS down
the street from my house for a 30 day supply of some SSRI, and then I got an
email notification from CVS right after I got a notification on my phone from
the Amazon app that said the stuff was gonna be delayed then. I got an email
from CVS saying that the antidepressant had been picked up by the US Postal
Service.
I was like, wait a minute, maybe I’ll actually get the antidepressant before I get
the stuff. That’s when I realized that this might be a race. What if we just do
whatever gets here first? I am gonna let the universe decide what I should do.
The stuff gets here first. I’m gonna kill myself. If the antidepressants get here
first, I’m gonna take them and I’m gonna try to get better.
And that was the game. Big mighty Amazon and the tiny little US Postal
Service are now racing things towards my house that will have very opposite
intentions and expressions are coming from 0.7 miles from my house. So close.
The stuff is coming from South Carolina to suburban Philadelphia. For some
reason, one of the maps I was looking at actually showed the Mason Dixon line
and I was like, the stuff has to cross the Mason Dixon line, like a disgraced
confederate soldier.
The other one has to cross like one busy street. Amazon has all these like giant
trucks, like it’s whole business model is like. Being as efficient as possible to the
point that it disregards human safety. The US Postal Service is the same thing
that used to use horses. A guy named Dennis just walks your things to you in
shorts.
That’s the like teams here. It’s David versus Goliath and like figuring it out and
watching it became kind of fun. But you were serious about it. Even though you
were laughing. I was a hundred percent sure that I was gonna do whatever got
there first. Did you start to root for one side or the other? I was at least kind of
at that point, rooting like a little bit maybe.
For the antidepressants, that was my horse in this race. Yeah, rooting for myself
feels unnatural. It was so much easier to root for the post office. They’re just
adorable. I probably had just enough time to start to imagine a better life when I
got a push notification from the Amazon app that the stuff had shipped from
South Carolina.
And I get an Apple News notification for a story about Trump rejecting a
bailout of the US Post service, and then the next day I get a notification from
Amazon that the stuff is out for delivery. When I got the notification, I actually
like went back to feeling relief because like the game’s about to be over.
A couple hours later I got a notification that said it had been delivered. At that
point, I was up in my bedroom and I kind of had that like feeling when you get
something delivered and you’re like, Ooh, my thing is here. I came down the
stairs and my mom was holding the package from Amazon and I’m just thinking
like, what can I pretend this is?
And she’s starting to open it. She’s got like the corner open. Fortunately, despite
the fact that there are like 18 tools around her living room that can be used forthis,
my mom opens boxes with her house keys. I had some time to get it out of
her hands before she opened it. And at first I was like panicked because like,
like I think deep down, probably a lot of the time people wanna be stopped, but
there’s just something like embarrassing about people knowing that you’re in
that bad a shape.
My mom knows that I have mental health problems. She’s heard my jokes, like
she knows, but I don’t want her to know at that time if I actually saw how much
that hurt her, I would never be able to do it. So I did not want her to know. Uh,
so I take the package with the stuff in it up to my bedroom. I sit down at my
desk and I immediately open it up.
Then I started thinking, I wonder how long it’s gonna take. Like am I gonna be
dead for a week before these antidepressants show up? Like how is that gonna
work? I don’t know. I’m still interested in this story. I’m still interested in the
outcome of this. Still interested in picturing Dennis stopping at the Dunkin
Donuts in between the CVS and my house and.
Dropping antidepressants on the ground and not realizing it. My brain thought
about the rest of the story, getting outside of a repetitive circle of thinking. It
was any different thought other than the rumination. I kind of realized that like I
had started this in a certain head space and I just wasn’t quite in that head space
anymore.
I did not have the same drive that I had had six days ago. I did not kill myself.
Uh, spoiler alert. Uh, yeah. I did not kill myself. I didn’t try to kill myself. I
didn’t throw away the stuff. I just put it away. Really, all I decided was that I
didn’t have to do it right now and I could try some other stuff first, and so I was
like, let me try one more antidepressant.
Which didn’t work.
Um, so what we wanted to do, if this is cool with you, is, um, you sent me that
set. This was a bit, um, that you were working on that had some like where you
introduce it by saying like, now you all wanna hear some sad jokes or
something. All right. I’ll clap if you want some sad jokes. Oh my God, thank
you so much.
Uh, uh, I was recently, uh, very, very sad because I had moved to Brooklyn and
I, I just didn’t have anyone to hang out with and I was really lonely like a lot of
the time, like the only interaction that I had with another human being for like year.
I was playing Grand Theft Auto with one of my roommates, which sucks
because that’s a one person game.
When he wasn’t there, I was so lonely that I would steal a car with a passenger
in it just to have somebody to talk to. It was very, very lonely and so I got to the
point where, how was that to listen to? Like that’s about very real things and my
reaction, like the things that were like. Kind of, uh, like hitting me as I was
listening to it weren’t the emotional things.
They were the comedy things. My brain is hearing where the comedy could be
better. It starts as something that’s like very emotional and real, but telling it
over and over again, it’s like it that I become kind of desensitized to my own
experiences and it no longer makes me feel the emotion. It’s just about the joke.
How do you feel like that set went? At the time, I remember it was a like a little
brewery in South Philly and I remember just being like, okay, this is just getting
a gauge for if these jokes will work. They don’t have to laugh hysterically. It
doesn’t have to be the best set ever, but like, are any of these things worth
working on and trying to make better?
Ultimately, the darker it is, I feel like the bigger the payoff has to be, but when I
first tell it, it doesn’t have to be. The biggest payoff and honestly, like if the
worst thing that ever happened to me got a huge laugh and I was proud of the
joke, it would absolutely be worth it to me.
When I first made the shift to start telling mental health jokes, I felt better. It
opened me up to start doing therapy. It did destigmatize suicide for people who
hear my jokes. But the more I normalize talking about it on stage, the more it
kind of like seeps into the rest of my life. I got to a point where talking about
killing myself, it becomes so desensitized that now I’m like sitting in traffic and
it’s like, oh, if this doesn’t start moving, I’m gonna kill myself.
Are you still performing these kind of jokes right now? Right now where I am is
that I have decided for the time being to not tell any jokes about suicide or my
mental health. Got to the point where I was like, I have to stop talking about this
to try to stop feeling like I wanna do it, if that makes sense.
I don’t really know where like the line is of like, this is helpful to talk about this
mental health thing and this is harmful to keep talking about this thing or
thinking about this thing over and over again. I do want to still be able to talk
about mental health stuff, but how do I make it so that’s not all that I think about
and talk about on stage or off stage to the point where.I’m just obsessed with my own depression.
My therapist and I were talking and she said something like, the best way to
stop being suicidal is to like take it off the table as an option. If you wanna quit
drinking, it’s easier to do if you don’t have alcohol in your house. Especially
now that it’s in your toolbox of solutions for literally every problem in your life
because it’s become so minimized.
How do I share who I am without the mental health stuff? Like who else am I. I
don’t know if I’ve told you this, but I talked to a friend of mine who’s a producer
and we were just like talking about the story she related to me, that she had
done a story that was pretty like involved with someone who ended up killing
herself after they had finished the story, which she kind of like said to me in so
many words, is like, if Cassandra kills herself.
How are you gonna feel about this being in the world? That gave me pause. I’m
thrilled that we’re sitting here together, but I was thinking about the possibility
of that not, and like as I checked in with you, you were in different places over
that year. For me, I kind of came to this place where like it just felt to me like,
why shouldn’t you be allowed to share this experience?
That’s what I felt when I like first listened to like your jokes. Why does this
corner of human experience have to be so nuclear? Why do we have to like
fence it off? I mean, I understand this like safety things. I’ve thought a lot about
it and heard different people say things, but my kind of feeling is like, it seems
good and useful to me.
I can’t control how anyone receives my comedy in any way. Whether today or a
day after I kill myself though, I do hope that when someone hears my jokes
about killing myself, I do hope it makes them laugh. I hope it makes them feel
like, my friends don’t talk about this. My friends don’t struggle with their mental
health, but other people do.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you to Cassandra D for sharing her story.
Cassandra’s Comedy Special Uncle Earth is available for free on YouTube from
Helium Comedy Studios. You can find her on Instagram at the Cassandra D.
That’s DEE. The story was produced by Justin Kreon with Anna Adlerstein for
the Love and Radio podcast.
The Love and Radio podcast is like Family to Snap. The host Nick VanDerKolk
used to work here. Anna Adlerstein used to work here. In fact, love and radio’s
episode called The World Tomorrow so we can hear my story about
growing upin a white supremacist doomsday cult. Their stories are intense, strange, unlike
anything in podcasting.
They are launching their 10th season later this year. I can’t wait to listen. Special
thanks. To Avia to Kornfeld for her help on this story. Hughes. Thanks as well to
Brent Ween at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Brent wrote the
following, which he asked us to pass on. He wrote, I think this story, it’s across
the feeling of ambivalence that people so often experience in the middle of a
suicidal crisis, and it demonstrates how getting someone through that intense
stage.
Of possible action by temporarily. Removing access to lethal means is
lifesaving. Research shows that in most cases, the person does not simply find
another way. They survive, they get help. Suicide is a leading cause of death in
the US, but it is often preventable. Help is available if you or loved one is in
crisis.
Please reach out to the 9 8 8 suicide crisis Lifeline. At 9, 8 8, you can learn
more about suicide healing and connect locally with others whose lives have
been affected by suicide to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. At
a fs p.org, at Peace is produced by Justin Kramon, Anna AERs Stein and Nick
VanDerKolk.
Now after this short break, snap is hopping in a giveaway car. And putting a
pedal to the metal. Stay tuned.