Jackie Kashian and Maria Bamford and Venus Williams and Debilitating Burnout
Also, Blue Oyster Cult. And dogs too.
Hey, guess what! Chicken butt. Yes. Of course. But furthermore: please remember that our show exists because of listener donations. If you’ve donated, THANK YOU. If not, it’s easy: go here, pick a level that works for you, then select DEPRESH MODE from the list of shows.
Okay. Here’s the situation. This week’s show features Jackie Kashian
35 years in standup comedy makes for a lot of great experience in presenting oneself. And so does extensive therapy to unlock the lasting effects of physical abuse and substance/addiction issues in one’s childhood home. On this week’s show: Jackie Kashian, who’s gots the both.
You can hear me get a bit heated up in the beginning of this episode about the misconceptions about therapy. I’m talking about ideas, dunderheaded ideas, like therapy is all about blaming people or living in the past, that you should “just get over it”. But my goodness, the PAST is the only reference you have to understand the PRESENT and the FUTURE. It’s not about blaming, it’s about knowing what you’re working with.
Jackie is a delight and she often tours and performs with Maria Bamford. And speaking of the Bammer, onto the next item.
I love doing things I love doing
Many years ago, I hosted a show called Wits. It was a stage show with interviews of authors. Then it was a stage and radio show with music and comedy. Then it was a canceled show. And now? We’ll see. But it’s back and it’s playing on 10/1 at the Fitzgerald Theater in Saint Paul.
How can a canceled show happen over six years since that cancellation? Because we refused to die. In the summer of 2019, I got together with John Munson, musical director of the show, to kick around the idea of a reunion show. We knew that the shows we did created a sense of community both in the Twin Cities and around the country. I’ve never been able to make things for a mass audience, I just don’t know how, but Wits fans were a fiercely loyal group.
Our main criteria for this possibility was that it would have to be fun. We’d do the parts of the show that we loved and cut the parts we had never enjoyed. We wouldn’t worry about length of a segment or swears because we weren’t on the radio anymore. So we did a show in November of 2019, big sell out performance, and it was great.
And the idea of doing shows without the involvement of my former employer regarding content or even venue (First Avenue now owns the Fitzgerald) was appealingly liberating. So we’re going to do a show on 10/1 and our guest will be Maria Bamford, one of the best and funniest humans to walk the earth. I’ve interviewed her a bunch and she’s one of the few people who can make me laugh so hard I have difficulty continuing the interview.
I can post Maria videos! Like this one with Stephen Colbert where they don’t realize how bad the pandemic is going to get:
Anyway, come to the show! If you have to work that day, quit your job!
There’s a change coming to sports
The recent decisions by Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles to pay attention to their mental health were big stories. But I think those decisions were symptoms of a much larger and more important story: athletes redefining who they are and turning the tables on the people who run professional sports.
Professional tennis is a meat grinder of mental health and has been for a long time. Talented players get taken away from their families at an early age and get worked to the bone by people who stand to profit handsomely off the players’ labor and success. And sure, the players can make good money too if they happen to be among the sliver who stay healthy and stay mentally intact.
I was talking with my wife the other day about the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena. I wondered how they’ve had such long careers in a sport where that’s rarely the case. She pointed out that they never did the juniors circuit when they were younger so their brains might be a lot less messed with than their peers. And then there’s this in this weekend’s New York Times.
I may be a professional tennis player, but I actually don’t think I’m that different from everyone else. All of us face mental health challenges resulting from the inevitable setbacks and uncertainties of life. We also live in a culture that glorifies being a workaholic, where the risks of burnout are often ignored, and where, let’s face it, whether you’re on or off the court, winning is everything.
It doesn’t matter who you are. You need support. You can’t divorce mental health from anything you do. It impacts your physical well-being, your decision-making, your ability to cope with difficult moments.
Go Venus.
We’ve started to see more of what we’re going to see a lot in the future: athletes from all sports truly exercising the power they have in these sports. Athletes who are defining themselves as people first and athletes after.
Also, here’s Serena Williams with the Dude Perfect guys where they try to simply return one of her serves, taking multiple guys to make the effort. I’ve saved to start at my favorite part, when she joyfully, cackling with glee, nails a guy in the leg with a tennis ball and then hits the same guy with a tennis ball in the butt, causing him to fall over in pain.
Companies provide a small amount of help for the enormous problems they cause
Writing in Mashable, Rebecca Ruiz offers some praise for Amazon’s new plan to offer a wellness benefit for its 950,000 employees. The initiative provides therapy sessions, crisis and suicide counseling, and an app (hoo boy, but I’ll keep an open mind) that offers “computerized cognitive behavioral therapy” (what).
Still, doing something is better than doing nothing.
Except that Amazon is creating a lot of the problems that the initiative doesn’t go nearly anywhere close to solving.
On its own, Amazon's move is important for the very reasons Galetti describes. Yet the company has also long denied accusations that its corporate and warehouse workplaces are the epitome of toxic: extractive, punitive, and sometimes discriminatory. Indeed, a few weeks after Resources for Living publicly launched, the New York Times ran a disturbing portrayal of life inside New York City's fulfillment center JFK8, where pickers say they raced to pack online orders and struggled to interact with human supervisors when the company's management app fails them.
It sounded like a worker's nightmare: unrelenting demand, little to no control over scheduling and working conditions, and limited empathy from higher ups. People seek therapy for numerous reasons, including parenting challenges, mental illness, grief, and trauma. But for Amazon employees negatively affected by the company's practices, it's plausible they're reaching out for help because their employer has designed a work environment rife with inescapable stressors, which can lead to anxiety, depression, or burnout, or compound the distress they're already experiencing.
Ruiz says this kind of issue is happening everywhere as employers are making some moves to protecting workers but it’s basically like patching two holes in a bucket that has twenty holes.
Burning out! For you! Take it away, Blue Oyster Cult in a shocking gold shirt!