Punchlines and Protective Walls

Jokingly, I asked my therapist, “What if I’m not funny anymore once we’re done?” It was one of those half-laugh, half-plea kind of questions, the kind you toss out like a joke so you don’t have to admit how deeply the fear behind it actually sits. She smiled that gentle, devastating smile she saves for the moments when she’s about to rearrange the architecture of my entire worldview and said, “Then I did my job, because once you truly heal from this, you’ll realize there’s absolutely nothing funny about what you went through to get here.” And I swear… the air shifted. I felt the words hit me in a place I didn’t even know still had soft tissue left. It was like someone opened a trapdoor in the floor of my ribcage and I dropped straight through it. My throat tightened, my stomach flipped, and all I could think was that I might genuinely need an entire new session just to recover from the violence of that truth… the way one sentence can drag every buried version of yourself into the light and force you to look at the cost of your own survival.

There’s a particular kind of dark humor that trauma teaches you… the sharp, deflecting kind. The kind that slips between ribs and organs like a blade disguised as a joke, cracking a laugh at the exact moment your chest is caving in. It’s the kind of humor you develop when you’ve spent years learning to swallow your own pain whole, like a meal you were never meant to taste, until laughter becomes the only socially acceptable translation for your suffering. I became fluent in it. My entire personality has been stitched together from well-timed sarcasm, self-deprecating punchlines, and emotional acrobatics that looked effortless from the outside but were actually just panic with choreography. It was all rooted in the quiet terror of being fully seen… of someone looking me in the eye and noticing the exhaustion behind the performance. Humor became the way I kept myself small enough to survive, shrinking into digestible versions of myself so no one would accuse me of being “too much.” And over time, that smallness stopped feeling like a coping mechanism and became a kind of home… cramped, dimly lit, and familiar enough that I forgot it was slowly suffocating me.

Therapy has been the slow, uncomfortable process of expanding out of that space, like trying to stretch limbs that have been folded into the same cramped position for years and suddenly realizing the ache you feel isn’t new pain, it’s old pain finally being acknowledged. It’s been the unsettling recognition that so many of the things I thought made me “me” were actually just survival instincts dressed up as personality traits. The way I overshare just enough to seem open but never enough to be truly known. The way I can make a room laugh but can’t make myself speak honestly when something hurts. The way I turn my trauma into a story with good comedic timing because it’s easier to play narrator than to admit I’m still living with the aftermath. I’ve had to face the truth that a lot of my so-called charm was really just masking… a pretty disguise tailored to keep people at a safe emotional distance. And the jokes… God, the jokes. Therapy made me see how many of them were actually confessions hiding in plain sight, tiny griefs and buried fears wrapped in punchlines because it felt safer to make people laugh at my pain than to risk them seeing me cry from it.

And it’s terrifying, the thought that healing might strip away the versions of myself I’ve relied on for so many years. It feels like standing in front of a mirror with shaking hands, knowing you’re about to wipe away layers of makeup that you’ve worn for so long you forgot what your real face looks like. There’s a grief in it, an anticipatory mourning for the selves I built out of necessity… the sarcastic one, the “I’m fine” one, the emotionally bulletproof one who could turn any wound into a joke before anyone noticed she was bleeding. Sometimes it feels like peeling back those layers will reveal a stranger, someone softer, someone I’m not sure I’ll know how to protect. And part of me is terrified that beneath all the carefully rehearsed versions of myself, there might be a woman who is nothing like the one I’ve learned to present… a woman who’s quieter, more fragile, more honest, more demanding of love and gentleness than I’ve ever allowed myself to be. Healing asks me to meet her. To become her. And there are days when that feels less like transformation and more like stepping into a life that no longer fits any of my old armor.

I guess the truth is… what I’m afraid of losing isn’t my humor, it’s the identity I built around pain. It’s the version of me that learned how to survive by turning wounds into witty one-liners, the version that figured out early on that people are far more comfortable with a woman who can laugh at her own suffering than one who asks them to witness it. Because it’s easier… so much easier to laugh than to admit I spent my entire life being trained to disappear. A glass child, raised in the shadows of crisis, praised for my silence, rewarded for not needing anything. I learned early that my job was to stay small, to stay good, to stay out of the way so the house didn’t fracture any further. By the time I stumbled into an abusive relationship, I already knew how to hold my breath long enough to keep the peace. I already knew how to swallow my feelings whole, how to apologize for things I didn’t do, how to make myself into a softer landing for someone else’s chaos. And then the decade-long unraveling of my voice, where every instinct I had was questioned, every emotion minimized until even my heartbeat felt like an inconvenience. A place where love meant endurance, where affection was a prize for compliance, where I became fluent in doubting myself because it was safer than believing I deserved better.

So yes… it’s easier to laugh. It’s easier to pretend it didn’t shape me, easier to mask the years of conditioning with humor than to admit how deeply it rewired the way I understand safety, connection, and myself. It’s easier to make light of my anxiety than to say out loud how many nights I cried myself to sleep, staring at the ceiling like it was the only thing steady enough to hold the truth that I felt unlovable, disposable, too much and never enough at the same time. It’s easier to joke about chaos than to acknowledge how deeply I normalized being the only stable person in rooms full of emotional firestorms, always putting myself between the flames and everyone else so no one would notice I was burning, too. I’ve spent so much of my life turning trauma into punchlines…  polishing the ugliest parts of my story until they sparkled just enough to distract from the ache. And the idea of healing sometimes feels like erasing the entire language I’ve used to navigate the world. Like being asked to speak without the armor of humor, without the shield of self-deprecation, without the familiar cadence of pain dressed as entertainment. But maybe… maybe that’s the point. Maybe the goal isn’t to lose myself, but to meet the version of me that never needed those translations in the first place.

Maybe healing isn’t about becoming less funny, maybe it’s about becoming less wounded. Maybe it’s about letting my humor unclench its fists and soften into something that doesn’t hide me, but reveals me. Something that doesn’t feel like a shield I grip until my knuckles ache, but a natural reflex that bubbles up from an actual place of lightness. I’m beginning to realize there’s a kind of laughter that isn’t forged in fire, not sharpened by survival, not bartered for safety… but born quietly, tenderly, from joy. And maybe that’s what healing looks like: allowing myself to experience humor that doesn’t demand I shrink to fit someone else’s comfort, or sand down the edges of my truth, or disguise the depth of what I survived just to make the room easier to sit in. Maybe it’s about stepping into a self that doesn’t use jokes as escape routes but as windows, openings where people can finally see inside instead of watching smoke signals and guessing what’s burning. Maybe healing is learning that my voice doesn’t have to tremble behind a punchline to deserve to be heard.

Healing feels like standing in a room without armor for the first time… the air colder, sharper, almost foreign against skin that’s spent years hidden beneath emotional metal. It feels like walking barefoot into emotions I once barricaded with jokes, stepping onto floors I always believed were too hot, too jagged, too dangerous to touch without padding myself in humor. It feels like letting my voice tremble in conversations where I used to perform, choosing honesty over entertainment, vulnerability over the safety of a well-timed laugh. Healing tastes like grief at first… thick, metallic, the kind that sits heavy in your throat… but somewhere underneath that weight, there’s a quiet, startling liberation. A sense of spaciousness I never knew existed, as if someone cracked open a window in a house I forgot I was suffocating inside. And in that sudden rush of fresh air, I am confronted with the terrifying truth that I deserve more than the scraps I used to settle for, more than the half-love, the emotional crumbs, the relationships where I was always the stable one absorbing the blow. So maybe I won’t be “funny” anymore in the way I used to be, the way that relied on pain as its punchline, the way that cost me parts of myself I didn’t even realize I was giving away.

Maybe I’ll be something else… something softer, something truer, something that doesn’t have to hide behind a punchline to feel safe. Maybe I’ll grow into a woman who doesn’t need to contort her pain into entertainment, who doesn’t have to wrap her vulnerability in irony, who can let her tenderness exist without apologizing for how loudly it beats. Maybe humor won’t be the mask I survive behind anymore, but the natural expression of a life that finally feels worth laughing inside of, a life where joy isn’t borrowed from ashes, where lightness isn’t just the absence of disaster, where laughter comes from an open window instead of a burning building. And honestly? If healing costs me the broken version of my personality I built to stay alive, the version that learned to make art out of ache, to smile through storms, to play the comedian in rooms where I was starving for someone to notice I was hurting… then that’s a price I’m finally ready to pay. Because maybe for the first time, I’m not choosing survival. I’m choosing myself.

And who knows… maybe I’ll still be funny. Just in a way that doesn’t require emotional triage afterward. I’d like to think my humor will survive the demolition, it just won’t be holding up the house anymore. Maybe it’ll finally get to be what it was always meant to be: a decoration, not a support beam… warmth, not a warning sign… something that adds color to my life instead of covering the cracks in the walls. Maybe my jokes won’t come from the fault lines in my chest, but from actual joy, actual ease, actual breath. Maybe humor can be something I reach for because I want to, not because I have to… not because it’s the only thing keeping the ceiling from collapsing. Maybe healing doesn’t mean losing my spark, it just means I stop burning myself to keep it alive.