"Dude, What’s a Spleen Anyway?"

At the end of rehearsal today, the crew of Condemned to a Life and I recorded voiceovers for the show.

The voiceovers include things that happen offstage, things people said to me, and things I probably replayed in my own head so many times that they became louder and more important than they ever deserved to be.

The show takes some of the most painful and embarrassing experiences of my life and, with the grace of time, lets me do something different with them.

Not erase them or even try to find a silver lining in them.

Just loosen their grip on the way I see myself.

There is a scene in the show about a period in my youth when I dyed my hair blonde and played the dumb blonde. I did not think people would like me for who I actually was, but I thought maybe if I were funny—like Kelly Bundy on Married... with Children—they would like me anyway.

In the scene, I am horrified by the prospect of having relationships with boys because I am convinced that eventually they will discover the truth about me.

“What if they knew who I really was?” I say. “A brunette whose mom drives a banana-yellow station wagon and who doesn’t have cable TV?”

These were actual sources of shame.

The station wagon. The lack of cable. My natural hair color.

At the time, these things felt like evidence that I was fundamentally uncool and possibly unlovable.

Now they are funny.

Not because the feelings were fake. The feelings were real. I was a teenager, so naturally everything carried the emotional weight of a public execution.

But time has a way of revealing that some of the things we thought would destroy us were actually just mildly inconvenient facts about our childhoods.

Then there is the car accident.

When I was sixteen, I was hit by a car. In the show, the stage goes black at the moment of impact. I was unconscious in real life, so the audience learns what is happening through the voices of doctors and medical staff.

“Sixteen-year-old female hit by a car.”

“Her spleen ruptured.”

“She is losing a lot of blood.”

This was obviously terrifying for my family. It was terrifying for me too, although not until later, because I was unconscious for the most dramatic part.

In rehearsal, we all took turns recording the medical voices.

At first, we were doing them more or less seriously.

Then an idea started tickling me.

I got up and told my director, Vishaal Desai, that I wanted to try something. He hit record.

I leaned into the microphone.

“Oh God, she needs a bedpan. Quick.”

Someone else added, “That’s a big mess.”

Then, in a stoner voice:

“Dude, what’s a spleen anyway?”

We cracked up.

A moment that had once been one of the most frightening events of my life was suddenly very funny.

That does not mean the accident was funny. It does not mean my family’s fear was funny, or that losing my spleen and sustaining a traumatic brain injury was secretly a gift.

I don’t believe every tragedy needs a punch line. I don’t believe suffering automatically makes us stronger, wiser, or more interesting. Sometimes terrible things are just terrible.

But I do know that humor has always been one of the ways I survive.

I find embarrassing moments funny. I find the gap between how important something felt at the time and how absurd it looks years later funny. I find doctors speaking in stoner voices funny.

And there was something freeing about taking this memory, which had once belonged to fear, and giving it to comedy.

That is part of what Condemned to a Life is about.

It is about second chances.

Some people get them. Others don’t. It sucks, but that is life.

I believe I got a second chance. Probably a third, a fourth, and a fifth too, if I’m being honest.

I’m using this chance to understand my life better. To have compassion and love for the girl I once was. And to use that as fuel to bring compassion and connection to other people, even when they are complicated, damaged, disappointing, or impossible to understand.

Writing this show was scary. Sharing the script with other people was scary.

Now I am getting ready to stand onstage and tell these stories in front of friends, family, and strangers, with puppets, voiceovers, and quite possibly a joke about a bedpan.

Am I crazy?

Maybe.

But I’m taking a chance on me.

Share Amy Does Improv