For Those Who Write about Sufferings, Do You Laugh at Your Writings?

Suffering in life, sometimes needs to be laughed at.

In life, you have experienced through a harsh series of events, and you are haunted by them every day. The stress of your mind then stretches out bigger, making life more frustrating. If so, sit down with me and enjoy a “banana”.

“Banana”, a fruit yellow like the positivity of life, dry like the disasters, and curved like the life’s irony. To me, “banana” helps me relax after too much suffering. It doesn’t comfort me, but it helps me laugh at those sufferings. Please, eat a “banana” now, while reading this.

Uggh.(I finished)

If you’re done eating, let’s continue.

You’re a single parent who’s struggling to raise your kids with financial limitations. You’re a person born with one or more disabilities that hinder you from living fully. You’re an outsider of the society, cast out like a monster and discriminated heavily. Then, desperate for a strong voice, you made stories about those sufferings, hoping to let out all of the melancholy. This is the beginning of the heart-moving tales. They’re tragic, sad, and depressing but also relieving.

Please share your sufferings of life to me in the comment for us to sympathize together. After all, speaking can help.

Like other human beings, I felt depressing and frustrated many times. All I could do is blaming myself or other people. That’s the repeating cycle that never ended in life… and then, “Joker” came into my life.

This 2019 movie spoke about the struggles of isolated people and how one individual approached the unjust reality of cruelty. The “Joker” wanted to be a comedian, but nobody laughed at him, until…he killed. He killed the people who made his life miserable and turned his happiness into misery. During those moments of life and death, other people laughed for him. At the end of the movie, he turned his city into sea of blood and chaos, and instead of feeling guilty, he laughed.

Joker laughed at the bitter reality in contrast with humans’ hope during his upward journey to a free monster, even though he was devastated by the truth. In the middle of the movie, when he found clues of Thomas Wayne, a billionaire, being his father from his mother, he was proud. The father would always raise and help his child, supporting with kindness because the paternal love is an important emotion in humans’ hearts. After many troubles of finding, he received a punch from this supposed father. Later on, we knew this theory wasn’t true, when he found his mother’s delusional psychosis. The truth stepped on him ruthlessly, but he laughed back at the comedic irony in life.

Reality is no different for us. We all hoped for better futures and got subverted by the terrible outcomes. Like the love we had for somebody, then when we finally confessed love to them, we found out they already had lovers. What a funny story, but the confessors would feel painful tragically. Yet, we laughed at those situations.

These stories revealed that only the outsiders would laugh at these comedic harsh situations, not the ones who experienced them, because of the pain they received. However, what if we, like Joker, laughed naturally at our pain as if we were the outsiders? After all, we’re storytellers. We are the little men on our own shoulders who observe the world from there. These little men are the spectators but also us. Paradoxically, there would be nothing wrong for us to laugh at ourselves in the most miserable moments.

I applied this rule to myself, when at school, many students bullied me for getting terrible grade and bad at PE. I hated them because mistreating people for their lack of success is immoral, at least to me. Later on, I saw them failing at school continuously and bullied them hardly. After the experience, I hated myself for it, feeling anguish on bed in my room. At the same time, I laughed at myself. I

I then found out that I was wrong for throwing out the hatred I had onto other people. After this lesson, I no longer dared to criticize anyone harshly, even if they mistreated me. It’s like the narrator in False Virtue: you stick to one glorious idea and become a hypocrite, destroying it.() You could find yourself with the same epiphany in life. Laughing at our sufferings doesn’t cure our problems like how the “Joker” couldn’t end his imprisonment in the city’s violence at the end of the movie, but at least, the laughter could move us to another window for us to think from a more humble perspective.

Whenever you found yourself in a desperate situation, try laughing at yourself to face a better reality.