The Last Thing on the List

Standup comic Cassandra Dee struggles with depression. She jokes about it in her standup comedy but isn’t sure if she can pull it off. She jokes about the kids that bullied her growing up, the bad dates, the suicidal ideations, the failed therapy sessions. The audience laughs, but she wonders… has she gone too far? And - a story from a young woman feeling trapped in her body, until one day she finds the perfect getaway vehicle. STORIES The Last Thing on the List from Love & Radio Standup comic Cassandra Dee struggles with depression. She jokes about it in her standup comedy but isn’t sure if she can pull it off. She jokes about the kids that bullied her growing up, the bad dates, the suicidal ideations, the failed therapy sessions. The audience laughs, but she wonders… has she gone too far? Although this is a story about finding hope, please note it discusses suicidal ideation. Please take care while listening. Thank you, thank you, to Cassandra Dee for sharing her story. Cassandra's comedy special, Uncle Earth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJUeQ4-Yi8k&pp=ygUPI3ByYWRlZWNvbWVkeTg1, is available for free on YouTube from Helium Comedy Studios. https://www.youtube.com/@HeliumComedyStudios You can also find her on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/thecassandradee/. This story was produced by Justin Kramon with Ana Adlerstein for the Love and Radio podcast. https://loveandradio.org/ Love and Radio is like family to Snap. Their stories are intense, strange, and unlike anything in podcasting – and they’re launching their tenth season later this year. Special thanks to Aviva DeKornfeld for her help on this story. Huge thanks also to Brett Wean at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Artwork by Teo Ducot. Help is available. If you or a loved one is in crisis, please call the Suicide Crisis Lifeline at 988 in the US. You can learn more about suicide prevention, healing, and connect locally with others whose lives have been affected by suicide through the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention https://afsp.org/. The Minivan A young woman feels trapped in her body, until one day she finds the perfect getaway vehicle. This story was performed at Snap LIVE at The Power Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in partnership with Michigan Radio and The Ann Arbor Summer Festival. Original Music by Alex Mandel. Music performed by Alex Mandel, Tim Frick, and David Brandt. Re-recording mix by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Season 16 - Episode 3 Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:08Glynn Washington?

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• 2:10Glynn Washington?

  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? It's picking at scabs that otherwise I would leave to fester. And all artists use their lives as the building bricks of their art.

• 2:48Glynn Washington?

  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 Con Washington. Believe me when I say, sometimes, the applause is all you have when you're listening to Snap Judgment.

• 3:32Glynn Washington?

  Now, today's story takes us deep into the life of a professional stand-up comedian. And of course, that means humor. The very best comedians bring their whole selves to the stage, and after years of struggling with her 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 want to be clear that though this is a beautiful story, a story about finding hope from one of the funniest persons I know, listeners should be advised it also discusses suicidal ideation.

• 4:13Glynn Washington?

  Cassandra's story comes from our friends at the Love and Radio Podcast, Snap Judgment.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  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, screaming, 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.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm calling you fat.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Well, if that ain't the big fat pot calling the Colonel Black.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  If we give a primetime show about it, we're not like the complete weirdos that I thought we were.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  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. Want to make it clear, not a Roseanne fan anymore, but...

• 5:33Speaker 01

  I feel great. Probably because I got blazed before I came out here.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  I should clarify, that's what I call wearing a blazer.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  If you've never seen me get pouted before, just so you can better understand what my vibe is like, the first time I went to headline a show, the booker was like, "How much time can you do?" And I was like, "About 45 minutes." He was like, "Nothing dirty." And I was like, "Okay, about 40 minutes." And then he was like, "Nothing sad." And I was like, "I have one joke."

• 6:19Speaker 01

  It's about my blazer.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  I have always loved comedy.

• 6:27Speaker 04

  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.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  When I was in high school, my friends and I were obsessed with Margaret Cho.

• 6:38Speaker 04

  And I want to call him up and go, "You know, what's the deal? I thought we had an agreement."

• 6:43Speaker 01

  I loved Wanda Sykes.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  I don't want no dolphin shit on me!

• 6:46Speaker 01

  I liked Ted Bird.

• 6:47Speaker 05

  I like rice. Rice is great when you're hungry and you want 2,000 of something.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  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 get feedback on whether or not something you're saying is funny is to say it to people. So I basically forced myself to do stand-up. Honestly, dating as a fat woman is basically like going out to eat at a restaurant if you're on a gluten-free diet. All right? It's like, we have options.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  There are just fewer of them.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  And a lot of them are gross.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Let me explain what I mean by that. When I look at my phone again, I will have a match on Tinder.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  And he will have a sword in his profile picture.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  What do I do to match with someone who doesn't own a cloak?

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Can anyone tell me?

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Couple of 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?

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Is that a kind of person? I haven't found one yet, but I have found a girl equivalent of guys with swords.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Anybody wanna guess what is in these profile pictures?

• 8:43Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, I heard someone say something. Can you say that louder? Horses. Horses.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Horses.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  It is horses.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  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 Boyardee 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.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  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.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  I was bullied a lot as a kid by both boys 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.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  They're not meaner, they're just really in it for the love of the game.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  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 rolls than Gino's Bakery." Barely faced me, just leaned back and whispered, "Gino's doesn't sell rolls."

• 11:27Speaker 01

  They have like cakes and pies and stuff.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  "The cream donut is delicious."

• 11:39Speaker 01

  At that point, I wasn't being bullied, but I just had like different Yelp reviews.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  That same year, a girl leaned over to me and whispered something I thought about every day for years. A girl leaned over to me in the middle of 7th grade science and said, "No one is ever going to love you."

• 12:02Speaker 01

  That's better.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  I became known for telling dark jokes. I became known as a comedian who talked about depression and suicide and mental health and hard things that maybe don't seem inherently funny at first.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  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 want to 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.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  But still, I was like, I should find out if this is okay. So I went to the doctor and I was like, hey, 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 I did. He sat me down and he was like, I'm 100% sure that you should keep taking this medicine. I said, that's great. Is it my blood pressure? He's like, no. So I guess my cholesterol? He's 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.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  I got diagnosed as jolly.

• 14:56Glynn Washington?

  When we return, Cassandra's comedy takes off, but everything else starts to go wrong. Snap Judgment.

• 15:15Speaker 06

  At Radiolab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But, but, we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing or- Politics. Country music. Hockey. Sex of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not-science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radiolab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcasts.

• 15:45Glynn Washington?

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• 16:29Glynn Washington?

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• 16:54Glynn Washington?

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• 17:38Glynn Washington?

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• 18:11Glynn Washington?

  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.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  I've been on and off antidepressants since I was 17, but I had had a few years, probably around the time I 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.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  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 called 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, my whole body is clenched and I'm just like

• 20:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  I had this thought about killing myself in my childhood bedroom, because 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'd lost like 15 pounds.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  And then I started thinking about that and then I wrote this other joke. I tried to make 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, I had made an appointment for 3 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.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  And like, I can't matter to another human being. And as I was sitting in that waiting room, I realized something really important that changed my life. I realized that it was 3:30, and my therapist had never shown up.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  She sent me a text message later, and was like, "Hey, I'm really sorry I missed her appointment. When do you want to reschedule?" And I sent her a text message back that said, "This is Cassandra's friend."

• 22:54Speaker 01

  She killed herself.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  I was no longer in that headspace, 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 this.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:31Speaker 05

  So then the pandemic hits. What happened?

• 24:36Speaker 01

  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.

• 25:04Speaker 05

  What happened on April 3rd where you felt you lost your mind?

• 25:10Speaker 01

  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 to stop.

• 25:19Speaker 05

  Why do you point to that day as the day that it kind of slipped off the edge?

• 25:23Speaker 01

  That's just the day where I was like, I decided I was going to kill myself.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  And for most of my life, I wasn't actually like planning to kill myself. But didn't think a lot about it. Like every time I would write a to do list,

• 25:42Speaker 01

  I would put kill yourself on there.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  But I know I wasn't that serious because it was never the last thing on the list.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  On that day, was it the like the last thing? Uh, it was probably the only thing.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  So I went on Amazon. I searched for [BLEEP]. And I thought about like adding other stuff to the cart. But I was like, that might delay it because 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.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  Like when you submit your taxes and you're like, all right, it's done. I could 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 care if I die. I don't believe that they 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.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Then got an email from CBS 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. My brain may have been like, I'm gonna kill myself, I'm gonna kill myself, I'm gonna kill myself. And then at some point, it was like, what if we just do whatever gets here first? I'm 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

• 28:42Speaker 01

  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. Antidepressants 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.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Amazon has all these like giant trucks, like its 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.

• 29:52Speaker 06

  But you were serious about it, even though you were laughing?

• 29:54Speaker 01

  I was 100% sure that I was gonna do whatever got there first.

• 29:58Speaker 06

  Do you start to root for one side or the other?

• 30:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  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 Postal 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

• 30:58Speaker 01

  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, oh, 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. And 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 for this, my mom opens boxes with her house keys. I had some time to get it out of her hands before she opened in. And at first I was like panicked because like, like I think deep down, probably a

• 31:42Speaker 01

  lot of the time, people want to 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 about me killing myself. Like she knows, but I don't want her to know at that time. I feel like if I saw my mom's reaction to knowing that I want to kill myself, like 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.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  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. I was thinking about where to go, how to do it so that like my parents or like a random child don't find my body. 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

• 33:01Speaker 01

  in between the CVS and my house and dropping the 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 headspace. And I just wasn't quite in that headspace anymore. I did not have the same drive that I had had six days ago. I did not kill myself. Spoiler alert, uh, yeah, I did not kill myself. I didn't try to kill myself.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 34:10Speaker 06

  So what we wanted to do, if this is cool with you, is you sent me that set, this was a bit 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.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  All right, now clap if you want some sad jokes. Oh my god. Thank you so much. All right, so clap it up if it's ever happened to you. Has anyone else ever had to like buy a bunch of new sex toys?

• 34:44Speaker 01

  Because you threw away all of your sex toys when you were planning to kill yourself?

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Because you didn't want whoever went through your stuff to find them?

• 34:56Speaker 01

  So no one else has a new sex toy budget line in their Mint app? It's just me?

• 35:04Speaker 01

  I was suicidal recently, and so first, let me just tell you that like, I'm okay now. I'm working on it. How was that to listen to? Like, that's about very real things, and my reaction, like, the things that were like, kind of, 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, 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?

• 35:48Speaker 01

  At the time, I remember, it was 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.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  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 de-stigmatize 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 had become 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?

• 37:08Speaker 01

  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 want to do it, if that makes sense.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  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 onstage or offstage to the point where I'm just obsessed with my own depression?

• 38:07Speaker 01

  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 want to 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?

• 38:42Speaker 06

  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. And it like fucked her up. What she kinda 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

• 39:26Speaker 06

  places over that year. For me, I kinda 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 kinda feeling is like, it seems good and useful to me.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 41:00Glynn Washington?

  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 thecassandraD. That's D E E. The story was produced by Justin Kramon with Anna Adlerstein for the Love and Radio Podcast.

• 41:25Glynn Washington?

  The Love Radio Podcast is like family to Snap. The host, Nick Vanderkolk, used to work here. Anna Adlerstein used to work here. In fact, Love Radio's episode called "The World Tomorrow" is where we can hear my story about growing up in 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 de Kornfeld for her help on this story. Huge thanks as well to Brent Ween at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Brent wrote the following, which he asked us to pass on.

• 42:08Glynn Washington?

  He wrote, "I think this story gets 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 life-saving." 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 a loved one is in crisis, please reach out to the 988 Suicide Crisis Lifeline at 988.

• 42:52Glynn Washington?

  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 AFSP.org. That piece was produced by Justin Kramon, Anna Adlerstein, and Nick Vanderkolk.

• 43:23Glynn Washington?

  Now, after this short break, Snap is hopping in a getaway car and putting the pedal to the metal. Stay tuned.

• 43:41Glynn Washington?

  Did you ever look at your credit card bill and think, "How did that happen? What am I gonna do? I need a plan." Well, I did. Let me tell you something. Having a plan is one thing, but using it, watching that number, that "I owe the credit people" number go to zero, that is something different. And Monarch helped me get there. The Debt Pay Down Simulator and Visualizer uses your real balances and payments to project your debt-free date. Try different payments. See what gets you there sooner. Watch that date move. And when you hit zero, that's when you get the budget for the celebration. Write your own money story with Monarch. Use code SNAP at monarch.com

• 44:26Glynn Washington?

  to get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just $50. That's 50% off your first year at monarch.com with code SNAP.

• 44:38Glynn Washington?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Americans United has spent the last 80 years defending your right to live as yourself and believe as you choose, so long as you don't harm others. Through film screenings, speaking engagements, and valuable resources like the Know Your Rights and Public School Guides, AU empowers people nationwide to recommit to the separation of church and state, protecting individual freedoms and strengthening our democracy for all. Freedom without favor and equality without exception. Learn more at au.org/TENC.

• 45:23Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment. My name is Glynn Washington. And now, we save you the very best seat at the Power Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for Snap Judgment Live to meet one of the hardest-working women in comedy, Kaitlin Gill.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  When I was young, it's not that I was big boned, it's just that I had delicious emotions.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  I think it all started at church. It was never my scene and I was always nervous, but every week, they had this big, huge box of doughnuts. At some point, I realized that if you are always holding half of a doughnut, it always looks like you're on your first doughnut.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  Even if you're on your seventh doughnut.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  It must have been a trick I learned from watching my grandpa drink scotch.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  It was all just baby fat. Until I wasn't a baby anymore. All of a sudden, I was in high school, where there are dates, dresses, dances, and all sorts of other tortures designed for the obese and the insecure.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  By the time I stopped trying, I had asked 13 boys to dances and heard 13 no's. That's a baker's dozen.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  I was sad because I was fat, and I was fat because I was sad. Now through all this, I did manage to make some great friends. And those friends and I decided that the end of our sophomore year of high school was gonna be something worth celebrating. We were gonna get tickets to the biggest concert event of the summer, Live 105's BFD. BFD! The concert's so epic, they almost swear about it on the radio. We all know what that F stands for.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  We went to the concert and it was amazing. We saw Erasure, and we saw the Squirrel Nut Zippers, and we saw Blur, and we saw The Cure. It was a very big deal for the 90s.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  After the concert, we all left the arena, went into the parking lot, and stuffed ourselves into my best friend's minivan. So full now, somebody had to sit on the floor.

• 48:02Speaker 04

  As we were leaving, the traffic was crazy and everybody was hungry. So we decided to stop at a Taco Bell. Now, this decision was also made by half of the gazillion people we were just at a concert with. So the drive-through line was a little bit long. We all got out of the van and we're just milling around in the parking lot. And when it was time to get back in, it was declared that the first to arrive back at the van would get to sit shotgun. And the last would have to sit on the floor. This resulted in a sprint, which predictably, I lost. Of course, I lost a sprint.

• 48:45Speaker 04

  I was stuck in a beef loaf of a body. It didn't sprint anywhere. And of course, I couldn't spend a full day without feeling like a fatty McFatFat. I always felt like my body kept me away from other people. This time, I literally didn't have a seat. I sat there with my sad butt on the floor of the van, sliding door open, my sad feet on the sad pavement. And that's when the van started moving. Now, what happened next only took about a second, but I had a lot of time to think about it. Hmm, the van's moving. I should probably lift up my legs.

• 49:28Speaker 04

  Gee, you know, now that the van's moving, it seems a lot harder to lift up my legs. Hey, I never noticed how close that tire was to my leg. Oh my God, my legs! The van sucked my right leg right under the tire. I flopped out of the van and I landed on my back. I looked down to assess the situation. And I could see that my right knee had been bent, so that my foot was touching my hip. But my toes were pointing right at the sky. I realized this wasn't my only immediate concern when my gaze continued downward to discover that the minivan had come to rest on my left leg.

• 50:12Speaker 04

  My best friend got out of the car, whining all the way around, see what happened, and stopped short when he saw me.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  I looked up at him and I said, "My leg is broken. Please move your car."

• 50:30Speaker 01

  He ran all the way back around. He climbed back in the van. He restarted it and he pulled it off my leg.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  The pain I was in was otherworldly. I had not experienced anything like it before and I have not since. I was in shock and the shock was making me twitch and every twitch would just send cramps down the damaged meat in my leg. And the way it was bent, there was no fixing anything until we got to a hospital, which meant that a fireman had to stand above me and use his bare hands to bend a metal leg brace to accommodate the new curve in my leg. You know, even when you're laying on the ground grievously injured, there really is something about a man in uniform.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  The rest of the night gets a little fuzzy. I remember learning that morphine is a hell of a drug.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  It turns out that my leg wasn't broken, but my kneecap had gone from the front of my leg to the back of my leg.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  A doctor and a few orderlies took a running start and yanked my leg back into place. They braced me up and they sent me home.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  The next morning, when I woke up,

• 51:50Speaker 01

  I would have given anything to have my body back the way it was the day before, when I hated it. And I have never hated my body again.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  I also quickly learned that crutching... Is a great core workout. Vicodin is an appetite suppressant and physical therapists are very serious about their work.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  I lost all the weight. I didn't need to carry anymore.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  I should make it clear that I do not endorse getting hit by a minivan as a weight loss plan.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  I lost 30 pounds in 10 days. That's not Weight Watchers. That's when doctors start watching your kidneys.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  But as terrible and painful as getting run over by a minivan was, I would not change a single thing about what happened that day. That was the event in my life that revealed my beauty to myself. It's the beauty we all share. It's the beauty of these bodies.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  As a bonus, it turns out that getting run over by a minivan in a Taco Bell parking lot after a concert makes a pretty good story.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  It's a story that when I came back to school the next year, people asked me to tell over and over and over again. And I figured out that they liked it better when it was funny. And I really, really loved making them laugh.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  That was half my life ago. Today, I'm a stand-up comedian. I'd like to close tonight by responding to what I think must be the best senior quote penned in any yearbook anywhere, ever. Dear Caitlin, sorry we ran you over.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  Apologies accepted. Thank you so much.

• 54:08Glynn Washington?

  Thank you, thank you, thank you Caitlin Gill. The music for that piece was written by Alex Mandel and performed live by the Snap Judgment Players, Alex Mandel, Tim Frick, and David Brandt.

• 54:25Glynn Washington?

  Yes. The Snap Judgment Storytelling Podcast awaits your ears each and every week, wherever you get your podcasts for free. KQED in San Francisco is where Snap producers have our weekly water gun fight because in the end, there can be only one. Snap is brought to you by the team that hears color and sees sound, except of course, for the Uber producer, Mr. Mark Ristich. Now there's Nancy Lopez, Pat Massey Miller, Anna Sussman, Renzo Goryo, John Facil, Shayna Shealy, Taylor DeCopp, Flo Wiley, Bo Walsh, David Exame, Marissa Dodge, and Regina Badiaco. My name is Glenn Washington, and this is not the news. No way is this the news.

• 55:08Glynn Washington?

  In fact, you could trade a toothpick for a toothbrush, a toothbrush for a hammer, a hammer for a piece of slate, the slate for a shack, the shack for a boat, the boat for that big sack of cash. You bet on the ponies and yes, yes, could tell this whole story to the nice officer at your IRS detention cell and you would still, still not be as far away from the news as this is. But this is P R X.

• 55:50Speaker 01

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