Today, I’d like to share something that has saved my life more than once:
“Desperate humor.”
Sometimes, life takes us to places that feel like the absolute bottom.
My first experience of rock bottom came in 2014, when my allergies were at their worst.
The itching from the eczema that had spread across my entire body was so severe that I went through day after day without getting a single moment of sleep.
My bedding had taken on a distinctive smell from blood and bodily fluids.
My body was at its limit, yet I couldn’t sleep, and eventually I began experiencing something similar to sleep paralysis.
I wanted to move, but I couldn’t.
I couldn’t even open my eyes.
I couldn’t speak.
In the darkness, everything around me seemed to spin at incredible speed. I couldn’t tell up from down or right from left, and I felt terribly sick.
Help me…!!
After what felt like forever, I finally managed to open my eyes. I took a huge breath, threw open the window, and leaned far out from the fourth-floor apartment where I was living alone at the time.
And then, suddenly, I saw the people working at a nearby logistics center.
It must have been sometime in the middle of the night or early morning.
I had no idea that people were working so close by at that hour.
They were carrying packages, organizing them, loading them onto trucks…
Everyone was moving briskly and efficiently.
Packages were being loaded one after another.
The trucks were lined up in neat rows.
As I watched them, something strange happened.
I began to feel calmer.
In the cool night air, I gradually felt myself coming back to my senses. It felt incredibly refreshing.
The next day, I opened the window again and watched the logistics center.
And the day after that.
And the day after that, too…
Little by little, I began to calm down.
But my circumstances hadn’t changed at all.
I was still at rock bottom.
Then, one day, I happened to notice the white gloves covering my horribly messed-up hands.
I stood in front of the full-length mirror, spread my arms, and held my palms out in front of me.
I shrugged my shoulders, pushed my palms forward, and tilted my head to one side.
A Mickey Mouse pose.
I looked at myself in the mirror and gave a little grin.
Years later, I read a book called Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl.
Frankl was Jewish and was imprisoned in concentration camps, where he endured horrific experiences.
When human life is pushed into unimaginable circumstances, he experienced an unexpected emotion rising within him.
It was what he described as “tragic optimism” and, in the Japanese translation, a kind of “desperate humor.”
“We tried to joke, to make fun of ourselves and each other, even while we were stripped naked and herded into the showers.”
Perhaps this is one of those remarkable human abilities that emerges at rock bottom.
Maybe something inside me, activated by the instinct to survive, was what made me do the Mickey Mouse pose.
When you think,
“I can’t do this anymore…”
Try stripping down, throwing your arms in the air, and jumping around the room shouting,
“Yaaay!!”
That’s desperate humor.
I can’t guarantee much in life, but I can guarantee that it might make you laugh.
Just make sure the windows are closed so nobody happens to see you!!