Name: David Foster Wallace's "Suicide as a Form of Present" but text to speech (footnotes in description)
Uploaded: 2018-03-30T05:42:19.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'David Foster Wallace's "Suicide as a Form of Present" but text to speech (footnotes in description)' from Norm and Other Stuff on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-03-30. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'David Foster Wallace's "Suicide as a Form of Present" but text to speech (footnotes in description)' from Norm and Other Stuff on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-03-30. Transcript available.

There was once a mother who had a very hard time indeed, emotionally, inside.
As she remembered it, she had always had a hard time, even as a child.
She remembered few of her childhood's specifics, but what she could remember
were feelings of
self-loathing, terror, and despair that seemed to have been with her always.
From an objective perspective, it would not be inaccurate to say that this
mother-to-be
had had some very heavy psychic shit laid on her as a little girl, and that
some of
this shit qualified as parental abuse.
Her childhood had not been as bad as some, but it had been no picnic.
All this, while accurate, would not be to the point.
The point is that, from as early an age as she could recall, this mother-to-be
loathed herself.
She viewed everything in life with apprehension, as if every occasion or
opportunity were some
sort of dreadfully important exam for which she had been too lazy or stupid to
prepare
properly.
It felt as if a perfect score on each such exam was necessary in order to avert
some shattering
punishment.
She was terrified of everything, and terrified to show it.
The mother-to-be knew perfectly well, from an early age, that this constant
horrible pressure
she felt was an internal pressure.
That it was not anyone else's fault.
Thus she loathed herself even more.
Her expectations of herself were of utter perfection, and each time she fell
short of perfection she
was filled with an unbearable plunging despair that threatened to shatter her
like a cheap mirror.
These very high expectations applied to every department of the future mother's
life, particularly those
departments which involved others' approval or disapproval.
She was thus, in childhood and adolescence, viewed as bright, attractive,
popular, impressive,
she was commended and approved.
Peers appeared to envy her energy, drive, appearance, intelligence, disposition,
and unfailing consideration
for the needs and feelings of others.
She had few close friends.
Throughout her adolescence, authorities such as teachers, employers, troop
leaders, pastors,
and FSA faculty advisors commented that the young mother-in-waiting seemed, to
have very, very high
expectations of, herself, and while these comments were often delivered in a
spirit of gentle concern or
reproof, there was no failing to discern in them that slight unmistakable note
of approval, of an authority's
detached, objective judgment and decision to approve, and at any rate the
future mother felt, for the moment,
approved, and felt seen, her standards were high.
She took a sort of abject pride in her mercilessness toward herself.
By the time she was grown up, it would be accurate to say that the mother-to-be
was having a very hard interior
time of it indeed.
When she became a mother, things became even harder.
The mother's expectations of her small child were also, it turned out, impossibly
high.
And every time the child fell short, her natural inclination was to loathe it.
In other words, every time it, the child, threatened to compromise the high
standards that were all the
mother felt she really had, inside, the mother's instinctive self-loathing
tended to project itself outward and
downward onto the child itself.
This tendency was compounded by the fact that there existed only a very tiny
and indistinct
separation in the mother's mind between her own identity and that of her small
child.
The child appeared in a sense to be the mother's own reflection in a diminishing
and deeply flawed mirror.
Thus every time the child was rude, greedy, foul, dense, selfish, cruel,
disobedient, lazy, foolish,
willful, or childish, the mother's deepest and most natural inclination was to
loathe it.
But she could not loathe it.
No good mother can loathe her child or judge it or abuse it or wish it harm in
any way.
The mother knew this.
And her standards for herself as a mother were, as one would expect, extremely
high.
It was thus that whenever she slipped, snapped, lost her patience and expressed,
or even felt,
loathing, however brief, for the child, the mother was instantly plunged into
such a
chasm of self-recrimination and despair that she felt it just could not be born.
Hence the mother was at war.
Her expectations were in fundamental conflict.
It was a conflict in which she felt her very life was at stake, to fail to
overcome her instinctive
dissatisfaction with her child would result in a terrible, shattering
punishment which she knew
she herself would administer, inside.
She was determined, desperate, to succeed, to satisfy her expectations of
herself as a mother,
no matter what it cost.
From an objective perspective, the mother was wildly successful in her efforts
at self-control.
In her outward conduct toward the child, the mother was indefatigably loving,
compassionate,
empathetic, patient, warm, effusive, unconditional, and devoid of any apparent
capacity to judge
or disapprove or withhold love in any form.
The more loathsome the child was, the more loving the mother required herself
to be.
Her conduct was, by any standard of what an outstanding mother might be
expected to be, impeccable.
In return, the small child, as it grew, loved the mother more than all other
things in the world
put together. If it had had the capacity to speak of itself truly somehow, the
child would have said
that it felt itself to be a very wicked, loathsome child who through some undeserved
stroke of good
fortune got to have the very best, most loving and patient and beautiful mother
in the whole world.
Inside, as the child grew, the mother was filled with self-loathing and despair.
Surely, she felt, the fact that the child lied and cheated and terrorized
neighborhood pets was her
fault, surely the child was simply expressing for all the world to see her own
grotesque and pathetic
deficiencies as a mother. Thus, when the child stole his class's UNICEF money
or swung a cat by its
tail and struck it repeatedly against the sharp corner of a brick home next
door, she took the child's
grotesque deficiencies upon herself, rewarding the child's tears and self-recriminations
with an
unconditionally loving forgiveness that made her seem to the child to be his
lone refuge in a world of
impossible expectations and merciless judgment and unending psychic shit. As he,
the child, grew, the
mother took all that was imperfect in him deep into herself and bore it all and
thus absolved him,
redeemed and renewed him, even as she added to her own inner fund of loathing.
So it went, throughout his childhood and adolescence, such that, by the time
the child was old enough to apply for
various licenses and permits, the mother was almost entirely filled, deep
inside, with loathing,
loathing for herself, for the delinquent and unhappy child, for a world of
impossible expectations and
merciless judgment. She could not, of course, express any of this. And so the
son, desperate, as are all
children, to repay the perfect love we may expect only of mothers, expressed it
all for her.
Her parents, by the way, did not beat her or ever even really discipline her,
nor did they
pressure her. Her parents had been low-income, physically imperfect, and not
very bright,
features. Which the child disliked herself for noting.
The phrases lighten up and chill out had not at this time come into currency,
nor, in fact,
had psychic shit, nor had parental abuse or even objective perspective.
In fact, one explanation the soon-to-be mother's own parents gave for their
disciplining.
Her so little was that their daughter had seemed so mercilessly to upbraid
herself for any
shortcoming or transgression that disciplining her would have felt, quote, a
little bit like
kicking a dog.