CIIS Public Programs Podcast

Transcript

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[Cheerful theme music begins] 

This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 

Between 2016 and 2018, essayist and humor writer Elissa Bassist saw over 20 medical professionals for a variety of mysterious ailments. Elissa had what millions of American women had: pain that didn’t make sense to doctors, a body that didn’t make sense to science, and a psyche that didn’t make sense to mankind. Then an acupuncturist suggested some of her physical pain could be caged fury finding expression, and that treating her voice would treat the problem. It did. 

In her memoir Hysterical, Elissa shares how growing up, her family, boyfriends, school, work, and television all had the same expectation for a woman’s voice: less is more. Elissa shares her journey of a voice lost and found and discusses new ways to think about a woman’s voice—where it’s being squashed and where it needs amplification. 

In this episode, Elissa is joined by novelist and CIIS professor in Interdisciplinary Arts and  

Writing Carolyn Cooke for an empowering conversation about how girls and women internalize and perpetuate directives about their voices and explore ways for them to unmute, listen to themselves, and use their voices again and again without regret. 

This episode was recorded during a live online event on December 7th, 2022. You can also watch it on the CIIS Public Programs YouTube channel. A transcript is available at ciispod.com.  

To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 

[Theme music concludes] 

Carolyn Cooke: Hi Elissa, good evening. [Elissa: Hi Carolyn, and everybody else out there.] Hi everyone. Great to see you. Great to have this big group of people to hear you. Could 

I start with a compliment? [Elissa: Please, of course. It's mandatory.] [Carolyn laughs] I wanted to say that Hysterical is the story of your great awakening from our collective misogyny that makes you and all of us, the whole culture sick. Especially if, like you, you are a digital native and grew up online, sort of able to connect with that culture constantly. It's really also the story of how you woke up from that sleep of misogyny. I just wanted to say that, having spent a little bit of time with you, I feel like I know you, and you're one of the most awake people I've ever met. [Elissa: Oh my God, that is the nicest compliment. Thank you so much. I took two naps today, so that's such a compliment.] [Both laughing] It shows, it shows. I'm looking so forward to this conversation. Your book is absolutely enraging. I think you also offer some incredibly useful insights that you're going to share, I think, not to spoil the book. You still need to read the book, everyone. You'll leave tonight with three things, at least three things you can do right now to wake from the sleepy, hideous misogyny of the culture and awaken as Elissa has, so that's great.  

I'm going to ask you to read a passage. You're going to read one of my favorite passages from the book. You did a lot of research beyond your own personal experience, so there's personal experience and research. And this passage, I think, is a wonderful example of the way you fuse the personal and the political.  

Elissa Bassist: Thank you. This is near the end. It's a collection of talking cures that I researched and tried on myself, and it's a few scenes of me going through it. Here I go.  

How exactly to speak again? How to do what women have been conditioned not to do? How to go against every instinct and societal directive in a world that prefers a woman's death to her opinions? Ancient cultures had ceremonial catharsis, in which laws were passed specifying the location, time, duration, personnel, choreography, musical content, and verbal content of the women's expression of grief or sorrow, writes Anne Carson in The Gender of Sound, located on this bookshelf.  

In the late 19th century, catharsis was a psychoanalytical technique. Dr. Freud, if you've heard of him, helped hysterical patients, aka women, with acid memories and hideous feelings that tainted the soul through hypnosis, and by inducing them to talk about what they couldn't, with the hope that the mind and the mouth, this time were up to it. He then put the unnamable into a narrative and the symptoms into a critical interpretation, and supposedly ghostwriting and analyzing the women's stories rid them of their symptoms. A famous patient known as Anna O, whose real name was Bertha Pappenheim, called this the talking cure.  

A little trivia, Bertha ended up founding the Jewish feminist movement later on in her life. After she was cured, she went on to do great things. I'd given the unspeakable a plot before. During one of my many, many breakups, I saw a Buddhist type therapist in San Francisco who tried an experimental psychotherapy procedure on me called EMDR. He’d used EMDR on 9/11 survivors to guide them through worst case scenarios, and to the other side of their fear. It's not covered by insurance. I thought, how dramatic to use this therapy on me, just another heartbroken girl. But I was game for any available exorcism.  

EMDR works based on the mind body connection and the mind body likeness, i.e, just as repeated physical trauma doesn't heal, repeated mental injury won't either, and trauma is an injury to the psyche that behaves like an open wound, as Freud said about the complex of melancholia. Typically, in EMDR, a therapist asks a patient to recall a traumatic event while the therapist directs the patient's eye movements or taps their hands. The varied sensory input helps neutralize a traumatic memory or unfreeze it in order to leave it behind. Memory isn't even the right word though, because trauma isn't remembered from the past. It's a reaction, re-lived without end, like chronic deja vu, where the traumatized confuse tenses and feel as if the past is in the present, and that there is no tomorrow. The traumatic moment must be made into a memory. Mind and body and EMDR must move it from now to then.  

How did I injure my psyche? The internet. Most of my conversations with my ex-boyfriend whose username was Fucktaco were via G chat or Gmail or text. So, 90% of our interactions were transcribed and stored and the 24/7 access to our history suspended it, and us, and me. I wasn't with Fucktaco anymore, but I experienced time as if I were, because I could return to our archives and fire up the relationship at will. Similar to a distinct catastrophe, my therapist explained, this overloads your brain until it can't integrate memory normally and your memories resemble traumatic ones unedited and locked. When my therapist turned on the paddles, instead of asking me to recall a distressing event, he asked me to describe a fantasy nightmare. All I had to do was grip as he asked me to imagine Fucktaco’s wedding to someone who wasn't me.  

What does he look like walking down the aisle, my heartless therapist asked, as I squeezed my eyelids trying to envision Fucktaco in an aisle, in a ceremony, in a wedding costume. He looks happy, I said as the paddles vibrated rhythmically left to right. That felt like enough work for one day, but the therapist wanted to know more. He trauma-splained that trauma amputates our imaginations and arrests the stories we tell ourselves in order to live. We can't imagine anything could be different, and change is unthinkable. By asking me about events that hadn't happened, the therapist was really asking me to write a new story, and inhabit a new reality, and experience an alternate ending, and reroute my heart.  

Where's the wedding he asked and I answered. The left paddle surged than the right, messing with my sensory perception and neural network. Healing trauma may be a matter of repairing disconnected neural networks, the therapist had said when he introduced me to EMDR. I went through my past plans about my future with Fucktaco to undo them, to rewrite what I had written in my mind in stone. We wouldn't have a big wedding or a small one. Our wedding would not be medium sized. We wouldn't waste a lifetime together. Death wouldn't do us part. We wouldn't even settle for each other.  

My therapist turned off the paddles and the old religion was over. In the book, this is a much longer scene. Takes a lot longer for the old religion to be over. At the end I cried until I lost muscle. Until I was done crying over the lost man who I had lost. The therapist asked me if I was okay, and I was shocked that I was. I was okay and not dead at all like I thought I would be.  

Years later when I was sick, an acupuncturist prescribed her own talking cure. A version of expressive writing. Psychologist James Pennebaker's psychological remedy for pain, and his theory that writing one's wounds helps close them. Pennebaker had asked his introductory psychology students to think about the darkest shit that had ever happened to them, and then he divided them into three groups and instructed them to sit alone for 15 minutes, four days in a row, and open a vein to write, like a personal essay class but for science. One group wrote about current life events which had minimum emotional voltage. Another group detailed their very bad memory which had medium emotional voltage. Group three recounted the dark shit and how they felt about it, and the lifelong impact which had maximum emotional voltage. Prior to the experiment, the students were asked about their medical histories, and they disclosed major and minor health problems including cancer, high blood pressure, ulcers, flu, headaches, and earaches. In Pennebaker's results, students who wrote with maximum emotional voltage experienced a 50% drop in doctor's visits. In repeated studies based on the same protocol, the results were the same. Improved health from writing correlated with improved immune function.  

In most studies of emotional awareness and expression therapy, writes science journalist Eleanor Cummins in Is All the Pain in My Head. Six people reported a significant reduction in their pain, around 20% which is on par with just about every pain management tool including opioids, antidepressant and anti-seizure medications, meditation and mindfulness therapies, massage and physical therapy and more. As someone who tried antidepressant and anti-seizure medications, meditation and mindfulness therapies, massage and physical therapy, writing worked, and I 11 out of 10 recommend it. As well as reading the rest of my book, that has a lot more ways to cure yourself by talking and writing. 

Carolyn: Thanks Elissa. I forgot to mention it's probably in the description that this is a tragicomic memoir. It's an enraging, funny, tragicomic memoir with really dark shit in it. It's interesting. I mean, there are a couple of things. One is that in a way, writing got you into trouble, right, in your relationship and you speak about that really beautifully. You have a line, my voice is most natural in an email when I'm trying to convince someone to love me, and then writing gets you out of it. I love that, because I think there is a way in which writing both takes you into the sort of weird, personal, obsessive place in your book, definitely in the relationship that happens on social media and I'd love for you to talk a little bit about love in the digital age and how it's possible actually to not know much about the person you're madly obsessed with because it's kind of you expressing, and you creating, and the dangers of that and kind of how that got you into trouble and the writing, the expressive writing is one of the three takeaways from the book that will save you, right, from the toxic culture we live in. 

Elissa: Yes, so you say that writing got me into this mess, but I don't think that's exactly true. 

I think it was the internet, writing on the internet that got me into this mess. I think if I had just had to write a letter and wait for it to be delivered, and then to have a response that would have been really different, and I may have been sane if it weren't for the internet. The internet was born, it seemed, along with me. We were born at the same time, but it became really popular when I was in, well, AOL. We started getting these CDs offering us 53 hours of worldwide web experience when I was in middle school, and we could sign on and connect.  

I was 12 years old, and I remember my first screen name was VicSecAngl, like an abbreviation of Victoria's Secret Angel and then I had another one called CandyApples with a K and then Fembot00. Like, I already knew at 12 that I needed to be sexy and have a sexy persona, and that I could have that not in life, but on the screen, and that I could trick people, including myself. I did that and that's how I got one, I think I got one boyfriend out of it. We never met. He sent me a letter in the mail with his photo and I didn't like it. I got scared. [both laugh]  

Then I went to college where now everyone had an email address and a laptop and a phone, not even a smartphone yet, but we could text message. It became really easy to have all of your conversations via text, and to be as intimate as you wanted to be via text when you're really just sitting alone in a room talking to yourself, getting feedback sometimes, but it wasn't even necessary. Like, it was necessary for dopamine. I became like, addicted to the chemical rush. I became addicted to who I was when I was writing. I became addicted to trying to win this dating competition I felt that I was in that the internet facilitated, which was convince someone to love me using my powers of persuasion, my grammatical acumen, and my big vocabulary, [Carolyn: And your screen name, your hot screen name.] I had abandoned my screen names. We didn't have them anymore. I just had an email address with my first name and my last name. I had to pretend that Elissa Bassist was Victoria's Secret angel and like, I could seduce in a text message and in an email in a way that like I could never in a million years in person. Like, I felt like I did every sexual position online and then offline, I hadn't even like put my mouth on somebody. Like, there was just such a disconnect there and what I was saying and feeling and then like, doing and in many ways, it felt so much safer. I could be so extreme in how I felt, I could be so vocal. I could be someone I wasn't, and then it always came crashing down whenever I was in person, and that felt so sad. I felt like I didn't know how to communicate in person. I felt at a loss for words. I felt like I didn't know what my personality was, who I was. I never even liked the person in person. I loved them so much as a figment of my imagination, and as someone who I was talking at, but then when they talked to me, I was like, this isn't as good. Like, can we get behind a screen and continue this conversation elsewhere? [Carolyn: Wow, wow, wow.] I'm worried about Gen Z. What's going to happen to them? Now, they communicate purely through TikTok.  

Carolyn: Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. The writing, in a way it's how you honed your voice as a writer, but it was the wrong voice. It was kind of a warped voice, would you say?  

Elissa: Yeah. Like, it's weird. Like, it was a bad voice to be in a relationship, but it was a great voice to become a writer. I really felt like what I was falling in love with was writing and expressing, but I had the wrong audience because I would be punished for saying too much. Like, I would get ghosted, I would get dumped and then I would be very sad. At the time of writing, I felt my most alive and I felt like I was writing my biography as I was living it, and I'm not sure I would have become a writer without it.  

Like, I remember always wanting to write when I was in elementary school and writing stories about my mom's many marriages and divorces and posting them on classroom walls. I was always very into it, but I don't know if I would have felt the same life or death feeling, that the internet made me feel. [Carolyn: And in real time, like in the moment you're, you're getting the dopamine as you say.]  Yeah. Yeah, and it was such a performance because I was auditioning for love. I was trying to seduce via text, and so I was putting my best, worst self out there.  

I think if I had been typing into a Word document, I could have written about 12 novels and they all would have been incredible, bestsellers, erotic thrillers. They would have been awesome, but 

they instead just went to one person who didn't want them. They were just very misdirected creative energies. Like, I don't feel like you should write to your muse. You should 

just use your muse to write and I didn't know how to do that. I don't think any of us do. I was never thinking like these emails could be a career until about 10 years after I had like, 10,000 emails and I was like, this is better served in a book than to Fucktaco. [Carolyn: Yeah.] So, I hope I spread the book.  

Carolyn: Well, you know, it makes me think about how we are sometimes our best when we're not in love with, um, the person, you know, who's going to love us back, but when we're trying out for someone out of our league or someone really challenging, right, and that it can bring out your, maybe not the self your friends and your family would like, they'd, you know, or maybe even not the real you, but the wittier,brighter, smarter, faster, sharper, sexier self and it makes me think around this time that you were doing this, um, Chris Krause published, I Love Dick, which was, you know, her novel later made into a TV show by Joey Soloway. I think you referenced it in the book and it's, I want to ask you to at some point, cause you're such a pop culture maven and you know so much about kind of, what is bad for us to watch, what kind of increases, what you term, one of my favorite lines in the book is the acid memories and hideous feelings that taint the soul and I think that's a feeling a lot of people know well. I know it really well as, a dating woman, you know, when I was looking for love and being someone who, who isn't you, you know, and then sort of coming up against the reality of your imagination and expectations and hopes and you seduce this thing. Now you're, you know, back at your dorm or your apartment or whatever, and one of the really moving moments in your book is when you talk about women talking about, their rapes and saying, well, it wasn't a back-alley rape, it was a kind of, you know, a cocktail party rape or some different kind of rape. There's maybe a space between those two things, between your younger self texting furiously and really entering the illness and the darker side of relationships. Could you talk a little about sort of, how it, the trajectory kind of went faster and sharper?  

Elissa: Yeah. When you mentioned the acid memories and the hideous feeling, I think that's what other people call our emotions and our memories. Like to me now, those are a super power and it is what makes us distinctly us and so human and so deep and wonderful, is how much we can feel and how we express that feeling. But, in a patriarchy, that's turned against us and it's used against us and we buy into that bullshit that it's our downfall as opposed to our power. When I started to believe that and when, I believed that, because again, I was being punished for saying what I felt, and punishment at the time was someone withholds their love and they don't love you how you want to be loved and you decide and they say, in so many words and society says, it's because you said too much, you felt too much. You said too much about how much you were feeling. You said the wrong thing. You were too much too big. You didn't bite your tongue and all of that.  

So, I learned to do all of those things because I didn't want to be punished and then, what I was doing to myself was punishing myself, not recognizing it. Then compounding that punishment with blame, guilt, stigma, shame, and the whole while making myself sick and unable to stand up for myself, advocate for myself and really just invite anybody to come and walk all over me, hurt me as they please. I had this outsized fear of being unloved that I would rather be loved and hurt than safe and unloved. Again, patriarchy is a sickness that makes us all sick.  

So, I just learned to stay quiet, to not say anything that would provoke, frustrate, and to get in a fight. I was so afraid of getting into a fight. I was so afraid of getting angry. I was so afraid of being called crazy or psycho or a bitch and it was so easy to be called those things. You really have to take a lot out of your vocabulary and squash a lot of your personality and your reactions and behaviors so that you avoid being called any of the above. I just got like, I mean, it contributed to my mental illness, being unable to express myself then literally into physical illness, which I didn't believe could happen because I'm a feminist and I know hysteria is fake. Only later did I learn that the mind-body connection is real and that our emotions impact our immune system, and stress can make us sick in ways that we could never imagine. It can prolong our sickness because we can't articulate what we need to in doctor's offices. I felt like I was just willing to do whatever a doctor said and bite my tongue because I didn't want to annoy them, and they knew everything, I knew nothing. I was so desperate for their help and again, so vulnerable and needed them to like me and to treat me. I wouldn't say like, no, I'm uncomfortable with that. Or if I did, they would brush that off and then I would be like, okay, you're right. I'm wrong. Do whatever. Then I had a few near-death experiences because of that. I don't recommend it. 

Carolyn: Yeah. Yeah, and all out of needing them to like you when it kind of begins with AOL 

and moves into the text messages that you are learning how to make people like you, 

how to, I mean, we're all doing that, right. Then, you also talk a lot about the pop culture that you consume, the media, the books, the movies. I really, um, I've been noticing it since I read your book. I just was listening on the radio today about critics, picks of the best movies of the year and noticing how many of the themes and tropes that you identify are in the movies that we're all just sort of mindlessly consuming all the time, which is why patriarchy isn't as much a problem for a man and especially, white men as it is for the rest of us who are also part of it and also made of it, right. I wonder if you could analyze a little bit, the medium culture of your time and how it influenced you in ways that maybe you're the first generation for that to happen to. That it's so available, so streaming. You don't even have to all be sitting down as a family and on the TV, watching one thing you could consume as much as you want of a certain kind of story. Maybe just a little of what you consumed and how it affected you for better and worse. 

Elissa: Yeah. So, I grew up on must see, dead girl TV. So that was, like so many television shows with dead girls, raped women, abducted teenagers. It was impossible to avoid. Such that, when I was younger, I truly believed that women lost their virginity through date rape. I thought virginity was taken from you. You lost it, and it was taken, and I was already scheming on how to avoid rape and I had plans that I was like, I'm going to pee on my rapist. I'm going to tell my rapist, I have AIDS. Like, this was like a child’s thought and I can't even believe it. It's like, and if I weren't watching TV, it wouldn't have mattered because I subscribed to Cosmo, the international magazine for women that told me 69 ways to bend over backwards and let a man finish those sentences for you.  

I was getting it from that, but I was also really smart, and I read a lot of books. As you can see, I've read many of these books, they are not just for show, and my favorite book in high school was The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. It was such a long book, and the sex scenes were really rape scenes, but I couldn't figure that out at the time. I just was bombarded by messages that a woman should be taken violently, should consent to be taken violently. That violence was integral to eroticism, that violence was just the name of the game and we had to either love it or love it. [Carolyn chuckles briefly] It was too much of a coincidence that I was getting this from 90210, Cosmo, Ayn Rand, that I was reading mostly books by men, about men where they ravage women. Women had very few words. They were always wives, girlfriends, dead, married. That's like the only thing that they were doing and that was like all we could aspire to, if not a wife or a girlfriend to be like a man and act like a man, um, and be one of the guys, which means like, hating women and so I hated women for like a very long time.  

I still feel like I'm shaking that off because I just had these like, knee jerk reactions. Like, I'll just be watching whatever award-winning prestige television or garbage television and I'm like, bitch, shut up. [Carolyn laughs] I'm just like, oh my God, I'm just like, die, die. I'm like, where does that come from? Where I'm like, rooting for a woman's wounds, and it makes it really easy for my own self to hurt, at least to not complain about it. Cause I'm like, well, this is expected. This is just like what I see all the time, and this is what women do. It's not ending like, for all the awareness that we have now for it being the year 2022, for the revolutions we've had with hashtags, me too. The feminist awakenings, like there's the backlash to the backlash to the backlash, like all like the patriarchy just like doubled down. Like, we are seeing Hollywood. They had like a brief moment where they were going to do better, but now they're back to their old tricks. They're canceling a lot of nonwhite male driven television shows and films. We're still getting the same story over and over and over again. That doesn't only glorify white men, but it really demonizes everyone else and not only demonizes, but dehumanizes, which makes it really easy to invalidate those people in real life and invalidate their stories, their voices, their perspective, whether we're conscious of it or not, and I think a lot of us aren't conscious of it and that's the problem. That's why I felt like I had to call it out in every area that I experienced it because it's everywhere all the time and it isn't getting better. 

Carolyn: Yeah. I want to talk about that. I want to talk about the Bassist test for media. Particularly I think as advice to writers and people who enjoy books and movies and television, how to maybe think about that differently and not sort of, unintentionally fill yourself with more misogyny. First, I hope you don't mind if I share a little bit of the Margaret Atwood quote that you gave me the other day. It's so incredible. It's from The Robber Bride and I've truncated it a little bit, but, Margaret Atwood, of course, wrote The Handmaid's Tale, uh, writes male fantasies, male fantasies is everything run by male fantasies. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur. 

Elissa: Oh, good. So good. Before I even read that line, I was feeling it. I remember feeling 

it when, after the 2016 election, I signed up for a self-defense class because I would not caught dead walking around the world without training, and I put on mascara for this self-defense class, which I think is full-blown patriarchy and I was just like, patriarchy misogyny, like it is everywhere. It is in the bathroom with me right now. It is in my eyeballs. It is in my movements. Like, it is such an unconscious thing that follows me everywhere and it is not a matter of not watching this or reading this. It is like, undoing lifetimes of socialization and like, rewiring your brain and having the awareness, first of all, that your brain is wired a certain way, that you have to like, really do a lot of work to brainwash yourself.  

Carolyn: Exactly, and I mean, we don't have time for all of the conversations, but even in, in writing the book and publishing the book, how many times you're sort of confronting people telling you how to be and how to sort of fit into a pre-existing mold. There's so much of it in the book. I want to make sure that we get to, you know, kind of, I think in this audience, probably there are quite a few psychologists and quite a few writers, maybe a few philosophers and I think for, people who are really thinking about, how do I become a maker of cultural products that aren't reifying patriarchy, you know, how can we do it when we're made of it? Maybe you could just speak to the, the Alison Bechdel's famous test for media to sort of, to assess whether you're just watching more patriarchal stuff come at you mindlessly, and then share the Bassist test as models and I think these are really important, Elissa, because I think everyone should write down the Bassist test and just walk around with it on a notecard for a week and notice, you know, how often you're experiencing something that is actually reifying misogyny in your body, in your mind, in your psyche and can you change that as you write, as you make things, as you even make choices about what you're going to watch or read? 

Elissa: Yes. So, okay. So, the Bechdel test is a very simple, straightforward test, which is if 

you're consuming anything first, are there two women in it who are named? They're not like blonde number two, waitress number seven. They have names. I think even first names are probably fine. Then these two women talking to each other, and then these two women talking to each other about anything other than a man. And most movies and TV shows fail the Bechdel test. Like, more than half of Academy award winners for best picture failed the Bechdel test and we're all, feminists are very aware of the Bechdel test and still it's hilarious how often it fails in what we're watching.  

I feel like there are so many directors, storytellers who have come up with their own tests. Like there's easily like the Soloway test that I've cribbed from where when I'm watching something I want, are there multiple genders featured? Not just a straight white man. I can't watch the straight white male anti-hero anymore. I have loved them. They've been my number one favorite go-to, love Tony Soprano, love Michael Scott. I love them. I was, you know, obsessed with them. I can quote them, but I ended up in many bad spots which you'll read about if you read my book. Loving them didn't get me very far in my life. Are there multiple genders? Are people of different genders, backgrounds, ethnicities, races in charge and power? Are they giving us, do they have like a rich story, a background? Are they something more than just a prop? Because usually they're just a prop or a stereotype, or they're there to serve the white male protagonist, either to be like the butt of his joke, to help him pull off some vigilante, spectacular bank heist to just, like, add in a few lines. They don't have lives of their own. I try to watch that kind of stuff and not just watch, of course, like I try to read.  

I don't think I've read a book by a white man in a really long time. It's not about reading books by white men. Of course, hashtag not all white men. It's just that I have read so much already. I've read a lifetime's worth that I'm ready to have all of these other perspectives. What I'm saying to do, the opposite of it is the norm. If I sound cuckoo bananas or like a militant feminazi, like that again is just like your unconscious bias playing you. We are given this like one storyline our whole lives. There are so many diverse stories. This is why we must use our voices and why we've been convinced not to because they've been so invalidated, so dismissed, so ridiculed, so silenced, so punished. We don't hear them and we're afraid of using them.  

I'm a writing teacher and a lot of my students have these ingrained beliefs that nobody cares what they have to say. Nobody cares what they've experienced. Nobody's interested in their perspective, their stories by default are stupid, mortifying, not heroic, so on and so forth. I constantly have to give them permission that like, writing about your feelings, that's interesting. Like, writing about your perspective as a teacher is fascinating. I am interested in all of that. I want to read about it because it's what the world's missing. It's what I haven't been reading. How you have lived your life, what you have suffered through, what you have overcome, your own unique sense of humor. Like, I'm so hungry for that. I think so many of us are. Many of us maybe just might not know it. These stories, they're not highlighted in our culture. They're not given a platform. They're not given money. They're not revered. They're not reviewed. It's easy to convince yourself that you don't like it. You don't want to produce it, but that's all bullshit. All I want to do is read these essays by my students who have been silenced their whole lives because they have the most interesting stuff to say. They have the most revolutionary stuff to say because they haven't been allowed to say it and nobody has. We haven't heard of it. It just, it upsets me, the stories we tell ourselves that are just reselling the bullshit we've been sold to our own selves. It's all bullshit. 

Carolyn: You're advocating here again for the acid memories and hideous feelings that taint the soul to become the gold that really draws together a wider, more expansive humanity. 

Elissa: That's all I want. I want acid memories and hideous feelings that taint the soul. I want 

like, books to come out that are just about that. I want to read all about it. That's what I'm just like, hungry for. As consumers, we have so much power and that's probably why we've been so duped for so long because they know we have so much power. Like, they want our money. They want our attention. They want our energy. They want our clicks, our eyeballs. We can seek out other stuff. It's definitely there. People are writing it. Small presses are publishing it. It just takes a while to find it. It's not on social media. It's not in the New York Times. Maybe not in a movie theater, but it's all around us. There's great stuff happening in just communities. I've always loved, especially when I've been in college and in grad school, the stuff that's going on there, like the genius that's happening there in these smaller scale productions, in these zines, chapbooks, open mics. People are saying and creating awesome stuff, but it's not on Netflix. Sorry Netflix, I love you.  

Carolyn: Could you maybe give a few examples of television, books, movies that you feel are, that we might have heard of, or we might seek out, that people might seek out that you feel are tending in this direction? 

Elissa: Yes, I'm trying to think of things I've been watching lately. I really love Never Have 

I Ever, which is one of Mindy Kaling’s shows that is on Netflix, and it's so good. It's like, been renewed, which is shocking. It's one of those shows that you think would be canceled right away, but it has three perfect glorious seasons. I love that one very much. I love We Are Lady Parts on Peacock, which is the offshoot of NBC, unfortunate name. I really like this show called Ghost that's on HBO through the UK and I think on CBS, the American version. That's very fun and has a great ensemble cast that's diverse and pushing boundaries. Pushing boundaries is just telling other people's perspective. That's funny to me.  

Anyway, anything Joey Soloway makes is great. That's I Love Dick, Afternoon Delight, their first feature film. Of course, Transparent, though that became mired in controversy. What else? I'm reading a great book called She's Nice Though, by Mia Mercado, which is all about how women, particularly Asian women, are supposed to be nice and how that's so limiting. Niceness is another form of silence, and she is just the funniest writer who is also so keen and has such great insights and such a great, wonderful, fresh perspective. Her book is my antidepressant. I read it every night in the darkness of 4pm because it's so great and it's a great, tragic comedy.  

I could go on forever. If anybody ever wants my list of TV shows and books, I have a long one. You can just email me, which is my first name dot my last name at Gmail dot com. I'll email you my list. Because I have to be writing it all down or else I will forget it. I want the evidence that the shows exist. Emily Nussbaum on Twitter, she's a great person to follow on Twitter because she champions a lot of great storytelling shows that are dismissed and she writes so smartly about them. I mean, she got the Pulitzer Prize for writing about TV, which is I think the coolest thing that's ever happened in the world.  

Carolyn: Great, great. Reservation Dogs comes to mind too, [Elissa gasps] an all-Indigenous writers' room. Amazing stories that I think until they're told like life on the res, what it's really like and the smallness in some ways and the vastness of history that it encapsulates and yet it was snubbed at the Oscars, I believe, just completely snubbed. Coming back for another season, but incredible stories, right? 

Elissa: Incredible. That is one of the funniest shows. That's always one of my go-to's. Season two just wrapped, devastating finale. That show is so full of heart and jokes. Yeah, I give that show all the Grammys, all the Academy Awards and all the Emmys. 

Carolyn:  Well, I think it does something that you reference a lot and maybe you could speak about a little bit. I think the connection between depressing, oppressive circumstances and humor and rage and humor, humor as an antidepressant, maybe you could speak about that. 

Elissa: Yeah, well, okay. Everything is fucked up, right? What do you do about that? 

Like, I just find when there's nothing to laugh about, then you can laugh about anything. Like, when you're at that point of desolation and tragedy, that things become hilarious in their absurdity and in how we ridicule them and how we talk about them.  

Like, I just saw the funniest TikTok, which was a satire of how the New York Times writes about and treats trans people. It was just like such a scathing, perfect parody of how it's like just asking questions. Do trans people, are they really people? Just asking questions. Like, let's ask these white supremacists for their opinions. Just asking questions. It's just like, when someone is doing something so bad, but it's so acceptable, I find the only way to appropriately call it out is to make fun of it and to mock it.  

It just illustrates the social, professional, societal sins so well when you can ridicule it and you can take it down by imitating it and not reproducing the racism and the transphobia but like by imitating it is to just show us how bad it is, how absurd it is, how ridiculous it is. We listen to a joke over a sob story or a rant or an accusation or a think piece. Like, I have so much hope for Gen Z because they, I love their sense of humor and the way that they can like package their angst and their rage in really funny, entertaining ways that like, get across the same point in a way that everybody can hear it. You, when you're being entertained, you can be like, tricked. Then that goes both ways. You can be tricked into dehumanizing people subconsciously, or you can be tricked into being like the New York Times is being transphobic and I'm going to unsubscribe to that bullshit because it's not okay. That information was so cleverly packaged and delivered and persuasive and I laughed the whole time. It's great and stuck with me and I'll never forget it. 

Carolyn: Great. So, humor is subversive too, right? You can take these templates as you've talked about and use them against the patriarchy, against the sort of institutions that are reifying misogyny and transphobia and things like that. You have, so we promised the three takeaways from your book. You've talked about the power of writing, the power of telling real authentic, raw stories, the more dangerous, the better, the acid memories and the hideous feelings that taint the soul. Then we've talked about the Bassist test, which is: are there people of other genders? Are they in power? Are they numerous? Then the last one is about the power of quitting, saying no, subverting expectations, just not doing what you're supposed to do. [Elissa: Yes.] Can you talk about how that's come forward in your own life? It was really one of the main pivot points of your healing, right? 

Elissa: Yes. I felt like I never learned how to say no. I learned how to say yes in a thousand different languages and in eight different octaves and could moan yes, but could never simply say no, because to say no was to be a bitch. It's rude. It's like, emotional terrorism. 

Like, no has such a bad rap, and for a very good reason.  

There's something known as rejection violence where there are statistics that every year, many, many, many, many, many women and basically non-white men are murdered for saying no, for trying to get out of a relationship for not wanting to have a romantic experience with a man that men go on shooting sprees for this all the time. This is what incels do. This is what regular domestic terrorists and abusers do. No is scary and difficult for a reason.  

Usually no, you're not going to be punished for it. I've noticed this the more that I've said it, because I was always afraid, oh my God, if I say no to the handyman, like no, I can't let you use my bathroom when my dog’s in there hiding from you, scared to death, that he isn't going to help me. He's going to tell the landlord about me. My mind just like, jumps to the worst possible conclusion. If I tell the landlord, no, that he can't take a poop in my toilet because I'm protecting my dog, then I'll be evicted. I think like, our fear system has been so attuned that we do have that worst case scenario fear. If we're rude or we say no, or we're not nice or we don't smile or we don't indulge, placate, compliment and so on.  

The more I say it, there's no consequences. I end up getting what I want. I just feel like I'm in my power and that I can actually get done what I need to get done. I'm not mad at myself because when I don't say no, there's all this punishment that happens. Like, I do get in situations I don't want to be in. I do get hurt. I do feel like I have no agency. I don't feel like I can trust myself. I get really frustrated. I waste a lot of time being frustrated, mad at myself and no one else. Now I can say it and know that no is a complete sentence and that it's not going to be the end of the world if I say it 20 times a day in mundane situations that seem mundane, but to me, I'm rewiring my brain. I'm building my confidence. I'm building trust in myself. I'm just feeling better and better that I'm in control of my own life and that I'm not at the mercy of someone else's whims, and that I don't have to sacrifice myself in order to make someone else not mad at me or feel more comfortable. I just was always forgetting that I was a person in every single situation and prioritizing the other person like their wants, needs, feelings mattered infinitely more than mine. These are like complete strangers most of the time. It's like someone on a plane, can I get your bag for you? No, I don't want you to. My dog's in my bag. Don't touch my bag, so much of it comes down to my dog. Protecting my dog is really important to me. I suggest getting a dog if you want to learn how to say no. [both laugh] It's also just like, building the muscle. The more I say it, the more it becomes second nature. Then the more I'm just like, I trust the words that are coming out of my mouth, the more I'm saying what I'm thinking, the more I feel like I can handle myself in like bigger situations and know that I don't have to be as afraid as I always am.  

Like, I'm rewiring my fear system at the same time, which I write a lot about in the book because our fear system and our immune systems, they're so complicated and so delicate. And like learning about them, I had no idea how much they affect us in our daily life and how much we, our feelings and what we say and what we do affects our internal system so much. There's so much going on in the body. It's magical, it's a magical thing. 

Carolyn: Yeah, it's interesting. The saying no, I mean, you seem so confident you've had all of these experiences. You can say no, you finished your book, which took 12 years to write. I wonder if you could just describe a little bit, I didn't know you 12 years ago, how you've 

changed over that time or how you're different now than you were through the process of actually writing the book.  

Elissa: I mean, 12 years ago, I mean, even like two years ago, three years ago, let's say. I just remember feeling so afraid, so anxious, so paralyzed. Like, I just had this picture of me, like just like being barely able to move because I was so afraid that I would make the wrong choice, say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, get in trouble, piss off some dude. Then my world just felt so small. I just felt like I was in this cage of my own making, and I had no idea how I was ever going to get out of that and walk through the world. Then I watched a lot of horror movies where women were eviscerated, so that's how I coped with it. It was only through so much therapy that, and really the right therapy for me because I was it took me a really long time to get the diagnosis that fit. I went through a few the regulars, depression, anxiety. Then I got the one that was my one true diagnosis, which was obsessive compulsive disorder, which was shocking because I didn't wash my hands in absurd amounts.  

I, of course, had a really limited understanding of OCD and of mental illness in general because 

we really only know what we know from TV, which is like a mockery of mental illness and mental health, physical, everything, everything. Once I got that and I could get the proper treatment for that, and a lot of it was me rewiring my fear system, as I said earlier. This fear, which is primitive, our fear system learns from behavior. No matter how much you know better, how much you know as a women, gender and sexuality studies major or a feminist or an academic, it doesn't matter how much you know and can tell people because your body knows more, and it will act in ways that you don't tell it to. I had to rewire my fear system in order for me to get out of my own way and put life in its proper perspective and know that everything that I was afraid of was, again, patriarchy.  

Where's the horror movie about patriarchy? I would love to see it. I'm sure it's happened in a few forms, but I would like more of it. It had so duped me into being afraid of everything. I mean, it's so effective and it just really got me. I had to unlearn all of that, go through everything that I had been taught and read and believed about the world and about myself and about other people and challenge it and find these alternatives, which are very minor in many ways. It's again, consuming different stories, learning how to say no and not apologizing for it. Like, oh my God, we all have to unlearn how to apologize. That's going to be a big one. So yeah, I'm perfect now. I've reached my highest true self. I'm done. No more work. Just kidding. [both laugh] 

I obviously have to relearn these lessons all the time. Every day I wake up and experience total amnesia and I'm like, how do I, what do I, who am I? It's hard because of course, we live in this world that hasn't caught up to our consciousness and to our therapy sessions and not everything in our everyday lives that we're constantly reacting to, our therapy isn't accessible in those moments. We see how much sexism and misogyny and racism is alive and thriving. That's very scary how dedicated people are to their phobias and their biases. There's just so much fighting we have to do collectively, but also personally on the level of regaining these words that make you feel in control of your own lives, revalidating our stories and telling them over and over and over again until people listen to us, until we listen to ourselves, until we find the people who do listen and learn to ignore the people who don't listen. And getting more dogs, adopting all the dogs. 

Carolyn: [laughs] Great. I wanted to ask you, I'm curious to know what you're working on now, if you're working on a new project. 

Elissa: I am doing that. For teaching, because I'm a Virgo, I have hundreds of handouts where I tell my students exactly how to do everything I think they should be doing. I'm turning those handouts into a craft book on humor and satire writing so that you can be funny in your most traumatic storytelling moments because it's been so profound and powerful for me. As someone who just like, loves jokes and has studied jokes for so long, I would love to teach other people how to joke because it's really not, it's not so hard. You don't have to be born with a sense of humor. You don't have to be naturally funny. There are so many tricks that you can employ in your writing and performing. It's whatever you're writing, your novels, your dating profiles, your emails, your letters to your landlord. Like, humor has just saved my life. Laughing has been like one of the biggest cures for me. I'm so grateful to everyone who has made me laugh. I just want to contribute as much as I can and what I know about jokes to help the world, to heal the world through laughter. 

Carolyn: Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you. Elissa, thank you so much. Hysterical is the truth and it's hard to read and hard to hear. But it’s also an antidote. I think it's also, as you've shown so beautifully, a book about how to wake up yourself and how to wake up even by writing a tragicomic memoir. Thank you so much for being with us and just for your generosity and all your great tips and really just sharing the, you know, grim and hideous journey that led us to this moment, so thank you so much. 

Elissa: Thank you. My book has a lot of jokes in it, so you'll be entertained while you're reading about the darkest shit that's ever happened to me. So, you're welcome. [Carolyn laughs] 

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live. 
 
Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS Public Programs. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Izzy Angus, Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliott, Emlyn Guiney, Patty Pforte, and Nikki Roda. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts, visit our website ciis.edu, and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 
 
CIIS Public Programs commits to use our in-person and online platforms to uplift the stories and teachings of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; those in the LGBTQIA+ community; and all those whose lives emerge from the intersections of multiple identities.  

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