So, this semester, I published a blog post about how I almost died on my way to take the LSAT. It’s a chaotic story, so I’ve linked the story HERE. So, this semester, I published a blog post about how I almost died on my way to take the LSAT. It’s a chaotic story, so I’ve linked the story HERE.

I bring this up, because having posted it online, I also shared it in person with some of my friends. And that experience of sharing that story brought us all to tears of laughter—including myself— and it reminds me of what comedy is most often: pain + time. Or, in that scenario, panic + time.

For a lot of my comedic life stories, that equation seems to hold up. As I am almost done with my senior year of college, I can’t help but remember my first semester freshman year. What chaos it was. I didn’t know how colleges calculated GPAs in comparison to high schools, so I thought I was doing a lot better than I really was. I remember thinking my grades were much higher because the eCollege grade book wasn’t accurate, and the +/- system didn’t register with me. I thought I was getting an A in biology and chemistry, and I ended up scratching by with Cs in both. Nearly got a C in psychology too, but I managed to get a B.

It was a time of panic. I remember crying on the phone to my mom, telling her that it was the end of my time at TCU because I was doing so poorly. I could not be contained in my hysterics. Luckily, I pulled it together with a 4.0 in the spring and have been riding on the Dean’s Honors List ever since, but that initial shock was HARD.

Of course, now that I’ve pulled my GPA up and know how to excel in college classes, it’s funny. Junior year, I told this story of panic and chaos to my roommates and my mom at Chuy’s during a birthday celebration, and we were all dying with laughter. It’s a story that still bonds us to this day.

I hope with the chaos of COVID—19 and all the moments we’ve missed, we can generate some of these stories and bring a bit of laughter into a world post-pandemic.