A mother facing serious health problems used dark humor to survive, joking about her pill regimen as a "breakfast of champions." Her son internalized that laughter as a survival tool, and when she died at his thirteen, he carried it forward as his own way of coping.
I grew up in a very funny household. My mother, through her experiences with multiple treatments, like in different regimens over the course of like a very short time with different medications and cycling through, she would always say things like, and keep in mind, she passed away when I was 13. So when she's saying these things, I'm very, very young, but she would say things like, I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy. Um, she called, she, she called the fistful of pills she had to take every morning her breakfast of champions. Working through difficult things by laughing in the face of their, of, of, of the fear that you might otherwise have has been like, that's my programming. That is like absolutely how I was built to survive. And I thank both of my parents every day for that.
