Life hits us hard sometimes. The impact of an unexpected misfortune, such as the death of a loved one, a serious illness, or the loss of a job, can render a person temporarily helpless and unable to cope.
For comedian Chelsea Handler, the catalyst was the realization that Donald Trump had won the presidency. She feels things deeply.
Handler sat down with “Real Time” host Bill Maher to discuss how “unhinged” she felt in the aftermath of the election. (The interview can be watched in the video below.)
Maher opened the segment by saying, “You know I’m reading your new book and I’m feeling like a bad friend, because I didn’t realize you were suffering so much. Everyone took the 2016 election hard, but I didn’t know it really knocked you down like that. And you came back stronger, that’s what the book is about.”
Yeah, I had a midlife identity crisis once Trump won, because I had never had my world feel so unhinged I think. And I had to pay a psychiatrist to listen to me bitch about Donald Trump for about the first three weeks.
And then once when we got past that and we got to the real stuff, I realized the parallel there was my world becoming unhinged when I was a little girl, my brother died when I was nine years old. I had never related the two, but for me, as I can imagine it must have been for so many people, it was a huge emotional trigger of everything being destabilized and I realized just how spoiled and privileged I had been all my life to realize, to be this upset and this (inaudible) every day and the outrage and the anger, I just wanted to f***ing fight people, you know? And I was like, ‘I gotta to go see a psychiatrist.’
Handler said she turned to marijuana to help her cope. “What I discovered is alcohol and outrage are not a good mix…so I pivoted towards weed and cannabis, and for me, the cannabis was a gateway drug to meditation. And then, I had my awakening, and I was like, hey, f*** Trump, we’ve got so many other beautiful things going on.”
Has Chelsea Handler just experienced a teaching moment?
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