Healings FAQ No. 10: Megan Koester
"Turns out if you process the unpleasant memories that are making you resent the present, the present becomes manageable. No one tells me shit."
Hello and happy Sunday. We hope you had a lovely solstice. Here on the eastside of L.A., we know summer’s started because it’s around now that certain denizens of the neighborhood can no longer suppress the urge to set off utterly illegal fireworks—we’re talking sticks of dynamite, the kind of explosives they’d use to blow up Jaws, which begin detonating with increasing frequency about two weeks out from the 4th. I’m normally a live-and-let-live kind of guy, but I’ve spent the last several nights clutching three deathly afraid and uncontrollably shaking dogs to my chest, and when this happens it turns me into Michael Douglas in that movie Falling Down. I wanna go on a rampage, or at least, like, write a letter to my city council member. Adding insult to injury, check out this branding… as a lib, I feel owned…
Anyway, speaking of fireworks, it’s time for another installment of the Healings FAQ. Is that a stupid joke? Sure. But it’s in honor of today’s contestant, comedian and writer Megan Koester. Megan makes the opposite of stupid jokes—she’s funny as hell, and also a fantastic writer, who runs the newsletter Exclusive Content, which is frequently sidesplitting, even though Megan mostly writes about things like depression, substance abuse, and complicated family dynamics. Ya know, hilarious stuff. But as I think you’ll see below, this is someone who’s often at her funniest and most insightful when she’s writing about heavy duty shit. So I’ll shut up now and let her do that. Enjoy!
What happens when we die?
I have absolutely no fucking idea, and that fact gives me a great deal of comfort. Aging, and with it, death, is an inevitability, despite what the Facial Serum Industrial Complex wants us to believe. But what happens to our consciousness when our bodies cease functioning? Anyone who tells you they know is either delusional, or trying to grift you, or both. I have never had a death-like experience via drugs, or psychosis, or drug-induced psychosis. Nor do I have any interest in having one, as I wouldn’t trust anything the experience “revealed” to me. My mind has told me many fictions in my life; it’s an unreliable narrator. But the not knowing comforts me, because when something is out of your hands, it is out of your control. I am normally, cripplingly, a control freak, so I welcome death’s escape from perceived agency. If I’m trapped in a purgatorial hellscape for eons after my body decays, what am I supposed to do about it in the now?
On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being terrified and 1 being it’s never crossed your mind, how afraid are you of dying? Explain.
A solid 5. I am aware of my own mortality, and have experienced reminders of the transitory nature of human existence. Does it mean I honor said existence, milking each day to its last drop of delight? Absolutely not. One of my favorite things to do is lay in bed, staring into the void of my phone with the curtains drawn on a bright, cloudless afternoon. Do I often think about how I’m throwing my life away idly watching others live theirs instead of, say, working on the Great American Blog Entry? Yes. That’s why I’m a solid 5. One of my best friends recently had cancer (heard of it?) and that really threw me for a loop, the idea someone my age could just up and die before he even got a chance to breed, or buy a house, or get canceled. It was touch and go for a while, but, well, he lived. Remember when we all thought we’d appreciate life more if we made it through the pandemic? Well, most of us did. And immediately returned to staring into the void of our phones on bright, cloudless afternoons.
My sister unexpectedly and unceremoniously died of meningitis at the age of three; one day she was making us put on Toy Story for the millionth fucking time, the next she was brain dead. I remember my family being summoned into the conference room of the children’s hospital to receive the news that she would never wake up from the coma. Did we want to keep her alive? the doctors asked. What did we look like, Catholics? The pandemic didn’t terrify me in the same way it did others, as I already knew the air was capable of killing you. For almost 30 years, I’ve known the air could kill me. Yet I keep staring at my goddamed phone.
I do stand up comedy, despite the fact I loathe the entertainment industry and my ethics prevent me from ever making a living wage at it. For over a decade, since I was an open micer, I thought the funniest thing I could ever do was record an audienceless comedy album with Steve Albini in his studio. Which is something I did two years ago, but I had a nervous breakdown shortly after the recording and never got around to editing and releasing it. Steve (who, not that you asked, was the nicest, most generous man I’ve ever met in the business of show – the only good edgelord is a reformed one) unexpectedly and unceremoniously died a month ago, which means I am now the only comedian to have ever recorded an album with him. I don’t know what to do with the existential weight of this fact so I continue staring at my phone.
What’s the closest you’ve come to death? What did you learn, if anything?
The closest I’ve felt is when I was on Wellbutrin while secretly downing a bottle of whiskey a night, the combination creating a panic disorder that made me continuously feel as though my brain was attempting to crawl out of my skull. As I was lying about drinking, neither my psychiatrist nor my friends had any idea the cause of my brain crawling. Which also meant I couldn’t just drink during the day, which would have made the anxiety go away, as drunkenness was the only reprieve from the panic (doctors hate this ONE trick!). What, exactly, did I learn from this? Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough, as I relapsed multiple times afterwards. It wasn’t until I started going to EMDR therapy in earnest, while fully abstaining from alcohol, that I began to find existence tolerable. Turns out if you process the unpleasant memories that are making you resent the present, the present becomes manageable. No one tells me shit.
Do you believe in God? Explain.
I don’t not. In much the same way I can’t hazard a guess as to what happens when we die, I can’t definitively say whether or not I know if someone, or something, has placed us here. One thing I do know is that the dogmatism of atheists can just be as insufferable as that of believers, and that is why I identify as agnostic. I used to believe that the only testable, quantifiable truths, so far as we can know, were scientific, but who’s to say that’s actually the case? Is there a realm beyond the quantifiable we only experience when we shed our mortal flesh? Is our reality, well, real? Are we in the Matrix? Fuck if I know. I just work here.
Do you have a spiritual practice? If so, what is it? If not, why not?
I do not. I used to go to recovery meetings on the eastside of Los Angeles, which are big on spiritual BUT NOT RELIGIOUS practices (which makes sense, as believing in a righteous and judgemental God might prevent men whose entire personalities are predicated on the fact they used to be in a band from sexually preying upon women who are one week into sobriety), but stopped because my sponsor wanted me to be honest in all my affairs, up to and including committing return fraud. But – and I’m sorry, Martha, I really am – I can’t. I love return fraud even more than I love turning my mind off with demon alcohol. I spent a solid decade committing return fraud for a living; it’s in my blood. Unlike alcoholism. (I think generational trauma is real, but I don’t necessarily think alcoholism is an illness. But that’s a subject for another questionnaire.)
I will say that, when I attended recovery meetings, my higher power was energy, as it cannot be created or destroyed. If you’ve got to believe in something, it may as well be the thing that is, in a literal sense, bigger than you. Or at least your belief of you. You get it. While the dig I made above about predatory men in recovery rooms may imply otherwise, I don’t judge anyone else’s spiritual practice; spirituality is just foreign to me, in that I have no experience with it. I think never having attended church never made me desire it, or an alternative to it.
Give me an example of a sacred text, for you personally—a work of some kind (book, album, song, painting) that’s essential to the formation of your spiritual worldview. Explain.
The keyword here for me is “formation.” I grew up sans religion, or any form of spiritualism. Existential questions were, like emotions, not considered appropriate fodder for thought or conversation. My mother was, I would imagine, agnostic, but my father was virulently atheist. In the interest of trying to achieve his ever-allusive approval (I didn’t yet know what undiagnosed bipolar disorder was, and how it rendered him incapable of said approval), I declared myself an atheist too. My sister’s death briefly made my mother read a series of pop spiritualist tomes, but my father just saw it as further proof of the lack of existence of a God.
When I was arrested in high school for technically committing a hate crime against a religious sect (I egged a Mormon Church, but my primary grievance against said church had nothing to do with the fact it was started so a cabal of white men could become wife collectors – rather, it was because the Mormon girls at school were always mean to me), my mother, horrified, insisted I return to the scene of the crime the next day and clean it up. But the next day was weekend dad’s, and the act I had committed filled him with a level of pride for his only surviving daughter the likes I had never experienced. Not only did my father not make me clean up the mess, he drove me up to San Francisco and took me on a shopping spree at the Virgin Megastore.
All of which to say my answer to the above question is the song “Where Do You Go When You Die?” by Robyn Hitchcock, taken from the Jonathan Demme-directed concert film Storefront Hitchcock, which my currently not-dead-from-cancer friend John and I would compulsively watch on VHS during his shifts at the only video store in town owned by a socialist (who, as we grew up in the vast, right-wing wasteland between Los Angeles and San Francisco, happened to also be the only socialist in town).
Side Note: Storefront Hitchcock might, in my opinion, be equally as good as the most revered concert film Demme directed, Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense. Additionally, and not that you asked, I think what A24 is doing to Talking Heads at the moment could be construed as elder abuse.
As a teenaged atheist, Hitchcock’s flippant, sing-songy “Where do you go when you die? Nooo-where” refrain was extremely my shit. Listening back to it now, the song’s impassioned denunciation of a Christian God was clearly written by someone who was forced into believing in Him, which I, mercifully, was not. Which is not to say being raised anti-religious didn’t present its own difficulties, especially when it came to, well, relating to other people.
And while I now cannot confirm or deny the existence of a Christian God, I will say I still agree with this verse: “All I’ve ever been is me / All I know is I / And I will turn to nothing / In the second that I die.” Isn’t that a comforting thought? We’re this now, then we’re something else entirely – nothing the present iteration of our mind can comprehend, and nothing to the rest of the world in which we’ve spent our entire consciousness. No use worrying about it. It’s out of our hands.
This is the Healings Newsletter. We thank you for reading. If you enjoyed it, why not share it with a friend, or better yet buy them a gift subscription.
Healings is written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs. Ayana H. Muwwakkil provides art direction.
Healings is about illness, recovery, spirituality, and related topics, and began in the summer of 2023 as a chronicle of Garrett’s battle with cancer. We make no guarantees that it will hold together, thematically speaking, now or ever.
Healings is free for all, but if you can support our efforts with a paid subscription, we’d really appreciate that. A portion of all proceeds goes to the Patient Advocate Foundation.
Further Reading:
