I Swear... 🧠⚡️

Plus, the Old "Tragedy + Time = Comedy" Formula Meets Shirley Jackson

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Greetings from Cambridge and the blizzard… where it’s actually been so stunningly quiet. Poetry weather, for certain. ❄️

I want to talk about something that keeps breaking my heart: how coverage of neurological disability so often ends up increasing stigma, even when everyone involved insists they’re trying to do the right thing.

When you live with a neurological disability—Tourette’s, epilepsy, anything rooted in a nervous system that misfires publicly—no one feels more horror or shame than we do at the discomfort other people experience around us. That part rarely makes it into the headlines.

I have epilepsy. I’ve lost relationships—family relationships—because I chose to be open about it. Because I refused to be ashamed. Because my nervous system makes other people uneasy, and they didn’t know where to put that feeling.

I understand the fear. Truly. Neurological events are inconvenient. They’re unpredictable. They interrupt the smooth fantasy that life—and bodies—are controllable. If I went to a work event with too many flashbulbs, I might very well have a seizure on the carpet or in the audience. I could become an embarrassment. A disruption. A problem that needs to be managed away.

But none of that would be me.

All of it would be a nervous system wired differently than yours. Not defective. Not malicious. Just different.

The human brain has eighty-six billion neurons. We call it mysterious. We call it miraculous. And then, when it behaves in ways we don’t like—ways that aren’t tidy or polite or narratively convenient—we suddenly decide it needs to be edited out, apologized for, explained away.

That’s what made the recent coverage around the BAFTAs so deeply saddening.

John Davidson, a Scottish campaigner for Tourette’s syndrome, was in the audience. A slur was uttered involuntarily—because Tourette’s is involuntary. What followed wasn’t just a discussion of editorial standards or broadcast delay. It was a cascade of moral panic, framed as responsibility.

People rushed to say it should have been bleeped. That it caused offence. That apologies were owed—to the actors onstage, to the audience, to the nation. And of course, offence matters. Harm matters. Words matter.

But so does context. So does compassion. So does understanding that for people with Tourette’s, causing offence is often profoundly distressing—not because they don’t care, but because they care deeply and cannot control what their bodies do.

What gets lost in this coverage is the quiet, crushing truth: when a neurological disability becomes a scandal, the disabled person becomes the problem to be managed. Not the system. Not the impossibility of live television. Not the limits of control.

Just the body.

I keep thinking about how many times disabled people are asked—implicitly or explicitly—to remove themselves to make others comfortable. To leave early. To stay home. To go dark.

John Davidson reportedly chose to leave the ceremony early. I know that move well. It’s the instinct to minimize yourself before someone else does it for you. I’m writing a lot about it these days.

But here’s what I wish we could say out loud: our nervous systems are not moral failures.

If someone has Tourette’s and a tic includes language that shocks, the answer is not shame. It is not erasure. It is not pretending the disability doesn’t exist while simultaneously punishing its effects.

Grace does not mean endorsement.
Compassion does not mean harm doesn’t matter.
And accountability does not require turning disabled people into cautionary tales.

So, stop it. (cue: Bob Newhart voice 😂)

There will be moments—at award shows, on red carpets, in classrooms, at work—when nervous systems misfire. When bodies do something unexpected. When the illusion of control cracks.

When that happens, we get to choose what kind of society we are.

One that treats disability as an editorial mistake to be apologized for.

Or one that understands that with eighty-six billion neurons, the human brain was never going to behave itself neatly on cue anyway.

Some grace, please, for faulty nervous systems.

We were not in charge of their design.
We are just living in them.

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Now… Our Little Weekly Comedy Tutorial

PAIN + DISTANCE = COMEDY
Or: Tragedy Is Just Comedy Waiting for a Better Draft

Core Principle:
Comedy isn’t the absence of pain.
It’s pain processed with perspective.

This week’s lesson is about timing—specifically, the lie we’re told about “too soon.”

When It’s Too Soon—and When It’s Perfect

People love to say something is “too soon” when what they really mean is:
I’m still inside it.

Comedy doesn’t arrive after pain disappears.
It arrives when pain stops being the showrunner—the veritable Liz Lemon in your life.

This is why Nora Ephron could write hilariously about betrayal, divorce, humiliation, and illness—not because those things didn’t hurt, but because she waited just long enough to see their shape.

She didn’t write from inside the wound.
She wrote from the chair across from it, coffee in hand, saying:
Oh. That’s what that was.

Perspective is not cruelty.
It’s survival with a point of view.

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The Shirley Jackson Rule

Shirley Jackson didn’t wait to be comfortable.
She waited to be clear.

Her humor—especially the domestic kind—is sharp because it comes from watching pain repeat. Watching fear organize itself into ritual. Watching people normalize the unbearable.

That’s distance, too.

Time doesn’t just soften pain.
It reveals patterns.

And once you can see the pattern, you can make a joke about it. Life Among the Savages is a prime example of how Jackson makes this work.

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Why Humor Is Often the Last Honest Language Left

When something is happening, everyone lies:

• We minimize

• We spiritualize

• We brand

• We say it’s “fine.”

Comedy shows up later and says:
Actually? No.

That’s why humor feels dangerous.
It tells the truth after the press release.

And that laugh people worry about?
It isn’t disrespect.
It’s recognition.

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Exercise: Write from the Future

Take something painful.
Not healed. Not resolved. Not redeemed.

Now, write about it from five years in the future.

Not wiser.
Not above it.
Just far enough away to see the outline.

Ask yourself:

• What was I pretending not to know?

• What kept happening that I refused to name?

• Where was the joke hiding while I was busy surviving?

That’s where comedy lives.

There will be a time when we can talk about now (awful as it is)—and laugh.
That laugh won’t mean it didn’t matter.
It’ll mean tragedy didn’t prevail.

Comedy isn’t denial.
It’s proof you got out alive—and brought a story back.

Ok, that’s what I got this week. Stay warm - xoxo - Gotham Girl

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PS - If you can make it, tune in to Substack Live tomorrow night, February 24th, to pop the champagne with us for the launch of <Mary L. Tabor>’s luminous novel Who By Fire. She’ll be joined by our own Kimberly Warner, author of Unfixed, and it will be a conversation you won’t soon forget!!! Details below.

Save the date!

PPS - I am a human typo. Amnesty appreciated.