Maybe in Another Universe I Don’t Have to Use Sarcasm to Hide My Feelings

Some people learn early that humor is a kind of camouflage. It’s not something they choose so much as something that chooses them—a way to stay safe, to steer the attention where it can’t hurt. You figure out how to make people laugh before they ask too many questions, before they notice the weight you’re carrying. And if you’ve ever been that person—the one who keeps the room entertained while quietly holding yourself together—you know it’s not lightness you’re offering.

It’s survival, wrapped up in a punchline.

You learn to read the room with surgical precision. To sense the tension before anyone else and break it with a joke. Not because you want to, but because you have to. Because silence is dangerous, and laughter is your way of keeping it at bay. People laugh, and for a moment, you almost believe you’ve tricked them. But when the room empties, and you’re left with just yourself, you feel it—the weight of everything you’ve been carrying and the cracks you work so hard to patch.

You tell yourself it’s enough to be the one who makes people laugh. That it’s a kind of love, isn’t it? To make things easier for everyone else. But there’s a heaviness to being the one who always knows how to hold the room together. You wonder if anyone notices when the person who makes everyone laugh stops smiling, even for a second. You wonder if they’d even know what to say.

It creeps in during the moments when your mask slips—when someone looks at you a second too long after a joke, like they’re trying to figure out if you really meant it. Or when you catch yourself laughing at your own deflection, knowing there’s more truth in it than you wanted anyone to see. Chandler Bing would get it. The joke that buys you just enough space to breathe. Lorelai Gilmore might call it wit, but you know better. You know it’s armor.

Maybe in another universe, you don’t have to perform. Maybe there, you never learned to use sarcasm as a shield. Maybe silence feels safe, and someone could sit across from you without expecting a punchline, just letting you be. But here, in this universe, the jokes have become second nature. They’re so much a part of you that even when you want to let them go, you don’t know how.

You wonder if anyone will ever stay when the jokes stop. If anyone will notice the way your humor stumbles when the weight is too much. It’s a terrifying thought—letting someone see you, really see you, in the rawest parts of yourself. What if they look and decide you’re not enough? Or worse, too much?

But then, there are the moments. The rare ones when someone catches a glimpse of what you’ve been trying so hard to hide, and instead of turning away, they lean in. They sit with you in the quiet. They don’t ask you to be funny, don’t expect you to make it easier for them. They just stay. And in those moments, you realize it’s not about being understood—it’s about being held.

If you’ve ever been the funny one, you know the ache of giving the world your laughter while keeping your pain locked away. You know the loneliness of being everyone’s relief but no one’s refuge. And maybe most people won’t look past the jokes. But when someone does—when they see the person underneath, not the act—you feel it. Like air rushing into lungs that had forgotten how to breathe.

Because you were never just the laughs you brought to the room. Never just the sarcasm, the clever deflections, the perfectly timed quips. You’ve always been more. And when someone stays long enough to remind you of that, you start to believe it, too. Maybe not all at once, but little by little, the mask gets easier to take off.

And in this universe, you won’t always need it. Here, you can learn what it feels like to just be.