Me: McDonald’s has the best orange soda. It’s not all that carbonated. It was my absolute favorite as a kid.

Male: You only think that because you haven’t had Mexican Fanta made with real sugar. It tastes like childhood. The good parts of childhood, not the terrifying, rapey parts.

Some people wouldn’t have laughed, but I did. I have a sense of humor about child sexual abuse and all the other traumatic things that have happened to me. It’s the only way to deal with it sometimes. If I didn’t have humor, I probably wouldn’t be alive.

My sense of humor is shiny and sleek. It is cutting, satirical and lightning fast. Sometimes, I wonder how it is that my brain can’t figure out what day it is, but I can come up with an incisive comeback in less than a second.

Between knowing what day it is and having a sense of humor, I’ll choose a sense of humor. I can always look up what day it is. You can’t look up humor.

My humor isn’t always there though. Sometimes, when I’m really depressed, it goes away. I don’t understand jokes and I don’t make them. Nothing is funny then, but I fight through it and it always comes back. Eventually, my sense of humor always returns to me.

I don’t remember being an especially funny kid. I was way too shy for that. I was probably hilarious to those who knew me well, but shy and reserved around strangers, even strangers I had known for years. Between innate shyness and sexual abuse, I retreated inward and only poked my head out once in a while. I bottled myself up.

It was only when I became a teenager and started not caring about anything that my humor really made an appearance. I became irreverent. I’m still irreverent, but now, I’m not quite as rebellious as I was. Nowadays, I’m more cynical than rebellious. Experience has taught me that you can’t really change the world by shaving your head into a mohawk and dying it pink. Combat boots, no matter how steel-toed they are, won’t crush the system; it’s too big and broken for one boot, or even two.

Over time, my sense of humor has changed or evolved, like everyone’s does. Farts and knock knock jokes aren’t the highest form of comedy like they were when I was eight years old. Though farts are still hilarious, especially when dogs get scared by them.

So, yeah, farts are still funny.

My point is that without humor, I never would have made it this far. I would have let the darkness swallow me whole. If I couldn’t find the humor in the darkest, most terrifying, rapey parts, I might as well pack it in now. It’s scary when my sense of humor disappears, but so far, it has always come back. I can’t live without it for long.

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Do you like your sense of humor? Do you like mine? Would you give me money if I did a dance for you?