By eight years old, my urine showed no promise of abandoning its nightly march out of my urethra and on to my mattress. New Hampshire was running out of clean sheets. All the doctors could offer was a diagnosis of enuresis – meaning my bladder was too small. I was tiny for my age, there was no medical cure but to grow.
In the last month of my 12th year, my mother helped me hide three diapers in the bottom of my sleeping bag and sent me off to go lead my fellow students camping. We were loaded on to the bus and on our way. When we got there, we lifted our gigantic packs on to our backs and up the mountain we hiked, led by me. I don't even think it was an hour before I started sobbing. When the teachers asked why I was crying, I reached for a more stoic answer than the truth.
As we set up our tents it started to pour, and after eating our smoky, fire-burned dinner, we went to sleep. Surrounded by my tentmates, I subtly reached to the bottom of my sleeping bag with my toes and took care of business without incident, probably because, in their wildest dreams – among the giggling and gossip and talking about boys – they would never guess that one of us was wearing Pampers.
Our bus pulled into the school parking lot after our long journey. The kids hopped off to be met by their parents. I saw my mother, waiting with the other moms, smiling. I was suddenly overwhelmed with shame. I was so embarrassed by my behaviour that first day of the trip, and seeing my mother made it real and permanent. This pain was compounded by the fact that with each step of the bus I descended, Mom was snapping pictures of me, the flash illuminating my shame from the inside out. I begged her to stop, but like a shuttering paparazzo she ignored me while continuing to take pictures. It's a bizarre way to be ignored.
As I walked to the car, enduring Mom's relentless camera flashes, a wave of… something… washed over me, and instantly transformed who I was. It happened as fast as a cloud covering the sun. It was at once devastatingly real and terrifyingly intangible. I felt helpless, but not in the familiar bedwetting sense. As quickly and casually as someone catches the flu, I caught depression, and it would last for the next three years.
By the time I was 14, I was taking four Xanax four times a day. Sixteen Xanax per day total. Although I never said it out loud, in my heart I thought, This cannot be right, so I saved each empty prescription bottle in a shoebox in my room as evidence if anything happened to me.
I was sent to another shrink. When I told him I was taking 16 Xanax a day, he was horrified. He called my mother in and told us that this was fucked-up shit (I'm paraphrasing) and that his very own brother died going off Xanax cold turkey. He explained that I would go off the Xanax gradually, a half a pill less each week. It was eight months before I was completely off meds – and the day I took that very last swallow of half a Xanax was the happiest day of my life to that point.
I finally grew, bladder and all. Around the time that I got my driver's licence, and the final traces of Xanax left my system, and the cloud of depression lifted, my enuresis went away. Just as the doctor had predicted, more than a decade before.
And then, in the summer before my last year of high school, I had my first experience of live comedy...My first set was pretty successful. I told some jokes about high school and ended the gig with a song about being flat-chested, which at the time I was. I was not especially nervous. It might be that I'm one of those people who are naturally comfortable on a stage. Or maybe my lack of stage fright was the upside of years of nightly bedwetting. Maybe that daily shame had ground away at my psyche, like glaciers against the coastline, so that somewhere in my consciousness, I understood that bombing on stage could never be as humiliating. My early trauma was a gift, it turned out, in a vocation where your best headspace is feeling that you have nothing to lose .
• This is an edited extract from The Bedwetter, by Sarah Silverman.
