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Today's Sad Girl is Alaina Bamfield (@alainabamfield), comedian, writer and survivor of Larry Nassar, the notorious convicted serial sex offender and former team doctor for the United States women's national gymnastics team. She speaks candidly about how the reality of what happened to her hit hardest when the news broke globally, and how her comedy special "Untouchable" out on YouTube has helped her process through humor. We also talk plopping hair, Flock camera pranks, and other subject matters that will probably get this episode shadow-banned (no worries!) And remember, it's okay to be sad, girl.

https://theathletesurvivorsassist.org/

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• a crowd work clip in which i called out a dude in the audience for using ai to tell him what was comfortable popped off. very unexpected, and [takes long drag of a cigarette] it’s been a long time since i’ve seen numbers such as these. guess it means i need to post more crowd work. i can’t lie its put a little wind under my wings.

• sad girl survival guide had 2 clips hit this week from my episode with clare austen-smith. one about her blonde cyst is doing well on reels and the other about dollz with a z on tiktok. take a look, subscribe & follow! i love my little show.

• if you’re in brooklyn, my comedy & cats show hosted with the hilarious rebecca weiser is happening friday march 27th at brooklyn brainery. tickets here.

• i discovered how to make a healthy-ish banana pudding because a gym bro i follow made one with greek yogurt. it has changed my whole life. and by that i mean i’ve been having it for dinner…

for some reason, i, a certified beach bum with horrible circulation issues (Raynaud’s gang, let me hear you say “fingies numb!”) found myself vacationing in norway. in february. in the arctic circle.

yeah, it was a choice. you would think someone as seasonally depressed as me, would be making like a goose and flying south this winter. instead, we went about as north as you can go, to alta.

the town we stayed in is so far north, there are days in the winter without any sunlight whatsoever. i asked one of our guides who was born and raised there what she does for fun and she said “drag race snowmobiles.” category is: reckless activity realness. 24 hour darkness girlies make do, i guess.

i couldn’t help but wonder how the hell they did it. it gets below freezing and little windy in new york and i become a full blown hermit. but maybe it’s not just about the weather.

something about feeling like you might freeze to death, can be lowkey revitalizing. i’m not talking about the wim hof/andrew huberman/joe rogan-ification of the cold plunge (though i did somewhat braggadociously post a fj∅rd dip video in which i rag on rfk jr for plunging in a tub in jeans to let him know: that don’t impress-a me much.)

maybe other forces at play living in america, like i dunno, the hyper-individualism, the rising cost of living, the lack of free healthcare or arts funding or labor protections or ai regulations or our tax dollars funding a genocide, as quick examples off the top of my head. maybe these things compounded with the dark, brutal winters are really the culprits.

there was something primal about staying in an arctic dome with limited running water while my stepmom tended a log fire through the night. made me grateful for my cushy life in brooklyn, that’s for sure. yeah, my apartment doesn’t get direct sunlight and i’d cut off my right arm for a dishwasher and laundry in-unit, but at least i’ve never risked freezing through the night and i don’t have to ration my tap water reservoir. it’s the little things.

while in Norway, i became my scandinavian alter-ego: gl∅rnja. she’s chic, unbothered, walks everywhere, has excellent work-life balance, free healthcare and is strictly a dog person. she saunas and parties. she eats local (you simply must try reindeer), thrifts and drinks fine wine.

so why is it i get so homesick? is it stockholm (or in this case, oslo) syndrome? whenever i travel too far from the comforts of my home, i feel this magnetic pull back to my couch. it makes me sort of uneasy to be away. i miss my cats and my boyfriend, sure, but i feel kind of like the world’s biggest and most ungrateful asshole for not being present and taking in the immense privilege of being able to travel the world for a few short days of my one life.

don’t get me wrong i know what we did and saw was awesome. but so is the little life and nest i’ve cultivated back home. i wanted to get back into my creative routine. see my friends. know my way around and go to my gym and grocery store. i know that sounds banal and perhaps i’m too comfortable in the banality of my life. maybe i’m coping by accepting and feeling attached to safety and security of what i know.

i suppose both can be true (has anyone ever said this?) travel can be enriching, mind-expanding, and bonding while also exhausting and difficult. being at home can be depressing, banal and comforting. i’m grateful for both.

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i miss her so much.

i grieve what i didn’t get to learn about her or show her i’ve created. i wonder what life would’ve been like if she had survived. i don’t know that i would’ve had the upbringing i would’ve had with my dad and stepmom. i don’t know that i would have my same insecurities, opinions, and sense of self. there’s no way to know. maybe there’s another timeline where she survives and the answers lies over there, but short of inventing a means of making a quantum leap, this is mine.

she battled, and ultimately lost to, multiple myeloma, a cancer of the white blood cells. now relatively treatable, it was the late 90s and survival rates were pretty slim. add to the circumstances that she was originally on a course of treatment for non-hodgkins lymphoma (pretty survivable back then), before being told “oops! we made a mistake and by the way you’re terminal”. my dad recounts the drive home from the hospital that day where my mom apparently freaked the fuck out, screamed and banged on the dashboard. a completely understandable reaction. her two kids were going to be without a mom. i wasn’t there, but i can picture it and it breaks my heart.

the timeline gets muddy for me, since the year she got sick i was 6 going on 7 (please don’t) and i think parsing childhood memories can be tough at the best of times, even without a traumatized brain. i could tell things were changing, nevertheless it was hard to understand it from my little kid perspective.

my mom was always a bit of a hippie, so her smoking weed was nothing out of the norm. i know now it certainly helped with her appetite and nausea brought on by the chemo. i remember thinking she was swelling up like a balloon and her hair was falling out, and being maintained shorter than usual. again, the cause and the effects were sorta lost on me. they just were. you’re gonna think i’m a big weirdo do this one, but i recall she had to do some sort of at home treatment that involved a catheter bag. not sure exactly. i wanted so badly to hang out with her in her room. she’d be in bed, and we’d listen to madonna’s ray of light album together. the catheter bag was like a little warm pillow sized water bed on the floor. i would lay my head on it and slosh it around, sorta completely unaware that it was quite literally a bag of my mommy’s pee.

my mom was a stay at home mom and an artist. she had drawers of clothing patterns, and multi-media paintings of flowers. she quilted and would collage travel brochure and magazine clippings into weird little eclectic scenes. an entire wall of our kitchen was dedicated to displaying my sister and my artwork we’d bring home from school. i remember one piece on the wall i had determined was not quite finished, so i took a crayon, and drew a big circle around it, staining the kitchen wall with red wax. i think my parents were pretty mad at me for that, but part of me thinks my mom knew i was just expressing myself.

she was a cool mom and a great cook. at least to a kid. beanie weenies (that’s baked beans with chopped up hotdogs) and tortellini with homemade alfredo sauce were regularly on the menu. god she was good. she’d play playstation with us. i say with “us”, meaning my mom and sister would play tomb raider, and i would watch until it got scary and i’d hide behind the couch.

we always had at least a dog and a cat. in fact, my habit of picking up street cats is definitely an inherited trait from her. she was also, after all, a white woman (with probable taxoplasmosis, we can’t help it!) our cat, woobie, was a helpless kitten on the side of the road when my mom decided that’s gonna be our cat. much like how my moonie was just a lil guy in the street when i put him in my purse and took him home. sometimes i think what would mommy do? and i know what she would’ve done in that scenario, because its exactly what she did.

as her illness progressed, we ended up moving to texas. there were better oncology hospitals down there, as well as my dad’s parents and my aunt and uncle. it was all hands on deck to take care of us, and that really started raising the alarm bells in my head. things were changing. my mom was less available to play with us. her best friend was helping us out, and i recall she put one my favorite sweaters in the dryer. it was wool and it shrank and i was so angry. disproportionately angry. i know now that the anger was amplified by the circumstances (the sweater was cute, but i didn’t need to tell my mom’s bestie that i hated her for that).

the woman who would eventually become my stepmom and a maternal figure for whom i am eternally grateful for stepping up, was already in the picture at the time. questionable timing aside, with my mom being sick and my dad starting a new relationship (do not look up the statistics on men who cheat on their wives when they get cancer, it’ll bum you out), my mom pulled my now stepmom aside, and asked that no matter what, she promise to take care of me and my sister. she did, and does to this day. thinking about that meeting of two women in some of the most fraught circumstances you can be in, when they should theoretically hate each other, or even refuse to acknowledge the other’s existence, making a commitment like that? that’s the doozy. that’s the one that puts the frog in my throat to this day. my stepmom never faltered. she’s not even with my dad anymore, and she is still my #1 supporter. she’s honoring my mom’s legacy through her love and care for us. it’s sort of incomprehensible. and no, i haven’t seen stepmom, the movie that came out the same year my mom died and is pretty much exactly the same story. which is freaky as hell, by the way.

holiday season 1998 rolls around. my mom’s condition worsens, and she’s in hospice. i recall my last visit to her room on the night of the 21st. she was effectively on life support, couldn’t talk or move really. i squeezed her hand and i felt her weakly squeeze mine back. its a weird memory i have that feels vivid, but also almost like frames of a movie, watching myself from outside my body. i see little me at the foot of her bed, knowing and completely not knowing what was happening or why. pudgy hands on that distinct hospital plastic bed frame. there i said goodbye, unaware it was truly for the last time.

that morning, my stepmom let me know my mom had passed in the night. she comforted me by puppeteering beanie babies, a little game of ours that we’d keep up for a lot of my childhood. it was odd to open gifts just 3 days later, with such a huge missing piece. i think my parents wanted to overcompensate and make christmas as fun as possible for two grief-stricken children. they put jokey to & from tags on the presents, hinting at what was inside. i got a gameboy color and pokemon gold. i threw myself in. ground zero for my dissociative gaming habit.

grief, especially childhood grief, is a strange thing. it can lie dormant for years and years and years until some other inciting event triggers the abandonment wound and rips it wide open. i didn’t know my mom’s death was considered trauma until my mid-20s, it was just something that happened to me. an event in my personal timeline. i didn’t interrogate the ways it made me see and navigate the world until my late-20s and still to this day.

it is said that grief is love with nowhere to go. i’m definitely biased, but i think its especially hard to have this well of love that you can’t give to the intended tangible earthly recipient of that love during the holidays. i try to honor her rebellious artistic spirit, her love and care and nurturing to others. my friends jokingly call me mommy, but i wear it with pride, knowing taking care of those around me is what my mommy would do.

squeeze the ones you love extra tight. learn their stories. make the memories. take the photos. and remember: its okay to be sad, girl.

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creating magic is effortful. putting up lights, baking cookies, hosting christmas dinner. wrapping presents?! dear god, i’ve had to strategically wrap in short bursts based on who i’m seeing christmas week and when this year. the marathon of locking myself in a room to wrap like i used to (because i’m a damn good wrapper if i do say so myself) feels closer to a prison sentence.

the generational baton handoff of creating the magic, is daunting. i’m child-free and so is a lot of my family. time comes at you faster and faster each an every year. these holidays come as quickly as they go. we’re exhausted! sure, adults may exchange gifts, but anticipation for each holiday season has waned. it feels more here we go again, than just hear those sleigh bells jinglin’.

i don’t know about yours, but my family certainly isn’t the matching pj’s type. we don’t do a christmas card (a custom i believe should be reserved to married couples at minimum, ideally with kids and pets, just my two cents - sorry!)

though, i remember one particularly magical christmas from when i was 4. my mom was still alive (yes, that grief post is coming tomorrow - the anniversary of her passing, strap in) and we were living on long island at the time. it was a white christmas (just like…the one’s we used to know) and i recall opening the front door of our house and there being a wall of snow over my head. granted, i was only about 3 feet tall at the time, but that absolutely rocked my shit. santa gave us that double whammy of snowing us in and endowing me with exactly what i wanted (a fisher price kitchen play set, of course).

even as a skeptical child, who didn’t really believe in santa at the time (i swear, i was a cool kid - i also had an older sister who most likely spoiled it for me young, no worries about that) it still felt magical. i knew my parents were eating up that their kids got a white christmas. it was everything you could’ve asked for.

i look back on it with a bittersweet feeling. an innocence i’ve since lost (would honestly be weird if i hadn’t…) but has in many ways shaped my sense of sentimentality as an adult. i want the kids in our family to have that sense of magic. i want them to cherish memories with us. i suppose it’s why i need to wrap in bursts, sprinting now rather than marathoning. i still want christmas to feel special. to insert magic where i can, with the effort and energy i can give to those i love.

and remember: its okay to be sad, girl.

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i did it to myself. these little bursts of motivation where i promise to create for a set period of time, usually as an over-correction to a period of dormancy, are just so typically me. i do it. i wonder why i committed myself to that level of - let’s call it what it is — homework. then i resent the work and myself for the punitive undertone that mars these short-lived, productivity-dense projects (if i complete the task, i’m good. if i don’t, i’m bad).

i’m taking the anxiousness and tying too much to my self-worth as a cue to slow the fuck down. it’s a week until christmas. you’re allowed to relax. you’re allowed to break routine, sleep a little extra, eat a little more, play a little animal crossing.

and remember: its okay to be sad, girl.

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