The delight of being known

Really, truly, deeply known

One warm Wednesday evening last Spring, I found myself at an open mic comedy night at a local café called Kreuzberg, doubling as a bar and coffee shop, named and styled after the hip district of Berlin. A commercial hipster café, basically—one that sells overpriced coffee and overpriced t-shirts adorned with the questionably embarrassing slogan, “Poor But Sexy”. A spacious, multi-room, multi-story building furnished with leather couches and metal chairs, Einstein bulbs, and massive portraits of literary legends splattering the walls. It feels cold in there to me—sterile—always has, and I much prefer the homey feel of the older hole in the wall down the street, so I rarely ever visit Kreuzberg. But I’d been frequenting the local dive bar at night quite a bit, and each Wednesday, I would mingle with people who gathered at the bar after leaving Kreuzberg’s weekly open mic comedy night. I got a little curious. “You have to check it out one night,” the locals swore to me—I’d either find it hilarious or hilariously bad, but worth it regardless, they promised.

When the next Wednesday night rolled around, I was feeling social, so I asked a friend if she had any plans for the evening. She mentioned that she was considering attending the open mic comedy night, and I took that as a sign that it was my time to finally check it out, so I tagged along with her. I’m not the most familiar with stand-up comedy, but I love performance art. I love watching someone get up on stage and dazzle a crowd. I love soaking in the vulnerability of people publicly baring their souls, panhandling strangers for reactions. I love to bear witness to the unique quirks performers can’t help but reveal as soon as they’re under the spotlight. So, I prepared myself to absorb the evening like a social scientist, excited for what I might discover.

My friend and I snagged a table along the side of the wall, right in front of the sprawling bar and right below the second floor, where unknown faces peered down upon us from a loft. As I took in the room, I spotted a few people I knew in the crowd—a professor I had in college, a bartender I knew from social media, and a few regulars from the local dive bar I’d been frequenting—and waved at them. I gossiped with my friend as we waited for the show to start. She shushed me as my voice got a little too loud to be spilling sensitive information. We laughed over my notorious lack of a filter. And soon enough, the show began.

And just as soon, the pedophilia jokes began.

Shocker, I know. They were delivered by a random white guy no more than a few years my senior, donning a Patagonia puff jacket and 5-panel hat, thinking he’d squeeze out a few laughs with a few lazy jokes, and perhaps even build some kind of comedic name for himself in the process. His brand of comedy? Edginess to make up for lack of creativity. Nothing new—terribly uninteresting and unoriginal. He made a few jokes about Black people, then a few about fat people, then a few about being a white guy, until finally, he devoted the rest of his set to Jeffrey Epstein pedophilia jokes. It wasn’t just a few; it was one after another. The pedophilia jokes dragged on, and on, and on, and on. And they weren’t funny. Not in the slightest.

He collected a few nervous laughs from the audience, either out of generosity or simple pity, or a mix of both, but whatever the case, those chuckles burrowed into my skin like leeches. My blood began to boil. I wanted to scream. I wanted to ruin the whole set. I tried to contain my rage—the rage of a child sexual abuse survivor expected to sit politely in a chair while listening to a man with the audacity to joke about something that violently steered the entire trajectory of her existence—as I waited for his painful set to conclude. I tried my best, I promise you. I wish I could explain how bad the jokes were, but you’ll have to trust me—so bad that I was left with a flaming fury I knew I wouldn’t be able to contain despite my best efforts, one I knew I wouldn’t possibly be leaving the venue with, not without pressing some kind of release valve first.

And soon enough, against my conscious volition, the release valve pressed itself. A single tear fell down my cheek. Out poured the liquid grief of my child self, crying not simply over a few harmless jokes, but over the entire context of the scene, positioned within the larger context of global culture, positioned within the even larger context of human history. Crying over the realization of just how terribly far the world is from taking the weight of child abuse seriously—and just how terribly evident that fact becomes in moments like this. Crying over how nothing will ever change if the topic is never treated seriously, if it remains a butt of cheap jokes and nervous laughter. Call me dramatic. I made sure to wipe my tears before my friend could notice, at least. Was I really just brought to tears by a few jokes at an open mic night? Embarrassing.

Just kidding, I’m not embarrassed at all—in fact, I’m rather shameless about these things. I’m not above public displays of grief. I find them valuable. I’m not above making a scene—certainly not if it’s for a good cause. Still, I wanted to carefully weigh my options, to examine my larger goal here, and to ask myself if an emotional reaction was truly worth it. I didn’t want to hastily jump to conclusions. I made sure to consider the very real possibility that, given rampant statistics, this comedian might be a child sexual abuse survivor, too, and that in the winding road of his survival as a male victim of pedophilia, this just happened to be his chosen way of coping with it all—by making jokes. And if that was the case, I would certainly be in no position to judge him. I wouldn’t make a fuss. I’d feel disappointed, surely, but I’d try to write it off as a difference in tastes. I’d lay down my sword. I’d agree to disagree.

Only one way to find out. I decided to get to the bottom of it, to collect the necessary data, like the social scientist I’d set out to embody. As he walked off the stage, I didn’t clap. I simply stared him down. I studied him. I scanned for clues. And in a split-second decision, just as he was about to pass me by, I tapped him on the shoulder and stopped him.

“Hey,” I whispered, motioning him towards me.

He positioned his ear closer to me to make out my voice in the crowded room.

“Are you a child sexual abuse survivor?”

He looked a bit caught off guard by the question, like he was never expecting his comedy set to elicit such a serious line of inquiry.

“No, actually, I’m not,” he replied.

And with that, any benefit of doubt was erased. I gave myself permission to press upon the release valve, this time on purpose, sharply aimed and fired.

“In every crowd you perform these jokes for, there are going to be a handful of child sexual abuse survivors. These jokes are disgusting for them to sit through.” I stared into his eyes as I said it, refusing to break contact with even a blink.

“I’m sure they are,” he replied.

It was clear to me that he was immediately writing me off as a caricature of the classic hypersensitive social justice warrior the internet loves to hate. Yet there was something deeper there—something more threatening in my tone, something ancient, something impossible to ignore—and I made sure that it made itself known. I made sure he could hear it, or I’d like to believe he could, at least. I wasn’t messing around. I was being serious, and I made sure my tone conveyed that. Yes, I was being serious—serious at the open mic comedy night, that one place you’re not supposed to be serious. I get it—you’re supposed to check your sensitivity at the door. But that’s not quite my style. I get it—the edginess factor was his whole comedy brand. But if the jokes are going to be distasteful, at least make them funny. I hoped my comment might make him rethink the impact of his lazy jokes, or perhaps ditch them altogether, or at the very least, I hoped it might make him uncomfortable for a brief moment—a fraction of how uncomfortable he made me. It was a small gesture that arose from my deep well of emotion, the least I could do for the child tearing up inside of me. With a look of annoyance, he slid past me, and that was the end of our exchange.

Amidst the transition of a loud and bustling room, my friend busied herself with ordering another drink, and she didn’t witness my passing interaction with the comedian. In fact, she seemed oblivious to the weight of the pedophilia jokes and the full scope of their impact on me, as if the jokes had gone over her head entirely. I suppose the jokes went over the heads of most people in the audience—anyone who didn’t have firsthand experience with their content. Meanwhile, I felt like a raw bundle of nerves, the emotions of my child self bubbling to the surface and threatening to spill out. More than anything, I just wanted a hug. I wished I had a mother’s arms to run into. Instead, I ran into the loving arms of the dive bar down the street. I told my friend I wasn’t liking the set and quickly excused myself—“I’ll be at McCarthy’s if you want to meet me there afterwards.”

As I arrived at the bar, I spotted three local boys I was warmly acquainted with gathered together at a table drinking beers, so I decided to join them. I didn’t order a drink for myself—wasn’t in the mood to risk getting any sadder. I was simply in the mood for some good ‘ole distraction, for any sort of light conversation unrelated to pedophilia, some kind of witty banter that might boost my spirits and get me laughing after the open mic comedy tragically failed to. I sat back in my chair and simply listened. I let my body attune to familiar faces and let my defenses lower. One boy in particular seemed rather interested in hearing about my night—he had been staring at me since I arrived—and he asked me what I had been up to.

“I went to Kreuzberg open mic comedy for the first time, but I left early because some guy started telling jokes about pedophilia and it made me cry.”

I wasn’t trying to be funny, but something about my delivery made him start cracking up. Maybe I should try my hand at stand-up, I thought to myself. I could see the humor in my situation, technically speaking, but still, I couldn’t bring myself to laugh along with him. Like I said—more than anything, I just wanted a hug. I wished I had a mother’s arms to run into. Turns out, the loving arms of the dive bar didn’t quite measure up. Perhaps a bar wasn’t the ideal place for my grief to land, but I wanted to stick it out. I had nowhere else to go, and I didn’t want to be alone. I gave it my all, letting myself dissolve into the drunken group conversation, offering my complete and total presence. The cute boy sitting next to me—the one who laughed at me—grabbed my hand out of nowhere, gazed into my eyes, and told me with sincerity, “I wish I could talk to you forever, but I have to go.”

Why is he holding my hand? He has a girlfriend! That was awfully flirtatious. Too flirtatious. My mind started spinning. And before I knew it, in the midst of this near-stranger’s questionable affection, I had forgotten all about the open mic grief. Distraction successful. What a charming man—charmed the pants right off my grief. As I walked home, his intense stare seared itself into my memory, as did the warmth of his hand. “What was that?” I thought to myself. “Was that a real connection? Was that just drunken flirting?” I toyed with new questions with every step I took—I’m embarrassingly affected by moments of intimacy—and as I did, the memory of him laughing at my confession of crying at the comedy show kept rudely popping back into my mind, over and over again. Why is this stuff so funny to everyone? Why can’t anyone take these topics seriously? He doesn’t get it, I grumbled to myself. Nobody gets it. Nobody gets me! I dramatically concluded. Ugh, so much for the successful distraction. Here I was, still thinking about it all again. Will I ever learn to lighten up?

I arrived home by midnight, crawled into bed, and slept off my grief. Nothing like a good night’s sleep to reset your inner child’s sensitivities. By the time I awoke the next morning, it was as if the night before hadn’t happened at all. By the end of the calendar year, in fact, I’d forgotten about the experience entirely.

Until the very last day of December, that is. I was on a coffee date with a sweet boy from out of town. I’d known the guy for years, and I’d always found him beautiful, smart, charming—the full package, so to speak—but never spent one on one time with him before. He was visiting home for the holidays, so I went out for a limb and asked him to coffee, thinking it’d be nice to connect briefly. We met at that hole in the wall down the street from Kreuzberg—the homier coffee shop I mentioned previously, the one I much prefer spending my time at. The two of us chatted for hours, sitting beside the quaint koi pond in the café’s back garden until the sun began setting, he began shivering, and we decided to make our way inside. Inside the cozy coffee shop, we continued talking amidst tea refills—we scanned their book shelf, flipped through communal journals, talked politics, picked each other’s brains. After years of knowing each other, for our first time truly spending time together, I was shocked by the quality of the conversation and the palpable chemistry between us. I didn’t want the day to end, if I’m being honest, and I don’t think he did, either—but the coffee shop was closing soon.

“What next?” I asked him.

“Well, when this place closes in a bit, I was thinking about heading to Kreuzberg,” he replied.

“I’ve never been there,” I blurted out.

It wasn’t true. Not in the slightest. Clearly, I have been there. I just wrote all about my experience there, after all. Don’t ask me why I said that—I’m not quite sure. It was an honest mistake. I think my brain was fried from hours of stimulating conversation. Or perhaps I was nervous, caught off guard while talking to someone I was really attracted to. Whatever the case, it simply wasn’t true. It was a slip of the tongue. I think I meant to say “I never go there anymore” or “I haven’t been there recently”—but instead, out came “I’ve never been there.”

“Yes, you have,” he replied instantly, an amused grin forming across his face. He looked at me with confusion.

I started cracking up. Yes, he was right. I have been to Kreuzberg. But I found the slip of my tongue so entertaining that I couldn’t help but play along with wherever this joke was leading us.

“No, I haven’t!” I poked back, just for the sake of the bit.

“Yes, you have.”

“How do you know?” I pushed.

“I’ve seen you there before. At their open mic comedy earlier this year.”

“What?! You were there?” I asked him. Like I said, it was the end of the year, and at this point, I had completely forgotten about that night—until now.

“Yeah. The night the guy was telling awful pedophilia jokes. You got up and left. I felt so bad for you as I was listening to him.”

My jaw dropped.

“You saw me leave?”

“I was watching from the top floor.”

“And you knew why I was leaving?”

“Of course.”

I stared at him in awe, jaw still theatrically dropped.

What a hilarious exchange. My strange slip of the tongue, falsely claiming “I’ve never been there,” brought forth the memory of the open mic comedy night I’d entirely forgotten about. And this boy, this sweet boy I was having the loveliest day with, just so happened to be there all those months ago. And the night was nothing but mundane to him, really. Just an average evening where he happened to witness me walk out of the event—and he just so happened to know exactly why, because he just so happens to be an incredibly attuned individual who just so happens to connect dots easily and empathize with others from a distance. I was shocked. Even the close friend I showed up to the event with that evening didn’t seem to fully understand how those pedophilia jokes were impacting me, or why I needed to excuse myself. But him? He knew exactly why I walked out that night—while I didn’t even know he was in the building that night, because he was watching from the top floor. He was one of those unknown faces peering down from the loft.

The bizarre avalanche of conversational mess happened so rapidly that I could barely contain how much it touched me. I stared into his eyes like I’d just been given the best gift of my life. I felt seen. And how euphoric it felt to be seen at that level, to have someone see my vulnerabilities so clearly and name them aloud, but in a casual way—not in a way that was trying to prove anything, not in a way that was trying to score points with me, simply an observation. In fact, it wasn’t supposed to come up in conversation at all, and he would have never mentioned it to me had it not been for my insane, hilarious, synchronistic slip of the tongue. It just came out of me, as if I was possessed by something, and I’m lucky it did, because I learned something about him in the process—I learned that he’s observant. I learned that some people know more about me, see more about me, than I’d like to admit. Certainly not everyone. Maybe just the special ones. Maybe just the people who choose to pay attention. Maybe just the people you cross paths with at the right or wrong times, in the right or wrong places, depending on who you’re asking. If you’re asking me, all of this felt right.

And then it hit me, fully and completely, like a ton of bricks—how strange it is to be known. How strange it is that we can be known so thoroughly, so deeply, so truly, and at times not even have a clue we’re being known at all. How strange it is that we can yearn so desperately to be known, and in our longing, in our pleading, in those moments where nobody understands, there might just be someone watching, someone understanding, someone knowing without you ever knowing it. Perhaps we’re never really at a loss for being known, but rather for knowing we’re being known, for those fleeting, euphoric moments of reflective perfection, where we fully register that we are known in the ways that we truly want to be. He knows me, I thought to myself, and in an instant, the rest of the world vanished. I was really, truly, deeply known.

Or at least it felt like that—for just a brief moment, as I stared him down in the middle of the café, as my jaw dropped in awe, as he so effortlessly revealed that he knew something about me that actually mattered, something other people can’t seem to bring themselves to know, something that feels so integral to truly knowing me. And I let myself recall my friend’s confusion as to why I decided to leave early that night. And I replayed the moment the guy at the bar laughed when I told him the jokes made me cry. And I retraced the steps I took walking myself home all those months ago. And I remembered how badly I wanted a hug more than anything else, how desperately I wished I had a mother’s arms to run into.

And nearly a year later, his simple comment, hitting me out of nowhere—so casually reading me, so clearly understanding what happened that night so many months ago—it was the hug I’d been waiting for. The warm hug of knowing. The delight of being known—really, truly, deeply known.