Simon Amstell: Set Free

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to stage...

Simon Amstell.

Hello.

I suppose the problem for humanity...

is there's a lot of people in here right now,

and everyone thinks that they're the special one,

even though all the evidence points towards the fact

that it is me.

I don't know why we need to feel so special as human beings.

We grasp for anything that will make us feel special.

I was dumped many years ago by somebody who went on to write an album.

I listened to the album thinking,

"I imagine a couple of these songs will be about me."

None of them.

The worst moment for me was seeing a picture of him online

being hugged by somebody who had also rejected me.

I sat there alone, thinking,

"I don't think there's any way that one of them is saying,

'How's Simon?'"

The therapist I saw for two years thought I needed to be so special

because I was terrified of intimacy.

In our first session, I was being quite funny,

and she said so wisely, "It's really good that you can be funny,

but, you know, you don't have to be funny here."

And I got what she was saying. I carried on talking.

And then she said,

"You know, you don't have to be interesting."

And then I was really confused and said,

"Do you want me to tell these stories but not as well?"

And what she wanted was for me to be authentic and grounded,

but I found that very difficult, because I'm so funny and interesting.

What I had to learn eventually was

it doesn't really matter how funny or interesting you think you can be.

You still can't get everyone to love you.

My dad, for example...

didn't come to the last couple of stand-up tours that I did,

and when I asked him why,

he said, "Well, I don't think you need my validation anymore, do you?"

And then he said that it wasn't his sort of thing.

And I wasn't brave enough to ask, "What? Comedy or me?"

For fear that he would say,

"Oh, no, I love comedy."

I realized in the end that my problem with my father is not my father.

It's my expectation of him as a father.

I thought, "Let's stop thinking of him as that

and just start thinking of him as a man who ejaculated."

Because often when men have ejaculated, they're tired.

You can't expect them to go on and love you.

I can't just keep screaming in my head for the rest of my life,

"If you can't love a child, don't ejaculate in a person.

Do it out of the window."

If I'm to focus on anything,

it should be on how grateful I am to my mom

for birthing me out of her body.

How can I ever thank her for that?

The best I can do is occasionally introduce her to a celebrity,

but is that enough?

"Thank you for your womb. Here's James Corden."

Not that my mom is perfect.

I had a memory of her screaming at my siblings and I one morning,

"One day, you'll come home from school and I'll be gone."

I reminded her of this, and she didn't remember,

but she said, "Look, I was a single parent."

And I said, "That's worse. One had already gone."

In a moment of openness on the phone recently with my mom,

she told me that when she was pregnant with me,

my dad wasn't being that great,

and a friend of hers called Mark took her out one day,

and he was so sweet and kind, she thought about leaving my father

and raising me with Mark instead.

She said, "Of course, I didn't do that, but that's why your middle name is Mark."

It's... it's very important not to talk to your parents.

But what are these problems? Are these problems?

I saw another therapist a while ago, and I was saying,

"Like, you know, compared to other people, what... what is any of this?"

And he said, "All feelings are valid."

He said, "If you lost a leg, and the person next door lost two legs,

you will still have lost a leg."

And I thought, "What is going on on this street?"

I think there have been problems. I think there have been problems.

I had a mild eating disorder a few years ago.

I don't know if it's an eating disorder.

I've never deliberately thrown up food,

but I have tried a bit too hard to poo. Now...

Is that... Is it an eating disorder

if once, to try and get something going, you poked a finger in? Is that...

It's not what you call classic bulimia, but it's something.

I don't know if that bit was worth the truth. I don't know.

So I hadn't seen my dad for a while,

and then I met up with him.

And his big news was he had trained to become a hypnotherapist,

which really angered me,

because I thought, "You can't be the therapist.

You're the trauma."

He then said that what would be great

is if I could introduce him to some of my crazy friends

so he could be a hypnotherapist to the stars.

I kept it all inside, because I thought, "Why express how I'm feeling to you now

when I can save it all up for a show that won't be your sort of thing?"

However, through this hypnotherapy training,

he developed a kind of emotional language that I hadn't witnessed in him before,

and we started talking about his very cold, distant mother.

And as he told me about her, I thought, "Oh, my God!

You are the more vulnerable one. You had the worst childhood.

I have to find some way to love you.

How did you turn it around, you sneaky, little hypnotist?"

I think maybe because of all that stuff,

I found it very difficult, or at least it took me a long time,

to become comfortable with the idea of being loved.

I just wasn't used intimacy, I suppose.

And then, when my boyfriend told me that he loved me,

it was a bit like what happened

when my brother cleaned his hamster's cage.

He'd never done that before,

and then when he cleaned the cage, the hamster died of shock.

Near the beginning of the relationship, we were in France together.

And it's really the most beautiful, authentic relationship I've ever been in.

And there were croissants.

And I think it's so good

because there is this real honesty between us.

We will talk about people who we find attractive.

That's so different to relationships I've been in in the past

where there was so much jealousy.

I was with someone for a while who was so jealous

I found myself having to say, "I really don't find anyone attractive.

And it's weird, because before I met you...

But they must have all moved."

In this relationship, we'll talk about people we find attractive.

We used to be a bit more sneaky about it.

Like, we'd go to see some ballet,

and we'd talk about the magic of the movements,

but we... we knew that what we were saying was,

"It'd be nice to take one home and lick him."

And we should be able to do that because the tickets are so expensive.

So, we were in France together,

and despite this being a near-perfect relationship,

or maybe because it's so perfect,

I fall asleep next to him,

and I have a dream that I'm in a sex dungeon

being seduced by--

I don't even know how to describe him other than "wet slut."

-I don't know. -

And it wasn't water. It was lubricant.

He... he was just covered.

He was covered in lubricant.

I should have known it was a dream, but my dreams aren't always this exciting.

The other night, I had a dream that I was in a queue.

And before I got to the end of the queue, I woke up.

So I said to this guy in the dungeon,

"It's lovely you've brought me here, but I'm in a relationship.

I can't really get involved."

And then I couldn't stop him, I think because he was so slippery.

And we did all kinds of sordid, wonderful things together.

But then, I thought, "Oh, my God! What have I done?

I've betrayed the best relationship I've ever been in.

What am I going to do? I've ruined my life."

And then I woke up.

I was in France. Everything was fine.

Everything was fine.

But then, for the next three days, all I could think was,

"I really loved that sex dungeon.

And is that who I really am?"

Because you can't argue with the unconscious.

Everything now just seems so appropriate and polite in real life.

"Do you want another croissant, Simon?"

"No, I want to shove this pain au chocolat up your ass."

"Your body's so dry."

I couldn't stop thinking that I was just this animal

who wanted to be in a dungeon,

and everything else is just a bit of conventional behavior.

And then...