I Used Humour as Armour for Ten Years

In Accra, I was known among my friends as the one you called when things were heavy because I would make the heavy thing lighter. I was good at it genuinely - the timing, the specific absurdity, the way a well-placed observation could shift the emotional temperature of a room.

I found genuine pleasure in it and I am not here to pathologise something that is also a real skill and a real form of connection. But I am here to be honest about the other thing it was doing, which I understood only in my late twenties after a long and somewhat reluctant period of self-examination.

The humour had a defensive function that I had not acknowledged. Any conversation that was moving toward genuine vulnerability - mine, not other people's - had a way of being redirected by a joke at precisely the moment it was getting close to something real. I was not doing this consciously.

The redirection was reflexive and had been for so long that I could not reliably distinguish between joking because something was funny and joking because the alternative was exposure.

The consequence was that at 28, despite having a wide and warm social world that genuinely loved my company, I had almost no one who knew what I was actually struggling with. Not because I had concealed it through silence - silence would have been noticeable.

I had concealed it through comedy, which is invisible because it looks like engagement rather than avoidance. The moment I understood this most clearly was during a conversation with a friend who had just been through a hard experience and who, after sharing it with me, said something quietly: that he appreciated that I always made him laugh but that he sometimes wished I would just tell him if I was not okay.

He was not accusing me of anything. He was extending an invitation. I deflected it with a joke and he smiled but I could not stop thinking about it. I went to see a therapist for the first time at 29. The first three sessions I made her laugh a lot and disclosed very little.

She noticed this in the fourth session and named it without judgment, and the naming of it was what finally made the pattern visible enough to examine. The work of learning to say things directly, without the packaging of comedy to soften the exposure, was genuinely difficult and occasionally felt like removing a layer of skin.

What I found underneath was that people did not run from the unpackaged version. Most of them moved closer.