"I'm Almost There": Finding Hope With Marc Maron
I can't believe I cried to a podcast.
Please come check out Ugly Flamingos at Q.E.D. Astoria on February 6 at 9pm. We have an amazing lineup of comedians and musicians. Tickets are $15.
It is a cold and windy night on the Upper East Side. I’m incredibly anxious. Shortly before I left, I went to go and certify for unemployment, and I received a notification from the New York Department of Labor that this would be the final payment that I’m eligible for after being laid off last year.
I have been actively applying to jobs since August 2023, when my former employer Hollywood Life was acquired by an outside company, terminating a large portion of the staff. Following a second acquisition, I was terminated as the new company that now owns HL has run the site and morale into the ground.
In 2024, I applied to over 500 jobs, with limited luck. So far in 2025, I’ve applied to about 50. Unemployment does not really provide an adequate substitution to what my salary was, but some form of income was helping to stay afloat. After receiving the notification, a pit hit my stomach. My heart started beating a little faster and depression started stopping me from applying to jobs.
Despite how unmotivated I’ve been, I was still dead set on going out and doing comedy at an 8pm open mic. I had an okay set. Nothing earth-shattering, but a few new ideas and jokes have been developing. After a few comics, I left the mic. I picked up a taquito at 7-11, and I started making my way to the subway.
Earlier in the day, I’d begun listening to a recent episode of Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, where he simply fielded questions from listeners. It was a bonus episode from his premium podcast feed, shared to coincide with release day landing on New Year’s Day.
Throughout the episode, he answered pieces that fans had been dying to know about his experience with interviewing people, how he got to where he is, etc. At the end, some of the questions got more serious, focusing on grief, death, legacy, and more. The final question was a relatively standard question where someone asked him to describe himself in 3 words. Maron sort of scoffed at the question, and then he proceeded to count out as he said “I’m almost there.”
Now, where Maron is heading to, I’m unsure. He’s incredibly accomplished, and to someone like me, it seems like he’s gotten to do everything he could possibly want. I also know that the want to do more never really goes away, but to someone like me, it looks like he’s “there.”
Still, 2024 coincidentally became one of the most trying years of my life. After getting laid off, clawing tooth and nail through unemployment, and not being where I want to be in comedy, I’ve had so many times that I felt discouraged. After going and working through a set of jokes at an open mic, I felt overwhelmed with emotion as Maron said “I’m almost there.”
I can’t confidently say that I’m “almost” anywhere that I want to be in my career or life. The past year has been difficult, filled with uncertainty, self-doubt, anger, resentment, and any slew of negative emotions. Still, I suppose that by continuing on, I’m closer to where I want to be than not. I’ve decided not to stay stagnant, and as I rode the escalator down to the Q train, I could feel tears forming in my eyes.
It feels dumb to receive some sense of hope from a parasocial relationship that I have with a podcast host and comedian who I admire, but I’m sure I’m not the only one. I suppose we see whatever signs that we want to see. My sign came in listening to a mailbag podcast episode, but it’s also been in the music that I listen to, books I read, conversations with people, etc.
Even though I started to feel my eyes welling up, it couldn’t last long, because as I looked down the escalator, I saw another comic that was just at the open mic, and I couldn’t let them see that I was crying on the subway.