I was so looking forward to 2022

It's January 1st, 2022. I just did my first show of the year and I bombed. Not only that, I was the worst performer of the night. And that's not even a matter of opinion. We had the Ong Show, which is sort of a gameshow format where the audience gets to decide if they want you to keep performing and I only performed for 4 minutes. Everybody else did way longer sets than me, which means I was objectively, and by far, the worst performer tonight.

Last night, I bombed as well. I did a 30-minute set on my livestream and at first, I was getting some laughs but towards the end, everyone stopped sending the laughing emojis. I was just glad I managed to get through it and I told myself that was the last time I would commit to doing an online set. I would go back to live performances where I'm appreciated. And then I bombed at tonight's show.

So ended 2021 by bombing and started 2022 by bombing.

The sad thing is, out of all the performers tonight, I'd been doing comedy the longest. I've been doing this for over 9 years and I have about a half-hour of usable material, which means I wrote about 3.3 minutes a year. I thought if I worked at it, maybe I can build this up to be a full hour this year, which means I need to write about as many jokes in the next 12 months as I had in the past 9 years. I know it seems like a deluded idea, but I really felt that I could do it. And now, I'm finding out that even the 30-minutes that I have now isn't even that good.

For the past 9 years, comedy has been a big part of my identity. It was just always the one thing I could hang on to to keep me sane. I may suck at everything else, but I had this one thing I was good at. And now I think maybe I suck at this too. Maybe I was never funny. Or maybe I used to be funny and I'm not funny anymore. All the signs were there. I don't get asked to be in a lot of shows. Nobody asks me to open for them. I have practically 0 fans. I made all kinds of excuses, maybe they don't know how good I am yet. Maybe I haven't found my audience yet. Maybe I'm ahead of my time in Malaysia. No, I just suck. That's the real reason. It all makes sense now.

I don't really know what to do. All I know is I'm not giving up comedy. I wish I could and never have to feel this way again. 

But I can't. I have nothing else. 

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