Ep. 307: Healing is Hilarious
Rachel LaForce Got Sober On Accident, And Never Went Looking For A Way Back
Rachel LaForce didn't decide to get sober. She decided to not be dramatic about a breakup.
It was 2018. She was living with a boyfriend she already knew wasn't right, and he beat her to the punch: he came home and told her he didn't want to do this anymore. They still had to share an apartment for fifty days while she figured out the logistics of moving out, so she made herself one small rule to get through it. She wasn't going to drink while she was still living there. No big announcement, no plan past that. Just fifty days.
You don't go fifty days without a drink as a grown adult and come out the other side unchanged. Everything she'd been numbing came up. She kept sitting with it instead of running from it, and she just never went back to drinking. That accident cracked open a spiritual path that's run underneath everything she's built since, including the podcast she now hosts, Healing is Hilarious.
The person at the edge of the pool
Rachel has a specific person in mind every time she posts one of her videos, and it isn't her younger self. She's talked to that person in a hundred interviews and she's bored of the advice. The person she's actually talking to is the one standing at the edge of the pool, the way you did as a kid, working up the nerve to push yourself in.
"I know you know that you're ready to leave that relationship," she says. "I know that you know that you're ready to go back to school." Her whole body lights up describing it, because she remembers being that person. Every time she didn't think she could push herself out of the pool, she pushed. Her logic is simple: if she can do it, you can do it. She thinks people overcomplicate chasing their dreams, setting boundaries, and finding peace, when most of the time the only thing between you and the leap is admitting you already know.
Is it a choice
Rachel comes from a comedy background, which means her general rule is that almost anything is fair game to joke about, as long as you're not punching down. But she holds one line without exception: is it a choice?
That's why Spencer Pratt running for mayor gets the full bit treatment from her (a man who lost a million dollars on crystals believing he can win an election, and getting people to hand him money for it, "let that be a lesson to you," she says, "you're not dreaming big enough"), while trad wife culture actually makes her sad. Not because she thinks women shouldn't choose a traditional life. She thinks that's fine. What gets her is the culture that springs up around it, the reels of women filming themselves at Home Goods on a Tuesday like it's a flex, dressed up as safety when she reads it as internalized misogyny with a ring light. A grown woman choosing a life is fair game. A woman not choosing, and not being allowed to say so, isn't funny to her at all.
Comedy as the vehicle
The through-line in almost everything Rachel talks about, whether it's Trump on a $250 bill, Jeff Bezos in a spray tan, or "cortisol dressing" (her theory: it's just a fancy word for staying in your pajamas), is that she's using pop culture's dumbest moments to smuggle in something true. She didn't grow up thinking of herself as a pop culture girl. What she grew up as, before there was language for it, was an empath who assumed everyone else read a room exactly the way she did. She spent years thinking that was just how brains worked, until parenthood, perimenopause, and postpartum unmasked what she now understands as her neurodivergence.
She's not interested in dunking on people or telling them they've been fooled. Her stated line for the pop culture chaos of the moment: we heal the individual, and through the individual, we heal the collective. If she can get people laughing at the ridiculousness of a UFC fight on the White House lawn, she figures they might stick around for the harder conversation underneath it.
Fifty days turned into never going back. A pool ledge turned into a whole framework for change. If there's one thing to take from this conversation, it's that Rachel LaForce built an entire career, and a whole philosophy, out of refusing to make her own turning point a bigger deal than it needed to be. She just kept choosing what was uncomfortable, on purpose, until it wasn't.
xo,
Allison
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