To Be Whole
Image by Gemini AI We live in a world that constantly asks us to earn our keep: not just financially, but emotionally and socially. From a young age, many of us learn that to be loved, we have to be something or do something. We become the high achiever, the reliable caretaker, the funny one… We put on a performance to justify taking up space. In David Grossman’s poignant novel, A Horse Walks into a Bar * , the narrator arrives at a startlingly quiet realisation: “ To be whole, it is enough to exist .” The story follows a washed-up comedian, Dovaleh, who uses self-deprecation, jokes, and hostility as armour. As a little boy, Dovaleh faced much hostility from companions at school and his own father at home. He learnt to walk on his hands in order to escape the punches from his peers. As an adult, he turns his deepest wounds into comedy: he is a stand-up comic by profession. The validation that comes from the audiences in the form of laughter is enough to please him, to giv...
