Here's the thing about self esteem…

It helps you shine the light on what's really goin on. When I was little, my Mum dressed me like a boy. I always wanted to be sexy but because of this I had really bad identity problems.

I always thought I was ugly.

That, coupled with trying to be a supah dupah good girl, made for a exhaustive navigation through reality.

I had friends steal my boyfriends all the time. They would say, "Sue, guys check you out all the time and you don't even notice" and I thought that was good because it meant that I wasn't vain.

Well it instead made me lose all the opportunities for a guy because they would go after them and get them.

I said this on WTF with Marc Maron and I'll say it again.

One of the most profound experiences that I ever had in therapy was when I was telling a story about a cute guy at the gym who was hanging all over me.

As I was tellin it, I mentioned that the girl behind the desk was all over him.

I made it sound like I didn't care because I thought I didn't.

Well all my therapist did was shift in her chair and say, "Well, someone's got to get the last piece of cake" and I felt a rage from the tip of my toes to the top of my head.

I was like "I WANT THE LAST PEICE OF CAKE!"

I had never tapped into my desire before, let alone my sexual desire but boy when I did!

Since then, I have learned how to have desire and to express it.

I can happily report that I finally feel really, really sexy.

That being said, I am realizing how many guys have thought that throughout my life it has to do with my looks, but so much more.

It's my generosity, my fun, my love, my sense of humor, my body, my brains, my strength, etc.

So here's where this all comes into play.

I was dating a guy, who to the naked eye, appeared to be a sexual human being.

But when I sent him sexy pics, he would ignore them.

It was OK because I thought maybe he's just not into that, but my second thought was, but every other guy I've ever sent a sexy pic to said "more" right away.

It's funny as I type this I wonder if those thoughts were reversed.

First, I probably thought, that's weird, then I justified it by defending him.

Then there was another time where we we totally acting out a sexy scene: he was shaving his beard while I watched. (That's all I'll say about that for the sake of privacy.)

Well we got into bed and.................................he fell asleep.

My first thought was, oh he must be tired, then my second thought was, I've never been in bed with a guy who could not keep his hands off me." And my third thought was, this is the beginning of this relationship so this can't be good.

Again, the thoughts were probably switched. My first thought was probably, what's wrong with this guy? Usually guys can't keep their hands off of me. Then the second thought was to justify it, under the guise of bein a supah dupah good girl.

I write this not to toot my own horn. I write this to show that if my self-esteem was lower I would have spent the rest of the relationship trying to prove that I was desirable, blaming myself for whatever his block was, and squelching my own desires to make him feel comfortable, which in turn would squelch us both.

Sex is life.

I did try to talk about it to no avail, cause that 's what right sized, regular, good girls do.

I wanted a sexual relationship, and he wasn't willing to talk about it, so I was able to make the decision to end the relationship.

"It's you, it's not me" is what I said when I ended it.

Me on WTF with Marc Maron !!!!

Marc puts aside his fear of Boston Natives to welcome the thickly accented and very funny Sue Costello to the garage. Sue talks about how the bottom dropped out on her rising comedy career and how an unlikely role in The Fighter prepped her for a comeback.

Meditation is the pause, the pause is the action and the action is spirituality

Be still and I know that I am. Even a star needs to pull in on itself in order to pulsate out. Sometimes one of the hardest actions in the world is to do nothing.

Silence.

It takes every muscle in my body.

When provoked and rightly so, the first instinct it to retaliate.

But in the long run, I’m the one who suffers.

Serena Williams attacked the judge at the US Open this weekend.

She flew off the handle.

She was mad, she thought the judge was being hard on her because she was black.

That was her past, being projected into the present, to create an unhappy future.

She was so emotional that she based what was goin on on something old in her nervous system.

An old wound.

You see the judge made the legal call.

But Serena was so emotional that she couldn't even stop herself to think for a second.

She reacted from her wound.

She knows the rules. She knows that any distraction during a time like this can be fatal.

Yet, even if she knew it, even if she cared, her lack of impulse control, her need to protect that wound, made her lose that match.

It's a fact.

Not only that, but she tried to bully that judge, to scare her.

But what do we know about bullies?

They are dumb. Not the person, but the bully behavior makes the person act like a dummy.

They are scared, so they scare others. But if the other person has more internal fortitude, if they have healed their wound and they don't feed into the bully, the bully crumbles in on themselves.

If the bully has nothing to push up against, they have to implode.

Fact.

Meditation is not just some weird thing that only wicked spiritual people do. It's a practice that you can take and apply to your everyday human life.

It actually helps you win, because most people have impulse control problems. They have wounds.

So, if you are the one who can remain still while others around you are acting out, you win in the long run.

Internal fortitude means guts; guts to care enough about yourself to protect yourself from a bully, which in the long run protects the bully because they have to suffer the consequences of their own behavior.

You can sit and listen and react to what is REALLY going on. You can stand up with your guts and sometime standing up means sitting down.

This is how the wound heals.

Fact.

The way to do this is to clean out all the things about you're personality that you don't think are part of who you are authentically.

Things, behaviors that you have developed to survive.

I have a secret: those things you developed to help you survive are turning on you and ruining your life.

Find your guts.

The ugly is not you. It's the wound you've created, the puss needs to get to the air to heal.

Once it heals, only the real you is left. Your guts — which is God, which has been in you all along.

The compass that will help you navigate a better life.

And that is when the miracle happens. You are actually listening, not projecting your past into your present to make an awful future.

Slow down. It might hurt at first to not say everything that's on your mind, but once you practice, you might even enjoy only sayin the things that actually mean something to you.

Then the words you say or don't say will match up with the authentic you to create a future different from your past.

And maybe, just maybe, others will slow down too because usually when you set a boundary with someone who has no impulse control they are so grateful because they can't do it for themselves.

Most people don't care enough about themselves to say something.

That is how you stand up to a bully and then the wound of the world begins to heal as well.

I'm on fiah

…and I'm burnin up for your love. Just now had a second to sit down and write. I've been so busy. I performed Minus 32 Million Words on Nantucket and they LOVED it. I'm so excited, but most importantly I'm blown away by the fact that I'm doing this all by myself. I have no representation (except God) and I am re-building my career one step at a time with lots of love.

The main reason for this is that I have worked so hard to become a person who can be around people, a person who cares about people but doesn't take abuse.

I ask myself why would I have someone else handle me for me?

I am responsible for my own life, for living in the world exactly how God made me.

Lately so many people have been telling me how smart I am. They have told me that my whole adult life.

In high school they told me differently. Also, as a child, there were many adults who didn't want me to realize how smart I was because (a) I would see and understand their bad behavior and (b) I would not take care of them and their bad behavior if I did.

They squelched me, but really they didn't — I squelched me.

I took my own fiah and turned it on myself and burned down everything around me.

I would hear people say that I was smart in my adult life and I would go to bed.

The anger was unbearable. I would think, "they were wrong about me."

Now I go out into the world more with those words, "I am smart" and they give me the confidence to keep my fiah burning in a healthy way.

I'm proud to say that instead of smoldering in the dark I'm setting the world on fiah in a contained, concise, purposeful way.

LOVE IS MY FIAH and I love me first, then I can't help but love you.

Also, feel free to light your fiah off of mine — just don't try to take it all or we'll both burn to the ground!

I get knocked down..

..but I get up again. The other day I was on a great clip with my career, feeling really good and I got a phone call that one of my friends was in the hospital and they didn't know if he was going to make it through the day.

It hit me like a ton of bricks.

I have had bad news before but something about that phone call, that idea that I could get another one telling me either he's gonna live or he's gonna die.

I was so uncomfortable the entire day. I was prickly, if you will.

It's easy for me to go on every day spouting my thoughts and beliefs about hope, but it’s times like these where faith is tempted.

I always think to myself when I am in pain, don't make anything worse.

Whether or not the pain is inflicted by a person or an event, the pain is still the same.

Being able to tolerate it without taking it out on someone else is the test that I always give myself.

My friend turned the corner and is going to be OK.

That's the phone call I got instead of the other one.

I am just starting to get my bearings back today and it's almost a week since I got the news.

Okay you wanna hear something CRAZY? An earthquake just hit the East Coast as I'm writing about getting knocked down.

My book shelves were shaking, I was on the phone with my friend and I felt the apartment shake then a few minutes later I saw the book shelves shaking.

So I ran down the stairs outside and the people there didn't feel anything.

Hmm…

Just goes to show you: what affects one person might not affect another person.

That being said I am affected by everything all the time. I'm sitting here scared right now and my first thought is, don't make anything worse.

And as for me — as for my friend — we are hopeful because as long as there is breath there is hope.

We get knocked down, but we get up again — even though it might take a few days to regroup.

Why are we here?

I woke up to some really sad news today. I was on the phone with one of my friends from Boston and he was telling me that another one of our friends was in the hospital, in very bad shape. As he was talking he was going in out of denial and so was I. He was even able to articulate that he was in denial.

I am still processing the conversation. I have no idea sometimes how to have my feelings, but the one thing I do know is that I want to have them. It has been my experience that if I go into denial those feeling manifest in some other way. Denial is healthy to some extent because it protects the body from taking in too much information too quickly.

When something tragic happens, I always think, why are we here? Life can be so random and oftentimes unfair, so how the hell do we get up everyday and keep going?

And then I always find my hope. I always say to myself, because that's why we are here: to grow spiritually, to be alive.

We are completely powerless over the circumstances outside of ourselves but we do have some control over how we react to them and how we process things. I do believe we can mourn anything, but we have to mourn it. We have to go right at it, feel it and then let it go. We then and only then can find peace with such an out-of-control world.

Because I ask you this: if you consider all the bad things that have happened to you in your life, why do you still get up everyday? Why do you still look for love? Why do you still care?

Because that's why we are here: not to make sense out of it all but to combat our denial. We are only here for as long as we are. We are here to be alive, until one day we are randomly not. We keep going and continue to hope that things get better because they always do…until we are dead, and who knows if that's better or worse?

I'm a person, who happens to be a woman,who happens to do comedy, who happens to HI- larious

Okay here goes: I've been doing stand up for almost 20 years now and I've never, ever wanted to talk or write about this thing, this unspoken thing, called sexism and this code of silence that comes along with it.

But I realize now that by not saying anything I am aiding and abetting it.

Whenever someone asks me which comics I admire, it's always the black guys: Chris Rock, Richard Prior, Eddie Murphy, etc.

If I had to guess, it's because they can freely stand on stage and talk about their oppression.

If a woman does that, the whole audience, including the women, squeeze their butt cheeks together. No one really wants to hear it.

When I did Last Comic Standing they interviewed my friend’s 4-year old who called me "Costello". They asked, "Do you think Costello is funny?" She said "No." Everyone laughed, they shut off the cameras, and away they went.

A few minutes later we found that little girl crying and when her mum asked her what was wrong, she said "I said Costello was not funny because I wanted to say she was pretty, because you can't be both.”

I had a club owner in NYC say to me recently, "Sue, you kill more often than any other comic I have at the club, but I hesitate to tell you that because you will use it against me, to get more spots."

Again, I caved. But as I sit here now I think wouldn't you want me to do more spots? Isn't that the best business decision?

I have always known I was funny, not only by my own measure, but by the consistency with which I kill.

I am one of the very few female comics to have had a sitcom based on her life.

When I came home to NYC after my TV show Costello got canceled, I went to a Women in Comedy panel. I raised my hand and spoke about how I thought we needed to admit to the sexism that we faced in the business in order to figure out a healthy way to combat it. I was met with screams from all the women.

I was young and just had my ass kicked in Hollywood, so I left, but looking back, I should have stayed. I should have been someone they were listening to.

Hadn't I just come back from the front lines?

Then I think, you know why they weren't listening to me? Because I wasn't completely committed to what I was saying. The first sign of resistance, I ran.

I ran right into that unspoken dynamic where women take each other down. And I get it, women get fewer spots and if there is only one spot, it's really hard for women to help others get it.

I have never done the Montreal Comedy Festival, properly.

It's not for lack of trying. Since they wouldn't book me as a stand up on any of the main shows, I had them come see my one-woman play Minus 32 Million Words thinking maybe I could get in that way. A show BTW that Patricia Clarkson, Colin Quinn, Molly Shannon, and Kevin Nealon have all raved about.

They said they weren't interested. I even emailed the woman and said, "I hope this has nothing to do with anything I've ever done because I vaguely remember my agent telling me that they you wanted me to do Montreal when my show was in pre-production and my agent told me not to.” Again, I took responsibility. I said, “I should have made my own decisions but I wasn't paying enough attention to my career because I wasn't myself back then, because my brother was lying in a hospital in Boston paralyzed and almost dead.”

To which I got the response, "Of course there are no bad feelings and I'm sorry to hear about your brother, I had no idea."

My brother breaking his neck is a one of the biggest parts in my show and this was the person who told me they didn't like it.

Again I thought, maybe she was having a bad night. Let me email her boss and ask for them to see it again.

I invited them to see it when I performed it (to a standing ovation) the night after the Academy Awards, where the movie The Fighter that I was in had just won a bunch of Oscars.

They never showed.

I followed up again to no avail.

I have never done a Comedy Central Half Hour. I've been told they don't know what to do with my energy.

I've never done a lot of shows.

None of this is for lack of trying. I have persistently and gracefully tried.

I had a manger who wanted to work with me a few years back and called around to see what my reputation was and he said, 'You'd be hard pressed to find someone in Hollywood who doesn't like Sue Costello."

So I sit here and think "what's the problem?" I never wanted to write about being a woman, a problem due to my own sexism. It's hard to tolerate that just because I'm a woman, I don't get certain opportunities.

But I figure instead of trying to tell others to admit to it, I should take some responsibility and admit to my own sexism and how I have been feeding into this unspoken agreement.

Another thing I'm sure that can be said about me is that I'm honest and that I have integrity but I kinda have been only doing that half way. If I'm really honest, I will have the balls, if you will, to just say it.

Maybe my problem is that I've been too much of a good girl. If I'm just a girl maybe eventually they will see me, but truthfully I’ve been hiding in public, playing the victim expecting them to do it for me. Feeding into the stereotype that I've been trying to avoid of the helpless victim who is secretly jealous of the boys.

You see I have a strong resistance to the comedy business and the way they can turn women into men in order for everyone to feel comfortable. I have always wanted to maintain my femininity and sexuality, but somewhere along the way I think I've used it as an excuse to cover my own sexism. I have been an accomplice.

I could argue that women aren't as funny because they don't get as much stage time. I could argue that it's harder to be funny because when I was done with my set one night, the club owner asked me to take off my shirt and he would then give me my check. I could argue that there are both women and men in positions of power who hate women. I could argue that the audiences judge women more, but I really can't, because all of that has happened to me and I'm still HI-larious.

So my only argument is I am part in this because I think I tricked myself into thinking that I was powerful enough to go around the industry, but that's another coping mechanism. I pretend to be more powerful than I am because I’m afraid to accept the powerlessness of being a woman. I can't go around an industry I need. Well, let me re phrase that — an industry that I want, I want real bad.

It's their industry and they can still say "no" to me, it's their prerogative.

But I'm still gonna stand up and ask for it, without taking someone else down. I guess it's taken me twenty years to become the woman I want to be and twenty years for me to see that I've been afraid that if I said something, they wouldn't let me do these shows. Well, really it's been twenty years so I figure I'll take a risk and admit my desire, my desire to be seen.

I am a person, who happens to be a woman who happens to be HI-larious, who happens to want to be very successful.

I'm workin on it

Oh boy I've been writing a blog about being a woman in comedy for over a week now. I wanted to take my time because I want to make sure it says exactly what I want.

In the meantime I've been working by tooshie off. I have my book out to a few peeps. I am gearing up to do Minus 32 Million Words in Nantucket on Aug 30th. I'm headlining at Gotham Comedy Club Tomorrow night and much much more.

I was thinking this morning as I was listening to the song "Can't Get Next To You" about that line and the line "I build a castle from a single grain of sand" and how much my castle grew when I stopped trying to get so close to others.

I have no agent, no manager, no nuthin. I do all my work myself.

A few years back I decided to cut out the middle man. I was sick of wasting time trying to get someone to see my vision and do the work that I was totally capable of doing, but scared to do.

I met someone recently who worked for a BIG agency. They told me that they were totally addicted to drugs. They spent their entire day trying not get caught. I sat there and thought (a) I'm glad this person is not hurting themselves anymore and (b) I had a vision of me sitting on my couch thinking, Why haven't they called me? They hate me.

Time to put the big girl pants on.