Yesterday my doctor told me I was broken, and—shockingly—that’s when I finally understood why Peanuts is funny.
Until that moment, Peanuts had always struck me as the slowest, saddest, most inexplicably beloved snoozefest this country has ever mass-distributed. Now? Oh, I get it. I get why Charlie Brown keeps trudging back to that football. I get why the adults all talk in wah-wah nonsense. I get the whole grayscale, existential doom-as-childhood-charm aesthetic. Because there I was yesterday, sitting on that crinkly paper like a grown-up Peanuts character—hair slightly frizzy, dignity slightly compromised—getting emotionally bludgeoned by someone who pretended he was offering me wisdom.
This life-changing triumph of imagination, this universe-level skill of connecting the dots, has been a long time coming.
Young Me vs. Schulz: The Original Grudge Match
In grade school, I wrote a letter to the editor of our local paper explaining why Peanuts was the worst comic in history and should be summarily banned from the funnies. I laid out the case with great research and even greater authority: the grown-ups clearly had undiagnosed speech disorders; Woodstock was a flying trauma victim; Pigpen was being neglected by every adult in a five-mile radius; Snoopy was flouting leash laws; Lucy was one bad day away from juvie; and then there was Charlie Brown and that endlessly weaponized football. This was NOT a comic. This was a goddamn American tragedy.
I was eight.
My one-kid crusade to purge existential humor from the newspaper fell on deaf ears, and Peanuts endured. (Don’t get Young Me started on Garfield.) And my hatred of the strip endured, too, for decades—until yesterday.
Enter: The Doctor Who Should’ve Been Voiced by a Trombone
My doctor walked into the room, sat down, glanced at my chart like it had personally inconvenienced him and sighed dramatically: “Doctors like me, we hate treating patients like you. You come in with your lists of symptoms and questions. You act ‘chippy’ because of all the other doctors who haven’t listened to you. You all get defensive.”
Yikes. Even Lucy would’ve paused before opening with that.
I looked down at the list in my hand. Oh. Okay. We’re skipping foreplay and going straight to emotional disembowelment. Great. Perfect. Delightful. Why not. Let’s go for the high score today.
“I mean this in the nicest way, but you’re part of the Land of Broken Toys. No offense.”
No offense? NO OFFENSE? If “no offense” were a magical get-out-of-jail-free card, every marriage counselor in America would be out of work.
And this doctor—who allegedly trained somewhere not in the Caymans—just called me defective with the tone you’d use to describe a whimsical Etsy ornament.
Reader, I’d love to say I stood up, planted my feet like Charlie Brown preparing for a righteous kick, and told him off—but I didn’t.
No, I LAUGHED when he told me I was broken. I made jokes. I kept it light. Like he hadn’t just bulldozed my dignity. Because I needed him to help me. And he wouldn’t help me if he was annoyed.
What is a doctor without a patient? On vacation. What is a patient without a doctor? Fucked.
“Appeasement Response” or Thanks for the Free Psychiatry, Dr. Snoopy
Then he hit me with this one:
“The way you’re talking right now? All upbeat and to-the-point, that’s called an appeasement response. You do it because of trauma.”
Wow, I’m so glad I have a cardiologist who won’t give me advice on headaches because it’s “not his area,” here to diagnose my speech mannerisms. He didn’t say it for my benefit. He said it to reassert power, to shape the narrative, to keep me compliant, to psychoanalyze me instead of treating me.
Again, I’d love to say I called him out. I’d love to say this was the first time I’ve been in this situation. But I didn’t. And it’s not.
Hello, everyone. My name is Charlie Brown, and this is my football.
The Great Pumpkin of Ableism Rises
“I won’t tell you not to get pregnant. But you feel bad now? How are you going to take care of a baby when it’s born? You can’t put them back in once they’re out, dear.”
Because nothing screams “medical expertise” like infantilizing your patient and disability-shaming.
And let’s be clear: what he said wasn’t “medical advice.” It wasn’t even doctor-adjacent. It was disability shaming with the bedside manner of a printer jam. He didn’t say, “Pregnancy could be physically demanding because of XYZ” or “We’d want to monitor you closely” or even the classic doctor favorite, “Hmm.” No. He skipped right to, “How will you take care of a baby?” as if disabled people have never once raised children in the history of humanity.
And the wild part? He made this sweeping declaration about my alleged inability to parent without even asking the most basic questions. Do I have support? Community? Accommodations? He didn’t care. He immediately filled in the rest of the story with his own eugenics-flavored Mad Libs. In his mind, parenting is done in a vacuum, and my vacuum is apparently haunted. Meanwhile, actual disabled parents all over the world are packing lunches, filling out school forms, and arguing with toddlers about why we don’t eat rocks. But sure, doctor, tell me more about how you have decided I’m unfit.
Lucy Charges Five Cents, This Man Bills My Insurance
Then: “The treatment that would help you is a weekly IV… but you know how hard that is to get through insurance? I’m not going to suggest it. Too much paperwork. Do you know how much paperwork us doctors have to fill out? I feel bad for us.”
So he knows what would help me. He’s just choosing not to do it. Because it’s annoying. Cool cool cool cool cool cool.
Imagine a firefighter calmly explaining that the hose would put out your house fire, but the nozzle is kind of hard to twist, so… good luck with the flames, sweetheart.
The truth is, he wasn’t evaluating my health or my capacity to parent or anything rooted in reality. He was protecting his own convenience. And when a doctor decides your existence is too inconvenient, suddenly everything about you gets recast as a flaw: your symptoms, your tone, your questions, your body, your future hypothetical baby. You become a “broken toy” and he becomes the benevolent owner who sadly just can’t fix you. It’s patronizing, it’s lazy, and it’s the medical equivalent of Lucy yanking the football away: predictable, humiliating, and somehow always your fault.
Fragile? No. Just Tired of Adult Voices Going Wah-Wah
He added, “I bet you know people in your family who are fragile like you.” I don’t consider myself fragile. And I don’t know anyone else in my family with this condition—but he didn’t ask.
What about my family history? He didn’t bother with questions. He just said not to worry about it. Or go to the ER if I felt sick.
It was at that moment—truly, spiritually—that I became Charlie Brown. Because even when you try to be polite, to be precise, to be soft enough that no one accuses you of anything… the football still gets pulled back.
Eventually, I put my lists away. Not out of defeat—out of recognition. Recognition that this wasn’t a medical appointment. It was a power ritual. And when I finally snapped, I snapped politely. LIKE A LADY. I texted my friends that he was the biggest asshole alive. (A lie. He’s not even top 20.)
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. The injustice. The imbalance. The absurdity. The way systems shape you into silence, then punish you for being silent. The way you learn to swallow the scream, to laugh instead of cry, to stay pleasant because your survival depends on it.
And eventually you understand—really understand—why Charlie Brown keeps trying. Because the alternative is giving up entirely, becoming one of the adults who only speaks in muffled nonsense and bureaucratic vagueness. You keep running at the football because the fight to stay human requires at least the attempt at hope.
Good Grief, Healthcare
I walked out of that office, and, suddenly, Peanuts was hilarious. I understand why the strip has endured. The adults don’t understand you. They’re not going to. You get knocked down. You get dismissed. You get analyzed instead of helped. And the whole world expects you to stay grateful, cheerful, nonthreatening.
It’s not a classic because it’s traditionally funny. It’s classic because the tragedy is familiar. And if you can’t laugh at the tragedy, you’ll implode.
Oh, that Charlie Brown… when will he learn? Probably the same day my doctor does.
Image Credit: Pankaj Shah
Description: Image of graffiti. Charlie brown has a cigarette in his mouth and is holding a can of gasoline.