Former Comedy Central Exec Tara Schuster Uses Humor As Door Into Discussing Her Darkest Days

Tara Schuster may not have been a household name like the talent she worked with for nearly a decade as a development executive at Comedy Central on series including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Key & Peele.

But she definitively understands the magic of using humor—as well as hefty doses of vulnerability, relatability and candid guidance—when it comes to sharing her own story of healing.

“One thing I learned at Comedy Central, particularly from Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, is that a sketch works because you as an audience member relate to the truth underneath of it. It’s something you always knew but you didn’t know how to articulate it,” Schuster says.

“And that’s why I think comedy is so powerful in mental health. Because you already know it; you already sense it. It just took an artist to pull it out of you and show you a mirror or a different perspective. When you can really tap into something more universal that we all share, I think that’s the way.”

Schuster’s recently released book Glow in the F*cking Dark: Simple Practices to Heal Your Soul, From Someone Who Learned the Hard Way taps heavily into her pandora’s box of trauma dating back to a childhood pock-marked by neglect. It chronicles what helped her claw her way out of her darkest depression after those wounds ran rampant when she was laid off from her job in 2020 and co-mingled with an identity crisis that set in after she lost her association as a player in the entertainment industry.

“I had a really terrible childhood, and I looked at work as my great salvation. My job gave me the status, the acceptance I had so craved growing up,” she says. “I always had the coolest job. I was going to comedy shows, I was going to the Emmys, to these parties. I was super glamorous from the outside, but it was a total distraction. It was like, ‘Look over here; don’t look at 25 years of complex trauma.’”

The tome opens by bringing readers right into Schuster’s rock bottom. One night while she was driving, she experienced a life-threatening dissociative episode. “I could see my hands but they didn’t feel like my hands, and it looked like they were floating above the steering wheel,” she recalls. “I felt full-body sick and for the first time ever I was forced to pull over and face the problem.”

While she praises Taylor Tomlinson as one of “a limited number of comedians speaking out loud about it,” Schuster says both comedy and conversations in Hollywood addressing mental health remain few and far between.

“The biggest thing I see is there is such a deep stigma, still, towards anxiety and depression, towards any mental health issues within Hollywood,” she says. “And I’ve seen through my own work that humor is such a good way into people. Because if you laugh, you have to let down your guard. You have to be vulnerable to people. And so I think it’s really an excellent tool for talking about mental health, but I think the executives are afraid. Nobody wants admit they are struggling.”

Glow In the F*ing Dark is Schuster’s second book, following her similarly irreverent self-care guide Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies, which was published in February 202o.

“This new book has been hard for me because it is so much deeper than my first book,” she says. “It’s been scary. I’m really vulnerable about topics that you’re really not supposed to talk about like suicidal ideation, which I go into in depth and try to make funny in a way.”

That chapter in particular, she notes, “is something I hope really resonates both with people who have contemplated suicidal ideation and their loved ones. Because it’s really hard to understand if you have not, and I would really like to give my experience to the friends and family of those who do so there’s more compassion.

“I think that’s what’s missing from a lot of us—compassion. And if you don’t have self-compassion, it’s really difficult to extend it to anyone else,” she says, recounting one of her own hard-learned lessons in not always being consistent with her self-care rituals. “I’ve realized rejecting yourself, criticizing yourself… you cannot hate your way to better health. It’s just not possible.

“So when I fall off the wagon on a routine, I say, ‘That’s OK sweetheart, let’s try again tomorrow.’ That’s self-acceptance. Not rejecting my flaws, not rejecting the deepest darkest parts of me. I don’t reject my depression; I work with my depression. It’s been mind-blowing to me how much easier my life is when I accept all of these parts of me as opposed to trying to get rid of or hating on these parts of me,” Schuster says.

Noting she was “completely unself-aware for the first 25 years of my life,” she adds, “I didn’t know what emotional regulation was, or contentment, and it really took every last drop of my soul to pull myself out and then do 10 years of studying to become a certain level of self awareness—and I have so much more to go. I only say that because if I could do it, any one can do it. I’m not special. It just takes work.”