When I Think About Myself - Analysis

Laughter as a survival reflex, not a punchline

The poem’s central claim is that the speaker’s laughter is a hard-earned strategy for staying alive inside a life that keeps trying to shrink her. From the first lines, I almost laugh myself to death lands as more than exaggeration: the joke is not simply amusing; it is dangerous, bodily, near-fatal. The speaker frames her whole life as performance—A dance that’s walked, A song that’s spoke—as if even ordinary movement and speech have been turned into acts she must deliver for someone else’s world.

The repeated return to When I think about myself feels like a ritual check-in: each time she looks straight at her own circumstances, the only safe response is laughter so intense it threatens to become choking. Humor here reads like a pressure valve, releasing what could otherwise become rage, grief, or despair.

Sixty years of being made small

The second stanza sharpens the poem’s social reality: Sixty years in these folks’ world locates her inside a world owned—socially and economically—by these folks, not by her. The humiliation is concentrated in one cutting detail: The child I works for calls me girl. Age and experience don’t protect her from being renamed as someone lesser; even a child can rehearse the hierarchy.

Her response—I say “Yes ma'am”—is not consent but tactics, a phrase spoken for working's sake. The poem doesn’t romanticize this: it shows the cost of living by accommodation, and the way dignity must sometimes be hidden inside obedience.

Too proud to bend, / Too poor to break

The tight contradiction at the center of the poem is captured in the couplet Too proud to bend, Too poor to break. Pride and poverty pull her in opposite directions: pride refuses submission, but poverty forces endurance. Bend suggests bowing, surrender; break suggests the final snapping of spirit or body. The speaker is caught between them, and her laughter becomes the third option—an expression that lets her acknowledge the absurdity without giving her oppressors the satisfaction of seeing her collapse.

That’s why the laughter is so physical: stomach ache, almost choke. The poem insists that oppression is not abstract; it sits in the throat and gut.

The turn: from laughing at herself to crying for her people

The last stanza pivots outward: My folks can make me split my side, and the focus slides from myself to my folks. The community’s storytelling is so extravagant it sound just like lying, but the poem treats this not as deceit—more as a creative necessity, a way of making life bearable through tall tales. Yet the stanza’s central image is bitterly exact: They grow the fruit, / But eat the rind. The people who do the labor don’t get the sweetness; they are left with scraps.

In the final turn, laughter crosses a border into grief: I laugh until I start to crying. The poem ends not on the individual’s private joke but on collective pain, as if the speaker can laugh at her own predicament—barely—but cannot keep laughing when she sees the pattern repeated across her people’s lives.

A sharp question the poem leaves hanging

When the speaker laughs for working's sake, is she protecting herself from humiliation—or protecting the system from her anger? The poem’s body-language of laughter—choking, aching, crying—suggests that what looks like lightness is actually a clenched endurance, a way to keep going in these folks’ world without letting it have her whole self.