“I AM GOING TO BE FURIOUSLY HAPPY, OUT OF SHEER SPITE.”

Ah, Jenny Lawson. You magnificent unicorn. I loved Let’s Pretend This Never Happened when it came out (and I recently revisited it on audiobook, which made it even funnier) and while Furiously Happy touches more on Lawson’s depression and anxiety, she still manages to infuse it with that special Bloggess touch.

“It’s about taking those moments when things are fine and making them amazing, because those moments are what make us who we are, and they’re the same moments we take into battle with us”

Lawson mentions her mental health issues a few times in her first book, but Let’s Pretend focused a bit more on her crazy childhood than her crazy mind (although I remember the chapter about visiting a blogging event fixates on it pretty heavily). Her blog, however, features it quite often, and her community of commentators provide encouragement and share their own stories each time. That community seems to sustain her, in a lot of ways, and she gives back just as much as she can. So she spends a lot of time in this book talking about her own issues (constant anxiety, intermittent depression, plus autoimmune problems that occasionally render her bedridden), and she does a great job of doing so honestly, but with that dark humor that we all love her for.

Whether or not you suffer from depression, or anxiety, or anything else that Lawson mentions in her stories, surely someone in your life does. I myself have anxiety issues (which manifest as OCD and have gotten steadily worse over the past five years), but I rarely talk about them because either people don’t take it seriously (“Oh, everyone’s OCD”) or I end up sounding like a complete weirdo when I describe it. So I keep my mouth shut. On the other hand, I have friends and family members who suffer from depression and I have no idea how to talk to them about it. Mental health issues have such a stigma about them, and that won’t change until people bring them out into the light and discuss them openly. Lawson has made a wonderful step towards that goal.