“Pudding wrestling with kangaroos”

The Northwest weather is conducive to naps. I’ve probably taken a few too many naps in the past few months to be considered healthy. But now that the sun is shining more, I seem to be a little more productive. Also back on track this week is my reading challenge. Funnily (surprising not ha, ha) enough this week’s challenge was to “read a book with a main character that has a mental illness.”

Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson is a collection of essays on how she deals with her anxiety by hiding under desks, stays in bed as needed due to her depression, but mostly tries to live her life by finding ways to be “furiously happy.”  From a hashtag she created for her blog to this collection of essays, this phrase “furiously happy” refers to seeking out wacky adventures while one can in order to look back on those moments when one can’t.  

Mental illness not only affects her as an individual, but friends and family members as well. Lawson writes how she constantly debates her mental stability with her mother who insists she’s normal.  She comments she loves these conversations with her mother “because she gives me perspective. It’s also why she hates having these conversations with me. Because I give her details.”

Details which may include the side effects of the antipsychotics she’s taken, taxidermied giraffes, coffins filled with scabie glitter to thwart grave robbers, cannonballing possums, and stunning uteruses (uteri?).

She also exasperates her husband Victor with Rory-the-dead-raccoon. Rory tends to pop up in the background of Victor’s conference calls or can be seen riding cats at midnight. As Lawson states, “Other women might show their adoration with baked goods or hand-knitted slippers, but mine is channeled through animal corpses.”

One of the most enlightening parts of the book is the spoon theory. She uses spoons to explain the limits of people living with chronic illness. For instance, each task one must accomplish in a day is represented by a spoon. Healthy people have an unlimited amount of spoons, but those living with chronic pain or an autoimmune disease may only have, say, six. So if someone chooses to use a spoon to pick up the dry cleaning, he or she won’t have a spoon left to clean the house. Or as Lawson tells it, she may have even fewer spoons the next day after she tries to explain to her husband how she ran out of spoons, gets frustrated when he misunderstands, and has the argument in her head instead because, yes, she has no more spoons for defending herself.

When she is running low on spoons and cannot get out of bed, living a furiously happy life means Lawson can still go to “a storeroom in the back of [her] mind filled with moments of tightrope walking, snorkeling in long-forgotten caves, and running barefoot through cemeteries with a red ball gown trailing behind.”

That image alone is worth staying awake for.