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I picked up Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson because I had read and loved Let’s Pretend This Never Happened. I suggest the audiobook if you’ve never read it before. Jenny does an awesome job narrating her book. I didn’t listen to Furiously Happy this time.

I first found Lawson through her Beyonce the Giant Metal Chicken story. If you haven’t read that particular gem, do yourself the favor and read it now. But don’t drink while you do it. Hot liquid through the nose is not comfortable I hear. I instantly took to Lawson’s sense of humor. I love how she sprinkles in curse words like the sentence enhancers they are.

Mostly though I loved Furiously Happy because it reminded me, again, that mental illness is something we can talk about, we should talk about. It reminds me that some people are different because that’s just a part of who they are. Much like I have blue eyes because that’s just a part of me. She also makes it okay to laugh about the lighter side of her experiences. She makes it alright to acknowledge that not all of us are as alright as we’d like to be.

I grew up with someone who had varying levels of depression and anxiety. I didn’t recognize them for what they were and in my late teens thought it was a cop out. I used to get so angry when I would look back and see what those things had done; that my childhood might have been better without them (the depression and anxiety). I used to be mad at the person in question. Why couldn’t they just stop being sad, stop worrying? Seriously, nothing life altering brought these episodes on. Why was it so hard to move on? Or those my were my thoughts before opening my mind and reading more about the subject. Now I see it for what it really was. And it’s not fair to anyone really. But it is life. Jenny Lawson helped me see that it wasn’t less of a life just a different one.

It wasn’t until I started reading books like Let’s Pretend This Never Happened and Furiously Happy that I started to understand the diseases. Of course I’ve read the public service posters, seen the commercials, heard the advocates telling us about it, but until someone could relate it at my level, I couldn’t see it for what it was.

So thank you Jenny Lawson for being brave enough to share your experiences with such honesty.