You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost)

by Felicia Day

I know I shouldn’t introduce my own memoir with this amount of insecurity, but my personal life philosophy is always to assume the worst, then you’re never disappointed. BAM! Highlight that previous sentence, baby! It’ll be one of many quotable life-nuggets you’ll be able to pull from this thing.

No matter how lonely and isolated and starved for connection you are, there’s always the possibility in the online world that you can find a place to be accepted, or discover a friendship that’s started with the smallest of interests but could last a lifetime. Your qualification for finding a place to belong is enthusiasm and passion, and I think that’s a beautiful thing.

If someone’s takeaway from this story is “Felicia Day said don’t study!,” I’ll punch you in the face. But I AM saying don’t chase perfection for perfection’s sake, or for anyone else’s sake at all. If you strive for something, make sure it’s for the right reasons. And if you fail, that will be a better lesson for you than any success you’ll ever have. Because you learn a lot from screwing up. Being perfect . . . not so much.

We all have periods of our life where we’re trapped, doing something we hate, and we develop habits that have nothing to do with our long-term goals to fill the downtime.

I continued to appear at conventions and conferences around the world, making speeches and doing panels and signing autographs. Which you’d think would make me feel better. People enjoying my work seems like a nice ego boost? Nope, I dodged those bullets of hope like a pessimist pro!

In retrospect, crappy chemicals in my brain were working overtime, driving me to destroy myself, like that thing that makes lemmings throw themselves over a cliff. (That’s actually folklore based on a Disney documentary where the filmmakers in the 1960s flung lemmings over the edge of the cliff for their movie. Horrible. But the video game was awesome, amiright?)

There’s a great Eleanor Roosevelt quote, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Well, I discovered that, even though the feeling had ruled me my entire life, no one could make me be anxious without my consent. It was an amazing realization.

We’re all a garbage dump of dysfunction, but if you get in there and churn the problems, they turn to mulch faster so new things can grow out of them. (I have no idea how to mulch, so I hope that analogy is accurate.)