Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

by Jenny Lawson

You are holding my severed head in your hands. This is a bad analogy but in my defense, I did tell you to stop. I don’t want to blame the victim, but at this point we’re in this together.

I bet marmalade was invented by the laziest person in the world. * * *

I don’t get the anti-slut-shaming movement. They’re like, “Don’t shame the sluts,” and I’m like, “You’re the one calling them sluts.” It’s like having a “Lay off the fatties” campaign.

“We wish you a merry Christmas” is the most demanding song ever. It starts off all nice and a second later you have an angry mob at your door scream-singing, “Now bring us some figgy pudding and bring it RIGHT HERE. WE WON’T GO UNTIL WE GET SOME SO BRING IT RIGHT HERE.” Also, they’re rhyming “here” with “here.” That’s just sloppy. I’m not rewarding unrequested, lazy singers with their aggressive pudding demands.

Bruce Springsteen said you can’t start a fire without a spark, but you can start it with a magnifying glass. It ruins the rhyme scheme but at the cost of science. And arson. But maybe it’s still a spark even if it starts with a magnifying glass? Maybe the first flame is always a spark? But that’s like saying you can’t start a fire without a fire. That’s just sloppy songwriting. Bruce Springsteen is obviously not the boss of scientific accuracy.

I don’t understand why people keep pushing that “Don’t be some random person. BE UNIQUE” message. You’re already incredibly unique. Everyone is incredibly unique. That’s why the police use fingerprints to identify people. So you’re incredibly unique … but in the exact same way that everyone else is.

If you put a bunch of chameleons on top of a bunch of chameleons on top of a bowl of Skittles what would happen? Is that science? Because if so, I finally get why people want to do science.

Truthfully though, there are some advantages to being on antipsychotics. First off, you can say you’re on antipsychotics. This might seem silly but when you go to the pharmacy and you’re standing in line with twenty germy people sneezing all over the place you can honestly say, “Would you mind if I went first? I have to pick up my antipsychotic meds and I REALLY needed them yesterday.” This tactic also works for grocery lines, the DMV, and some buffets.

Then he got mad that I was going to spend money on bear arms, and I was like, “I have the right to bear arms, Victor,” and then I realized what I’d said and we both started giggling for a bit. And that moment? That’s the moment when I realized how incredibly lucky I am to have spent eighteen years with a man who can laugh at bad gun-control jokes while a severed bear head is lying on his pillow.

“You really do love me, don’t you?” I asked. “You bought me taxidermy. You are literally bearing your heart.” Victor scratched his head. “I don’t think that’s how ‘literally’ works. And that’s not really the right use of the word ‘bare’ either.” And, well, maybe not … but I think that’s how love works. Sometimes it means doing the washing up when it’s not your mess, and sometimes it’s driving to the airport three times in one week to pick up a loved one, and sometimes it’s all unexpected bears and possible surprise giraffes. Probably not so much the last ones for most people, but then again, we’re not most people. And thank God for that.

Without the dark there isn’t light. Without the pain there is no relief. And I remind myself that I’m lucky to be able to feel such great sorrow, and also such great happiness. I can grab on to each moment of joy and live in those moments because I have seen the bright contrast from dark to light and back again. I am privileged to be able to recognize that the sound of laughter is a blessing and a song, and to realize that the bright hours spent with my family and friends are extraordinary treasures to be saved, because those same moments are a medicine, a balm. Those moments are a promise that life is worth fighting for, and that promise is what pulls me through when depression distorts reality and tries to convince me otherwise.

It was informative but it wasn’t making it any easier to understand why anyone would choose to take a vacation with wild animals and not me.

Noodling (aka hillbilly handfishing) is when you catch a catfish, but instead of using a fishing pole you just shove your hands into underwater holes that you’re hoping might have fish in them rather than crocodiles, snakes, or bitey turtles. It’s how people fish when they’ve run completely out of bait, dynamite, and any common sense whatsoever. There are stories of people being dragged to their death by giant catfish, which is a really shitty way to die. It’s like being dragged to your death by mermaids, except instead of mermaids it’s a fish that tastes like mud.

Victor watched as the bolt cutters slid back through the door and he said, “Oh, hell no,” and grabbed the bolt cutters and pulled hard. The person holding the bolt cutters was caught off guard and slammed into the other side of the door with a dull thud. Then Victor threw open the door and yelled, “WHAT IN THE SHIT IS GOING ON OUT HERE?” while angrily waving the bolt cutters at four skittish Asian people who gasped in horror and ran away down the hall as if they were being chased by Godzilla. It was possible they were just really bad burglars, or maybe they were just surprised to see a large, disheveled American man wearing only socks and a pair of novelty boxer shorts with a big fish across the rear that read “NICE BASS!” who was waving bolt cutters at them semi-menacingly. (I would pay real money for that surveillance tape as it’s probably very popular on whatever the Japanese version of America’s Funniest Home Videos is.)

Finally I said that we were going to a marriage counselor so that way he’d have to go and I could watch. I was like a shrink voyeur. Victor was against it until I explained that a therapist is like a referee who could decide which of us was the most wrong in the recurring arguments we’d been having over and over for the last twenty years. Usually when we were in a fight I’d end up saying something like “If we were on Jerry Springer everyone would be booing you right now,” but Victor doesn’t watch Jerry Springer so instead I moved to, “If we were at a therapist’s she’d be shaking her head at you in disappointment and throwing dollar bills at me in appreciation for my seemingly inhuman patience.”

It’s my personal opinion that airlines can do two things to make air travel better for everyone. The first is to have the people taking boarding tickets recognize the person who seems the most unreasonably determined to be sitting on the plane, hold up their arm, and joyfully announce over the loudspeaker: “YOU, SIR! You are our winner for most unaccountably and frantically eager to get on a plane that will not leave until every single person is seated anyway. Well done, you! Can you tell us how you feel now that you’ve won?” At best he’ll realize he’s being a bit douchey, laugh it off, and might calm the hell down from now on. At worst he’ll start yelling and then everyone else gets a good show. Then give him a small medal and a mild tranquilizer. Plus a mild tranquilizer for the person who has to sit next to him. And, if you’re handing them out, I’ll take one too. In fact, mild tranquilizers for everyone!

Have you ever noticed that all of the stuff on the posters of what you can’t bring into the airport terminal is pretty much exactly the same stuff that would come in really handy if a zombie apocalypse broke out? Swords, guns, grenades, meat cleavers, fire, disinfectant, booze, chain saws: these are all things I’d want on me if there were a zombie epidemic in Terminal B.

I often take photos of the posters showing the prohibited items you can’t take through security to use as an outline for preparing my own zombie prep kit and it’s interesting how they subtly change from airport to airport. Some of them can be quite intimidating and are filled with items you wouldn’t think you’d have to put on a sign, like machine guns and dynamite. Others focus more on having too much lotion. At our airport it says you can’t bring in snow globes. Swear to God. Snow globes. Which seems weird. It’s

When my last book came out I spent a lot of time avoiding people who wanted to interview me because I was afraid I’d say something wrong, or because I couldn’t find pants.

Some people don’t understand that for a lot of us, mental illness is a severe chemical imbalance rather just having “a case of the Mondays.” Those same well-meaning people will tell me that I’m keeping myself from recovering because I really “just need to cheer up and smile.” That’s when I consider chopping off their arms and then blaming them for not picking up their severed arms so they can take them to the hospital to get reattached. “Just pick them up and take them to get fixed. IT’S NOT THAT HARD, SARAH. I pick up stuff all the time. We all do. No, I’m not going to help you because you have to learn to do this for yourself. I won’t always be around to help you, you know. I’m sure you could do it if you just tried. Honestly, it’s like you don’t even want to have arms.” Granted, it’s not a perfect analogy because you don’t usually lose your arms due to involuntary chemical imbalances. Except that if I cut off your arms because of my mental illness then technically a chemical imbalance did lead to your arms falling off, so it’s dangerous for everyone. I guess my point here is that we all suffer when mental illness is not taken seriously.

You only think it’s weird because you’ve never accidentally written something offensive. I write intentionally offensive stuff all the time and I’m prepared to take the heat on that, but I’m always afraid of writing or saying something that I have no clue is awful.

I gasped for breath and told Victor that I was having a heart attack. Then he pointed out that I was clutching the wrong side of my chest for it to be my heart and that’s when I realized that I was probably having a heart attack so bad that my heart was trying to run away. Or maybe my right boob was exploding.

The next twenty minutes were a blur, but I remember looking at my feet as the ambulance careened down the road and thinking that I should totally tweet a picture of this. Then I realized I hurt too much to use Twitter and that’s when I knew I was dying.

“She’s not good with pain,” he explained as the doctor backed away from the gurney. Then the doctor nodded and ordered something diluted to give to me. I told him I wanted the full strength and then he explained that he’d actually said “Dilaudid” and that this was a major pain reliever. A few excruciating minutes later a nurse injected me with the Dilaudid1 and then the pain abated and I decided not to set fire to the hospital after all. In fact, I felt so grateful that I thought I should make up for my poor behavior by sharing a bit of trivia. “Did you know,” I asked no one in particular, “that sharks are attracted to urine?” “She’ll be a bit high for a while,” the nurse said to Victor. “So no matter how scared you are,” I continued, “DO NOT URINATE.” “And that’s how you can tell the drugs are working,” said the nurse. “No,” Victor sighed. “It’s actually not. This is your tip. She does this at restaurants too.”

Dr. Morales said he’d fill me full of carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide (whichever one is not poisonous) and yank out my gallbladder through a hole in my belly button, but when I asked if I could keep my gallstones (so I could make a necklace out of them) he said that he couldn’t do that because the new regulations are assholes, and he said that he couldn’t even give people who’d been shot the bullets he dug out of them because they’re considered “medical waste” once they’ve been pulled out of your body. This seems a bit hypocritical because my daughter came out of my body and they totally let me take her home.

ME: I was just thinking that when I see other people yawn I yawn because it’s contagious, but when I see cats yawn it never makes me yawn. VICTOR: You know, you don’t actually have to tell me everything that pops into your head.

sleeper train through Australia since I hated to fly, and I grudgingly admitted that I had always wanted to go on the Orient Express, but that I’d sort of consider it a wasted opportunity if a murder didn’t happen.

We actually saw some flying foxes around Darling Harbour, which seems an unfortunate name. I don’t like a place that randomly gives itself a compliment. A helpful Australian tried to tell me it was named after a guy whose last name was Darling but I wasn’t having it. “I don’t love it,” I explained. “It insists on itself.” The man nodded noncommittally, deciding it was better not to argue with a strange foreigner dressed in a full-body koala costume because it was cold and she didn’t bring a coat.

“Plus, tons of them have chlamydia. Luckily koala chlamydia is not contagious to people though,” Laura added. “Huh. Does it feel like human chlamydia?” I asked. “I dunno. I’ve never had human chlamydia,” she replied. Laura can be a real braggart sometimes.

My hopes of smuggling a live koala out of the country were significantly dampened though when it took the koala wranglers two weeks just to approve my koala costume because they were afraid that the fleecy costume would terrify and startle the koalas. It finally got approved, but then when we got to the Sydney zoo we were told that we were not on the list and were certainly not going to be holding any of their koalas. Possibly the koala costume threw them off. I explained that we’d specifically been told we could come here to snuggle koalas and that my outfit had been approved weeks in advance and they looked at me in a way that made me think that they’d called security. (I am way too familiar with that look.) We pulled out our paperwork and they sighed in relief when they told us that we’d come to the wrong place and that we wanted the Wild Life Sydney Zoo, which is not the same thing as the Sydney zoo.

have several friends who went to the parts of Australia where you can still hold a koala and they all said that it was sweet but that the koalas are very heavy and a bit stinkier than you’d expect. They suggested that if you really want to hold a koala but can’t, just get a furry pillowcase and fill it with lightly used cat litter. Or tie a bunch of sedated raccoons together. Or maybe hold a dead koala. I probably should have asked, “Do you have any koalas that are already dead from the shock of being cuddled? Because we’re fine with that. We’re not picky.

“From now on I’m just going to measure everything in babies. Lengthwise. Everyone knows how long a baby is so it’s totally universal. The math people will probably be mad about having to convert everything though. This is probably how God felt when people stopped measuring arks in cubits.”

“One caution though,” he said. “Absolutely no food in your tent because that will attract wild animals.” “Yes.” I paused. “But Laura and I are made of meat.”

I don’t have any pictures of the lovely Aboriginal people I met because they think it traps their spirit, and if they’re correct then Facebook is basically creating a living hell. Which is really not that surprising, now that I say it out loud.

For someone who stays home for weeks at a time and struggles to even have a conversation with the UPS guy, saying yes to leaving my safe place was an achievement. And it was worth it. Sometimes you have to force yourself to leave your house even though every introverted bone in your body wants to secede and make you into a human jellyfish. But I pushed through. And it was amazing. And horrifying. And back to amazing. And weird. And baffling. And fantastic.

I try to love myself exactly the way I am, but it’s hard to not feel a bit crappy when your doctor is focused on “health” and all that bullshit. And yes, I might be slightly overweight but I’m pretty sure this isn’t entirely my fault. It’s the world’s fault.

Regardless, on the moon I weigh about as much as a large toaster, so using that logic I’m not overweight. I’m simply overgravitated. Spell-check says that I can’t be “overgravitated” because that isn’t a real word and suggested that I probably meant to say that I’m “overly aggravating.” Victor says spell-check has a point. Spell-check and Victor are both dead to me.

If cream cheese is cream made out of cheese then why isn’t face cream made out of face?

I’m dangerously lactose intolerant and I’m always afraid there will be some sort of cream hidden in there that will send me to the hospital, but what sucks is that the waiters keep walking around asking you over and over if you want a canapé now even though I just said two minutes ago that I couldn’t eat them, and now it’s like they’re just taunting me with food I can’t have. I recently fixed that problem though because I realized that the secret to not having to continually say no to delicious food is to loudly say, “No. Sorry, I can’t eat that BECAUSE DIARRHEA.” It’s jarring for the people around you, but I’ve found that most waiters continually ask if you want food not because they really want you to eat, but because they’ve zoned out or are high (I’m basing that on my personal experience in food service so stop judging me. Unless you’re judging me for being high, in which case, fair game) and they’ve already forgotten who said no. But no one forgets diarrhea. “BECAUSE DIARRHEA” will make all the waiters perk up and avoid you completely. So will a lot of the people at dinner parties, but those are the risks of diarrhea.

Brief Awkward Pauses “I’m having one of those weeks where I just want to rip off my clothes and lie in the street. Is that a medical condition? Because it feels like it.”

To her credit, my psychiatrist almost never seems shocked or surprised and usually just follows up with a calm “And how does that make you feel?”

Of course, now that I’ve written about how awesome my insides are I realize I’ve just made my eventual skeleton incredibly tantalizing to grave robbers and so now I’m going to have to make booby traps to protect my dead body. Like maybe I should plan to get buried in a coffin full of glitter because that way if anyone in the future digs me up they’ll be like, “What the fuck? Is that glitter? That shit never goes away. Fuck that noise. Let’s just rob the guy next to her.” (Sorry, Victor.) That’s how I’d keep grave robbers out.

And I have the Internet. That sounds weird, but Twitter is a lot like having a large, invisible gang of equally messed-up people who will hide with you in bathrooms and make you laugh under the pillow fort you’ve built in a lonely hotel room. Many of them suffer from the same fears, which keep them similarly isolated, but we’ve found a way to be alone together.

My mother’s words have echoed through my head for years. Mostly because they’re a really good excuse to not dust. (And technically my sister and I never minded if she didn’t dust because her dust cloths were usually my father’s old pairs of underwear. It’s weird knowing that the house was cleanest when it’d been wiped down by your father’s underpants.) Plus, it’s a really good way to get out of cleaning because whenever I try to explain my mom’s dusting theory to Victor his eyes get all squinty and he accuses me of being insane and I just scream, “IT’S A FAMILY TRADITION, VICTOR. YOU WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND IT.”