Easy Crafts for the Insane: A Mostly Funny Memoir of Mental Illness and Making Things

by Kelly Williams Brown

“All your sorrows have been wasted on you if you have not yet learned how to be wretched.”

It was a charmed life, although as a lifelong depressive, this didn’t prevent me from sometimes thinking it would be pretty convenient if a semi smashed into me on my way home.

When you got it, did you find yourself whole and happy? Or temporarily satisfied but then hungry for the next thing? I was finding success hollow. It is amazing, yes, and it was fun in the moment and made for an impressive bio. But it doesn’t—and can’t—sustain

sustain you. The quality of your relationships, the skill of building and keeping contentment, and your ability to sit with pain and not squirm away from it is what will actually keep you going after that first flush of happiness.

I so, so often have felt like I am too much, exhausting even to myself, and doing everything in the wrong amount. Eating too much or too little, drinking too much or too little, or feeling things too much or too little.

It’s the same envy I feel for the very religious. They don’t have to question; they just know, and they have hundreds of other people who also know, and they’re all making something delicious for this Sunday’s potluck. The idea of this obedience and submission is chafing, but it sure does look nice. I wish I knew.

But honestly, in this case, I’m not sure how it could’ve been helped. A bunch of bad things happened, one after another. Each time something bad happened, I withdrew from the world a little bit more and cared about my life a little bit less. It’s always been the case that sometimes I don’t feel like being alive, in the same way that I sometimes don’t feel like vacuuming my house or following through on happy-hour plans, but it had never been like this.

Tenderness, she said, is the price of being an artist. If you want to see and create things that other humans haven’t seen or created, that means you’re going to feel things a little bit more than others do. Those two parts of oneself cannot be divorced. The pain is both a feature and a bug.

Some theorize that depression is, in fact, an adaptation because the depressed are really, really good at dwelling on things. We have “depressive ruminations,” as Paul W. Andrews and J. Anderson Thomson Jr. put it, and “this thinking style is often highly analytical. They dwell on a complex problem, breaking it down into smaller components, which are considered one at a time.”*

As my therapist once pointed out, we don’t really have bad days, we have bad hours or moments.

would be great (both narratively and, um, for my life) if there were some fixed finish line. And I had crossed it. And now I was Better, Forever, and You Could Be, Too. This is not the nature of anything, though. There is not a beginning, a middle, and an end. It’s a constant coaxing, reinforced with boundaries and medication. It is following good mental health hygiene—which is the real self-care, although it’s so, so boring! It is cultivating contentment rather than chasing happiness.

I cannot control the world, and I often cannot control my own mind, but dang it, I can make you an extremely thoughtful embroidered gift.

I am resilient and scrappy as fuck, and you should never, ever bet against me.

I wanted to talk about dissolving and having to reconstitute yourself. And if you can’t reconstitute, if for now you are just a cup of dirty paintbrush water, that’s okay, too. Every single watercolor you’ve ever looked at has involved lots and lots and lots of dirty paintbrush water.

It reminds me that my things are mine, and while I cannot and should not control other people, I can definitely gild any inanimate possession I please. This is a very Catholic (and ineffective) solution, but that’s never stopped me.

“Why did you marry him?” you might ask. Easy: he was the smartest, funniest, and kindest person I’d ever met. All three, by a long shot. He would casually drop things in conversation that rearranged my understanding of the universe. He was, and is, astonishingly loyal and loving.

I would, in fact, give a fairly glowing letter of recommendation to anyone who wanted to marry him who is not me.

We could not get along for a week to save our goddamn lives. Everything—everything!—had to be a fight. I am quite conflict-averse and had never really fought with a significant other before. So imagine my surprise when he got mad at me on our third date, which I was terribly late for. In my defense, I tried to cancel, saying my day had filled up and I couldn’t get up to Portland in time, but he said that he’d looked forward to and planned our date, insisted I be there and did not want to reschedule. When I did finally arrive, he wasn’t at his apartment but at a coffee shop nearby, tutoring one of his friends in math. He told me coldly that I could wait until he was done, and so I did, sitting chastised and quiet a few tables away. I’d apologized several times already, starting with when I tried to reschedule, but it still took another one before he looked me in the eyes and told me he forgave me.

I withheld love and avoided him. The more he ran toward me, the more I desperately wanted to bolt.

Something neat about staying in a decaying relationship is your slow but notable transformation into a version of yourself who is unrecognizable. This person is so different from who you imagine yourself to be, and yet she looks, talks, and cries just like you. When did you get so angry?

decided perhaps one didn’t get to be happy in their relationship, that fighting all the time, about everything, was something I needed to be more Zen about.

And like I said a few pages earlier, I loved him. And he loved me. He was unlike anyone I’d ever met before, and as excruciating as life with him was, life without him felt like it would be worse.

Why did I always feel the urge to bolt when they wanted to settle down? The commonality in my relationships was me; therefore, perhaps, I was the problem. Maybe I was the one incapable of accurately assessing my own relationships and should, instead, outsource this job to the general community. My friends loved him; in fact, we had lots of people in common even before we dated, all of whom were delighted by our pairing.

Yes, the wedding was beautiful—but oh, the internal screaming. A good bit of ugly-crying during our honeymoon in Sicily when, yet again, I’d violated some principle that I didn’t understand and he stormed off, leaving me in the street. (This happened several times.)

I did not take to wifeliness, and in fact, divorcée was the role I was born to play!

meanwhile, your relation, whom I married, is reaching out to everyone we know to inform them that I have maybe gone crazy. I am not sure how to handle this. He is, after all, the heartbroken one, so why not give him this one last chance to center his emotional reality over mine?

I’ve made a playlist of every song I’ve loved since I was 15. These songs remind me that I exist and remain the same person through space and time.

I know that I can have significant and enduring relationships outside of marriage, that I can commit and rely on my closest friends as my partnerships. I know I call my own shots.

I am so, so excited for my future. I realize that, despite what everyone has told me and I have deeply internalized, I don’t have to have a husband to qualify as a human.

“People see me as mean. I’m not mean,” she once said. “I’m just bored by most people.”

There’s a Japanese phrase, “koi no yokan.” It’s not love at first sight but rather the premonition of love—the sense, upon meeting someone, that you will love them.

Because this is what I do. Every three or four years, I see a man and I know, and then I will wait until time and circumstances are right—sometimes years, with lesser relationships in between. I write the entire story before I’ve met the main character, and I don’t leave room for edits.

Neither of us is ready to call it a night, because—although I don’t know it yet—both of us are victim to classic addict thinking: if three is good, then nine is three times as good.

He tells me, later, that in the teeny passenger seat he felt the gravity. That he’d been in a before, and he was now moving to an after.

If it’s not all-consuming, I’m not interested (healthyhealthyhealthysohealthy!). I don’t want to see you tonight and then again in four days with intermittent texting; I want to go to bed for four days. I want to call in sick to work. I don’t want you to like me; I want you to feel like you can’t believe I exist and now you can’t live without me. This, for me, is the high, way better than any drink or drug or yoga or eating or not eating or cigarettes or any of the things I do to feel slightly different than the baseline for a few minutes.

Every little receptor in my brain is overwhelmed by these very happy chemicals because here he is. I feel sparkly, powerful, magical, as if I have called him into being.

I have this theory that the kernel of every relationship’s demise can and will be vocalized on the first date. In this case, we discuss how dark our lives have been, at times, and then contrast it with who we are now. We don’t know it, but we are listing the things that will be stripped from us, that we will strip from each other, while we are together.

there is nothing I love more than a moody man, and there is nothing any of us love more than someone who pushes our fucked-up childhood buttons.

It howls over the eaves of my bedroom, and as we stay up all night, I tell him there is a 66.7 percent chance we’re going to fall in love. He laughs, and I ask him if I’m wrong, and he agrees that I am not wrong, and then we roll around some more. Boundaries! Someday I will (please, God) have them, but October 30, 2016, was not that day.

I just want to be fine by myself, and I haven’t been doing that. I’ve felt like a gaping wound of need for the past six months; at what point will people be exhausted by me? I’m tired of being fragile, vulnerable.

The goal of sad-naps is the sweet relief of sleep, which is preferable to not-sleep. Also, fun fact: You don’t actually need to be sleeping to sad-nap! As soon as you crawl into that bed after telling yourself you won’t, hey—you’re sad-nappin’, baby!!

I just get so afraid, and so maybe I should obsess about and voice aloud every terrifying thing that could conceivably happen as a result of my actions. God or the universe will then nod approvingly that I’ve really thought this through, and that dire consequence will not come to pass. This is logic and science, according to my brain.

I am a hungry ghost who is always yearning for the next room,

“Everyone does their best; some people’s best is shitty.”

When I was the most injured I’d ever been,* she was the only person who could have helped me, yet she chose not to.

It’s horrible to realize your habits and your traits and every memory you have—every Christmas and birthday cake and kiss— are all stored in a physical location that’s not entirely secure.

But I am so angry, I tell them. Someone should suffer because I have suffered. Maybe, they answer, but that sounds like a you problem.

It’s hard to oversell how distracting and distressing it is to be in pain all the time. Your entire brain is dedicated to registering, minute by minute, the fact that something hurts. This is obvious if you’ve ever been through it and nearly impossible to grasp if you haven’t.

My instinct is to tell myself that it will get worse, but what I have to do instead is tell myself that it will not remain this way. I’ve never had a feeling forever, not once. If I’ve had a terrible day, I tell myself that no matter what, I never have to have that day again. If I’m hurting, I tell myself that it will not kill me, that nothing yet has killed me, even when it seemed like it could or would.