the best medicine
Beset with anxiety, depression, and rheumatoid arthritis, Jenny Lawson is one woman turning her absurd lot into a prescription for comedy gold
On the cover of Jenny Lawson’s new book, Furiously Happy, is a preposterous raccoon. He stands on his two back legs, arms outstretched as though, Lawson writes, he’s “the most excited member of your surprise party.” He has a “bafflingly enormous smile,” and would, technically speaking, qualify as bad taxidermy. His name is Rory, and Lawson loves him.
“Whenever I’d accomplished a particularly impossible goal (like remembering to refill my ADD meds even though I have ADD and was out of ADD meds) Rory was always there,” Lawson writes, “eternally offering supportive high fives because HE understood the value of celebrating small victories.”
Furiously Happy isn’t about Rory, but Rory — in all his grotesque whimsicality — is sort of a physical metaphor (and remarkably poignant mascot) for Furiously Happy, Lawson’s quasi-memoir about her struggle with mental illness. This, for Lawson, doesn’t just mean the aforementioned ADD: as she lays out early in the book, the writer and journalist is a “high-functioning depressive with severe anxiety disorder, moderate clinical depression, and mild self-harm issues that stem from an impulse-control disorder.” There’s also avoidant personality disorder and occasional depersonalization disorder, plus rheumatoid arthritis and autoimmune issues.
It’s a tall order of hardships, which Lawson readily and frequently admits, and a handful. And in its tallness, it is — like Rory, in his enthusiastic squatness — completely preposterous.
Or at least that’s how Lawson treats her particular maladies in Furiously Happy, making the point through nearly 300 pages of non sequiturs and off-kilter anecdotes that while mental illness is neither fun nor frivolous, it is irrational. Irrational in the same way as using a taxidermied raccoon as an anxiety companion on airplanes, as Lawson claims to do.
Lawson’s use of absurdist humour as a way of illustrating and whittling down to the most universally salient points her experiences with and treatments of mental illness is not merely a literary device, but a hugely effective means of, essentially, fostering empathy. Certainly she uses her own particular brand of and taste for absurdist humour as therapy (in practice, this often seems to be accompanied by the use of Rory as a prop), but primarily as a way of communicating her life’s ups and downs. The effect makes her not-quite-relatable story nonetheless resonate as very human, in a particular way. For instance, we all know that individuals with mental health issues are sometimes prescribed medication, and that sometimes, those medications help. Lawson puts it like this: “There is nothing better than hearing that there is a drug that will fix a terrible problem, unless you also hear that the drug is for treating schizophrenia (or possibly that it kills fairies every time you take it).”
It is very difficult to apply stigma to that sentence, but remarkably easy to laugh along with it, and with Lawson. It also conveys very strongly that Lawson’s survival strategy has not been to attempt to fit herself into a world that doesn’t very well accommodate those living with mental illness, but rather, to contextualize that world through her own absurdist lens. That she uses the simplest language possible to describe her complicated situation only makes it easier to see things as she does.
It’s a similar approach to that taken by Allie Brosh, the writer of web comic Hyperbole and a Half. In 2011, Brosh published a comic titled Adventures in Depression, in which she laid out — in both text and dozens of comic panels crudely drawn in Microsoft Paint — exactly what it has been like, for her, to live with depression. In it, Brosh details her transition from what she describes as being sad for no reason to experiencing the type of debilitating depression that made doing things like laundry seem not only impossible, but pointless: “Who cares — it wasn’t like I had been showering regularly and sitting on a pile of clothes isn’t necessarily uncomfortable.”
She published a second installment, Depression Part 2, in 2013. Brosh uses similarly rudimentary language, which, as with Lawson, serves the important task of communicating as much complex emotion in the most comprehensive way possible — no easy feat, and a task both writers navigate with startling efficacy. For Brosh, this means writing things like “trying to use willpower to overcome the apathetic sort of sadness that accompanies depression is like a person with no arms trying to punch themselves until their hands grow back. A fundamental component of the plan is missing and it isn’t going to work.”
Or, of the sense of numbness that eventually came to characterize her depression, Brosh captioned a stickfigure drawing of herself: “I feel like a computer.” Of the apathy: “Finally — finally — after a lifetime of feelings and anxiety and more feelings, I didn’t have any feelings left. I had spent my last feeling being disappointed that I couldn’t rent Jumanji. I felt invincible.”
It’s all sort of off-kilter, but again, applying absurdist logic to the irrationality of mental illness is perhaps similar to two negatives making a positive; you can’t fight fire with fire, but you can make sense of unwanted nonsense through creating some willfully crafted nonsense of your own.
An excellent example of this is The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, the Netflix series whose protagonist is — despite the overarching sense of cheer that pervades the series — a trauma survivor, having recently escaped from from the man who abducted her as a teen, and indoctrinated her into a cult. Kimmy’s underground past is often played for laughs on the series, but not in a way that negates the fact that she, alongside the women with whom she was trapped, experienced very real violence. It’s why there is a rage that underpins Kimmy’s unshakeable will; her happiness is furious.
Kimmy Schmidt is a comedy, but its hero conveys the same theme of insidious humour-as-poignancy throughout the series. She’s rendered seemingly incapable of navigating much of her existence due to decades lived underground, but she manages it through an unfailing desire to get by using whatever means possible. How could any of it be any worse than what she’s already lived through? “Smile until you feel better,” Kimmy says. “I call it Kimmying.”
This, I’ll tell you once more, is conceptually absurd, absurdly hilarious, and hilariously poignant. These women, Lawson, Brosh, and even fictional Kimmy Schmidt, force you to find pieces of yourself in odd phrasing and weird bits of prose that are communicative of great emotional depth, almost in spite of their authors. It facilitates a very deep sort of empathy. And again, all of the above approaches convey a steadfastness that living with trauma or mental illness doesn’t have to mean being cured or fixed; rather, it simply requires one to navigate the world on a more personalized plane. And in the cases of Lawson, Brosh and Kimmy Schmidt, the key to survival comes down to the absurd lot of human beings in the face of all bad things: unfailing perseverance. The show must go on, even when it sucks.
Any coping mechanism that works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for others — Kimmy Schmidt doesn’t share Lawson’s predilection for dead animals and Allie Brosh doesn’t live in an apartment whose floors are just painted dirt — and so this is not all to suggest that unfailing, off-kilter positivity is mentalillness panacea. But if Lawson et al make one clear, universal point, it’s that, for many, the world is an upside-down place. And since the tools that are meant to set it right side up don’t always work, the best way to fix things might just be standing on your head.