FURIOUSLY HAPPY

Being a lover of all things raccoon, Furiously Happy's book cover jumped out at me from the librarian's choice shelf. Warning: This book contains bad language and a number of rambling non-sequiturs. Jenny Lawson's humor is so clever, she doesn't need expletives to pack a punchline. Lawson treats religion with disdain, sardonic comments are sprinkled throughout the book. As an added bonus I learned kangaroo genitals are even weirder than I thought. Female kangaroos have three vaginas. The outside two are for sperm and lead to the uteruses. The middle one is for giving birth. To go with the two sperm-vaginas, male kangaroos often have two-pronged penises.

"I didn't know if I had another book in me." she said in an interview in front of a thousand people. After reading, Furiously Happy, I knew what she meant. Experiences shared about her life, as an author, public speaker, mother, and wife with few exceptions have little or nothing to do with mental health. I was ready to take it all back after reading, The Spoon Theory, then she added it came from a neighbor. On page 130 she describes depression as...it's like when you meticulously scroll up through hundreds of pages in a word document to find a specific paragraph you need to fix, and then you try to type but it automatically takes you right back down to the bottom because you forgot to place your cursor where you wanted to type.

While confident I can manage physical diagnoses like type 2 diabetes, I literally suffer with depression/anxiety. Being newly single can be difficult for anyone. For me it has been excruciating. Though I frequently remind myself our relationship was unhealthy and I'm better off navigating the world on my own, I miss having a good friend. The coping strategies suggested in the book for dealing with depression aren't realistic for me because they involve either having more money/friends. If either of those were easy for me to come by, would I still be chronically depressed?

My greatest enemy is do-nothingism. Any block of time that allows me to sit and stew is dangerous. To give you an example: while sitting on a Trax (express transit) platform for only ten minutes my mood went from homeostasis to self abhorrent and homicidal, bad combination. When the train arrived its cars were jam packed with Ute fans. I begged off the idea of going east to TJ's for free samples, despite suspecting I may have been experiencing low blood sugar. Instead I rode my bike in the opposite direction, stopping at the next Trax station on the line and headed home. During downtime on the train I write stuff, such as this blog post and the darkness recedes.