Humor writer Jenny Lawson has never dealt with her mental health issues the traditional way.
As a small child, for example, she had a toy box. When she was feeling anxious, she would take all the toys out of the box and climb inside it.
"I would close it," Lawson says, "and it was like a sensory deprivation chamber for poor people."
She saw her first therapist in college, and since then, Lawson says, she's been diagnosed with depression, anxiety, mild self-harm issues, avoidant personality disorder, occasional depersonalization disorder, mild OCD and trichotillomania.
Dealing with all that has never been easy, but as she explains in her new book, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things, it helps to have a sharp sense of the absurd. Humor helps her see through the dark.
There was the time that Lawson, who battles chronic insomnia, staged a 2 a.m. rodeo in her living room with Rory, her dead, stuffed raccoon, riding atop one of her house cats ā Ferris Mewler. And the time she pulled up to the drive-thru window at her local drugstore just in time to see the pharmacist scarf down a handful of broken dog biscuits.
[For more of this story, written by Lynne Shallcross, go to http://tpr.org/post/ridiculous...ns-darkness#stream/0]
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