1. Content warning: Discussion of suicide. 2. Jenny puts words to her experience of ADD – "being a kitten on cocaine" – and her anxiety – seeing "rainbow fire.” 3. How Jenny felt guilty for years about a way her mental illness impacted her mothering – only to later learn it was her child’s favorite memory. 4. The moment she decided to be honest about her struggles – and how sharing our awkwardness can save the world and cure our loneliness. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 800-273-8255 About Jenny: Jenny Lawson is an award-winning humorist known for her great candor in sharing her struggle with mental illness. She's written four NYT bestsellers, including Let's Pretend This Never Happened (a mostly true memoir), Furiously Happy (A funny book about terrible things), You Are Here (An owner's manual for dangerous minds) and Broken (in the best possible way), which recently won the Goodreads Choice award for Best Humor of 2021. One of those books is a coloring book but she insists it still counts. She lives in Texas with her husband and child and would like to be your friend unless you're a real asshole. TW: @TheBloggess IG: @thebloggess To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Full Episode
Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. Hi, everybody. Hi. How you doing, babe?
I'm very excited.
And how are you, sis? I'm very excited. Oh, good. I'm very excited to talk to our guest today. Me too. As you might know, it's Mental Health Awareness Month. Otherwise known as all year in our world. How funny is it? We're going to take one month off. To talk about our mental health. Like, it's so fascinating.
I think it shows how we haven't yet figured out that mental health is for everyone with a mental, right?
Yeah.
With a mind. Yes, I know. You know, it's a mind. But- There are some people whose minds are so special and so different that they can serve as guides for all who have mentals. And our guest today is one of those guides. And she has been a guide for me forever. I have been reading Jenny Lawson's, well, first on her blog, like decades ago. The blog is how I found her.
I think her tagline on her website is like Mother Teresa, but better. That's how I first fell in love with her with just that line. I've always loved Jenny as she's a hero of a lot of folks. And it's for many reasons. One, because she's unbelievably hilarious and honest.
But also because there's so many people who talk about mental health in like our cultural way of talking about it, which is like just from an expert view. or from like a before and after story, like mental health, extreme home makeover. Like they used to be a mess and now they're better. Before and after. Exactly. And it never feels true to me because that's never been true for me ever.
So I don't understand how that, I always feel like people are lying when they're done with mental health illness or something. Like that's not the way it works.
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