Salutations, bibliophiles.
Today, I’m very excited to bring you
.Natalie writes
, a veritable cornucopia of mildly entertaining personal essays about chronic illness, medical misadventures, quirky city life, and elaborate plans to steal basset hounds (to have as pets, not to make fur coats!).The essay Natalie has written for us is, in many respects, the quintessence of what BTMU is all about. She shares the story of how she came to read a book twice—with the read-throughs coming at very different moments in her life—and with profound honesty (and humour!) shares how it came to become the user manual for her new life. Enjoy!
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"FURIOUSLY HAPPY is all about...taking those moments when things are fine and making them amazing, because those moments are what make us who we are, and they're the same moments we take into battle with us when our brains declare war on our very existence."
— Furiously Happy by
Rule number one of the Facebook employee commuter shuttle: Do not sit next to someone on the shuttle unless there are no empty rows of seats on both levels. Doing so forces someone to move their backpack off the seat next to them. It also results in awkward elbow bumping as you work side-by-side on laptops.
Rule number two: Do not talk on the phone while riding the shuttle. But if you must talk on the phone, mumble frantically and look ashamed of yourself. If you dare to speak loudly on the phone, you will be passive-aggressively shamed in company-internal Facebook groups.
Rule number three: Do not, under any circumstances, talk to other shuttle riders while riding on the shuttle. This is, clearly, twice as offensive as talking on the phone and deserving of twice the punishment.
By the age of 25, I had been riding these wifi-equipped, leather-seated buses with onboard bathrooms for four years. I also had a salary that made my hard-working parents proud, something called “stock options” that seemed mysterious but possibly useful, and access to unlimited frozen yogurt while at the company’s sprawling campus. My husband and I traveled, we ate out, we biked and hiked. We tried (and failed) to learn swing dancing.
I usually worked on the hour-long ride home, so I’m not sure how I ended up reading Furiously Happy on my Kindle one evening on the shuttle. I’m not even sure how I had heard of the book, or why I decided to download it from my local library. What I do remember, though, was snorting, loudly, over Lawson’s obsession with taxidermy as the air vents in the ceiling chanted shush, shush, shush.
Furiously Happy is a book born out of a blog born out of Lawson’s battle with mental illness. It has no plot. It contains entirely made-up words, rambling footnotes, and ridiculous rants. It talks about resurrected raccoons, voodoo vaginas, and cat rodeos. Though I couldn’t relate to most of Lawson’s struggles, and I was haughtily skeptical of the “furiously happy” mantra she puts forth in the book, her honesty drew me in, and her writing made me laugh out loud. She is singularly, indescribably, painfully funny.
Reading Furiously Happy for the first time also reminded me of a passion I’d largely abandoned since moving to San Francisco: writing. Writing was my first love, not computers. By the first grade, I wanted to be an author. In high school, I spent my spare time running the student newspaper, not building robots or competing in math leagues. In fact, math has always been my least favorite subject. But I was good enough at both math and programming to land a high-paying job—at Facebook, no less—so writing became a dream deferred, probably indefinitely. After all, how could I walk away from such a promising career path?
Nonetheless, I loved Lawson’s ability to see the humor in everyday life, and to be fully herself on the page. I wondered what it would be like to tell stories like hers. I wondered if I’d ever have the guts to try it.
Two years later, I left my job at Facebook, but not to become a writer. I left because I was too sick to continue working. I’d developed chronic migraine disorder—an incurable, debilitating neurological disease that causes long-lasting migraine headaches and, in my case, a nightmarish list of other symptoms. It started virtually overnight. One day I was prepping a big presentation for a high-priority project, and the next, I was lying on the couch, too dizzy to get up for a glass of water.
For the entire first year of my illness, I fought hard to get my life back. I spent weeks in the hospital, I tried many drugs with terrible side effects, I talked to every doctor that crossed my path. But there was precious little to show for it, other than a towering stack of medical bills and a very, very messy house.
My migraines threw me into a deep depression, and I became a very anxious person. I feared people with their prying questions and loud voices. I feared going to unfamiliar places with bright lights or loud noises. I feared flying. I feared going out at night. I even feared going to bed, as I knew that the pain could wake me up from sleep. No more traveling, no more eating out, no more biking. No more swing dancing.
This is when I read Furiously Happy again. My reaction: Was this really the same book I had read before? It did have an ecstatic raccoon on the cover, just like I remembered. And it was funny, also like I remembered. But I didn’t remember this book being about…me.
Ok, it’s not about me, exactly. Unlike Lawson, I don’t have trichotillomania, I’m not much of a cat person, and I’m not buddies with Brené Brown. But just as re-watching your favorite Disney movie as an adult reveals all the clever jokes you missed as a kid, re-reading Furiously Happy after getting a chronic illness revealed a book that was altogether different, and better, than the one I’d read before.
When Lawson worries that her pharmacist will suddenly hate her and stop giving her drugs, I laugh because I know. When she talks about how her phone helps her cope with anxiety, and describes chronic illness in terms of spoons, I nod in stunned agreement. When she talks about the thrill of walking out into the snow, alone, barefoot, bleeding, in pajamas, in the middle of the night, I realize that “making it” is overrated—not dying is what’s really worth celebrating.
We also both love koalas, which I think is an important detail.
When I picked up Furiously Happy for the second time, I had lost my job, many of my friends, and my health. But I’d also learned what it meant to fight your own body for survival, and through that, I’d discovered the point of being “furiously happy.” So I decided to make this book my user manual for chronic illness, and my battle cry. I started finding humor in the darkness of disease (which really isn’t hard to do, especially in the American medical system).
Then I started writing.
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This was riveting. From the descriptions of the socially-awkward Facebook shuttle to the revelations from the second reading of the book, you have a gift for immersive writing. Thank you!
Nice! :)
Quote 'When she talks about the thrill of walking out into the snow, alone, barefoot, bleeding, in pajamas, in the middle of the night, I realize that “making it” is overrated—not dying is what’s really worth celebrating.
I really relate to this as a Chronic health housebound subscriber...
Every time I stand outside the door or sit by an open window I feel a thrill so great. Yep making it was def over rated for me I'm fact it bought me to my knees.. Lately instead. Of feeling low about needing to go to bed 'again, I think of my ex colleagues and feel glee that I get to settle down on a memory foam cloud mattress and a soft quilt 😜