Furiously Happy

by Jenny Lawson

Maile nodded. “I should do a live webcam of my uterus and call it What’s Up Maile?”

  I wasn’t sure it would play on prime time but it’d probably be more redeeming than the Kardashians.

  I’d recently been to a spa that offered wrinkle removals but I’d just read that some places use dead people’s donated skin to fill in wrinkles, which is insulting because it’s like saying, “You look so awful that we think injecting dead people into your face might be an improvement.” Although now that I’m thinking about it, I bet the donated skin is only helpful when it’s pulled off of a young and still collagen-filled corpse, which seems a little like bathing in the blood of virgins, but with less blood and more injections.

  Where does the skin come from? What if it’s penis skin? Or ball-sack skin? No one wants the skin of someone’s nut sack injected into their lip wrinkles. In fact, when I see heavily cosmetically altered people my first thought is “I wonder how much of their face is genitals?” My second thought is that they probably got their corpse skin from grave robbers. That’s why I told Victor to leave a warning in my coffin of scabie-glitter telling potential robbers not to inject my corpse into rich old people’s faces. Then Victor said that he was going to put a lock on his office door since I apparently didn’t understand what was or wasn’t acceptable to say while he was on a conference call.

  This isn’t to say that I’m completely averse to cosmetic surgery or even that I’ve never had it before. Victor recently found a picture labeled “Jenny, age seven. After the procedure.” I was unconscious and I had an enormous cast on my head.

  (Courtesy of Nelda Dusek)

  “What in the hell happened to you?” he asked. “And are those metal bars on the windows?”

  I leaned over to glance at the photo. “I think the bars were on the hospital bed to keep me from falling out. I was always falling out of beds at that age.”

  He stared at the giant brain cast, and then at me, and then nodded to himself. “This explains so much,” he whispered.

  It looks worse than it really was. The doctor who did my tonsillectomy decided that since I was already under anesthesia they should fix the wonky ear I’d been born with. I suspect it was not his area of expertise and that he was just bored or high and thought, “Hang on, I wanna try something,” because I woke up to a misshapen head cast where giant bushels of hair stuck out in awkward clumps. I looked like if a drunken child tried to make a papier-mâché hat on an angry Snuffleupagus. A week later they removed the cast, some of my hair, and what little dignity I had left. My ear looked exactly the same as before, so the doctor told me to sleep with a headband over my ear for the next year because that would work just like a retainer. And it absolutely did if the point of retainers is not to work at all.

  Twenty years later I tried elective surgery again when I got tired of wearing glasses and decided to get laser eye surgery. The clinic tried to up-sell me on what they referred to as “superhuman eyesight” but I told them that I wouldn’t want to be able to see through clothes because that would really ruin Thanksgiving dinners for me. They explained that it just meant that I’d have better than twenty-twenty vision but it was too expensive and honestly I prefer things a little soft and fuzzy around the edges. The world always looks nicer when it’s a little blurry—that’s why so many of us have a second glass of wine at dinner.

  The eye surgery was fine except that they used an older suction tool that made me go temporarily blind in whatever eye they were working on, which was unsettling.

  “THIS IS THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT I WANT,” I may have screamed during the procedure.

  Apparently it was a rarish reaction so they don’t warn people of it beforehand. Also, I was like, “You guys? I smell something burning.” And then I realized it was me. The doctor later explained that it was the smell of a chemical reaction, which just happens to smell exactly like burning flesh. And this is why I don’t trust doctors anymore. That and the ear thing.

  Still, the eye surgery mostly worked and I got to stop wearing glasses for several years until my eyes got all shitty again. That happens. You expect that you’re fixed forever but your eyesight continues to fade as you get older, which ends up being a nice coincidence because the older you get the less clearly you want to see yourself in the mirror.

  A few weeks ago my friend Brooke Shaden came to take my photograph. She was set to do it a few years ago but I was always sure I’d be thinner the next month and so I kept procrastinating and putting it off until Brooke eventually decided to just come to me. She’s one of my favorite photographers. Her work is dark and unsettling and beautiful and I imagined the photo shoot would be glamorous and insightful. And it was at least half of those things.

  We drove to a swamp where I wore a thrift-store evening gown and a cape made out of a tablecloth. Brooke wanted me to sit on a tree branch that was several feet above my head. Victor and Hailey had come along for the ride so Victor decided to grab my feet and throw me into the tree, which actually worked. But then when it was time to come back down I was totally stuck. Victor suggested that I step into his clasped hands and then fall over onto him, but apparently I wasn’t doing it right because Victor kept grunting and yelling, “Just fall into me, Jenny.” I said, “I AM FALLING,” and he said, “NO, YOU’RE JUST CROUCHING ON MY HANDS. FALL ONTO ME,” and I was like, “I’M FALLING AS HARD AS I CAN, VICTOR,” and he yelled, “YOU’RE NOT FALLING RIGHT,” and I said, “FALLING IS THE ONLY THING I CAN DO RIGHT. I CAN’T FALL ANY BETTER THAN THIS,” and then Hailey yelled, “YOU GUYS, I FOUND A KITTY,” and that was disconcerting because we were in a swamp and most swamp kitties end up being rabid skunks. But it was good timing because it caught me off guard and I fell across Victor’s shoulder. Unfortunately, the pressure of Victor’s shoulder was like being punched in the stomach and caused me to fart extraordinarily loudly.

  And that was me: farting and screaming and flailing upside down and grabbing on to the back of Victor’s pants to prop myself up so I could frantically scan the swamp for diseased skunks. I’m not sure I have the words to describe that moment but if there’s a word that means the exact opposite of “ladylike,” that would be a good start. It was mortifying but Brooke smiled widely and said it was perfect because she thought she’d captured my essence. Victor volunteered that it would have been hard to avoid my essence but I’m pretty sure he was making a cheap fart joke.

  A week later Brooke finished my portrait, a photograph of me as the oxymoronic Bluebird of Happiness, locked in my cage but still blithely optimistic even as dark clouds swept around me.

  It was me, with all my bumps and wrinkles, and even a hint of my wonky ear. And it wasn’t pretty. It was better than pretty.

  It was goddamn potaterrific.

  (Courtesy of Brooke Shaden)

  It’s Called “Catouflage”

  For the past several months I’ve been getting these giant goose-egg bumps on my head. I called my sister (who was an EMT for several years) to ask if she thought they were cancer. Lisa sighed and said I needed to stop thinking everything was cancer, as it was more likely that the bumps were silent twins I’d absorbed in the womb who were just now starting to sprout into new heads who, she hoped, would not inherit my habit of calling her at three a.m. to ask if they had cancer. Then she hung up because she has a terrible bedside manner. Or maybe her EMT license had expired and she wasn’t allowed to diagnose cancer over the phone anymore. I don’t know. I sort of preferred the job she had before she was an EMT, when she was a professional clown, because she always had candy in her pockets and if I was sad she’d make me a balloon poodle.

  The bumps would appear almost overnight. They were the size of itchy half–golf balls and eventually turned into smaller bumps, which I assumed were hives from my anxiety disorder. My shrink agreed but suggested I visit the dermatologist next door just to make sure it wasn’t something more serious.

  A few days later I went in for the exam and the doctor glanced at my scalp and said, rather dismissively,
“Oh, that’s just a folliculitis staph infection.” Then I stared at him and he explained, “Your rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease, which makes you more likely to get infections like this. Take these pills.” I explained that I was concerned because I’d always heard that staph could be super deadly but he said, “You’ll be fine. It’s like acne, but on your scalp. No one ever died from acne.”

  I thought he was being awfully nonchalant and he thought I was overreacting. I pointed out that he had just told me I have a staph infection spreading toward my brain, and he was all, “Where are you getting this from? You have a rash on your head,” and I clarified that my brain lives in my head, and I was a little concerned that I had to point that out since he’s the one who’s supposed to be the doctor. Then he shook his head in almost the same way Victor does, told me to stay off the Internet, and walked out of the room to call in my prescription. Of course, I immediately pulled out my phone to see what he was so afraid of my looking up because I’m pretty sure “Stay off the Internet” is code for “I fucking dare you to Google that shit.”

  “This is a terribly lazy way to tell me I’m dying,” I thought.

  When the doctor returned I showed him my phone accusingly and asked him why he was prescribing medication that treated “malaria, anthrax, and cholera.” He told me that was exactly why he didn’t want me on the Internet and pointed out that this specific medication was also used for treating acne. And he’s right, but it’s still disconcerting. It’s like taking a pill for a stubbed toe that also cures the plague and grows back missing arms. I was getting mixed messages. Was this a serious medical affliction that I should be getting pity and bed rest for, or was it nothing? He assured me it was “mostly nothing” and told me to take the malaria pills twice a day. Then I showed him a weird bump I’ve had on my leg for the last eight years and he said, “Yeah, that’s just a bump,” and then I started to question whether this man was even a real doctor.

  Regardless, it is nice to hear “No, it’s not cancer” and I suppose it’s also nice not to have to worry about picking up malaria, even though it wasn’t really a worry I had before this appointment.

  The most unsettling part of the visit, however, came when the doctor casually asked if I’d ever considered having any work done, as they were having a special on Botox. Then I stabbed him in the knee with a pen. But just in my mind, because you can never find a pen when you really need one. In reality I just told him that I wasn’t a fan of paying money to inject paralyzing poison into my face and that I was actually quite proud of my laugh lines, which I view as a badge that tells people I’m not an asshole. He countered that it was really the frown line between my eyebrows that he’d focus on. I pointed out that I’d gone through a lot of living to get that frowny wrinkle and I wasn’t about to erase it now.

  “MY HUSBAND MADE THAT LINE,” I said, with a defensiveness that surprised even me. “This line represents every time I have ever argued with him about everything in the damn world. It’s a line that says, ‘Don’t cross me or I will cut you.’ It’s practically a medal for time served and I EARNED IT.”

  He nodded (surprisingly easily) and went back to filling out my chart.

  “But,” I admitted, “I would be okay with you taking that weird bump off my leg. I don’t have any personal relationship with that bump.” He looked at it closer and told me that he could remove it but that it would leave a big hole and a scar. I decided to pass because it seemed wasteful to pay to have a different type of disfigurement when I could just keep the one I accidentally grew for free.

  As the doctor walked me out he told me to “stop worrying so much” because it’s possible that some of the rash actually is hives caused by nerves, and I made a note to tell my shrink the breaking news that the medical world finally found the cure for my severe anxiety disorder and that the prescription is “Just stop worrying so much.”

  My God, we’ve come so far with science.

  Later I called Lisa to get a second opinion and she reminded me again that she wasn’t a doctor, that we lived in very different time zones, and that she was going to start turning off her ringer after midnight, but she perked up when I mentioned my leg bump because she realized that she has the exact same bump on her leg. I asked if she’d ever had it looked at and she was like, “Why would I have it looked at? It’s just a bump, dingus.” And that’s when I realized that she would have made a great doctor. She told me that it was good I was on malaria pills because with my luck I probably already had malaria anyway, and she had a point. She also said that I should have the surgery to remove my leg bump because then I could use the hole where it had been for people who wanted to do body shots out of it. I was pretty sure no one would want to drink alcohol from my scarred, puckered leg hole and she said, “Come to LA. There’s always a market for something.” She’s probably right, but I suspect that the people who would want to get drunk out of my leg hole wouldn’t be the people I’d want to have getting drunk out of my leg hole. That’s just one of those truisms of life. Lisa said that I’d never get a job as a living leg shot-glass with that attitude. I’d like to think that job doesn’t exist with any attitude.

  Regardless, now I feel old and wrinkly and I probably would be considering Botox right this moment if my friend hadn’t just had it done and now one of her eyebrows is slightly lower than the other one because it’s too relaxed. She asked if it was noticeable and I told her no, and that it looked like she was constantly puzzling over something, so if anything it just made her look pensive and intellectual. She seemed fine with my answer, I think. Or she was really mad. That’s the bad thing about talking to someone whose face is slightly paralyzed. You never know if they’re leaning toward you for a hug or to punch you in the neck.

  Lisa groggily took all this in and pointed out that it seemed slightly suspect that my therapist encouraged me to go to a doctor who then made me feel old so that I would be forced to make another appointment with my shrink to discuss the midlife crisis that I didn’t even know I was having until he brought it on.

  I nodded. “And then when I go back to see my shrink she’ll probably rub poison ivy all over my chair so I’ll have to keep seeing the dermatologist. And eventually I’d probably start to suspect that I was being played but no one would ever believe that my shrink was poisoning me so Victor would force me to see my shrink again to get treated for my ‘unfounded paranoia.’”

  “Bingo,” Lisa said. “Now you’re thinking like a doctor. Or maybe a psychopath.”

  It was more likely the latter because my shrink is as sweet as pie and has the clear and innocent face of someone utterly unfettered by a guilty conscience. Or, possibly, of someone who has an addiction to Botox that she’s financing by sending the dermatologist extra clients.

  Either way, I probably need to stop thinking about this. It’s giving me wrinkles.

  PS: My doctor assured me that staph-infection-of-the-head is easily treated and most likely won’t eventually spread to my face, brain, and body, but (just in case) I’ve been practicing using a cat for camouflage. I call it “catouflage” because it’s more fun to say. Basically I just carry the cat around and put him up to my face to cover any imperfections, blemishes, double chins, etc.

  Sadly, I now have to use catouflage to cover up cat scratches as well, so it’s a bit of a catch-22. It’s nice though because you get to wear fur, but no one from PETA is going to yell at you about it. Unless I staple Ferris Mewler to my neck. Then they’d probably get pissy about cat-stapling. But I would never do that because that would be ridiculous and cruel and would probably lead to even more infections, and then Dr. Yep-that’s-a-bump-all-right would be like, “Yes, I know you think these marks are vampire bites but you probably just have an infection from stapling cats to your neck. Stop doing that. Here’s a pill for that, and also it cures testicular decay and loss of eyeballs.” So that’s why I’m thinking that maybe I should just get a baby sling to put Ferris Mewler in, so that I can wear him on my che
st without staples.

  Someone get me a BabyBjörn with a tail hole cut in it.

  And some bed rest.

  And some malaria.

  Might as well get my money’s worth.

  We’re Better Than Galileo. Because He’s Dead.

  I have learned that every person in the world is on the spectrum of mental illness. Many people barely register on the scale, while others have far more than they could be expected to handle. Even specific disorders are incredibly individualized. For example, my depressive disorder comes and goes and when it’s gone I have a hard time remembering how I could ever have felt as lost or numb as I get during those times. My anxiety disorder, on the other hand, is always with me and comes with all sorts of niggling “bonus” disorders and phobias, like some sort of terrible boxed set.

  I struggle with a host of phobias, like agoraphobia—the fear of being in a situation where escape is impossible if things go shitty. I have acute social anxiety disorder (a.k.a. anthropophobia), which is the fear of people. I don’t have arachnophobia (irrational fear of spiders) because fear of spiders is perfectly rational so I refuse to recognize it as a “disorder.” I also have arachno-anthropophobia, which is the fear of people who are covered in spiders. I made up that last one but it’s still a valid concern.

  The fear of people is something I think most introverted, socially awkward people understand, but I tend to take it a step further … into a place filled with weird shame. The disorder manifests itself in strange ways, but when I’m having a bad spell I can’t make myself interact with the outside world. I even find myself hiding in my own home, my panicked heartbeat in my ears when someone comes to the door.

  This would be easier to handle if I were in another room but I’m inevitably home alone and sitting in my office near the front door when the doorbell rings. Usually my blinds are closed but they’re always raised a few inches so that the cats can look out at the world I’m avoiding.