"This is about some shitty but also normal human stuff I got through, and how I did it, and also how to make comics about a skeleton version of your mother."
This is a hard book to read because it goes very, very deep down the rabbit hole of depression fucking you up BAD. I'm reminded of Nothing To Fall Back On, another book I've read where the heroine's life went to absolute shit for several years. In Kelly's case, she got married and the marriage went to hell very quickly, Trump won the election, she injured most of her limbs very badly, she had to switch careers because she used to be in journalism (me too, girl), dad gets cancer, her cat dies, her grandmother dies, and she has Depression From Hell that drains her relationship dry and ends her friendships with her "chosen family." And when she goes on a certain medication, she's one of those people who ends up going spontaneously suicidal, surviving the attempt, and then having to go into a mental institution.
I will note as an FYI that should anyone consider this idea: (a) spontaneously giving it a shot isn't the best idea, (b) especially if anyone else is in the house to find what you did, (c) you will end up locked up in an institution with even more drugs and no control over your own life at all. As Dorothy Parker once said, you might as well live. Eventually Kelly gets on the right medication and gets back to enjoying life and coping again, but it's a rough road. I also note that apparently being hospitalized somehow improves the medication experience? She notes that instead of ramping up for six weeks, they just dose you and monitor you and she was fine again within a few days. Go figure.
Oh yeah, and there's pretty stress-free crafts periodically to do (but not involving yarn, you don't get any of that in the mental institution) to help distract you and help you cope. Stuff like making tiny paper stars, skeleton-mom, dragon eggs.
"Crafting has always calmed me, made me feel better, and given my hands something to do so my brain can stop shrieking at me for one gosh darn second.
So in those 700 days, when I wasn't able to work, leave my house, or function as a human, I crafted. I couldn't write--I didn't have anything to say, plus one doesn't get much writing done when one is in bed 14 hours a day and catatonically watching MSNBC the other 10--but I could embroider, letter, teach myself block printing, cut out Bad Decision Shrinky Dink charm bracelets, make weird modular origami spheres, fold literally thousands of tiny stars, and just for good measure, make those trivets out of plastic tube-shaped beads that you then iron to melt one side.
Crafting gives me a sense of accomplishment even when I feel like I can't accomplish anything. Crafting is tangible proof that I can do something. To craft is to set things correct in tiny ways--to make this crease or that stitch or move that candle over a bit because it just looks better there--and I can almost always effect those changes in the universe. Crafting reminds me that my brain moving differently from other people's brains is not all bad thing."
Anyway: this is more of a depression memoir than a craft book--and I dunno on the funny--but if you're down a deep hole, this actually helps to read. You go down the hole with Kelly, and then follow her back out again. Which is a relief. If reading about someone being suicidal is a bad idea for you, then skip certain chapters, but if you need reasons to NOT be, this is a good one.
Four stars.
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