Words Crush Wednesday – Jenny Lawson

How did it get to be Wednesday already?  Where did this week go?  And last week?  Ur, never mind.  NaNo messes with my head, even in Camp form.  Right, so, anyway, for Words Crush Wednesday this week, I’m going to give one quote from Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, by Jenny Lawson, AKA the Bloggess.  I told myself I wasn’t going to post any quotes at all, ’cause then I’d wanna quote all of it, and that wouldn’t be very fair to her if I posted her whole book piecemeal. 😛  But I had to quote this part here:

People with anxiety disorders are often labeled as “shy” or “quiet” or “that strange girl who probably buries bodies in her basement.”  I’ve never actually heard anyone refer to me as the latter, but I always assume that’s what people are thinking, because that sort of paranoia is a common side effect of anxiety disorder.  Personally, I always labeled myself as “socially awkward” and reassured myself that there are lots of perfectly normal people who don’t like to talk in public.  And that’s true.  Unfortunately it’s also true that my fear pushes slightly past the land of “perfectly normal” and lands well into the desert of “paralyzing pathological handicap.”

I can’t express how rare it is to read something in a book that so perfectly feels like “that’s me!”  Except that no one would ever call me “that strange girl” who anything; they definitely call me “that creepy woman” who…whatever they think I do.  (I don’t wanna know.  They probably assume I’m borderline criminal, or at least completely deranged.  Probably both, actually.)  Apart from anxiety disorder — and, admittedly, mine’s not as powerful as hers — I don’t actually have too much in common with her, overall.

In any case, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened is definitely one of the funniest books I’ve read in a very long time.  (Probably shouldn’t have started reading it in a doctor’s office waiting room…)