Thank you Mike Sowden, Margreet de Heer, chris eliopoulos, Jennifer Wells, Doreen Schmid, and many others for tuning into my live video with Jenny Lawson (thebloggess)! Join me for my next live video in the app: Thurs 12th March at 11am EDT with the abovementioned Margreet de Heer!
While I was going back and re-listening to this episode to write the recap below, I wrote down so many gems that Jenny shared- tips I will properly keep with me forever and tape to the wall. I put together about 6 of the best down below. This was a really great conversation- one of my all-timefavourites. I hope you find it as valuable as I did.
I am setting a new personal record for the amount of times I can wash the exact same load of laundry without ever putting it in the dryer.
I think I’m on wash number five. I put the clothes in, turn the machine on, walk away, immediately forget the machine exists, and then remember three days later when the super tells me the basement has started smelling like a wet golden retriever trapped in a swamp. So, I wash them again. And the cycle continues. (Literally.)
This is what having an adult ADHD brain actually looks like. It’s not just being a little “flighty” or getting distracted by shiny objects, (although there’s a lot of that); it’s a relentless, exhausting daily battle with your own executive function. It’s opening an email, deciding you don’t have the emotional bandwidth or energy to answer it, marking it as “unread,” snoozing it to tomorrow, and then doing that exact same sequence of events forty-six more times over a two-month period. So productive.
This is also why my chat with Jenny Lawson on Friday’s Draw Me Anything was less of an interview and more of an aggressively validating group therapy session. I haven’t really talked about my lifelong struggles with ADHD before because it feels a bit weird.. TikTok convinced everyone in the pandemic that anyone who has a hard time finishing a book had it, and it kind of blew up the legitimacy of a genuinely challenging neurological condition.
But I digress…
Jenny Lawson (thebloggess) has been writing online for over 15 years, and has a new book coming out on March 31st called How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay: Tips and Tricks That Kept Me Alive, Happy, and Creative in Spite of Myself.
I got an advance copy, and I genuinely could not put it down. (Have you ever read a book so good you run out of sticky notes?)
It is an absurdly funny, deeply vulnerable survival guide for anyone whose brain is a slightly hostile work environment. Jenny and I both share a potent daily cocktail of ADHD, various flavours of anxiety, and an inability to perceive the passage of time. (I currently have nine clocks in my apartment, and I am still late to everything I have ever attended. Even before my death, people refer to me as “The Late Jason Chatfield.”) Here are a few of the brilliant, sanity-saving things we talked about during the stream, including why you should always strive to be a Murder Potato.
1. Humour As a Means of Defanging Hard Shit
Jenny and I both use comedy as a (healthy) coping mechanism. We talked about how, when terrible things happen, humour is our only way to genuinely process the grief.
“I think humour is super helpful for me,” Jenny said. “If I can laugh at something, instead of this enormous monster, it becomes like a little bit smaller, a little bit easier to understand.”
It’s an on-ramp. If you write about crushing depression, anxiety, or mental illness, people who don’t suffer from those things might immediately put the book down. But if you make them laugh, it invites them in. It tells them that the stakes aren’t going to crush them alive.
“If you make somebody laugh, first of all, you invite them in, and you say, ‘It’s okay. It’s not that serious, even when it’s serious. A lot of people who have either reached out to me and said, ‘I read this because it was funny. And then later, years later, when I found myself in depression for the first time... I could go back and be like, oh, okay, I’m not alone.’”
2. Rejection Sensitivity & Farting at the Queen
If you have ADHD, you likely suffer from Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD). This means you spend a terrifying amount of your day convincing yourself that everyone secretly hates you.
“I constantly am sure that I have said something wrong, done something wrong. I overthink, I second-guess,” Jenny confessed. “The amount of work that I do in my head... it is exhausting.”
You leave a conversation, and ten seconds later, you are meticulously replaying every word, convinced you offended someone. You assume if a friend hasn’t texted back in four hours, they have legally disowned you. You live in a constant state of wondering, “Are we fighting? Are you mad at me?”
Jenny’s friend gave her some advice that completely short-circuits this panic: She asked her to try to remember the last time she saw someone else completely mortify themselves in public.
She couldn’t think of a single time.
“She was like, ‘No, what it really is, is everyone is constantly doing it. But you’re only paying attention to yourself,” Jenny told me. “Nobody is paying attention to how I fucked something up because they’re way more worried about the thing that they fucked up.”
This led us to my absolute favourite chapter in Jenny’s entire book, brilliantly titled: But Did You Fart at a Queen?
It turns out, there is a historical account from the 1600s of the 17th Earl of Oxford. He was bowing to Queen Elizabeth, and while doing so, he let out a massive, echoing fart. He was so intensely mortified by this bodily betrayal that he literally imposed a seven-year exile on himself. He left the country for seven years. Seven.
When he finally returned, the Queen greeted him and said, “My Lord, I had forgotten the fart.”
She didn’t even remember. She had a country to run; she wasn’t thinking about his flatulence. So, the next time you lie awake at 3:00 AM sweating over a slightly awkward joke you made to your unusually attractive barista, just ask yourself: Did I fart at a Queen? No? I’m doing bloody fine.
3. The Spoon Theory (and Budgeting Your Sanity)
Trying to explain executive dysfunction to a neurotypical person is like trying to explain calculus to a golden retriever. They just tilt their head and look at you blankly. “Why don’t you just do the thing?” they ask.
If you want to hear about the Spoon Theory (and how to explain your exhaustion to a neurotypical person), Shirley Jackson’s brilliant method for handling internet trolls, and why you should aspire to be a Murder Potato, upgrade your subscription below. It costs less than a bodega coffee, and it ensures I can eventually afford a dryer that actually works.
