Is Anyone Else Worried About Allie Brosch?

Who is that, you ask? And then, if you haven't read the title of this post, you're asking me, "Who is who, and what kind of opening sentence is that for a blog post? Please take more writing classes or I will be forced to start reading Lady Gaga tweets again, and I just can't go back to that place in my life, I can't!"

Ok, well first, calm down, we'll get through this together. All celebrity tweets are addictive, the most addictive of course is Steve Martin's. You can't help it. Steve Martin is the world's most brilliantly funny human. His last tweet was "Is the election this year or next year?" See! See! He's being silly because the election is SO obviously this year. And it's even funnier when I explain the joke.

But that's not why I'm writing tonight. I am writing because Allie Brosch, writer of Hyperbole And a Half has not posted anything for about a year and the last thing she wrote was about depression. This woman is so funny that it should be against the laws of perpetual entertainment for her to stop writing. And drawing. I love her drawings so much that, for a while, this was my Facebook profile picture:


I know that I've never posted a picture of myself here, but you'll have to trust me that this is exactly what I look like when I get the impulse to clean. My cleaning cycle happens in mad bursts where I run around with a broom, shaking my stick arms, with my googly eyes popping out. Allie might not have realized that she was drawing me, I'm sure that she thinks she was drawing herself, but I recognized it and I've kept up with her blog ever since to see how I'm doing.

I haven't had any update lately though. Maybe I should do some internet stalking - I mean, google research. (15 minutes later) Ok, I found her. Sorta. She answered a question on AskReddit.com and the question was, "Does anybody know what's happening with Allie Brosch?" And she has, indeed, been suffering from depression, but that update was from six months ago. I've wondered from time to time when I read her stuff if she suffered from depression and insecurity. The first thing I'd think was, "How could she possibly feel bad about herself? She's got over 50,000 followers. How could she think she sucks when she's so talented and makes so many people laugh?" But I know that shameful feeling, the feeling of disliking yourself not because you are a bad person but just because you ARE, and it's so hard to shake. Nothing on the outside can cure it, it's all inside stuff and it can shade everything in your life if left untreated.

I just finished reading Bird By Bird, by Anne Lamott, and one of my favorite things that she about success as a writer was this, "the realtionship between getting published and mental health was summed up in one line of the movie Cool Runnings which is about the first Jamaican bobsled team. The coach is a four-hundred pound man who had won a gold metal  in Olympc bobsledding twenty years before but has been a complete loser ever since. The men on his team are desperate to win an Olympic medal, just as half the people in my [writing] classes are desperate to get published. But the coach says, 'If you're not enough before the gold metal, you won't be enough with it.' You may want to tape this to the wall near your desk.'"

I forget that just because a person is successful doesn't mean that they don't get insecure about themselves or their work, just like I do. I have 27 followers so if I don't write for a while, that means about a handful of poeple will be disappointed, whereas, the suffering of Allie Brosch has affected thousands of people, and caused me to internet stalk her to make she she's alright which I never NEVER do, unless I'm really worried about someone or unless they said that they were going to call me and they didn't or when it's Steve Martin and he's Tweeted something about going shoe shopping and I suspect that it might be the Payless near my house, then MAYBE I might do some web snooping but other than that I'm a typically well-adjusted non-obsessed person.

Hmm, reading back over this I don't sound all that considered about her as a person, just as someone's whose writing makes me laugh. It's ok, Allie! Take all the time you need to heal yourself! What you're dealing with is something that's not you're fault and is really REALLY hard to fight but you can do it! I'm ok, I've got backup, I can reread my Bloom County collection, and I can follow Ellen Degeneres for good measure...

But wait...Bloom County...That cartoonist hasn't come out with anything in years. Is anyone else worried about Berke Breathed?



ps- I also just found this which I thought was a good, both as an update on Allie Brosch and about depression.

Read, girl

I have to quit the library, even though I love it, even though the other day I met another librarian with a wandering eye, inch thick glasses, and a Boris and Natasha tie on who discussed Anthony Burgess at length and I thought, "I simply love this place. This is the adult nerd's refuge." I mean, I can be openly nerdy there. I am no longer closeted. That's right. I (prepare yourself) am a geek. And goddamn it, I'm proud. I'm here and I'm weird.

But I was offered a full-time job at Ochsner Hospital and the kids and I need the money and the benefits. I'm going to have to be a nerd some place else. Don't get me wrong, I'm thankful for the new job. It's a good step towards becoming a medical writer. But I am going to miss being a professional bookworm and answering questions like "Who wrote A Movable Feast?" To which I dig deep into my superior knowledge and intellect and reply, "Um, Rachael Ray?"

So what can I tell you about this geek's paradise that I shall miss? And I mean that in the most affectionate way. It made me remember some things that I had forgotten. First, book lovers, true book lovers, read EVERYTHING. The other day my manager said she recently finished a book on calculus and that it was just fascinating.
"That would be like reading a foreign language to me," I said.
"Ordinarily me too," she answered. "But this was a young adult book, and it explained it in an easy way. I could really appreciate it, even though I didn't totally understand it."

The woman read a kids' book on calculus and found it fascinating. I love that. These are people who appreciate anything for the sake of its delivery, as long as it's told well it could be about anything.

And it reminded me about something I haven't been doing much of lately. Reading. I've read several times that the best way to learn to write is to read whatever you can get your hands on. But other than reading self-help type stuff, I've fallen behind on the stuff I love. Literature, personal essays, German pornography and stuff like that. So, for some reason or another, the universe has decided to give me a sign. Literally.

If you live in New Orleans, you can drive down St. Claude and see this, and I suggest you do. There is a house that's all boarded up, with four windows on the front of it, like the tall kind of windows you can stand in. Those windows have long boards patching them up, and spray painted on each board, large enough to read easily from the road, is one letter that spells out the word "READ." Below the "D" is the word "girl." So on this broken down, ugly as hell house is the message, "READ, girl."

And I intend to. I'm sorry that I have to quit the library, but I'm so thankful to be reaquinted with an old love. Right now I'm reading Bird by Bird, which I highly recommend. It's by Emeril Lagasse, I think.