Judy Basmaji

“Depression lies,” said Jenny Lawson . “Because every single time, it says, ‘You’ll never come out of this again. You are absolutely worthless, your family is better off without you.’ And then I remind myself depression lies. Those things are lies.”
― John Moe, The Hilarious World of Depression

“Only by being useful or talented, and receiving external recognition, would I achieve personhood. I couldn’t imagine a world where I was a worthwhile person by dint of mere existence; I felt like I needed to earn it and prove it every day. Don’t worry, this feeling went away after only several decades.”
― John Moe, The Hilarious World of Depression

“Here’s the weird part: even when I was in the darkest and most despairing times of my depression, I still found depression funny. It was funny to me that the illness distorted my view of the real world like a funhouse mirror. It was funny that I could be immobilized by something that had no basis in a broken bone or bacteria or any tangible factor. And when other people, especially comedians and writers, shared their experiences with depression and those experiences were resonant with my own, I could laugh because we were all getting fooled together. I laughed in the same way an audience laughs at a particularly good trick pulled off by a magician. “We’ve all been deceived, but we don’t know how!”
― John Moe, The Hilarious World of Depression

“Trauma occurs when something happens that’s too horrible for your brain to deal with, so you just store it away. Over time, the horrible thing, which is still there, starts coming out in a variety of ugly ways, causing mental problems that you don’t even associate with the trauma because it happened so long ago.”
― John Moe, The Hilarious World of Depression