Funny Feelings
Tarah DeWitt
PLAYLIST
Could Have Been Me - The Struts Shelter from the Storm - Bob Dylan Song 6 - George Ezra
It’s Called Freefall - Rainbow Kitten Surprise 100 Bad Days - AJR
Take A Chance On Me - ABBA For Me, It’s You - Lo Moon Wait - JP Cooper
Fool’s Gold - One Direction Run - Taylor Swift ft Ed Sheeran (Taylor’s version) Stone - Alessia Cara, Sebastian Kole Crowded Places - Banks
The Sound - The 1975
Home - Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes There She Goes - The La’s Only Love Can Hurt Like This - Paloma Faith Alone - Jessie Ware
Never Let You Go - Third Eye Blind Simply the Best (Acoustic) - Ben Haynes Rainbow - Kacey Musgraves Stand By Me - Ben E. King Don’t Worry Baby - The Brook & The Bluff Just a Cloud Away - Pharrell Williams
This book is dedicated to all the women who’ve ever been told that they’re Too Much. Maybe you’re too loud, too crass, too open, too bawdy. You overshare too often, say too many bad words, you’re too weird, or too emotional.
To the women who, in their quiet moments, still think back on their social interactions and wonder if they really are too much, if they should feel embarrassed, or ashamed.
You are fucking incredible. You are my people. Don’t you dare dilute yourselves to make yourselves more palatable. You are all heart and fire.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This story felt like an important one for me to write. It was partially inspired by what it felt like to write my first book and have it be out in the world, what it feels like to create anything for anyone else’s consumption.
When you put something into the world for others to judge, especially when you hope to entertain and elicit some kind of feeling from them, you know, logically, that it won’t be “for” everyone. Creating something that does connect to someone, though, is an absolutely irreplaceable feeling. It’s an addictive feeling. Writing somehow made me feel more myself than ever before, while simultaneously making me more deeply self-conscious than ever before. It was this rush of joy that was often swiftly followed by a dark downhill tumble into Imposter Syndrome.
So, in this particularly low period, I utilized one of my go-to mental health tools; I reached for a way to laugh. When I have blue periods (notice I said blue, not depressed) in life, one of my favorite things to do is to watch stand-up comedy. I put funny stuff in my face. I allow myself to sit in the feelings and acknowledge them, and then I do something good for me: I laugh. Don’t get me wrong, I do the other, less sexy work to keep my mental health in check, too, but partner it with finding a laugh. Because I can tell you this: The last thing I feel like doing when I am feeling low is a mental checklist of my blessings and telling myself that I’m being ungrateful, or that I’m wrong for feeling bad. It only leads to me feeling worse about myself. So instead, I have often found that comedy can be a truly healthy coping mechanism for me.
Comedy has educated me, has helped me see a new perspective on many things in my life. Comedy can be so profound.
That being said, something touched me deeply one day when I realized that often, the comedians in our lives, not just the ones on stages, are the ones who are privately struggling the most. It really clicked for me that you should never dismiss a person who is willing to lay a piece of themselves before you, in any art form, even if it’s just to make you laugh.
When I received a message on my personal Instagram from a random woman telling me that I should be ashamed to have written such trash, especially when I have two little girls who will undoubtedly grow up to be as foul as me, I knew I needed to write Farley. I set aside 30k+ words in another book and started to write this one.
I wanted to write a woman who has a “foul” mouth, who tells sex stories to the public, who is loud and obnoxious and willing to be self-deprecating and even makes a living out of it. I wanted to write a character that makes silly, stupid jokes, but is deceptively brilliant, driven, and feels deeply.
I wanted to show her softer side.
Because even the most sarcastic, irreverent people in your life have intensely sensitive sides, as well. Trust me on that.
I wanted to write a man who saw all of this and accepted every bit of her, who still struggled with his own mental health, but was deeply self-aware and just as loving.
While the characters in this book work in comedy for a living, I as a writer don’t fool myself into thinking that I can write an entire stand-up set. So, this story is probably the least ‘done-for-laughs’ that I’ve written so far, and a few of the stand-up specific jokes told are inspired by certain comedians who helped me in some low periods, all of whom I will list. Of course, I was sure to still make the jokes my own, but I refuse to not at least acknowledge inspiration and give credit where it’s due.
BUT, most importantly, the characters in this story have safe harbor in each other, so we see their sensitive sides more than anything else, and it is not entirely comedy-focused.
Content Warnings for this story: -Death of a loved one is mentioned in two scenarios, with the deaths happening off page.
-Strong language -Sexually explicit content -A toxic parent/absentee parent
Just like I won’t claim to be a comedian, I’ll also never claim to be an expert at mental health. I recognize that my blue periods are not the same as someone else’s true medical depression, and I would never seek to advise anyone on how they should handle that, nor would I expect them to solve it with some funny Netflix specials. But this is my homage to a tool that happened to greatly help me.