It's kind of a sad story

Ned Vizzini’s *It’s Kind of a Funny Story* called to me at least three times in bookstores. The last time I was shopping for a book to take home with me at an airport bookshop, I was caught between Gillian Flynn’s *Gone Girl* and this book and chose the former, only to end up buying the latter just a day later back in Manila.

THIS WAY TO SANITY

To cut the long story short, I was meant to read this book. *It’s Kind of a Funny Story* is like Ken Kesey’s *One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest*, but minus the lobotomy and the evil nurse. It’s like a sequel to J.D. Salinger’s *The Catcher in the Rye*, whose protagonist Holden Caulfield was my high school buddy, so I sure wish it were a sequel. It’s also like Jeff Kinney’s *Diary of a Wimpy Kid*, but a little more serious, a little more like life. A little like mine, but whereas Vizzini’s protagonist, 15-year-old Craig Gilner, was an overachiever, I was the opposite—an underachiever. I see them both as the opposite ends of the same thing, though. I was 18 when I started to see a psychologist, Dr. Lourdes Lapuz at St. Luke’s in Quezon City. Even then, I didn’t think there was anything wrong with me. “My aunt made me go, that’s it,” I told her. Craig’s reason for being in the same place I was was a little more theatrical, which is why from there, he had to end up in a psychiatric hospital. One day, he decided he was better off dead, but before he could do it, a book led him to dial the suicide hotline. “You know, when you want to commit suicide, we consider that a medical emergency. Did you know that?” said the voice on the other end of the line. “Are you going to the emergency room…or would you like us to call 911?” Craig checked himself in at a hospital two blocks away from his home in Brooklyn. Mine is also kind of a funny story. One day, after seeing Dr. Lapuz for months, I found a part-time job as executive assistant to the president of a shipping company—at 19 and while still in college! By this time I was in love with my “shrink.” I would see her every Thursday and without fail I would call the day before to make sure she would be there. But I found a job. While I thought it was immature to keep my folks paying for my weekly visits at St. Luke’s, I was also unwilling to draw the money from my salary. She protested, saying I should at least complete a year.  “This is not about the money,” said Dr. Lapuz. “Come see me at home every Sunday.” So I did, but after a few more months, I told her I was going to quit for real. “Now that I get to see you for free, you’re just like a friend who listens to me,” I said. “Besides, you never ever even say what’s wrong with me.”

ALL PLAY NO PAUSE

But was I wrong! I had to think back to realize how it all changed. I woke up one day and with half of my face still buried in my pillow, I looked at my study desk across the room. I could see the clutter and the thick film of dust gathering on what little surface was left on the desk and I was thinking: “This is not the life I want to live.” I have no doubt that Dr. Lapuz had much to do with it, though most of the time she would just look into my eyes, nod her head, say uhm, oh, or ah, and laugh at my jokes. Thursdays with her were some of the best days of my life because not only could I be me, but I could be anybody I wanted, including S.E Hinton’s Ponyboy Curtis in *The Outsiders* or even Robert Bloch’s Norman Bates in *Psycho* and all she would ever say was either uhm or oh or ah, that is, if she wasn’t throwing back my own questions at me: “Do you think I’m hopeless?” “Oh, do you think you’re hopeless?” But yes, I woke up one morning and I was changed. That was how simple what Craig called “The Shift” was for me. I cleaned my room, not knowing I was doing it both literally and metaphorically. I was cleaning up my act. “Like I told you, you’re not lazy. You just didn’t want to do what you didn’t want to do, like everybody else,” said Dr. Lapuz at some point and, in hindsight, I believe it to have been my “aha” moment. Laziness is a curious thing. It is both the cause and effect of depression. Some days you feel you have no will to live. (I don’t mean you want to die, I mean you don’t want to get up in the morning or go to work/school or answer your phone or eat your meals or face your problems or whatever it takes to live each day.) But then there’s no pause to life. It goes on and it piles up. What you miss today because you feel you have too much weight on your shoulders that holds you down in bed is still going to be there tomorrow, but heavier because there’s tomorrow’s burden to carry, too.

RELEASE THE PRESSURE

Laziness is both a coping mechanism and the aggravator of all sorts of self-inadequacies that are inevitable in our search for success, meaning, or purpose. To Craig, it is an escape and so it was to me, but it was a trap, a kind of a graveyard of dreams. I didn’t have clinical depression. Unlike Craig, I wasn’t prescribed Zoloft or any other antidepressants, but just like Craig I was in a hole, defeated by Statistics or Chemistry or Physics or teachers or attendance records or school uniforms, and it took a doctor of medicine to pluck me out of it. I can’t help thinking how much more of a torment life has become now that technology is giving us more and more tools to get things done, to make things happen, to not fail. Plus there’s social media, which is some kind of a blow-by-blow real-time progress report on the life of the people around us—more pressure! But, as I learned from Dr. Lapuz, even if the most she ever said was uhm or oh or ah, I have it in me to relieve myself of the pressure. Life does get a little overwhelming, but as long as you don’t let it pile up, if all it means is putting your dirty clothes in the hamper or emptying your inbox of things to edit or reply to or move to trash, you can keep it under control. Although *It’s Kind of A Funny Story* is kind of a sad story when you think about its author, Ned Vizzini, jumping to his death in 2013 (he was 32), I would recommend this 2006 bestseller to anybody who feels they are about to buckle under pressure, perchance they come to terms with their own need for prescription drugs, for weekly therapy sessions, for a little faith and meditation, or for some realization such as that which I found on the pages of a book like this one.