(courtesy Hachette Australia)
Is it possible to be funny both funny and incisive about mental health?
It is if you’re comedian Susan Calman, who, when she’s not making us laugh from the stage or on TV – her Grand Day Out series is a joy and makes travelling just as much fun as it should be – is trying to handle the presence of one Crab of Hate, her animalistic representation of the anxiety and depression with which she has struggled for most of her life.
The first thing you notice in Cheer Up Love (and yes, somehow we missed this 2016/17 gem until now) is that Calman has a wondrously good grasp on what mental health is like in a real world context.
She doesn’t pretend for a second to be inspirational or the guru of insight but simply be being honest about her journey with mental health issues (itself a loaded word) she’s inspires you to be honest about where you might be at with whatever you’re working through and to look at them not necessarily as something that needs to be bested so much as lived with in a productive way.
In fact, it is downright freeing to read Cheer Up Love precisely because Calman, by being authentic about what she’s gone through, doesn’t make being honest yourself seem like an impossible task or burden and something that can be tackled in the course of your day-to-day-life and with those nearest and dearest to you.
I know many people who have been greatly helped by a daily pill or two and would swear by the change that they’ve made, and as with everything in relation to mental health, if it works for you then congratulations and best of luck. It’s just my personal belief that I need to deal with the root of my problems, namely my own lack of self-confidence and general feeling of self-hatred.
What’s even more encouraging if you’re a queer person like this reviewer is that Calman is bracingly real about what it is like for a LGBTQI+ plus person to face mental health issues and how we are more likely to have them dog us given the adversarial environment in which many of us are raised or live in.
A lesbian who lives happily with her brilliantly supportive wife in Glasgow, Calman discusses at a number of points why it is that many LGBTQI+ people have issues with their mental health, and she’s at pains to out that while the haters and bigots say it is because we are fundamentally wrong, broken and flawed (clearly not even remotely true), the more likely reason is that its precisely because we have been told all our lives that we are wrong somehow that we end up with anxiety and depression and a range of other conditions.
How can you not end up rife with all kinds of issues when, like this reviewer, you spent your formative years being bullied as a “poof” and a “pansy” by schoolmates and told by the church that all LGBTQI+ people are hideous sinners who need to repent and if they don’t, will face a terrible eternity in hell.
How can that not doing something to you? It’s near impossible to just shrug that off, and among her many pearls of reassuring wisdom, delivered by someone who has embraced her Crab of Hate and come out the other side happy for that ownership, Calman makes it clear that we are the cause of our mental health maladies.
(courtesy official Twitter now known as X account)
But what is so wonderful about this very funny book is that Calman talks about how she has journeyed through some very dark times and that rather than magically wishing her mental health issues, she has found constructive and useful ways to deal with them and to live alongside them.
Certainly therapy and the support of family and friends has helped enormously to lessen the impact of her anxiety and depression but much of Cheer Up Love centres on how you never really get rid of your mental health issues such as you find a way to deal with them.
Far from being defeatist which it most certainly is not, what Calman offers up is freeing in the extreme because it says, yes, you should work the limit the damage done by your mental health issues but that you should also recognise they will likely be with you for life, embrace them and build them into the entirety of your life and accept that much of their presence is mitigation, not eradication.
Calman also talks about how widespread mental health issues are and that far from being freakish oddities prone to all kinds of dark deeds and violence as the media and popular culture likes to think, that we are just normal people who are more numerous than anyone seems to like to admit.
I’m an odd woman with odd ways, but that makes life interesting. More than that, I’m proud of who I am, whatever anyone might think of me. I’m a depressed, foul mouthed, angry, serious, intelligent, passionate, emotional, angry, sensitive, polite, feminist comedian. And I love every bit of me.
I am Calman. Hear me roar.
That frankly is a relief.
When you are down in the depths of your anxiety and depression, it’s very easy to feel like you are the only person in the world facing off against the twin issues, and while that isn’t true, sharing how you’re honestly feeling with your friends and the shock, horror and discomfort, they often register can certainly make you feel like that.
But Calman time and again and with absolutely laugh-out-loud inducing hilarity that sits easily along with far more serious moments, of which there are insightfully and thoughtfully many, makes it clear that having less than perfect mental health is not weird or strange or anything of the sort but very very normal.
And yes, it is disruptive and difficult and incredibly hard to deal with things like anxiety and depression at times, especially when they make you hate yourself with the power of a thousand highly critical suns, but it is possible to climb out the other side, to find ways to not just mitigate their effects but to live happily with them still present.
Once you finish Cheer Up Love and pause after all the laughing and feelings and thinking, you will feel empowered and relieved that someone has finally said it like it actually is and then talked about how having these issues on your plate can be horrible and nasty at times, but that they are not the end of the story and that by accepting the totality of who you are, that you can become, and I love this wording from the back cover blurb, “the most joyous sad person you’ll ever meet.”