The first time I read best-selling author Jenny Lawson, I was on a New York City subway, laughing so hard at her debut, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir, that people started giving me strange looks and slowly moving away. In a city where people rarely react, that's really saying something. But if I've learned anything from Lawson, it's not to let my pure joy be an embarrassment.
For nearly two decades, Lawson has built a devoted following by turning life’s most uncomfortable moments — anxiety, depression, and everyday embarrassments — into stories that are both hilarious and unexpectedly comforting. Today, that audience extends well beyond her books, with more than 167,000 followers on Instagram and 204,000 on Facebook.
Her newest book, How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay: The Tools and Tricks That Kept Me Alive, Happy, and Creative in Spite of Myself, continues that tradition, blending practical advice on navigating mental health, creativity, and life’s challenges with the quirky personal stories she’s known for, including chapter titles like “Murder Potatoes” and “Wash Your Brain More Than You Wash Your Bra.”
“I don’t really have the ability to not be myself,” Lawson tells Katie Couric Media. “I don’t have filters. I struggle not to just lay everything out there — basically vomiting my life onto the page.”
In our conversation, Lawson shares how her honest approach to sharing has improved her life and relationships — and could do the same for you.
Harnessing the power of authenticity
In contrast to what's commonly portrayed on social media — polished highlight reels and carefully curated lives — Lawson’s openness can feel a bit unusual. But those who've been with her since the beginning are used to it. She launched her blog, The Bloggess, in 2007, when she began building a loyal audience through her candid, hilarious posts.
While she began as a blogger, being intentional about how much time she spends online has become an important part of protecting her mental health. Lawson gives herself about 20 minutes to check the news or scroll through social media before stepping away and deciding what — if anything — she wants to do with the information she was confronted with. The habit, she says, helps her stay informed without letting the noise overwhelm her. “Humans aren’t really built for a world where it feels like everything is constantly on fire,” she points out.
That mindset also shapes the way she connects with readers. Rather than presenting a pristine version of her life, Lawson has found that sharing the awkward or difficult moments tends to create deeper connections.
“It’s very rare that someone says, ‘I want to be friends with this person because they have a fancy sports car,’” she says. “But if you talk about something embarrassing or something you’re struggling with, people say, ‘Oh, I want to be your friend.’”
Still, Lawson admits that sharing such an unfiltered version of herself with the world comes with its own trade-offs.
“I never know if someone’s going to say, ‘I’ve read you and I hate you,’” she jokes. “Or, ‘Why do you use so much profanity? Why did you say Jesus was a zombie one time?’"
Laughing through the rough stuff
For Lawson, humor has long been one of the most powerful ways to talk about the things people often struggle to say out loud. “Humor is sort of an on-ramp. It lets people say, ‘OK, I can talk about this too,” she explains.
Reframing those experiences might change how we relate to them. “Taking ownership of something scary or embarrassing makes it less likely to hurt you,” Lawson has found.
This approach has struck a chord with readers. Some have told Lawson that her writing helped them explain mental health struggles to family members, while others say it gave them the language to finally seek out support. “I’ve had people tell me they were in the process of planning their suicide and decided instead to get help,” she says. “Not necessarily because of what I wrote, but because they saw other readers responding and saying, ‘Me too.’”
Those moments, she says, are a powerful reminder of how important community can be, especially during difficult times. “Depression lies to you,” Lawson says. “But when you see other people saying the same thing you’re feeling, you realize maybe it’s not the truth.”
Mental health advice isn’t one-size-fits-all
Lawson likes to think of How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay as a toolbox rather than a rulebook. She’s quick to admit that some widely recommended coping strategies — like yoga for anxiety — didn’t work for her at first.
“My therapist was teaching me breathing techniques, and it turns out I was doing it so badly that I thought, ‘I didn’t even know you could fail at this,’” she says. “I was having a panic attack and somehow it was making it worse. I felt like I was suffocating.”
Eventually, though, Lawson discovered the power of breathing exercises in an unexpected moment when she experienced a panic attack in an alley and a stranger stepped in to help.
“A woman came over and said, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to breathe.’ I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, please go away,'” she recalls. “But she told me to put my hand on my stomach and breathe in slowly, feeling it rise and fall. She walked me through it, and it worked.”
Experiences like that, Lawson says, are a reminder that coping strategies can evolve over time. What helps at one point in life may stop working later — or suddenly start working when it hadn’t before. “That doesn’t mean you failed,” she emphasizes. “It just means you’re changing.”
That belief — that there’s no single formula for navigating mental health — sits at the heart of Lawson’s book, which asks a deceptively simple question: What does it actually mean to be OK in a world that often feels overwhelming?
For Lawson, being “OK” doesn’t mean pretending everything is fine. Instead, it’s about finding small moments of calm and perspective, even when things feel chaotic.
“There are so many more good people out there than bad people,” she says. “It’s just that the bad people are louder.”
Ultimately, she believes taking care of yourself is part of something bigger.
“The only way I can help make the world better is by finding a way to be OK myself,” she adds.
