Jenny Lawson, also known as the much-celebrated Bloggess, is the author of the hilarious, heartbreaking Let's Pretend This Never Happened. Today, she reveals her own unique (and by unique, we mean very, very unique) way of defeating her crippling fears and doubts in order to “walk purposefully into the story” of her own adult life.

When I was young, my family didn't go on outings to the circus or trips to Disneyland. We couldn't afford them. Instead, we stayed in our small rural West Texas town, and my parents took us to cemeteries. My sister Lisa and I would run through the sun-scorched lawns, hiding behind the tombstones and marking the largest ones as "safe" or "poison." We brought out reams of butcher paper and crayons and made rubbings of the tombstones.' 'We were dark back before it was cool, basking in a sort of poverty-induced pre-puberty Goth period.

Later—after we'd run out of energy—we'd walk through the graveyard and try to piece together stories. We'd start at the largest, most prominent tombstone (usually a mayor or a town founder) and work our way out, piecing together the lives and deaths of the people who'd once made the town come alive, and from there we'd embellish.

For example: Samuels was a town founder who'd gone through three wives in his long life, but in the end, he was buried next to his first wife, Georgina, whom he'd been married to only a few short years before she died at 22. Her tombstone was larger than those of the other women, with a weeping angel standing watch, and a spot at the top was dark, as if charred.

"Or," my mom said knowingly, "as if a man had laid his hand there many times over his past 60 years." "Or," my father added, "as if hobos used it as an ashtray."

We walked on to the Smith family plot, about which we made up long and complicated stories filled with imagined scandal and laughter and heartache. In our minds, the oldest son had been an incurable dreamer who died young while attempting to create an early (and painfully unsuccessful) jetpack. The Smith plots were overgrown, though, and it seemed as if the family line had died out—and the only stories still told about them were the ones told by people like us: poor amateur detectives with strong imaginations and no access to cable.

Inevitably, we always ended up with at least one tombstone that didn't quite fit with the rest. Set off from the others, it bore a last name that didn't seem to match anyone else's. There were no special engravings, no "beloved child" or "She is not dead. She only rests." Instead, there was just a name and, possibly, a date. Those markers always made me the saddest, probably because I identified most with them.

Even at age 10, I already knew that I was different from most people. My anxiety disorder was still years from being diagnosed, but it affected me quite deeply. I was too afraid to speak out in class, too nervous to make real friends. It was always the single, lonely grave that I'd stop at to pull out the weeds and leave wildflowers. In a way, I suppose, I was mourning for myself, for the outgoing, friend-to-all person I would never be. At that young age, I already felt as if I'd always fade into the background. I was terrified of slumber parties, let alone leaving the house. I couldn't give a book report and, instead, would stand in front of the class laughing nervously without ever uttering a word.

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