Ode to my new idol

Year of Living Authentically: How I love Felicia Day, let me count the ways.

I have a weakness for celebrity books. Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Mindy Kaling. If you haven't read Aziz Ansari's Modern Romance, you need to now. It is the best thing I have discovered since Mary Roach's Stiff. They are short sections and funny, and when I have to put them down to start with life again, I don't have to go back to my note card with all the character names to remember what is going on.

I was BEYOND excited when I found out through the Geek and Sundry feed that Felicia Day had written a book as well. I pre-ordered my copy of You're Never Weird on the Internet (almost) that day.

If you don't know who Felicia Day is, go Google her. I'll wait. She is the Queen of the Geeks. She's a gamer, she's an actress, she's a business woman. She's sort of from Texas. She is smart and you can tell that she works really hard to make sure there is a medium for the Geek/Gamer/Girls in this world. She also got to hug Jensen Ackles on multiple occasions on Supernatural. This is only one of the many reasons that I have followed her career and wished to be more like her.

Or what I thought I knew of her. Not surprising there is a lot of stuff in the book that fans never saw on Eureka.

I wanted to write about her not just because she is awesome personified with red hair (as it should be) or that she unabashedly loves to reads the kind of books that we like to write here at Supernatural Underground,  but that in her book, she describes with complete detail what it is like to live with anxiety and depression and creative pressure and enough self doubt to fill a dump truck. Don't get me wrong, parts of this book totally read like a kid's guide to being a geek in the 90s (of which everything is painfully accurate to how I lived it). But as she describes her fight to make a niche for weird, she doesn't pussyfoot around the not fun stuff of being a human with brain chemistry that is sometimes not your friend.

Her talking about her anxiety, her putting it a book that hit the NYT bestseller list (another reason I want to follow in her footsteps), means that she isn't hiding anymore. She isn't trying to shun it away as something that is not a part of her. She has embraced it as she has embraced her weird. She is living authentically. 

Her being authentic to herself, her putting honest words down on paper helped me understand that I am not alone. Other people wrote bad fanfic when they were teenagers and they went on to write better things. Other people have had life-crippling bouts of depression that made them loose lots of weight, but they are better, happier, and completely rocking this life thing now. I hope others read her authenticity and it helps them out as I hope that me being honest about writing and motherhood will help others, or at least my daughter. Insert butterfly effect metaphor here.

But back to Felicia.  

I related to her playing a quirky girl named Vi on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I totally crushed on her as Codex in the web series she wrote, The Guild.

I might have wanted to kill her for getting to play Charlie Bradbury in Supernatural  and for introducing me to so many online games during her Flog.

But for being a champion of living authentically, I love her more than ever.

#alwayskeepfighting

YOLA!

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Amanda Arista
Author, Diaries of an Urban Panther
www.amandaarista.com