Judith Lucy: In her new book Well Well Well. . . the comedian charts her journey to get . . . well

My own ‘wellness journey’ started roughly twenty-five years ago when I took up yoga. Back then I just wanted to do a physical activity that was slightly more challenging than lifting a glass to my lips, but my growing interest in this ‘space’ soon became about trying to deal with my anxiety. Then it became about dealing with all sorts of other things.

Like almost everyone I know, I’ve been sick in one form or another for a long time. I can’t remember when I didn’t suffer from some low-level illness that made me feel like crap: insomnia, digestive issues, back pain, shoulder pain, arthritis, terrible period pain, mysterious nausea and bloating, fatigue and a general feeling of being not quite right. (That’s not including the really fun stuff like a general sense of emptiness and despair — although don’t worry, we’ll get to that too . . .) I know how lucky I am not to have a more serious health condition (if you have cancer or anything approaching that level of severity, I would stop reading now so that you don’t want to fire me out of a cannon or tattoo ‘Donald Trump is one sexy mother’ on my face next time you see me) but for what seems like forever, I’ve being trying to become ‘well’, with everything from a celery detox and another trip to the naturopath to a ten-day silent meditation retreat.

So I thought that I, too, could get a slice of that sweet, sweet wellness pie by writing a fun guide to all the stuff I’ve tried! There’s the sound bathing, rebirthing, living in a tiny house and cryotherapy. Yes, a lot of it is bats..t but some of it — and this is one of the many maddening things about ‘wellness’ — are genuinely worthwhile and scientifically proven, like meditation or breathwork. The idea was to write about both ends of the spectrum, telling you what worked for me and what . . . didn’t, but just when I was about to make some filthy lucre out of all this nonsense (or more accurately, recoup some of the money I’ve spent on it), I really did get sick. Different from the constant annoying maladies, this was ‘couldn’t-really-get-out-of-bed-or-work’ sick. This was ‘can-I-even-write-a-book?’ sick. It was ‘retire-from-stand-up-and-move-back-to-my-hometown-of-Perth’ sick. So, while what you’re about to read is still a guide to some of the kooky things that I’ve been trying since my early thirties, it’s also the story of the last couple of years and my rather desperate attempts to feel better.

Spoiler alert: there’s no magic pill (well there are lots of them, but they tend to only ‘cure’ you for about four to six hours). I know what it’s like to feel like s... and to have no real idea how to get healthy again. I know how much anyone who’s felt like this desperately wants to believe the person telling them that they have the answer. I know what it’s like to have a lot of vague symptoms that together are debilitating while your doctor tells you that according to your blood tests, you’re fine. I know what it’s like to be told that you have something like long COVID or that you’re burnt out but feel that even with a diagnosis there doesn’t really seem to be anything concrete to do about it.

So I’m not going to tell you that I have the answer because, quite honestly, even as I’m writing this, I still don’t feel great. But I am finally heading in the right direction, and this is the story of how that happened (although it does have to be said that writing a book about wellness while trying to get well may not have been my smartest idea). It involves some of the big-picture topics like ‘nature’ and ‘the mind’ but also specific problems and remedies — having spent a quarter of a century exploring this area, I can at least tell you what, for me, was a complete waste of time and money and what genuinely seems to have helped. Where I can, I’ve included a bit of scientific research. I’m a comedian for God’s sake and this isn’t a reference book, but maybe some parts of it will be useful. I’ve drunk my own urine so you don’t have to (I haven’t actually but I think we can all accept that ingesting your own waste is probably not a terrific idea).

Still, it should go without saying that this is my very personal journey and so what works for me won’t necessarily work for you. Also, what I think is a totally crackpot notion might strike you as making a lot of sense. And anyone who has taken a step down this path knows that the practitioner has as much to do with the cure as the treatment itself — sometimes I might have just had a dud. I also mention this because, as you’ll see, I found something called craniosacral therapy very effective, but my suspicion is that it had a lot more to do with the therapist that I was seeing as opposed to the actual practice. Who knows? (Something I have found myself saying a lot over the last couple of years.)

There’s no scientific method to my madness: basically, I’ve tried techniques that have piqued my interest. For example, I got about halfway through reading a book about manifesting and realised that it didn’t remotely grab me. I also gave stoicism a miss. And I know some people swear by the Enneagram, which divides people into nine interconnected personality types, each of which is given a number. I wound up being pretty convinced that I was a 1 until I read the description for a type 2 person, but that went out the window when I read about 3s. In the end, I thought I was at least five of them and decided that FOR ME this was just complete garbage. On the other hand, I am not a Buddhist but I have found some of that religion’s approaches very useful when it comes to dealing with our cheeky minds in particular, so Siddhartha Gautama gets a reasonable amount of airtime here.

And there are plenty of approaches I haven’t tried either because I wasn’t ready or just haven’t had time. I was hoping to write something about financial wellness, but considering that I’ve written ‘BUDGET’ in my diary every week for an entire year and have done absolutely nothing about it, you’ll have to read about that in the sequel when I’ve hopefully stopped pissing my savings up a wall.

Lastly, it’d be fair to say that even the things I know work, I don’t always do. There is mounting evidence that drinking any alcohol at all is a bad idea. I imbibe a lot less than I used to but am I ready or willing to cut it out completely? No, I’m not. (And honestly, with the world in the state that it’s currently in, scientists decided to tell us about the no-booze thing NOW??? Make mine a jug of ethanol and chin-chin!)

To put all that another way: this is very much MY journey through wellness.

(Oh, and a quick apology: you’re about to learn more about my bowels then you ever wanted or needed to know.)

An extract from Well Well Well. . . by Judith Lucy, $36.99, Simon & Schuster