Hyperbole and a Half

by Allie Brosh

Fortunately, it turns out that being scared of yourself is a somewhat effective motivational technique.

I’ve gotten pretty good at making myself feel ashamed. I can even use shame in a theoretical sense to make myself do the right thing BEFORE I do the wrong thing. This skill could be described as “morality,” but I prefer to call it “How Horrible Can I Be Before I Experience a Prohibitive Amount of Shame?”

Fear and shame are the backbone of my self-control. They are my source of inspiration, my insurance against becoming entirely unacceptable. They help me do the right thing. And I am terrified of what I would be without them. Because I suspect that, left to my own devices, I would completely lose control of my life.

Some people have a legitimate reason to feel depressed, but not me. I just woke up one day feeling arbitrarily sad and helpless.

Essentially, I was being robbed of my right to feel self-pity, which is the only redeeming part of sadness.

In a final, desperate attempt to regain power over myself, I turned to shame as a sort of motivational tool.

But, since I was depressed, this tactic was less inspirational and more just a way to oppress myself with hatred.

it became obvious that there’s a huge difference between not giving a fuck and not being able to give a fuck. Cognitively, you might know that different things are happening to you, but they don’t feel very different.

However, I could no longer rely on genuine emotion to generate facial expressions, and when you have to spend every social interaction consciously manipulating your face into shapes that are only approximately the right ones, alienating people is inevitable.

people want to help. So they try harder to make you feel hopeful and positive about the situation. You explain it again, hoping they’ll try a less hope-centric approach, but re-explaining your total inability to experience joy inevitably sounds kind of negative, like maybe you WANT to be depressed. So the positivity starts coming out in a spray—a giant, desperate happiness sprinkler pointed directly at your face. And it keeps going like that until you’re having this weird argument where you’re trying to convince the person that you are far too hopeless for hope so that they’ll give up on their optimism crusade and let you go back to feeling bored and lonely by yourself.

Soon afterward, I discovered that there’s no tactful or comfortable way to inform other people that you might be suicidal. And there’s definitely no way to ask for help casually.

like most children, I yearned for attention and approval, and I couldn’t exactly afford to be picky about how I earned it.

The longer I procrastinate on returning phone calls and emails, the more guilty I feel about it. The guilt I feel causes me to avoid the issue further, which only leads to more guilt and more procrastination. It gets to the point where I don’t email someone for fear of reminding them that they emailed me and thus giving them a reason to be disappointed in me.

Because, deep down, I know how pointless and helpless I am, and it scares me. I am an animal trapped in a horrifying, lawless environment, and I have no idea what it’s going to do to me. It just DOES it to me.

And this is possibly the most humiliating thing of all. That I am so embarrassed about how embarrassing I am. As if I’ve got some sort of dignity to protect. Because I am a serious, dignified person. And I don’t want anyone to know I’m not.