Hyperbole and a Half

by Allie Brosh

Tell me, how does mixing Dijon mustard with sand and then eating it make someone love you?

no one is going to love you until you stop doing things like trying to make them love you by eating mustard–sand.

My mom had prepared the cake early in the day to get the task out of the way. She thought she was being efficient, but really she had only ensured that she would be forced to spend the whole day protecting the cake from my all-encompassing need to eat it.

I crept toward the cake, my body quivering with anticipation. It was mine. All mine.

It didn’t matter how violently ill I felt; in that moment, I was a god—the god of cake—and I was unstoppable.

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. Then the guilt from my ignored responsibilities grows so large that merely carrying it around with me feels like a huge responsibility. It takes up a sizable portion of my capacity, leaving me almost completely useless for anything other than consuming nachos and surfing the Internet like an attention-deficient squirrel on PCP.

I have a subconscious list of rules for how reality should work. I did not develop these rules on purpose, and most of them don’t make sense—which is disturbing when you consider that they are an attempt to govern the behavior of reality—but they exist, and they play a large role in determining how I react to the things that happen to me. Large enough that a majority of the feelings I feel are simply a reaction to reality not complying with my arbitrary set of rules.

Reality doesn’t give a shit about my rules, and this upsets me. Not to a great degree. Not even to an obvious degree. But when reality disobeys my rules, detectable levels of surprise, disappointment, and frustration are produced. And to me, it feels perfectly logical to be feeling those things. But if someone were to observe me in my natural environment—having all the thoughts and feelings my natural environment causes me to have—I would seem much less logical. In fact, I might seem sort of like a wild animal trying to adapt to an alternate reality that it somehow became trapped in.

On a fundamental level, I am someone who would throw sand at children. I know this because I have had to resist doing it, and that means that it’s what I would naturally be doing if I wasn’t resisting it.

I might not be able to be someone who never ever gets the urge to push people or throw sand at them, but I try to be that person.