Hyperbole and a Half

by Allie Brosh

I’m always surprised when I lose.

But I keep allowing it to happen because, to me, the future doesn’t seem real. It’s just this magical place where I can put my responsibilities so that I don’t have to be scared while hurtling toward failure at eight hundred miles per hour.

I’ve experienced enough failure at this point to become suspicious of where I’m going and what’s going to happen when I get there. And for the last helpless moments of the journey, I’m fully aware and terrified.

Procrastination has become its own solution—a tool I can use to push myself so close to disaster that I become terrified and flee toward success.

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.

But trying to use willpower to overcome the apathetic sort of sadness that accompanies depression is like a person with no arms trying to punch themselves until their hands grow back. A fundamental component of the plan is missing and it isn’t going to work.

The problem might not even have a solution. But you aren’t necessarily looking for solutions. You’re maybe just looking for someone to say “Sorry about how dead your fish are,” or “Wow, those are super dead. I still like you, though.”

The absurdity of working so hard to continue doing something you don’t like can be overwhelming. And the longer it takes to feel different, the more it starts to seem like everything might actually be hopeless bullshit.

Being a good person is a very important part of my identity, but being a genuinely good person is time-consuming and complicated. You don’t have to be a good person to feel like a good person, though.

It felt horrible to find bad qualities that I didn’t know about. And it felt even worse to know that some of the things I thought were my good qualities were actually just a disguise for more bad qualities.