Hyperbole and a Half

by Allie Brosh

When I was ten years old, I wrote a letter to my future self and buried it in my backyard. Seventeen years later, I remembered that I was supposed to remember to dig it up two years earlier. I looked forward to getting a nostalgic glimpse into my childhood—perhaps I would marvel at my own innocence or see the first glimmer of my current aspirations. As it turns out, it just made me feel real weird about myself. The letter was scrawled in green crayon on the back of a utility bill. My ten-year-old self had obviously not spent much time planning out the presentation of it. Most likely, I had simply been walking through the kitchen and suddenly realized that it was entirely possible to write a letter to my future self.

Dear ten-year-old, Wow, you really like dogs. In fact, you like dogs so much that I’m not even sure it’s emotionally healthy. It might be normal to love dogs a lot, or to be really interested in dogs, but you go way, way past that. Normal children don’t walk around pretending to be a dog nearly as much as you do, for example. You’re ten. It makes people wonder about your developmental progress when you growl and bark at them. An even more concerning issue is the obstacle course. Fine, you want to train your dog to run through an obstacle course. That’s pretty normal. What isn’t normal is making your mother time you as you crawl through the course on all fours, over and over and over again. You’re making Mom think that she did something wrong to make you this way.

I figured that maybe she just hadn’t been exposed to stairs yet. Accepting the noble responsibility of educating this poor, underprivileged creature, I spent hours tenderly guiding her up and down the staircase—placing biscuits on each step to lure her and celebrating any sign of progress. When she still couldn’t successfully navigate the stairs at the end of her first week with me, I blamed it on her extreme lack of motor control. This dog is uncoordinated in a way that would suggest her canine lineage is tainted with traces of a species with a different number of legs—like maybe a starfish or a snake.

one night I was sitting on my couch mindlessly surfing the Internet when I looked up and noticed my dog licking the floor. Just licking and licking. At first I thought maybe I’d spilled something there, but her licking did not appear to be localized to one spot. Rather, she was walking around the room licking seemingly at random. She lay down on her side and kept licking out of the side of her mouth while staring directly at me. At that moment I realized that I needed to know for sure whether my dog was retarded or not.

🤣

Most people can motivate themselves to do things simply by knowing that those things need to be done. But not me. For me, motivation is this horrible, scary game where I try to make myself do something while I actively avoid doing it. If I win, I have to do something I don’t want to do. If I lose, I’m one step closer to ruining my entire life. And I never know whether I’m going to win or lose until the last second.

Omg same

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.

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.

The simple dog has a lot of weird qualities that make her seem un-dog-like. She’s more like a sea cucumber with legs.

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.

I’ve always wanted to not give a fuck. While crying helplessly into my pillow for no good reason, I would often fantasize that maybe someday I could be one of those stoic badasses whose emotions are mostly comprised of rock music and not being afraid of things.

I tried to get out more, but most fun activities just left me existentially confused or frustrated with my inability to enjoy them.

I had so very few feelings, and everyone else had so many, and it felt like they were having all of them in front of me at once. I didn’t really know what to do, so I agreed to see a doctor so that everyone would stop having all of their feelings at me.

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. My feelings did start to return eventually. But not all of them came back, and they didn’t arrive symmetrically. I had not been able to care for a very long time, and when I finally started being able to care about things again, I HATED them. But hatred is technically a feeling, and my brain latched on to it like a child learning a new word.

Thankfully, I rediscovered crying just before I got sick of hating things. I call this emotion “crying” and not “sadness” because that’s all it really was. Just crying for the sake of crying. My brain had partially learned how to be sad again, but it took the feeling out for a joyride before it had learned how to use the brakes or steer.

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.

OMG SAME

we rounded the corner and spotted the goose in our living room. It was walking around and methodically pecking all of our belongings, as if to convey: This is mine now. I own it. And also this. And also this. And this. Everything is mine. As I watched from the doorway, I felt an absurd rage build up inside me. Who the fuck does this goose think it is? It thinks it can waltz into my home, bite everyone, and then proceed to claim ownership of my couch and my DVD player? Geese have no business owning DVD players. It was entirely unacceptable.

I seem to spend a lot of time being mildly disappointed by things that aren’t actually disappointing.

I don’t like being inconvenienced, and I especially don’t like being inconvenienced too many times in a row. If something I don’t like happens, then several more things that I don’t like happen directly afterward, that is too many. They shouldn’t cluster like that. Unfortunately, that’s just how probability works.

I don’t like when I can’t control what reality is doing. Which is unfortunate because reality works independently of the things I want, and I have only a limited number of ways to influence it, none of which are guaranteed to work. I still want to keep tabs on reality, though. Just in case it tries to do anything sneaky. It makes me feel like I’m contributing. The illusion of control makes the helplessness seem more palatable. And when that illusion is taken away, I panic. 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.

I can understand wanting to try this out. I can understand thinking, Hmm . . . maybe this will do something and experimenting a little. But for the past three years, you’ve spent the entire duration of every walk strangling yourselves on the off chance that maybe this time it will work. It’s never going to work, dogs. No matter how hard you pull, it’s never going to make me think, “You know what? Maybe it would be sort of fun to walk in the middle of the street with all the cars . . . and maybe I do want to go splashing around in the duck pond in the middle of December.” You aren’t allowed to decide because you are really bad at making decisions. And you have to wear a leash because you don’t know that you are bad at making decisions. You would make too many of them if the leash didn’t stop you.

I’m legitimately terrified that someday, someone I love is actually going to need a kidney. I’d like to say this fear stems from concern over the health of my loved ones, but it’s mostly because I don’t want to find out how I would react to someone needing one of my kidneys. I desperately want to believe I would seize the opportunity to help a loved one without a second thought for my own well-being, but I’m almost certain it wouldn’t play out like that. First of all, I really, really wouldn’t want to give away a kidney, and that would make me feel weird about myself. I’d feel selfish. Because I am. And if I was not a match, I’d be relieved, which would also put me face-to-face with some uncomfortable truths about myself.

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 would also shove everyone, never share anything, and shout at people who aren’t letting me do exactly what I want. I don’t do those things, though. Because I don’t want to have to know that I did them. It would hamper my ability to feel like a good person. I don’t even want to know that I would do them.

Allie Brosh lives as a recluse in her bedroom in Bend, Oregon. In 2009, she thought, “I know what would be a good idea! Instead of becoming a scientist, I should write and draw things on the Internet!” This was a horrible idea for too many reasons to count, but the decision wasn’t really based on logic. Things sort of spiraled from there. Brosh’s award-winning blog Hyperbole and a Half somehow became an award-winning blog, and in 2013, Advertising Age named Brosh one of the fifty most influential creative figures in the world. Brosh has also given herself many awards, including “fanciest horse drawing” and “most likely to succeed.”