Hyperbole and a Half

by Allie Brosh

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.

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?”

I’m still hoping that perhaps someday I’ll learn how to use willpower like a real person, but until that very unlikely day, I will confidently battle toward adequacy, wielding my crude skill set of fear and shame.

my mom knew that it was extremely important to keep the cake away from me because she knew that if I was allowed even a tiny amount of sugar, not only would I become intensely hyperactive, but the entire scope of my existence would funnel down to the singular goal of obtaining and ingesting more sugar. My need for sugar would become so massive that it would collapse in upon itself and create a vacuum into which even more sugar would be drawn until all the world had been stripped of sweetness.

My mom had locked the cake in the back bedroom. How was I going to get to it now? I hadn’t yet learned the art of lock-picking and I wasn’t nearly strong enough to kick the door in. It felt as though all my life’s aspirations were slipping away from me in a landslide of tragedy. How could they do this to me? How could they just sit there placidly as my reason for living slowly faded from my grasp? I couldn’t take it. My little mind began to crumble.

The shelter worker said, “This one hates everything and she doesn’t know anything, and I hope you aren’t planning on taking her outside ever because she’s more like a bear than a dog, really, and unfortunately, she can scale a seven-foot-tall fence like the fucking Spider-Man.” And we were like, “Sure, why not.”

From what we can tell, the helper dog holds a firm belief that other dogs should not exist. The fact that they do fills her with uncontrollable, psychotic rage.

You might be thinking, How many problems can a dog actually have? There are only, like, eight things dogs can do. And that’s what I thought too.

The staring was a bit unsettling, but that wasn’t what forced us to move the helper dog’s bed into the hallway. What did that was the neighbor’s dog. The problem with the neighbor’s dog is that it exists. It especially exists at five o’clock in the morning.

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.

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.

It’s a strange moment when you realize that you don’t want to be alive anymore. If I had feelings, I’m sure I would have felt surprised. I have spent the vast majority of my life actively attempting to survive. Ever since my most distant single-celled ancestor squiggled into existence, there has been an unbroken chain of things that wanted to stick around.

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.

Murphy’s actions over the next few hours didn’t seem particularly purposeful. But at some point during one of her stick-thrashing sprees, she took off into the woods—presumably to see what it would feel like to run into a lot of objects while holding a small tree trunk in her mouth—

Not surprisingly, the helper dog interpreted the snow as a sign of her imminent demise. But she was so exhausted from worrying about all of the other signs of her demise that she just gave up and accepted her death.

Upon discovering that the toy squeaked when it was compressed forcefully, the simple dog immediately forgot that she’d ever experienced doubt or anxiety ever in her life.

But a few times a year, I spontaneously decide that I’m ready to be a real adult. I don’t know why I decide this; it always ends terribly for me. But I do it anyway. I sit myself down and tell myself how I’m going to start cleaning the house every day and paying my bills on time and replying to emails before my inbox reaches quadruple digits. Schedules are drafted. Day planners are purchased. I stock up on fancy food because I’m also planning on morphing into a master chef and actually cooking instead of just eating nachos for dinner every night. I prepare for my new life as an adult like some people prepare for the apocalypse.

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.

Imagine a grizzly bear. Now imagine that by some accident of nature, the bear sprouts wings and learns how to use a flamethrower. That would be a really unfair thing to have happen. Bears are already powerful enough without those things. Similarly, children are already annoying enough without access to a toy that will record and repeat any sound in the entire world.

When it finally registered that the source of the sound was merely a honking goose, I was relieved. Then I had a flashback to my childhood. And I remembered that most geese are dangerous psychopaths that become extremely violent for absolutely no reason.

The light in the kitchen cast a sharp silhouette of the goose against the blanket. “What should we do with it?” said Duncan. I said, “I guess it lives in our kitchen now.”

Finally, Duncan whispered, “We could trap it with a blanket.” I said, “This room is pretty big, right? We could just live in here.”

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—

I am incensed that reality has the audacity to do some of the things it does when I CLEARLY don’t want those things to happen.

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.

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.”

The only proper way to react to bees is to leave them alone. In case the distinction isn’t clear, leaving bees alone does not include eating them.

here’s a little pop quiz. It’s tricky, so don’t get discouraged: It’s ten o’clock at night. The TV is emitting a sound that you don’t immediately recognize. Confused, you begin barking and clawing at the door. You then hear me shout the word “no” at you. What am I trying to tell you? A. Keep going! You’re doing a great job! B. Make a different sound. C. I know you’re busy, but when you find the time, could you knock everything off the table? D. Hey, listen! I want to say one of the words I know! E. Stop doing that, I hate it. Answer: E. Stop doing that, I hate it. Hopefully you were not surprised by that answer.

Horse statue: I know, I know—it looks like a horse. But it isn’t. Statues are tricky like that.

Also, I’m never going to believe that all four of your legs stopped working at the exact moment I decided we should leave the dog park. You think you’re being so sneaky. I’ll admit that it’s embarrassing when I have to drag you to the car by your perfectly functional legs, past all the people who are judging me because none of their dogs become situationally quadriplegic and they’ve never experienced this so they don’t know what’s going on.