Hyperbole and a Half

by Allie Brosh

One of the most terrifying things that has ever happened to me was watching myself decide over and over again—thirty-five days in a row—to not return a movie I had rented. Every day, I saw it sitting there on the arm of my couch. And every day, I thought, I should really do something about that . . . and then I just didn’t.

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.

being scared of yourself is a somewhat effective motivational technique.

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.

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.

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.

I would eat all of the cake or I would evaporate from the sheer power of my desire to eat it.

Nobody can guarantee that it’s going to be okay, but—and I don’t know if this will be comforting to anyone else—the possibility exists that there’s a piece of corn on a floor somewhere that will make you just as confused about why you are laughing as you have ever been about why you are depressed. And

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.

like to believe that I would behave heroically in a disaster situation. I like to think this because it makes me feel good about myself.

Unfortunately, I am not disciplined enough to maintain my behavior up to the standards of my ridiculously optimistic self-image, and I possess a great number of undesirable qualities, so it’s a daily struggle to prevent myself from ruining my own fantasy.

Being a good person is a very important part of my identity, but being a genuinely good person is time-consuming and complicated.

The fact that I think about doing nice things feels almost like actually doing them. I get to feel all the good feelings without any of the inconvenience. It’s disgusting how proud of myself I am for things I’ve never done.

my identity is based on so many things that aren’t true, it doesn’t have a built-in fact-checking mechanism, and sometimes discrepancies arise.

This is quite uncomfortable because it means I need to pick a side. But I don’t like picking sides when it comes to my identity, so I usually try to ignore it or find a way to trick myself into thinking it isn’t a discrepancy.

This triggers an uncomfortable level of self-awareness where I’m dangerously close to discovering how full of shit I am.

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.

When you start figuring out how full of shit you are, it’s like opening a tunnel to all the lies you’ve ever told yourself. The tunnel is really deep and scary, but you’re suspicious about it and you want to see what’s down there.

Unfortunately, the source of my shittiness is the fact that I’m shitty. I just am.

didn’t want the source of my problems to turn out to be “You’re just sort of naturally shittier than what you wanted, and you had to trick yourself so you wouldn’t find out and be disappointed.”