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.

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.

the biggest flaw being that I still have to get very close to failure before I recognize some of the landmarks and panic.

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. Because I suspect that, left to my own devices, I would completely lose control of my life.

Listening to sad music and imagining that my life was a movie just made me feel kind of weird because I couldn’t really get behind the idea of a movie where the character is sad for no reason.

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.

At first, I’d try to explain that it’s not really negativity or sadness anymore, it’s more just this detached, meaningless fog where you can’t feel anything about anything—even the things you love, even fun things—and you’re horribly bored and lonely, but since you’ve lost your ability to connect with any of the things that would normally make you feel less bored and lonely, you’re stuck in the boring, lonely, meaningless void without anything to distract you from how boring, lonely, and meaningless it is.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I also feel disproportionately good about myself whenever I’m presented with absurdly easy opportunities to do the right thing and then actually do it.

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.

A lot of other people are better than me. When something causes me to become aware of this, it makes it more difficult for me to be satisfied with the way I am because the way I am seems so shitty compared to the way these better people are able to be.