Hyperbole and a Half

by Allie Brosh

carpet. I was so miserable, but my suffering was small compared to the satisfaction I felt every time my horrible, conniving mother had to watch me retch up another rainbow of sweet, semidigested success: This is for you, Mom. This is what happens when you try to get between me and cake.

myself around like a bully, narrating my thoughts and actions with a constant stream of abuse.

But my experiences slowly flattened and blended together until it became obvious that there’s a huge difference between not giving a fuck and not being able to give a fuck.

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

I could no longer rely on genuine emotion to generate facial expressions, and when you have to spend every social interaction consciously manipulating your face into shapes that are only approximately the right ones, alienating people is inevitable.

It’s weird for people who still have feelings to be around depressed people. They try to help you have feelings again so things can go back to normal, and it’s frustrating for them when that doesn’t happen.

From their perspective, it seems like there has got to be some untapped source of happiness within you that you’ve simply lost track of, and if you could just see how beautiful things are . . .

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.

the most frustrating thing about depression. It isn’t always something you can fight back against with hope. It isn’t even something—it’s nothing. And you can’t combat nothing. You can’t fill it up. You can’t cover it. It’s just there, pulling the meaning out of everything.

It’s a strange moment when you realize that you don’t want to be alive anymore.

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.

The syrupy, oversimplified optimism started to feel almost offensive.

Reality doesn’t give a shit about my rules, and this upsets me. Not to a great degree. Not even to an obvious degree.

I seem to spend a lot of time being mildly disappointed by things that aren’t actually disappointing. They appear disappointing, though, because I’m constantly trying to be impressed or surprised by everything.

It feels unfair when the other things in the world refuse to be governed by my justice system. To be fair, though, my concept of “fairness” is sort of questionable and not based on the way reality actually works.

And this is possibly the most humiliating thing of all. That I am so embarrassed about how embarrassing I am.

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.

Thankfully, I have an entire system of lies and tricks in place to prevent me from realizing how shitty I actually am.

Unfortunately, the source of my shittiness is the fact that I’m shitty. I just am. It is not possible for me to not be that way. I can prevent myself from being actively shitty. I can do things that a not-shitty person would do. But the shittiness is always going to be there, just beneath the surface, straining to get out.