Solutions and Other Problems

by Allie Brosh

That’s the scary thing about decisions: you don’t know what they are when you’re making them.

The only thing worse than getting trapped in the same bucket nineteen times is surrender.

For the sake of trust building, the third chapter will follow the second. But then we will jump directly to chapter five, do you understand? No chapter four. Why? Because sometimes things don’t go like they should. This is an inescapable property of reality, which we all must learn to accept. There just isn’t enough power in the universe for everybody to have all of it.

But we are civilized, friendly people, and sometimes it is best to restrain ourselves.

but I don’t think I’d reached that crucial developmental point where you’re capable of recognizing how creepy you’re being.

I’m a tragic, greedy animal with too many dreams to feel satisfied by reality. I want to know what everything cool feels like. I want to ride dragons into battle. I want to be important. I want to know what it would be like if everybody believed in me, including Ryan. I want to win high-stakes dance-offs and math tournaments and stunning victories for humankind. I want to be brave like a gladiator. I want to be powerful like a god.

Anger is not a graceful emotion. I’ve never gotten mad and been like, I’m glad I behaved like that!

It was the type of argument you can only have with people you’re really close to—people you know so well you start to forget they’re a different person from you, so it sort of feels like nobody can see you.

If you keep going, you’ll eventually realize that the one true answer to all your questions is: Of course it doesn’t make sense—what business do you have expecting things to make sense?

Unfortunately, the world doesn’t make sense. It just doesn’t. Not fully, at least. Not if you keep poking it. And poking harder doesn’t do anything. In fact, the harder you poke it, the less sense it makes. And once you start to notice this, it rips through you like a Tasmanian tornado octopus, rending your stupid little sense of meaning apart with its flailing power arms.

You want to go back to the way it was before, and it’s terrifying when you can’t.

You wonder what the endless aftermath will be like, and what percentage of yourself you lost, and how you’ll survive without it. You question whether it was fair for this to happen, and what can be done from here, and you realize how powerless you are.

Over the following weeks, they put my body inside a bunch of crazy machines to check out what the fuck kind of practical joke it was trying to pull,

When you can explain things to people who are willing to listen to you explain them, it is extremely difficult to resist fully and brutally explaining them. It feels good to explain them—like maybe you’re getting somewhere. Like maybe, if you can just… really explain them, the experiences will realize you’re catching on and stop bothering you.

I wanted to really go into detail about how awkward death can be, and describe the lack of closure and how it always just sits there, and the guilt, and the regrets, and which crossing it was, and all my guesses for what her last thoughts might have been, and how I still have dreams about her, but she acts different now.

From there, I wanted to go on to express how unfair the world is, and how many mistakes it’s possible to make even when you’re trying as hard as you can, and why I made the ones I did, and what they all were. I wanted to also explain what parts weren’t my fault, and tell you the full details of all my medical conditions, and how scared I feel all the time, and how familiar hospitals have become.

Sometimes all you can really do is keep moving and hope you end up somewhere that makes sense.

am doing at all, but I’m trying REALLY hard.

And trying really hard when you don’t know what you’re doing just happens to be the exact recipe for acting like a fuckin’ weirdo.

Adopting a cat is an entirely different process from adopting a dog. With dogs, it’s all very regimented. Visitation hours and stuff. With cats, they’re like, “What do you want? Cats?” You say yeah, and they say, “Great. Grab however many you want—they’re strewn throughout the building.” And then you walk around for three hours trying to find one that likes you.

It’s dead, so right from the beginning, things aren’t going well.

Because that’s intimacy, Buckaroos. Somebody who understands exactly how weird you are, and you understand exactly how weird they are, and you’re in a sort of mutually beneficial hostage situation.

I think what I’m trying to describe is loneliness. I felt pretty offended by it. I mean, what am I—some clueless animal who needs love and companionship?

When the vast majority of your interactions with somebody have been brutally critical—warlike, even—and you also personally caused almost all the bad things that ever happened to them, it may take a while before they don’t feel spooked by your presence.

—Attempt to ensnare us in baseless speculation about pointless bullshit that doesn’t need to be wondered and can’t actually be answered in a meaningful way

Because it is a person. And people need somebody who cares about them.