It's Kind of a Funny Story

by Ned Vizzini

If you can’t get out of bed for long enough, people come and take your bed away.

I just want to not be me. Whether it’s sleeping or playing video games or riding my bike or studying. Giving my brain up. That’s what’s important.”

A person’s relationship with food is one of their most important relationships. I don’t think your relationship with your parents is that important. Some people never know their parents. I don’t think your relationships with your friends are important. But your relationship with air—that’s key. You can’t break up with air. You’re kind of stuck together. Only slightly less crucial is water. And then food. You can’t be dropping food to hang with someone else. You need to strike up an agreement with it.

But I find God to be an ineffectual shrink. He adopts the “do nothing” method of therapy. You tell him your problems and he, ah, does nothing.

Who hasn’t thought about killing themselves, as a kid? How can you grow up in this world and not think about it?

Time is a person-made concept.”

There’s so much more for me to be doing. I should be a success and I’m not and other people—younger people—are. Younger people than me are on TV and getting paid and winning scholarships and getting their lives in order. I’m still a nobody. When am I going to not be a nobody?

I look at what she’s typing on the screen. Under “reason for admission,” she puts SUICIDAL IDEATION. That would be a good band name, I think.

Life’s not about feeling better; it’s about getting the job done.

My mom seems happier about me getting into the hospital than she was about me getting into high school.

Here in the real world, all equals are created animal, but some are more animal than others.

They take away your options and all you can do is live, and it’s just like Humble said: I’m not afraid of dying; I’m afraid of living.

I wish the world were like this, if I just woke up and marked the food I’d be eating and it came to me later in the day. I suppose it is like that, except you have to pay for whatever you want to eat, so maybe what I’m asking for is communism, but I think it’s actually deeper than communism—I’m asking for simplicity, for purity and ease of choice and no pressure. I’m asking for something that no politics is going to provide, something that probably you only get in preschool. I’m asking for preschool.

I work, Monica, and I think about work, and I freak out about work, and I think about how much I think about work, and I freak out about how much I think about how much I think about work, and I think about how freaked out I get about how much I think about how much I think about work. Does that count as a hobby?

A working brain is probably a lot like a map, where anybody can get from one place to another on the freeways. It’s the nonworking brains that get blocked, that have dead ends, that are under construction like mine.

I’m done with those; regrets are an excuse for people who have failed.

Because deep down I believe my year was a special year: it produced me.

I don’t owe people anything, and I don’t have to talk to them any more than I feel I need to.

I raise my wrist, show him the bracelets. I have pride in them now. They’re true, and people can’t screw with them. And when you say the truth you get stronger.