Hyperbole and a Half

Adventures in Depression

2011-10-27T15:08:00.001-06:00

Some people have a legitimate reason to feel depressed, but not me. I just woke up one day feeling sad and helpless for absolutely no reason.

It's disappointing to feel sad for no reason. Sadness can be almost pleasantly indulgent when you have a way to justify it - you can listen to sad music and imagine yourself as the protagonist in a dramatic movie. You can gaze out the window while you're crying and think "This is so sad. I can't even believe how sad this whole situation is. I bet even a reenactment of my sadness could bring an entire theater audience to tears."

But my sadness didn't have a purpose. 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.

Essentially, I was being robbed of my right to feel self pity, which is the only redeeming part of sadness.

And for a little bit, that was a good enough reason to pity myself.

Standing around feeling sorry for myself was momentarily exhilarating, but I grew tired of it quickly. "That will do," I thought. "I've had my fun, let's move on to something else now." But the sadness didn't go away.

I tried to force myself to not be sad.

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.

When I couldn't will myself to not be sad, I became frustrated and angry. In a final, desperate attempt to regain power over myself, I turned to shame as a sort of motivational tool.

But, since I was depressed, this tactic was less inspirational and more just a way to oppress myself with hatred.

Which made me more sad.

Which then made me more frustrated and abusive.

And that made me even more sad, and so on and so forth until the only way to adequately express my sadness was to crawl very slowly across the floor.

The self-loathing and shame had ceased to be even slightly productive, but it was too late to go back at that point, so I just kept going. I followed myself around like a bully, narrating my thoughts and actions with a constant stream of abuse.

I spent months shut in my house, surfing the internet on top of a pile of my own dirty laundry which I set on the couch for "just a second" because I experienced a sudden moment of apathy on my way to the washer and couldn't continue. And then, two weeks later, I still hadn't completed that journey. But who cares - it wasn't like I had been showering regularly and sitting on a pile of clothes isn't necessarily uncomfortable. But even if it was, I couldn't feel anything through the self hatred anyway, so it didn't matter. JUST LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE.

Slowly, my feelings started to shrivel up. The few that managed to survive the constant beatings staggered around like wounded baby deer, just biding their time until they could die and join all the other carcasses strewn across the wasteland of my soul.

I couldn't even muster up the enthusiasm to hate myself anymore.

I just drifted around, completely unsure of what I was feeling or whether I could actually feel anything at all.

If my life was a movie, the turning point of my depression would have been inspirational and meaningful. It would have involved wisdom-filled epiphanies about discovering my true self and I would conquer my demons and go on to live out the rest of my life in happiness.

Instead, my turning point mostly hinged upon the fact that I had rented some movies and then I didn't return them for too long.

The late fees had reached the point where the injustice of paying any more than I already owed outweighed my apathy. I considered just keeping the movies and never going to the video store again, but then I remembered that I still wanted to re-watch Jumanji.

I put on some clothes, put the movies in my backpack and biked to the video store. It was the slowest, most resentful bike ride ever.

And when I arrived, I found out that they didn't even have Jumanji in.

Just as I was debating whether I should settle on a movie that wasn't Jumanji or go home and stare in abject silence, I noticed a woman looking at me weirdly from a couple rows over.

She was probably looking at me that way because I looked really, really depressed and I was dressed like an eskimo vagrant.

Normally, I would have felt an instant, crushing sense of self-consciousness, but instead, I felt nothing.

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. And finally - finally - after a lifetime of feelings and anxiety and more feelings, I didn't have any feelings left. I had spent my last feeling being disappointed that I couldn't rent Jumanji.

I felt invincible.

And thus began a tiny rebellion.

Then I swooped out of there like the Batman and biked home in a blaze of defiant glory.

And that's how my depression got so horrible that it actually broke through to the other side and became a sort of fear-proof exoskeleton.

:D

2011-05-05T13:38:00.000-06:00

Guess what?

...

I'm writing a book. With pages!

And there will be pictures on the pages. And words. And maybe the pages will be really aerodynamic or something. I haven't really decided what all of the hi-tech features are going to be yet. It's tough to choose.

Anyway, I've been wanting to tell you guys about this for a very, very long time, and now I finally can!

Touchstone (a division of Simon & Schuster) will tentatively release my book in Fall 2012, which sounds like it's a long time away, but really, it's only the gestation period of two slightly premature babies. And if you're a time-traveler, then it can be as soon as you want it to be. It can be now!

If you're not a time traveler, here are some helpful time-frame comparisons to make the book's publication date seem not as far away:

So really, it isn't actually that far away. And I'll keep updating here in the meantime.

The book will contain roughly 50% new material. The other 50% will be posts I've published on this site already, but some of the posts that did not previously contain illustrations will be illustrated. It will be basically just like my blog in book-form (illustrated short stories, guides, etc.), but it will have at least an attempt at an organizational structure, probably.

There isn't really an appropriately climactic way to end this announcement, so here's a picture of some shapes:

Wild Animal (The Simple Dog Goes for a Joy Ride)

2011-04-19T16:15:00.000-06:00

My simple-minded dog recently went on an unplanned adventure. Because the simple dog is so very simple, her adventure was alarming and horrible for everyone involved.

Even in her normal, familiar environment, the simple dog exists in a state of almost constant confusion.

She also appears to have very little control over what she is doing or why she is doing it. For example, the other day, she was standing in the middle of the room just staring vacantly. Then she started turning in circles like she was preparing to lie down.

But instead of completing a few rotations and then lying down like a normal dog, she got stuck in the repetitive motion and couldn't stop turning slowly in place.

She is definitely not the type of animal that would thrive in the wild.

Unfortunately, she managed to escape one day while we were out walking, and she very nearly became a wild animal.

In the park where we were walking, there is a large horse statue. We had passed the statue many times without incident, but for some reason, on that day, the simple dog became highly alarmed by it.

No one expects their dog to instantaneously develop an extremely specific fear of horse statues, and I was unprepared for her reaction, which was to sprint powerfully in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, what the simple dog lacks in cognitive capacity, she makes up in ground speed, and her sudden fleeing yanked the leash from my hand.

I chased her all the way across the park and into an adjacent neighborhood. She ran into a partially fenced yard and, when her forward trajectory was interrupted by the fence, she began to gallop in giant, crazy circles just out of my reach.

I'm fairly certain she had already forgotten what she was running from and had no idea what was going on, but there she was - propelling herself in endless loops around someone else's yard.

After several minutes of tearing around in circles, she felt compelled to take off running in a straight line. She didn't know where she was going, but she was going to go there really fast.

I have spent a truly impressive amount of time teaching the simple dog how to respond to her name. I distinctly remember the self-congratulatory feelings I had when I thought I'd succeeded. I've done it, I thought. I've overcome all of the obstacles and taught this animal her name, and now she will return to me like a falcon whenever I beckon her.

But as I watched my dog disappear into the distance, I realized just how futile my efforts had been.

I spent the rest of the day frantically trying to find her. I drove around calling for her on the off-chance that she would actually respond. I stopped random people on the street to ask them if they'd seen her. It started to get dark and I imagined my poor dog, lost and scared - completely unable to make sense of what was happening to her.

Finally, I got a call from a woman who had managed to catch the simple dog. The woman said that she found the simple dog standing in the middle of the road, wagging her tail and barking at cars. She gave me her address and I drove over to collect my wayward animal.

When I got there, the simple dog was curled up in a little ball on a towel on the woman's floor. I walked over to her and she looked confused.

She had forgotten who I was. She thought she lived on the towel.

She was wet and dirty and she stunk like she had rolled on a dead animal. There were burrs in her tail. She had puked up a pile of half-digested grass onto the woman's nice wood floor and was attempting to re-ingest it.

Based on the evidence, her adventure went something like this:

I helped the woman clean up the mess that my disgraceful animal had created in her home, then I thanked her and called my dog to go.

The simple dog did not respond, so I picked her up and carried her out.

I was glad to have her back, even though she didn't know who I was. I couldn't blame her for forgetting. A dog who becomes terrified by the mere existence of a stone rendering of a horse is not a dog who is well-prepared to absorb hundreds of unfamiliar sights and sounds, and I reasoned that she was most likely still in shock. I can only imagine how overwhelming the whole ordeal must have been from her perspective:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the simple dog had trouble readjusting to being at home in the aftermath of her big adventure.

Because of her cognitive handicap, the simple dog is at a unique disadvantage when it comes to coping with minor obstacles that most dogs would take in stride. For most dogs, getting a taste of freedom wouldn't be something that would cause a major shift in their perception of reality. But it absolutely ruined the simple dog.

She had only been outside by herself for a few hours, but the staggering amount of new experiences had crowded out all her memories from before the adventure.

As far as the simple dog was concerned, she had been snatched away from her life as a wild, towel-dwelling animal and transplanted to a strange wonderland filled with terrifyingly unfamiliar sensory bombardments.

We have experienced these episodes a few times before. From what I understand, they are a pretty normal consequence of disabled-dog-husbandry, and are usually pretty fleeting. But this one was different. This time, the precipitating incident had been so extremely, entirely mind-bending that the simple dog had actually forgotten how to be a domesticated animal.

We had to teach her how to use the stairs all over again.

Despite having been potty-trained for the overwhelming majority of her life, she started blatantly soiling the carpet right in front of us, as if she had no idea she was doing anything wrong.

She violently destroyed every toy she had - even her inexplicably-patriotic-themed squeaky owl toy, which is her favorite.

And after she destroyed her owl, she grieved. And we had to sew it up for her to avoid pushing her any further into psychosis.

She forgot her name and how to sit and all of the various other things we'd spent so many hours carefully guiding her to understand.

We did eventually manage to re-domesticate the simple dog. She re-learned stairs and how to not pee in the house and how to respond properly when her name is called. She may not remember exactly who we are, but she seems to accept that she lives with us now. She even plays nicely with her toys.

But every now and then, she will stare wistfully out the window.

And through the window, she will see the outdoors.

And sometimes, when the shapes of the trees and grass and birds hit her brain in just the right way, she will feel the call of the wild deep within her soul.

And it will trigger a relapse.