Hyperbole and a Half Read online

  The problem with the neighbor’s dog is that it exists. It especially exists at five o’clock in the morning. We know this because whenever the helper dog senses its presence, she scream-growls and runs into the sliding glass door with a tremendous amount of force.

  And then she paces and makes whining and gurgling sounds for the next three hours because that dog was out there and surely it’s still somewhere.

  Three nights of this in a row was enough for the helper dog to be transplanted to the hallway, where she would have no view of the neighbor’s yard and no view of the neighbor’s dog. I thought that this would fix the problem. But she didn’t stay in the hallway like I thought she would. She went downstairs and lurked next to the back door all night long, just waiting for the neighbor’s dog to emerge. At which point, she scream-growled and ran into the glass as usual.

  So it wasn’t an issue of being circumstantially exposed to the neighbor’s dog and overreacting. It was more that the helper dog is a psychotic, creepy dog-bear-beast and she wants to see the neighbor dog and feel all the feelings that it makes her feel.

  The next day, we bought a baby gate, which we put at the top of the stairs to keep the helper dog in the upstairs hallway. Where she could not, in any way, see the neighbor’s dog.

  We were awakened at five o’clock the next morning by the sound of the baby gate falling down the stairs, and then, five seconds later, the sound of the helper dog slamming herself into the back door repeatedly, biting the glass and roaring.

  We set the vacuum cleaner in front of it. The helper dog hates the vacuum cleaner. But apparently she doesn’t hate it as much as she hates the neighbor’s dog, because we were awakened at the stroke of five by both the baby gate AND the vacuum cleaner AND the helper dog crashing down the stairs.

  We secured the baby gate with rope so that she couldn’t knock it over. She lurked in the shadows until five o’clock, then leapt over it, tumbled down the stairs, and proceeded as usual.

  We bought a box fan. Maybe she can hear the neighbor’s dog and that’s how she knows it’s out there, we thought.

  But she doesn’t need to see or hear the neighbor’s dog. She can sense it. And even when there is no possible way for her to get downstairs because we’ve piled everything we own into an eight-foot-tall stair-blocking super-barrier, she can slam herself against our bedroom door until we lock her in the bathroom and reconsider all our decisions.

  Yet somehow . . .

  . . . even though the helper dog hates everything and doesn’t know anything . . .

  . . . and even though I’m pretty certain all the hate inside her crowds out her ability to feel love . . .

  . . . and even though she has pretty much every single problem that it is possible for a dog to have . . .

  . . . plus some new problems that she invented all by herself . . .

  . . . she is our dog. And because she is our dog, we can pick out the tiny, almost imperceptible good qualities from the ocean of terrible qualities, and we can cling to them. Because we want to love our dog.

  Also, we accidentally discovered that she can’t sense the neighbor dog from the bathroom.

  Some people have a legitimate reason to feel depressed, but not me. I just woke up one day feeling arbitrarily sad and helpless.

  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 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 rewatch 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 spe
nt 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.

  I remember being endlessly entertained by the adventures of my toys. Some days they died repeated, violent deaths; other days they traveled to space or discussed my swim lessons and how I absolutely should be allowed in the deep end of the pool, especially since I was such a talented doggy-paddler.

  I didn’t understand why it was fun for me, it just was.

  But as I grew older, it became harder and harder to access that expansive imaginary space that made my toys fun. I remember looking at them and feeling sort of frustrated and confused that things weren’t the same.

  I played out all the same story lines that had been fun before, but the meaning had disappeared. Horse’s Big Space Adventure transformed into holding a plastic horse in the air, hoping it would somehow be enjoyable for me. Prehistoric Crazy-Bus Death Ride was just smashing a toy bus full of dinosaurs into the wall while feeling sort of bored and unfulfilled. I could no longer connect to my toys in a way that allowed me to participate in the experience.

  The second half of my depression felt almost exactly like that, except about everything.

  At first, though, the invulnerability that accompanied the detachment was exhilarating. At least as exhilarating as something can be without involving real emotions.

  The beginning of my depression had been nothing but feelings, so the emotional deadening that followed was a welcome relief. I had always viewed feelings as a weakness—annoying obstacles on my quest for total power over myself. And I finally didn’t have to feel them anymore.

  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. Cognitively, you might know that different things are happening to you, but they don’t feel very different.

  Which leads to horrible, soul-decaying boredom.

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

  Months oozed by, and I gradually came to accept that maybe enjoyment was not a thing I got to feel anymore. I didn’t want anyone to know, though. I was still sort of uncomfortable about how bored and detached I felt around other people, and I was still holding out hope that the whole thing would spontaneously work itself out. As long as I could manage to not alienate anyone, everything might be okay!

  However, 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.

  Everyone noticed.

  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 . . .

  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.

  But people want to help. So they try harder to make you feel hopeful and positive about the situation. You explain it again, hoping they’ll try a less hope-centric approach, but re-explaining your total inability to experience joy inevitably sounds kind of negative, like maybe you WANT to be depressed. So the positivity starts coming out in a spray—a giant, desperate happiness sprinkler pointed directly at your face. And 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.

  And that’s 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. That being the case, all the hopeful, proactive solutions start to sound completely insane in contrast to the scope of the problem.

  It would be like having a bunch of dead fish, but no one around you will acknowledge that the fish are dead. Instead, they offer to help you look for the fish or try to help you figure out why they disappeared.

  The problem might not even have a solution. But you aren’t necessarily looking for solutions. You’re maybe just looking for someone to say “Sorry about how dead your fish are,” or “Wow, those are super dead. I still like you, though.”

  I started spending more time alone.

  Perhaps it was because I lacked the emotional depth necessary to panic, or maybe my predicament didn’t feel dramatic enough to make me suspicious, but I somehow managed to convince myself that everything was still under my control right up until I noticed myself wishing that nothing loved me so I wouldn’t feel obligated to keep existing.

  It’s a strange moment when you realize that you don’t want to be alive anymore. If I had feelings, I’m sure I would have felt surprised. I have spent the vast majority of my life actively attempting to survive. Ever since my most distant single-celled ancestor squiggled into existence, there has been an unbroken chain of things that wanted to stick around.

  Yet there I was, casually wishing that I could stop existing in the same way you’d want to leave an empty room or mute an unbearably repetitive noise.

  That wasn’t the worst part, though. The worst part was deciding to keep going.

  When I say that deciding to not kill myself was the worst part, I should clarify that I don’t mean it in a retrospective sense. From where I am now, it seems like a solid enough decision. But at the time, it felt like I had been dragging myself through the most miserable, endless wasteland, and—far in the distance—I had seen the promising glimmer of a slightly less miserable wasteland. And for just a moment, I thought maybe I’d be able to stop and rest. But as soon as I arrived at the border of the less miserable wasteland, I found out that I’d have to turn around and walk back the other way.

  Soon afterward, I discovered that there’s no tactful or comfortable way to inform other people that you might be suicidal. And there’s definitely no way to ask for help casually.

  I didn’t want it to be a big deal. However, it’s an alarming subject. Trying to be nonchalant about it just makes it weird for everyone.

  I was also extremely ill-prepared for the position of comforting people. The things that seemed reassuring to me at the time weren’t necessarily comforting for others.

  I had so very few feelings, and everyone else had so many, and it felt like they were having all of them in front of me at once. I didn’t really know what to do, so I agreed to see a doctor so that everyone would stop having all of their feelings at me.

  The next few weeks were a haze of talking to relentlessly hopeful people about my feelings that didn’t exist so I could be prescribed medication that might help me have them again.

  And every direction WAS bullshit for a really long time, especially up. 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 mo
re it starts to seem like everything might actually be hopeless bullshit.

  My feelings did start to return eventually. But not all of them came back, and they didn’t arrive symmetrically.

  I had not been able to care for a very long time, and when I finally started being able to care about things again, I HATED them. But hatred is technically a feeling, and my brain latched on to it like a child learning a new word.

  Hating everything made all the positivity and hope feel even more unpalatable. The syrupy, oversimplified optimism started to feel almost offensive.

  Thankfully, I rediscovered crying just before I got sick of hating things. I call this emotion “crying” and not “sadness” because that’s all it really was. Just crying for the sake of crying. My brain had partially learned how to be sad again, but it took the feeling out for a joyride before it had learned how to use the brakes or steer.