Hyperbole and a Half Read online

  What I am is constantly thrust into my face while I’m trying to be better than I am. Even if I’m actively doing all the right things, I can’t escape the fact that my internal reactions are those of a fundamentally horrible person.

  I don’t just want to do the right thing. I want to WANT to do the right thing. This might seem like a noble goal to strive for, but I don’t actually care about adhering to morality. It’s more that being aware of not wanting to do the right thing ruins my ability to enjoy doing the right thing after I’m forced into doing it through shame.

  A lot of other people are better than me. When something causes me to become aware of this, it makes it more difficult for me to be satisfied with the way I am because the way I am seems so shitty compared to the way these better people are able to be.

  And this, of course, highlights how petty I am, which is also something I don’t like to think about.

  Which highlights the fact that I don’t like to think about how petty I am, which makes me feel like maybe there are other things about myself that I’m avoiding.

  Because my identity is based on so many things that aren’t true, it doesn’t have a built-in fact-checking mechanism, and sometimes discrepancies arise.

  This is quite uncomfortable because it means I need to pick a side.

  But I don’t like picking sides when it comes to my identity, so I usually try to ignore it or find a way to trick myself into thinking it isn’t a discrepancy.

  I would never have to know about any of this if I was sneakier about it or if I had more reasonable expectations for myself, but I keep noticing while I’m contradicting the things I want to believe are true.

  This triggers an uncomfortable level of self-awareness where I’m dangerously close to discovering how full of shit I am.

  On a fundamental level, I am someone who would throw sand at children. I know this because I have had to resist doing it, and that means that it’s what I would naturally be doing if I wasn’t resisting it.

  I would also shove everyone, never share anything, and shout at people who aren’t letting me do exactly what I want.

  I don’t do those things, though. Because I don’t want to have to know that I did them. It would hamper my ability to feel like a good person. I don’t even want to know that I would do them.

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

  If you actually are a genuinely good person, perhaps you don’t need lies and tricks to feel good about yourself. But every day—against my will—I am bombarded by all these shitty, selfish thoughts, and I don’t want to find out that the reason I have them is because that’s what I’m really like. That would be disappointing. This system protects me from that.

  But I’m a little greedy about the good qualities I want to believe I have, and I’m not very sneaky, so at some point I accidentally started to figure out what was going on.

  When you start figuring out how full of shit you are, it’s like opening a tunnel to all the lies you’ve ever told yourself. The tunnel is really deep and scary, but you’re suspicious about it and you want to see what’s down there.

  I wanted to know if I had been lying to myself about anything else. And, with only a minimal level of investigation, I was able to determine that I’d been lying to myself quite a lot.

  It felt horrible to find bad qualities that I didn’t know about. And it felt even worse to know that some of the things I thought were my good qualities were actually just a disguise for more bad qualities.

  I was disgusted.

  And here’s where most people would stop probing. Because most people are smart enough to realize that self-improvement is supposed to be a delicate, lifelong process of exploring until you find a teensy amount of truth—just enough to make yourself uncomfortable—then getting the hell out so you can process what you learned in the comfort of your warm, familiar lie fortress.

  But not me. I’m arrogant, and I thought I could handle it all at once.

  I thought the whole process was going to be sort of like getting rid of a wasp nest—a few stings, but once you remove the source of the problem, it’s gone. Unlike wasp nests, however, you cannot beat your fundamental insufficiencies to death with a fourteen-foot-long tree branch while hiding behind a ski mask and a cloud of Mace. And unlike wasps, uncomfortable truths don’t stop coming once you destroy their home.

  On some level, I think I truly believed that if I just kept going . . . maybe I could locate the source of my shittiness and actually get rid of it.

  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.

  I did not know that yet, though. I had a wonderful, lie-generating loophole machine protecting me from ever coming into contact with that information, and, somewhat ironically, that’s what gave me the confidence to ignore the warnings and bumble onward.

  The human brain knows when it isn’t ready to discover everything about itself, and there are a few emergency-emergency security measures in place to keep you safe in the event that you decide to go traipsing around in your deep brain-wilderness like a reckless idiot.

  My attempts at self-preservation backfired and turned into clues I could use to guide myself further toward the truth.

  I was getting dangerously close to uncovering the inner workings of my self-worth generator, and that is not something I wanted myself to know about—like most illusions, if you figure out how it works, you won’t be able to believe it anymore. But fucking Sherlock Holmes Psychology Explorer refused to give up.

  I was so upset when I figured it out.

  Nobody likes being tricked, especially not for so long and about all the things that are important to them.

  I didn’t want the source of my problems to turn out to be “You’re just sort of naturally shittier than what you wanted, and you had to trick yourself so you wouldn’t find out and be disappointed.”

  And I really, really did. And I suppose that’s something. I might not be able to be someone who never ever gets the urge to push people or throw sand at them, but I try to be that person. In the not-throwing-sand-and-not-shoving-people competition, I get the participant ribbon. And even though I know there aren’t any special requirements for earning the participant ribbon aside from the participation itself, I still feel sort of proud of it, because IT’S HARD not pushing people and not throwing sand at them.

  I still try to trick myself, though.

  I know I’m being tricked, but I let it happen because it feels nice.

  I spent eight days completely paralyzed by how many people I wanted to thank before deciding to just thank everyone because I didn’t want to leave anyone out.

  You guys know who you are and why I’m grateful for you. You know exactly why.

  I hope you all enjoyed the fancy spiral things I put on the letters. It was the best way I could think of to show you how very, very serious I am about my gratitude.

  © ALLIE BROSH

  Allie Brosh lives as a recluse in her bedroom in Bend, Oregon. In 2009, she thought, “I know what would be a good idea! Instead of becoming a scientist, I should write and draw things on the Internet!” This was a horrible idea for too many reasons to count, but the decision wasn’t really based on logic. Things sort of spiraled from there.

  Brosh’s award-winning blog Hyperbole and a Half somehow became an award-winning blog, and in 2013, Advertising Age named Brosh one of the fifty most influential creative figures in the world.

  Brosh has also given herself many awards, including “fanciest horse drawing” and “most likely to succeed.”

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  Copyright © 2013 by Alexandra Brosh

  Portions of this book have been previously published on the author’s blog.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Touchstone Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Touchstone paperback edition November 2013

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  Designed by Ruth Lee-Mui

  Jacket Design and Illustrations by Allie Brosh

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brosh, Allie.

  Hyperbole and a half : unfortunate situations, flawed coping mechanisms, mayhem, and other things that happened / Allie Brosh.

  pages cm

  “A Touchstone book.”

  1. Brosh, Allie. 2. Comedians—United States—Biography. 3. Conduct of life—Humor. I. Title.

  PN2287.B6955A3 2013

  792.702’8092—dc23

  [B]

  2013025527

  ISBN 978-1-4516-6617-5

  ISBN 978-1-4516-6618-2 (ebook)