Hyperbole and a Half: Depression

Hyperbole and a Half is a blog by Allie Brosh. It is incredibly smart and interesting and entertaining and just generally downright hysterical. Allie writes about anything and everything: funny stories from when she was a kid, thoughts she has, things she has experienced. She writes semi-seriously about humorous topics and humorous topics. She uses a deadpan tone, but she is hilariously and brutally honest. Through a combination of text and exaggerated terrible MS Paint drawings, she makes her stories accessible and engaging for just about anybody.

Adventures in Depression is a two part series about her own experience of dealing with depression in her own life and I think she does an admirable job of capturing its essence. In part one, Allie writes how she had no real reason to feel sad or depressed, she just was. She woke up one day and felt helpless. She walks us readers through different stages she experienced in her depression. She tried to force herself to stop feeling sad, to get up and do things. Then she got mad and tried to shame herself into action, which only made her feel sadder and more worthless. She got trapped in loops of self hatred for months, barely even leaving her house. Finally her feelings started to shrivel up until she could not feel anything anymore. By the end of part one, she has finally achieved not being able to care about anything at all.

In part two, Allie compared depression with the feeling of getting older and having less fun playing imagination games with toys. She says depression felt similar, but with every aspect of life. She writes about how at first the detachment she felt was exhilarating, but then she realized the difference between not caring about things and not being able to care about things. Nothing felt like it had any meaning or purpose. Her friends would try to encourage her to go outside or do uplifting things, but it did not matter because she was stuck in a place where everything felt like nothing no matter what she did. She thought it would have been more helpful if her friends could just acknowledge that she was depressed without trying to "fix" her, because nothing they did helped. Allie goes on to talk about wanting to be dead but not wanting to kill herself. Just wanting to stop existing.

Then she started to get some of her feelings back. Once in a while she would feel mad, or start crying. It did not really make much sense, but it was something. Finally she gets to the moment everything changed. She was lying on the floor of her kitchen and she saw a kernel of corn under the refrigerator and she started laughing hysterically. Allie says that it was the funniest thing she has ever seen, but she could never in a million years explain why it was so funny. She ends on a semi hopeful note: "And even if everything still seems like hopeless bullshit, maybe it's just pointless bullshit or weird bullshit or possibly not even bullshit."

I loved these stories. They were an emotional rollercoaster. They made me laugh, they made me cry, they made uncomfortable, and I learned a lot. I think that this is a great place to start for people who are curious about depression but haven't experienced it themselves. And depression is an individual experience that is different from person to person, of course, but it can be extremely helpful to read about the perspective of somebody who has experienced it. Because it does not really make sense, but it is good to know that sometimes the best thing (or the only thing) we can do for someone is to let them know that we are there for them and we care about them.

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2011/10/adventures-in-depression.html

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2013/05/depression-part-two.html