Tag Archives: depression

Book Review: Solutions and Other Problems

Posted on by
Reply

Book: Solutions and Other Problems
Author: Allie Brosh
Release Date: September 2020
Source: own
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

If you’re familiar with the name Allie Brosh, you know where this is going. Allie Brosh maintained a blog called Hyperbole and a Half, which was half personal essay, half comic (drawn with child-like simplicity). The blog discussed her rather unusual childhood, her struggles with severe depression, and her very silly dog. It was at turns hilarious, heartfelt, sobering, and very very recognizable to those of us who also deal with severe depression.

In October 2013, her first book was published, also titled Hyperbole and a Half, which contains some essays/comics from her blog, as well as new material. It did very well. She went on book tours and all that. And then she disappeared, seemingly off the face of the planet, for seven years.

When Simon & Schuster announced the imminent release of her new book (I think I first heard about it no sooner than July of this year), it was a SHOCK! There had been no news of Allie Brosh for AGES. I had wondered often how she was doing, and if she had perhaps lost her battle with depression and suicide ideation after all. And suddenly here she was again! I was ecstatic! And I still am.

Her new book, titled Solutions and Other Problems, covers a lot of ground. It covers the reasons for her long disappearance, including severe physical health issues (she nearly died!), a divorce, and the death of her sister. It also covers, in far more detail than her first book, how truly strange she was as a child (and still is!). Just like her first book, and the blog before it, it is both hilarious and sobering. And heartbreaking. I laugh so hard during the first few chapters I could barely breathe. A few chapters later, and I was crying.

The simplistic child-like drawing style is the same, and her characteristic wit and humor are still there, but this book is angrier and sadder than her first book. And for good reason, as you’ll see if you read it.

And yet, it is still laugh-out-loud hilarious. I’m not sure how she manages to hold these conflicting tones and feelings in balance, but she does. Constantly. I suspect it is how she lives her whole life, and is probably the only way she has managed to survive as long as she has.

Now, to help you understand the true hilarity and insanity of this book, I would like to share just a bit of the second chapter. In this chapter, Allie Brosh explains how she discovered she could sneak into the cat door of her neighbor’s house, and proceeded to…. go insane… It is probably the funniest chapter in the book. Here is just ONE page to illustrate:

I need you all to understand that this is pretty early-on in the proceedings. It gets a LOT more insane from here…

In any case, if you want to laugh and cry and have your heart ripped out of your chest; if you’ve dealt with depression, or the death of a loved one, this book (and her first book) might just be for you.

Smashing Plates

Posted on by
2

I don’t know about anyone else, but I am having a rough week. Outside of, or on top of, the same sort of coronavirus concerns that the whole world is experiencing (though, I’ll be honest, I hadn’t been quite as concerned about that as maybe I should be until the last couple days), I am, on a personal level, having a “valiantly resisting the urge to smash plates on the counter/going off to scream into a pillow/trying very hard not to angry-cry” sort of week.

I don’t want to get into specifics, but suffice it to say that I am feeling ill-used, and taken-advantage-of, and taken for granted. I THINK, though I am never sure these days, that I am justified in feeling this way. But… well, my family (and an occasional friend) has always had a habit of implying (or flat-out saying) that I am a) overreacting and being melodramatic, b) imagining or misunderstanding things, and/or c) misrepresenting or actually lying about the things I have to put up with… so I live in constant fear that I really am imagining myself worse off than I actually am, without realizing it. Or that I am complaining about things that are totally normal and maybe I really am just over-sensitive, or in some cases (as my family has been known to accuse me of) just being lazy or selfish. I honestly, genuinely can’t tell anymore.

I know gaslighting is a thing. I understand the concept. But how do you know if you’re being gaslighted, or if you really ARE just that unreasonable/over-sensitive/etc? I don’t have an answer.

So I spend a lot of my time biting my tongue, screaming into pillows, fighting off anxiety attacks (or failing to fight off anxiety attacks and proceeding to hyperventilate, cry, and so forth), and complaining to my two best friends who are pretty much the only people I trust to NOT tell I’m being a whiny baby.

I have been swallowing back so much anger and frustration and anxiety since I was a teenager that I sometimes (more than sometimes) feel like there’s a black hole at the center of my chest slowly eating me away. I always – and I am not exaggerating, I really mean ALWAYS – have a pain in my sternum and in my back right between my shoulder blades. It never goes away. Since I was 14 years old.

I spend so much of my time wishing to be somewhere else. Wishing to be someONE else. Anyone else. I do not like who I am. I do not like where I have ended up. Child-me, teenage-me, would be so disappointed by today-me. Hell, today-me is disappointed in today-me. And I am trying so SO hard to change that, but so far it isn’t going so well.

So, I spend a lot of my time swallow back screams and tears and resisting the rage to break things – plates, windows, mirrors, myself.

This is not a book-related post, for which I apologize. People don’t really need or want to hear me complain about my life. Sorry. I have finished both Middlegame and Disney’s Land. Hopefully, I will post reviews for both soon. But today I just needed to write this. In the hopes that writing it might help purge some of the anger. I’m not sure it worked.

2019 Sucked, Here’s to 2020

Posted on by
Reply
This meme (and the second near the end) were found floating around on Twitter. I have no idea who originated them.

In order to move forward being open and honest, I have to first look back a bit. Because the last handful of years have been increasingly difficult and painful.

At the end of 2018/beginning of 2019, I posted to Facebook a long explanation of exactly how bad 2018 had been (financial worries, family problems, crippling depression, being suicidal for months), and how badly I needed 2019 to be kinder and give me a break.

So, of course, 2019 decided to double-down instead. It said “you haven’t seen bad yet! Yeet, Bitch!” It sucker-punched me and then kicked me in the face repeatedly while I was prone on the ground.

I was begging for a break, for some mercy, but instead this is what my year looked like:

  1. my grandmother fell and fractured her spine in January and was in the hospital for a month
  2. My mother had a heart-scare in February and was in the hospital for a couple of days
  3. Also in February, one of our dogs escaped the yard and was hit by a car – he survived but my mother and I both had to take out a substantial loans to pay for his care
  4. In May, just days after her birthday, my mother was laid off from her job (keep in mind, I was already mostly-unemployed excepting for some part-time work and money was already very tight)
  5. In July one of our cats (my mother’s Baby Girl, Mieko) was diagnosed with cancer – after thousands of dollars worth or tests and early treatments, it was deemed untreatable
  6. In August, my grandmother (still recovering from the spine fracture, and already suffering from an auto-immune disease) was diagnosed with Parkinson’s
  7. In September, while caring for our dying cancer-stricken cat, one of our other cats (MY Baby Girl, Bobbi) died very suddenly of an aneurysm with no warning whatsoever
  8. In October, Mieko died
  9. In November, with my part-time job becoming more and more financially unstable and being unable to pay me consistently, I got a second job in hopes that I could eventually make it a FULL-time job — only to learn a couple weeks later than, actually, the store is closing at the end of January at which point its back to the drawing board.

Things were so rough at the end of there, that instead of saving the money my dad sent me for Christmas, I used it to buy Christmas gifts for others. The good news is that my mother finally has a job again, but having been financial unstable for so long, it will be months before we can crawl our way out of severe debt and back into something at least resembling manageable.

After 2016 was rough, and 2017 was a little worse, and 2018 was horrendous, and 2019 was an evil sadistic bitch, I feel tired and beat-up and hopeless. I’m afraid to even bother asking the universe for help anymore. It always responds by kicking me while I’m down.

But I keep telling myself I have to keep trying. Trying to keep myself together, trying to find more direction and purpose in life, trying to find more stable work. There are tiny glimmers of possibility here at the beginning of a brand new year and a brand new decade. I starting to read more again. I am trying to save money again (for the first time in years). I am looking at some possibly good part-time jobs (*fingers crossed*). But I am afraid to get my hopes up, so I guess we’ll see…

So here’s to the year 2020: may the world be a little kinder and more merciful this time around.

Most years (though not all), Neil Gaiman writes a new “Wishes for the New Year” on his blog that is encouraging and hopeful. He said he wasn’t going to do one this year, and then in the end couldn’t seem to help himself. The one he wrote for this year is a little different than the kind of thing he usually writes, but it seems fitting, so I’m going to end this post with his wish:

…I hope in the year to come you won’t burn. And I hope you won’t freeze. I hope you and your family will be safe, and walk freely in the world and that the place you live, if you have one, will  be there when you get back. I hope that, for all of us, in the year ahead, kindness will prevail and that gentleness and humanity and forgiveness will be there for us if and when we need them.

And may your New Year be happy, and may you be happy in it.

I hope you make something in the year to come you’ve always dreamed of making, and didn’t know if you could or not. But I bet you can. And I’m sure you will.

— Neil Gaiman, from “A New Year’s Thought”