Hyperbole and a Half Returns and Totally Nails It

Fans of the web comic/blog Hyperbole and a Half rejoiced Wednesday when the founder of the site put out a teaser saying she would post something new today. In it, Brosh included a drawing of an airplane and hyped that her next piece would be about depression.

“In parts, it might get a little flinch-y and uncomfortable, and if I succeed in making you laugh during those parts, you’re going to feel real weird about yourselves,” wrote Brosh. “But it’s okay. Just let it happen. I WANT it to happen. Because it makes me feel powerful, and also because there are flinch-y, uncomfortable things everywhere. Seeing them is inevitable. If we can laugh about some of them, maybe they’ll be less scary to look at.”

Brosh’s wrote a piece on depression in October of 2011, but since then, she’s been off the grid (save for talking a bit about her issues on Reddit). In her new blog post, she lays out the many stages of depression, like how you can feel at the beginning when people don’t understand you:

“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.”

Read/look at the whole thing – even the comments, which for once on the internet are the not the worst thing you’ve ever read and are actually a great addition to the work.

Brosh’s book Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened will be published in October. You can pre-order it on Amazon, if you so desire.