My piece of corn on the floor
May. 12th, 2013 11:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogJust about everybody knows Hyperbole and a Half. It goes back to 2009, but the memeworthy entries started showing up a year or so later, around ALL THE THINGS and CAKE and, maybe most famously, 
And then she went away. The Internet is a cruel bitch, and has claimed other brilliant souls like the creator of I Harth Darth and the metaquoty magic of active_apathy, but Allie, at least, told us what was going on:
She was depressed.
Clinical, DSM-IV stylee depressed. Like me- and many of you. She told the tale with bravery and wit and, of course, the cutest stick figures in the universe. We responded- over 4,200 times to that 2011 entry- to sympathize and empathize and wish her the best on her journey back to the PARP!
I knew her real name from someplace, and she's Facebooky friendly with a longtime friend of mine (not real-lifey that she knows, but they did both grow up in the same small town in Idaho), so I'd occasionally get to see a friend-of-friend posting there. A couple of weekends ago, after I went for my ROUN in the PARP! here, I took a look and saw that she'd surfaced, briefly, in mid-2012, just thanking everyone for their patience as she tried to finish her followup post to her 2011 one.
It took her nine months- as many good things do- but it finally arrived last week. And it's beautiful. A snippet will not do it justice, but a thread within it, presented here without the artwork, is what nailed it for me, and many others who read it:
At some point during this phase, I was crying on the kitchen floor for no reason. As was common practice during bouts of floor-crying, I was staring straight ahead at nothing in particular and feeling sort of weird about myself. Then, through the film of tears and nothingness, I spotted a tiny, shriveled piece of corn under the refrigerator.
I don't claim to know why this happened, but when I saw the piece of corn, something snapped. And then that thing twisted through a few permutations of logic that I don't understand, and produced the most confusing bout of uncontrollable, debilitating laughter that I have ever experienced.
I had absolutely no idea what was going on.
My brain had apparently been storing every unfelt scrap of happiness from the last nineteen months, and it had impulsively decided to unleash all of it at once in what would appear to be an act of vengeance.
That piece of corn is the funniest thing I have ever seen, and I cannot explain to anyone why it's funny. I don't even know why. If someone ever asks me "what was the exact moment where things started to feel slightly less shitty?" instead of telling a nice, heartwarming story about the support of the people who loved and believed in me, I'm going to have to tell them about the piece of corn. And then I'm going to have to try to explain that no, really, it was funny. Because, see, the way the corn was sitting on the floor... it was so alone... and it was just sitting there! And no matter how I explain it, I'll get the same, confused look. So maybe I'll try to show them the piece of corn - to see if they get it. They won't. Things will get even weirder.
Anyway, I wanted to end this on a hopeful, positive note, but, seeing as how my sense of hope and positivity is still shrouded in a thick layer of feeling like hope and positivity are bullshit, I'll just say this: Nobody can guarantee that it's going to be okay, but — and I don't know if this will be comforting to anyone else — the possibility exists that there's a piece of corn on a floor somewhere that will make you just as confused about why you are laughing as you have ever been about why you are depressed. And even if everything still seems like hopeless bullshit, maybe it's just pointless bullshit or weird bullshit or possibly not even bullshit.
I don't know.
But when you're concerned that the miserable, boring wasteland in front of you might stretch all the way into forever, not knowing feels strangely hope-like.
That post quickly achieved Blogger's 5,000-comment maximum, most of it, again, full of support and appreciation. Not all of it, though. The first comment on LJ's RSS feed of the post called Allie out for not putting the pictures behind an LJ-cut.
REALLY?
Several people (Eleanor included) shot that idiot right down. Yet there were other voices concerned about the message of the post- that Allie's struggle, and the overwhelming popularity of the Internet response to it, would diminish the importance of the issue, or trivialize it, because, hey look! funny pictures! (I think that's the gist of it.)
What I think went missing in that analysis is how unique Allie's situation is in at least one respect. She got the reaction she did because she was already Internet-famous, and then went away, and then came back, with bookends of bravery on both ends announcing her problem and the bare beginnings of her solution to it. And she did it through the medium of visual humor that made her Internet-famous in the first place. That doesn't trivialize the condition- for me, at least, it universalizes it, and gives me, as a fellow sufferer, some brilliant and tangible pieces of hope to keep me going on my own journey...
even if the tangible part is only a piece of corn on the floor.
----
But it isn't. It's a car mirror, of all things.
A couple of weeks ago, Eleanor and I got into a Car Accident of Stupid. In a moment of simultaneous combustion, she rolled her truck into our driveway at the exact second that I was (a) backing out of the garage and (b) looking over my shoulder to the right to ensure that I didn't whack my passenger-side mirror against the edge of the garage door.
Instead, I heard the horrific crunching noise and realized I had instead whacked my driver-side mirror against her truck. Nothing else was damaged beyond cosmetics, and she quickly glued the frame back to the driver's side door (as she did six years ago when she backed into ME on a very bad day), but this time the mirror itself was beyond repair. For a week or so, I relied on duct tape and ducking to see out of it from its fixed position, but clearly that was not gonna last, so I sucked it up earlier this week and asked our mechanic how bad it would be.
Answer: not too. I'd heard other people telling me to expect close to 500 bucks, but those gizmos are apparently the high-end, heated SUV kind; mine clocked in a bit over a Benjamin, but Erin had to order it. I went over midweek after it came in, and, turned out, it hadn't. The third time was the charm, though, and after he put it on, I adjusted it, looked behind me to my left, and felt almost as insanely happy about this silly little piece of reality as Allie did about finding a piece of corn on the floor.
I don't know what caused it, either. Maybe there's just something about the tangible, the limited, the familiar- not tied to any memory or obligation- that makes you just Focus (yes, that's what I drive) on something that's just There, doing what it does, without expecting anything of you in return. Maybe it's the erasure of that horrid moment of crunch that those hundred bucks magically atoned for.
All I do know is, it made me happy- and her return toward the PARP! (if not actually to it) made me even palpably more so.
Find your piece of corn. Or don't even look for it. In all likelihood, when the time is right, it will find you.
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no subject
Date: 2013-05-12 08:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-13 12:27 am (UTC)I believe that every psychologist should have a copy of that to hand out to the family of depressed people to explain what their loved ones are going through.
And that every ER and doctor's office should switch to the Brosh Revised Visual Pain Scale.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-13 04:48 am (UTC):) Yes indeed.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-19 10:42 pm (UTC)*speechless*