I'm Not Okay Right Now

I’ve lost it. Well technically I didn’t lose it, my little sister stole it from my room and lent it to her friend who promptly lost it – my beloved Hyperbole and a Half book. When I noticed it was missing I asked my sister about it and she said it was in her possession so I didn’t think much of it, assuming she meant to read it and would promptly give it back. It wasn’t until weeks later and a partial mental breakdown on my part that she finally admitted that she had given it to a friend and it was lost. Here’s why that matters.

First of all, I was deeply disappointed that she would take something without asking. Second of all, I was shocked that she would lend it to someone that I didn’t know without my permission. And third, this particular book is one of my most prized possessions. If this book and my laptop were both about to be thrown into a furnace and I could only choose one to save, I'd save the book. It was given to me by a friend for my birthday last year after a particularly difficult time mental health wise and it has a letter of support written inside it.

As a person with a summer birthday and parents who don’t approve of birthday parties, this was huge for me, the fact that someone would take the time to go out of their way to buy me a book, write a letter in it, and give it to me for my birthday. It was the one item other than the clothes on my back and a dead cell phone that I brought with me when I was 5150'd to a psychiatric hospital last July after an extremely bad panic attack caused by my mother throwing a suitcase at me. It’s been invaluable to calming me down when I have anxiety. It was one of the few things that could truly cheer me up a bit when I had depression. In short, I consider it essential to my mental health. And now it's gone, by no fault of my own.

Clearly, no one here has it, but here is my dilemma: if I don’t have this book, I'd be missing a key piece of my mental health support system. If I have a replacement copy that my sister's friend offered to buy, it will be tainted with the memory of this incident and there’s no way that it’d be of any help that way. The only ways I can think of this situation being resolved is if the book is found and returned to me (the likelihood of which is probably slim by now) or if the original friend buys another copy, writes a letter, and gives it to me for my birthday (obviously I couldn’t ask her to do that).

If you think I’m overreacting, you’re probably right. If your only response is, “So what it's a published book just get over it,” well I wish I could. I really wish this wouldn’t affect me at all and I could just forget about it but I can’t. Eventually, I will have no choice but to accept that it is gone and there is nothing I can do, but at the moment, I feel like I've had a piece of my soul ripped from me, or a pet stolen and killed. It feels like the moment when Wanda realizes Pietro is dead, and she can do nothing but scream her anger and sorrow and shock. As I'm going to be going to college for the first time this fall, I won’t have that support system of friends to keep me afloat on bad days. I was going to bring this book with me to college to help with anxiety, but now it's gone, I'm utterly distraught, and I can't do anything about it except to listen to loud music to distract myself and to rant about it online in hopes of catharsis from even a fraction of the pain. I'm not okay right now and I don't know what to do. ◊