I try and be a human, and I do have these amazing sparks of joy and connection … but then it seems everything kinda catches up with me and it all stops and I feel a bit like a paper-thin marionette. Know what I mean? Hey I’ve got it all sussed! I’m amazing wahoo! Oh my God why is my brain turning into mush I can’t think or form sentences anymore wabooooo! (waboo is the opposite of wahoo and if we learn nothing else, I’m pretty pleased with that one).
A close friend was in a workshop recently and said there was someone there talking about their ‘cluster of traumas’, and my friend was like “Hah, you should talk to Sindy!”. (ok fine my real name isn’t Sindy, but I’m sure you guessed that by now).
Anyway hearing them describe my stuff as greater than / massively outranking any ‘cluster of traumas’ made me really stop and think. Ah. Shit yeah. Huh. I’ve just been bumbling along through life really, wondering why I’m this paper marionette, wondering why I go silent and retreat, wondering why I live in this fantasy world in my head … and then this friend is like “You’ve got tons of shit you’re carrying. How are you even functioning?”
And I had no idea! What a freaking idiot. I know the theory, and I’ve gone through counselling for specific traumatic events (more than once … ok more than three times), but it seems the older I get, the more aware I’m becoming of some completely unresolved things in my past, which I’ve just (up until now) pretty much ignored.
Like, I know it’s bad to ignore that stuff when it’s an obvious trauma (the sort when you’re covered in blood, battling to keep someone alive etc etc). But when it’s not an obvious trauma (like when your family leaves you for a few weeks so they can go on holiday, or you get locked in somewhere and your parents don’t help, or a group is really abusive and you go to someone in charge for help and they say stop being silly you probably liked it … or the fifty other examples of non-battlefield trauma), it seems I do have a tendency to not deal with it.
Much easier to categorise it as not-a-trauma, and then I don’t have to do anything about it, right? And then I wonder why I’m this paper marionette once more. Wonder why I can’t eat or think straight.
And though writing my comics has been helpful, maybe its really just been a delaying tactic. Retreating into a fantasy that I can control, in order to escape the murky mixture of feelings that I can’t control.
But I have to treat myself like I would my best friend, and say to myself “It’s ok. That’s a very normal human response, don’t feel bad about it. Put the phone down and let’s explore this tricky unresolved stuff just as we would the ‘real’ battlefield kinda traumas.” … and that’s hard to do, let’s be honest.
But until I do it, I’m only going to go full Karen … I’m only going to transmit my pain. And nobody wants that.
Ahhh, shit. Now I have to explore tricky stuff that I was hoping ‘Time would heal’. It seems time does not heal bloody anything.
Buggeration!
Ah well, on the plus side, if you’re a douchebag or hate yourself or are a Karen and you know it, at least you know there’s someone sadder than you! It me!
Comic update: I’m dragging my heels a bit because there are lots of decisions to be made about how the final few Lithium comics pan out, how they conclude, and I don’t want to make drastic decisions while my brain is contemplating bleak things, so like I’ll keep rendering but might hold onto the last scene or two of this comic until the next few comics are clearer in my head. I mean those scripts are done, it’s a case of deciding what to emphasise, what’s the major theme of the entire series because it’ll start to come clear as we get closer to the end.
PS: it’s interesting looking at stats for my blog, I know people use proxies so it’s hard to tell real stuff, but it seems my comics are wildly popular in North America, EXCEPT for Wyoming and South Dakota! They consistently have literally 0-3 visitors per month, which is absolutely nothing compared to their neighbouring states! Why is that do we think? Maybe it’s a cultural thing.
