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Thomas has a quality that I have come to call Confident Neuroticism. To most people he seems perfectly normal, but his outward personality is a tarp draped over a scaffold of anxiety, phobias, & mental health issues. It’s not impossible to see in the comic, but generally he’s kept it very well hidden from the rest of the cast. It shouldn’t be surprising that I’m very familiar with the concept since it’s basically how I am in real life. Most people who know me, who don’t follow my work, or blog, or whatever, most likely see me as a fairly confident, surly, loner, who makes jokes regularly at the expense of others. Under the tarp, however, I’m barely keeping my shit together most of he time. I spend a lot of time yearning for death while simultaneously fearing it. The state of having these two states active inside yourself most of the time wears on a person. To the point that I’ve nearly completely broken down more than once. Over time it has compounded. I functioned fairly well when I was the age Thomas is in the comic but now I kind of limp along trying to overcome anxiety that has grown nearly insurmountable. Yet, somehow, I carry on. I take some measure of comfort knowing that many people struggle the exact same way as I do, and also do it without much consideration from the outside world.
When I first started the comic, at the end of the first arc. About 300 pages in. I had a pretty severe mental breakdown. I had never really had to rely completely on my own merits to survive before then. I had always been a cog in someone else’s machine. The weight of knowing that everything was on me finally broke through my denial and I cracked. It was spurred on by a round of very sustained and targeted trolling disguised as criticism. As an entertainer you have to learn that there are people who want to destroy your life just because you’re there. Being confronted with that for a prolonged period of time cause my brain to have to rewire itself to cope. It took a very long time to retrain my brain. The worst of it took about a year, then I kind of leveled out and continued to develop coping mechanisms. I developed an anxiety disorder that I have been managing ever since, but in some ways I think it was always there, it just needed something to let it loose. Now I have something more like actual self confidence that allows me to at least function well enough to produce this comic & make a living from it. But tonight I had a moment after I completed this filler page where my brain took me aside & said “What if you can’t do this properly after all this is over?” And for a moment I forgot to ignore it.
My brain is addictive. It’s why I’ve never drank, smoked, or done any drugs ever. I know that my brain can get addicted to anything I like. People, food, games, anything I like, but for most of my life I was addicted to misery. That’s part of what I had to train out of it when I had the breakdown after the first arc. Just like any addict I have to keep myself from going back to misery and wallowing in it, because my brain loves it. It loves feeling sorry for itself. It loves blaming everyone else for its failures. So I have to stop it. Tonight it got a little taste for just a second & I struggled to make it let go. It really wanted to think about how devastating to my life it would be if I suddenly couldn’t tap into my creativity anymore and keep this whole thing going. It was reaching for it like Gollum grasping for the precious. I wrestled it away, but I may have lost a finger.
Anyway, I got myself under control partially by writing this out. I always hope that by reading my posts someone with the same issues might be able to find some useful trick that helps them get by. Getting out of my head seems to help, at the risk of bringing down the room, so to speak. To end on a positive note I will say that the supportive posts and whatnot I get from you all is part of what allows me to convince myself that I will be able to keep going, so never think that taking the time to leave a little positive comment is wasted. They have a real effect. So thank you for helping me.