Weekly Thoughts 4/8/23

It’s been a hectic week at work. I didn’t get much done because there was always something pulling me away from what I needed to be doing. And I don’t get why it was so busy. I don’t recall Easter being this big a shopping holiday. It’s also the first week since I completed Bet Your Sweet Bottom, so I’m in that unusual space where I don’t quite know how to spend my time. I always forget what I do when I don’t have a creative project. Especially when I don’t have money. Anyways, I wrote this intro Saturday morning, in time to post it, while the rest of this article was written Monday. It’s something I had to do in the moment. So, please continue below.

I’m here to talk about my various anxieties. So first off, to settle my brain as I force myself back through this traumatic cycle to write it down, a story. I went to my high school reunion. I was about as terrible then as I am now at socializing, I was just more outwardly depressive and had longer hair. At the main event, I met someone that I always liked but never really got to be friends with. She had become a teacher, and apparently she keeps manga on her shelves in the classroom. When I said I read a lot of manga, she asked if I had any recommendations for her. I said I’d get back to her and went through my list, and I did make a list. I didn’t get to talk to her for the rest of the night, because I was not and never would be mingling, and she had a lot of other people catching up with her; double the obstacles. The dance floor was formally opened, and my old friends and I decided to leave, because none of us were going to dance. I figured I’d swing by and give her the list, or get her email or something, before I left. I saw her standing in the middle of a crowd of happy, sociable people dancing. Immediately, I realized I wasn’t going to get to her and left. It wasn’t a big, dramatic wave of fear or nerves, I just knew it was never going to happen. My brain took the shortcut to the conclusion and I didn’t fight the instinct. That’s generally how I experience anxiety, when I’m active. It’s different if I’m sitting around thinking about it. Hard to fight something that you wouldn’t even recognize as a nervous breakdown.

The anxiety I want to start with is my career. I’m currently working retail, barely keeping my head above water and anticipating that I won’t be able to if my rent goes up like I think it will. I am currently trying to enter a path to management because it’s the most available move I have to making a reasonable amount of money to live on, and quite frankly, I resent that it’s my option. I don’t want to be in charge of people, I don’t want to be retail management. Working retail makes me feel like a zombie doing meaningless nonsense that ultimately accelerates our planetary and societal collapse, at the worst of times. Sure, I can zone out as I put away clothes, but they’re talking credit cards over the walkie all day, and when it gets super busy, all my misanthropy for the animals we call customers builds up, and I don’t really accomplish anything, and I burn out. What I want to do is make comics. Tell stories. Something creative like that.

But what specific shape? Do I want to make ongoing series, or would I enjoy publishing some graphic novels? Do I want to write, or continue to do my own art for everything? I don’t have a single answer, it could be a mix of all those things or some other career I don’t know about. I don’t have a specific question to ask anyone about what I could end up doing or what it would take. Whenever I have seen comics professionals talk about their careers and how they got there, it sounds like someone telling me to run for the hills unless I simply don’t have other options. I guess that’s me, but I’m not looking to be exploited by an industry that will only pay me enough to live if I kill myself working multiple jobs for years. Because I certainly can’t expect any creative job I get to pay me enough to do it exclusively until I reach a certain threshold, so I’d have to also have a full-time job on top of it, and that would probably prevent me from actually doing the creative work up to that threshold. Unless I got a family member or (for me) a fully theoretical, imaginary romantic partner to let me mooch off them for potentially decades until I get “successful.” And that success would only last a brief period of time, and then I’d be back to struggling. I realize I’m ignorant of a lot of things here, this is just the impression that’s been placed in my head, it’s all I have to go on.

And to get to any sort of point where serious career moves are an actual consideration in my life, I need to improve my skills. I know I’m not that good right now, and I am eager to get better. I can work on that in some way no matter what, and I intend to. That said, I don’t know how to study or practice beyond giving myself projects so I have to do something. I was forced to go to school, it was a structured environment, and I absorb information like a sponge; I was an honor student who never had to study and did most of their homework at school because it doesn’t belong at home. While I can stumble and reinvent the wheel forever to improve, what I really need is structure and instruction; I don’t have any questions to ask, I want someone to tell me what to do, and I’ll soar ever higher. But I can’t possibly afford art school, and I don’t know if I can mentally withstand a full-time job (“hopefully” as an assistant manager) and art school at the same time. I guess there’s more hope here than with the other anxieties, because finding other kinds of lessons, or trying stuff like Skill Share, could work well for me. The latter being more likely in my area, where there’s nothing except shopping and the military.

In order to be a successful creative these days, you have to manage your own marketing and “branding” through social media and networking events. Two things I know nothing about and barely comprehend. I have never known how to approach social media; I don’t know how to connect with anyone through it, and I don’t know what the platform wants from me, either. Trying to stay on top of all that nonsense is, on its own, another full-time job. In person networking is also pretty out of my league, requiring social skills I fully lack and that make my head shut down. I may not have put enough mustard on this paragraph, but this is actually worse than the others for me. Work is stressful, but I can muddle through, and I’d maybe find new ways of viewing and approaching it as I went along; after all, it’s just to survive, and then there’s always hope. This is a concentrated dose of all my social anxiety with the added bonus of inhuman overlords antagonizing me for everything. And I’m at a moment where I wouldn’t even know what platform to work on to begin with: Even if Twitter lasts longer than I expect, it’s not the place to be; Facebook has long stopped being any sort of place I can or would want to rely on; Instagram is fully a mystery that I don’t want to untangle, plus I hear it’s not great for artists anymore; beyond those, I don’t know any other social media platform that would work for what I need and want that’s actually viable.

As I think about all of these problems, I feel an unending dread at the fact that there’s basically no way for me to pursue any of these things and also live my life. I wouldn’t have time to read books, play games, or see movies. I wouldn’t have time to focus on my diet and build a healthy lifestyle. I wouldn’t have the time or money to get clothes and things to feel more like myself. I would never have the chance to learn random fun skills as the fancy strikes. I certainly wouldn’t have time to figure out my social life.

I don’t know how to make friends, or even decide who I want to befriend. My only friends, who I can count on one hand, live far away, and I don’t get to talk to them enough, so I don’t have anyone to hang out with. Where could I go, what could I do to meet people? I don’t do things that facilitate that because nothing I do is a social activity, because again, no one to do social things with. What about my love life? I want to be having more sex, and I want to find out what dating is like. Turns out, it’s hard to get into dating in your late twenties, when others are looking to settle down and get married, if you’re still at the teenage step of, “What is flirting? What is dating? How do I talk to people?” And when I think about what I want, it’s muddled. I’m not convinced marriage is what I want in life, but I also don’t want to end up alone. I kinda just want to have romantic friendships with my friends. Is that polyamory? Because whatever it is, now I have to find friends I can also be romantic with, and they’re cool with it never being a guarantee we’d settle into something “serious” like what most people want. Do I want that? I kinda think I’m the type to give everything to others, and I’d feel wounded if they didn’t return the favor, but at the same time my own interactions might turn off suddenly, like the cat I am. I don’t know myself enough to trust myself.

I’ve gotten pretty far down this road, so I want to hammer home again that as of this moment, I struggle with starting conversations with everyone about anything. That’s my starting block. To my knowledge, there’s no place you can go to learn any of this, there’s no school for social skills; you’re just expected to learn it all naturally as a kid, and then either coast with the same group of friends from high school or college the rest of your life or be an amazing social butterfly in every setting you find yourself in forever. I want to figure this out and tackle it, and if I seriously address the career-focused concerns above, I’ll never have time to do that. So both ways, I have massive anxiety about being alone forever.

So basically, I don’t have an escape from this. My goals and desires, at the moment, appear in conflict, with no vision in my mind for resolving it. I have general desires and impulses, but I’m not far enough with anything to have a target to set my sights on. I have more ideas in my head I know I should listen to, and I try, but they never clear any of this fog. I just sit there, feeling by brain scream, and I never quite cry even though it would feel amazing, and I get so tired and defeated, and my brain shuts down. I know I should see a therapist, I’d love to, really. With what money, though? Is there anyone in my area I’d like? Seems doubtful. Well, that’s premature and pessimistic, I just don’t have a lot of hope for it at the moment. I can’t afford any of the help I want and need, in both time and money, and all I want is to read a book and forget I’m sitting in a chair at home for an hour. I’ll calm down later and keep living my life like normal, until the next time my brain gets fried and I have to play the, “Am I depressive, or do I just have a migraine?” game. I want to do literally anything to address any of these concerns. Maybe writing this out for others to see can help. All I know now is I’m hungry, and I set down my dinner to spend over an hour writing this because it was the only thing I could think to do.