Comicking your feelings

I’ve been going through a bit of a rough patch lately in terms of my mental health. I don’t talk about it that often, but I don’t keep it a secret that I’ve always struggled with anxiety. Recently I started on medication for it for the first time, which is currently having the wonderfully ironic side effect of increasing my anxiety. (Powering through until the real effects kick in…)

Anyways, this news post isn’t a sad one! One of the best ways I’ve found to deal with my anxiety is to identify and challenge my anxious thoughts. I usually refer to these internal dialogues as anxiety brain vs. logic brain. Logic brain is usually a ways behind anxiety brain, but he always shows up eventually. Anxiety brain is the one that says “you got turned down for that job because it’s a pattern of failure reaching into your past and future” and starts sobbing immediately. Logic brain turns up twenty minutes later and gently reminds anxiety brain of all my successes, and totally rational reasons why someone else might have been a better choice for this particular job that don’t reflect on me as a person.

I’ve never been big on journalling, but last week I started scripting some of the frequent arguments that anxiety brain and logic brain have. I found it made me feel a lot better to actually put down, in words, just how ridiculous my thought patterns are sometimes. Initially I was going back and forth between drawing the characters as caricatures of me or as giant brains, but ultimately they ended up as cats instead: one very frazzled, and the other with an elegant pince-nez. Somehow these guys seem like a pretty accurate depiction of my brain.

They’re probably a deeper look into my psyche than anyone else wants or needs, but what better time than right around Halloween to make everyone slightly uncomfortable? Check out one of the first ones below.

Do you journal? Do you ever use comics to express what's going on inside your head?



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