New comic!
How to Walk Thru Fire.
"seek first to understand, then to judge"
And for those of you interested in back story, the working cogs, the spoilers of a thing - I started this 14 weeks ago, or so my time-keeper Instagram tells me. That was March. Just before I dove headfirst into printing the Xeric, and at a moment of really awful personal and emotional stress. The feeling I'd very nearly ducked at the end of last year was cycling back again. Overwhelmed by the enormity of the task ahead of me and feeling out of line with the values of people populating my days and out of favor of loved ones - not a pleasant feeling. It'd already been a long, drawn-out winter - and there was more to come, as I would soon find.
So again, I put my nose down on a stack of twenty sheets of paper one particularly shitty day while sitting at Le Spyhouse and hacked that feeling out. The only goddamn thing to do about it. This story was another one that seemed to unearth itself in large heaps. Had most of it fleshed out by that night, and my own unhappiness slightly eased.
I'm a quietly a believer in moony-things. Stars, numbers, the works. If you do believe, using the stars to navigate yourself is a seemingly obvious avenue to take. And I was fucking confused. About everything. Waking up meant rising out of bad dreams into visceral dread. I couldn't understand the actions or read my friends' intentions, and it scared me. So I read them wrong and got hurt. I turned to those moony-things to tell me what was wrong with me, why I was so out of step with everyone else. Whether it was purely exhaustion, bad stars, or simply reaching my fill of the cruelty of humanity I felt washing over me too often, I thought I was going through an emotional beat-down. In reality, more just an internal re-structuring. A hardware update.
I have always processed the world through my internal framework, taken in and processed against an invisible metric that, admittedly, I cannot articulate. A system of ideals and moral bracketing through which all earthly information had to pass, and pass judgement. A trait I also have not been fully aware of - and, until very, very recently, not aware at all that this is not how everybody functions. A reason why I might seem quiet or clam-mouthed, or why I look too intently when people speak, or withdraw from the over-stimulation of things other people consider so goddamn "fun." I'm taking in a shit-ton of information, only a fraction of it verbal, and running it through this cotton-gin brain. And it'll fry my circuit on a bad day. It's also why I have, now admittedly, high expectations of myself and everyone - but most of all myself. I came with pre-installed, ancient hardware of processing right/wrong, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse.
And the moment I seemed to realize that every other person on earth just functioned differently than I did, and that was simply the truth, without it being "right" or "wrong," I sort of freaked out. Lashed out for a while, withdrew for another while. Drew this story. And very slowly came to terms with it. Realizing that if I changed my mind, it was not destroying the integrity of this internal framework by taking out a crucial piece - and by extension destroying myself in the process, as I've always felt internally like one, unchanged and unchangeable thing - but just fixing one piece of that thing. A new spark-plug a different car does not make. And in this analogy it's not even a spark-plug. It's a fucking rear-view mirror I'm switching out, so why burn the car down for that?
That's one long-ass mixed metaphor about my head and heart being a computer and a car, but that's I guess how it is.
See all of you on the flip.
