Double Life, Double Mind (Patreon)

The last couple months I’ve been living a double life. On the day we launched the Kickstarter for Volume 4, I would pull myself together just enough to make chirpy updates on social media and then I would curl back up into a ball and sob under my blanket because I was losing my goddamn mind.

I’m doing better now but it feels so fragile. For a couple months my brain felt like a swarm of wasps smashing into each other and crashing against my skull. I wish I got the “fun” hypomania, where you’re energized and feel like you can take on the world. Instead I get the sad, scary kind. The kind of mania that vibrates self-hatred and panic thought your body so hard that it feels like you’re literally being torn apart from the inside out, like chunks of your body are going to rip right off of you. 

What I wanted to do was burrow into a safe, warm cave away from any and every human being until the wasps in my head could settle down. 

And what I had to do was smile and joke and dance on the internet to fund our Kickstarter. 

It really fucked with my head. 

DON’T GET ME WRONG:

I’m so grateful I have an audience who supports my work. I’m so grateful the Kickstarter funded enough that we could send our guest cartoonists book and cash bonuses. I’m so grateful the Kickstarter definitely raised enough to cover the expenses of producing the books and it looks like there should be a bit left over for Matt and me as payment for the year of work that went into that book (Kinda like a reverse “advance” you’d get from a publisher, where they pay you before you start doing the book. With us, we get paid after all the work is done and all the other expenses that go into producing a book have been paid. I guess you could call our payment a “retroactive”). I am full of gratitude and appreciation and awe that my audience enables me to do this job.

That is all 100% true

And also.

The last couple months have been hell.

Hm. Hrm. I like to have a bit of a closing thought at the end of my letters, a little “Here’s the moral of the story!” but I don’t really have one because I’m still working through this. I’m trying to figure out how to live with the dichotomy of being An Internet Character online and A Real Human Being in the world. There’s so much I want to share, stuff I think people can relate to or at least be entertained by, stuff that’s bursting out of my heart and brain. But the punishment that comes from sharing any part of yourself with the internet is… it’s devastating. It leaves you naked and sobbing on the floor of a hotel room in Sweden at 1am, convinced you have to abandon your life’s work because the unrelenting punishment from the internet just isn’t worth it any more. 

Or maybe that’s just me?

Anyway, anyway, anyway. 

I’m doing better now. It feels very fragile and temporary, but I’ll take it. I’m talking with my loved ones about how to move forward, what changes need to happen in my public/private lives so I can be a functional, healthier person. I feel optimistic. I feel hopeful. I’m going to have some stories about all this to share on here in the future.

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Yet another post where I very respectfully request that you DO NOT COMMENT. Getting feedback when I share vulnerable personal stuff trips my brain up right now, but I still want to share with you guys, so my compromise is to tell you what's up and then kindly ask that you DO NOT COMMENT.

Thank you for indulging my poor crazy brain's irrational requests.