Early Page 402 (Patreon)

Mmm, gotta love anxiety.

This is another page where a lot changed from the original script to the final (as you can see by the thumbnail). Originally, Ainsley's little anxiety attack was just a kind of sidenote -- a quirk of how they were communicating on this page. But it wasn't well delivered by the original at all.

So we reworked the page, adding more anticipation, really hammering home the anxiety spike. Ari adjusted all the dialogue to fit the new art -- originally, Milo was much more grumpy about the fact that Oakewood doesn't make it easy to love him, but it makes a lot more sense in the scene for him to say it with sympathy to Ainsley instead. He's already pulled back his grump after he was rude to Ainsley earlier, after all!

Either way, I'm super proud of this page. It's very representative of my experiences with having clinical anxiety, where it spikes at random stimulus (being PERCEIVED, for example), and then I just have to work on managing it while still communicating and getting through it. Anxiety attacks don't always slam you in your tracks; most of the time (for me anyways), they just make things harder, not impossible. (Of course, I've also spent years and years learning how to work through them, and I'm also on medication to help with them, so that does make a huge difference, lol.)

Anyway, it was fun to see if I could portray my experience and I think I did a good job.