OhJoySexToy

November 7

Added 2014-11-07 23:43:59 +0000 UTC

This entry is about making art, it just takes a while to get there.

When my therapist told me I have PTSD last week, I laughed. Soldiers get PTSD, I told her. Rape survivors have PTSD. But a privileged white cartoonist reviewing sex toys in Portland? C’mon.

I expected my husband and closest friends to roll their eyes at such a dramatic evaluation when I brought it up with them, but instead I got back a perfectly harmonized “What? You mean you didn’t know?”

For 18 years I survived in a house that was burning down around me, but those persevering skills that got me through the past don’t work so well in the present. One of my coping mechanisms was to create material other people enjoyed consuming. When I can make people laugh or relate to a story through my comics, it’s ok that I’m alive. If I’m not producing anything valuable to others, then I have no right to exist. Without my work, I’m worthless.

So what happens if I become healthy?

If I find the right combination of meds and my brain get as close to balanced as it can, if I can heal from the violence that I lived with for two decades, if I recover from the forces that compel me to produce my work in the first place… will I still create? If I feel worthwhile on my own, without outside validation, what motivation will I have to make shit?

People go to their jobs to pay the rent, right? If you could live in your home rent-free, why go to work?

I want so badly to be healthy. But I’m scared getting better means losing the one part of me I like.

So anyway, next week’s comic is about dragon dicks.