Creature Comforts

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TL;DR
The Creature Comfort series looks at how different our inner voices are, how affecting they are, and how we can work to lessen the negative messages to increase the volume (in both senses!) of the positive ones. Jump to comic.

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Well, hallo there, you spectacular beauties! Welcome to a new, intermittently-dispensed series on navigating the emotional rollercoaster of life with mood and anxiety disorders.

I’m writing this foreword retroactively to when I posted this first wee comic, as I’m now in a much better headspace and can contextualize it. I also want to give a little background on Creature Comfort and their relationship to the main character in the comic series who, spoiler alert, is kind of an avatar for myself.

I’m a creative at heart, for better or worse, whether I’m absolute dog shite or the bee’s most athletic and sprightly of knees. When you’re an old millennial like me, you’ll understand how important your knees are, therefore how wonderful athletic, sprightly knees are.

I sketched and doodled a lot in my teen years before turning primarily to writing as my creative outlet. In early 2020, things took a nosedive as they did for many. After 6-7 months of increasingly worse symptoms, I was finally diagnosed with gastroparesis. I was working 16 hours a day for my regular job, plus another 8-15 a week part-time to afford living where I was. During this, I could barely eat, I’d already lost a significant amount of weight, and I could barely stand without shaking. At one point, I had to go to urgent care for dehydration because I could barely stomach fluids. I lived alone, and my family were all about 700 miles away. My saving grace here were some amazing friends who would come by and check on me and help out and generally be great.

Anyway, I ended up having to quit my job/s and move back home. I was low, and I felt cognitively slow at times. It was hard to express any kind of feelings after that, because I would get so overwhelmed so easily. It was like suddenly I had a speech impediment and the lexical range of a three-year-old. But… you don’t need words to draw.

I began to draw as a form of therapy. I drew what was going on in my head, using a creature to help represent inner conflict. Well, not necessarily conflict. Creature Comfort is the embodiment of those little voices that sometimes pipe up in your head: the little criticisms when you’re feeling low, the cheerleader when you’ve done good, the voice of caution you sometimes don’t listen to (you know that Tinder date, smh), that one voice that sounds a lot like a loved one comforting you. Yeah, you know the ones.

The Creature Comforts series looks at how different those inner voices are, how affecting they are, and how we can work to lessen the negative messages and increase the volume (in both senses!) of the positive ones.

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