It seems to be happening more often these days. Just little tufts of pure anxiety and worry, usually aggravated by not enough sleep or the regurgitation of bad, sour memories.
I wonder if it's a good thing that I feel panic more and more, and it makes me curious at the prospect of something horrid about to happen on the horizon; a danger that I have yet to identify...

I think half of what causes the strife is the slow and agonizing waking of a heart that at some point (or perhaps never has felt) lost the ability to truly feel things that it should have been feeling. Maybe the slue of stunted and buried emotions that I wasn't able nor allowed to feel is causing the anxiety.

I'm not really sure.

At some level I think I'm thankful for that cold impenetrable heart as I know it was the source of great empowerment when I was seemingly powerless. But on that same line of thought I am starting to sense and see all the things that I have missed out on and I slowly become aware that my greatest defense has left me inept in so many ways.

Thus.

I am unsure whether to wear the panic that comes more and more often as a badge of pride and an optimistic sign that feeling is returning or as a poor omen of some kind of mental illness that has finaly come to an ugly head.

So much to be unsure about.

The more I learn about myself and about the world around me, the more I begin to realize my constant and never ending need to distance myself from it. Everything I enjoy and focus upon typically aides in my never ending need for escape. This has led to several important realisations about my personality and my own limitations.

First off, the need for disconnection has made me into a flake. It's hard to properly empathise with ordinary people with ordinary problems as I get older. I'm slowly becoming irritated with what I'm beginning to see as whining and complaining. It's not fair nor a healthy out look on people, yet I can't help but feel this way. Maybe it's because most of my concerns and complaints of the past have either fallen on deaf or clueless ears, leaving me jaded. Maybe I'm out growing the people around me, and now find their childish behaviors garish and unnecessary. Or maybe I'm simply becoming apathetic.

It's a rather tough call all around.

But what ever the case, I feel a tremendous disconnection with others around me. Half of my loss of contact I legitimately can blame on being stunted by the mistreatment of others, the other half is due to a large fear I have of people that slowly becomes more and more apparent with each passing year. The 2 reasons go hand and hand when you really get down to it, and it frustrates me to know that I'm letting fear and past misfortune effect my behavior so heavily.


I think to my own problems for clarity and solution and maybe that is my biggest pit fall.

How can you grow if you keep yourself self-contained? Is it honestly possible?

The first drawing I was ever proud of was a picture of a lopsided rabbit with floppy ears. I was in kindergarten at the time, probably no older than six, and I distinctly remember running out to the hallway showing the first person I saw my masterpiece. I believe she was a 1st or 2nd grade teacher...woman at the end of her prime with dyed blond hair, her dark graying roots showing through. She wore a blue dress and an awkward smile as I forced her to look at what I made. I can no longer recall what she told me, bu I remember her words being warm and kind, as I beamed after they were said.

For the life of me I cannot remember why I recall that one instance vividly in my mind, nor why I felt such a pointlessly gratuitous swell of pride and self worth at what I had created, nor why I felt the need to share it with a woman I never met. Maybe I am over analyzing things, as this happened before I became a withdrawn child, and when a small child does something well they seek out confirmation for their achievements. I don't believe I will ever forget that instance, and often I ponder it's significance.

Maybe it stands clear as it was the first time in my life I was proud of something that I created myself. It wasn't some hokey cartoon character that I colored in a book, nor something I imitated from a television show, but instead something of my own design. I even remember drawing a home and a family that lived with him, and dreamed up stories and adventures they embarked on until the moment was lost and I moved onto something else.


It's been some 17 odd years since that incident, and I have evolved past creating rabbits yet still find a joy in creating characters and inventing stories to give them life and further dimension. Admittedly, while I no longer run out and seek instant gratification for my creations from the very kind yet mostly confused, I very much love the swell of an audience that appreciates my art to this day.

In the past, I believed it the only reason to why I tried so hard in making artwork, but looking back, there was a very obvious yet obscure theme in all of my artwork that I wasn't able to fully see. A vast amount of my artwork has this indescribable depression behind them and it's quite distressing that I could not see it before.

With my past record and all that has occurred, it's really little wonder that so much of it turned out that way, as the bitter truth is, I was deeply troubled. I was very very keen on slipping into into any distraction or fantasy, finding that if I wasn't allowed distraction I would start slipping into something dismal and horrifying.

It let me to being very unproductive and underachieving in my youth. For the longest time I couldn't understand why I would become paralyzed or simply avoid taking responsibilities for things that had to get done, but I'm starting to understand.

But getting back on task, one of my favorite and more productive distractions was drawing, and I think the underlying sadness and overall desperation was well outlined in my work whether or not I could see it at the time.

I have a small notebook in my possession that went by the name "Mick" full of ideas and bits and pieces of comics of a large project that I have abandoned due to incoherence. It was a story about a goddess on earth who split in half. The half that split grew into a tree that could bestow eternal life to all that lived around it. Eventually the goddess becomes lonely, and cohorts with the tree to create 3 "Princes" so there are other people that are "like her". The first 2 come out perfectly, but when she goes to create the 3rd, a disaster occurs and the last Prince is birthed along with a horrific disease that wipes out most of the world. The story takes place after the world has finally fully recovered from the horrid blight and solving the remaining deep rooted problems that are left from the disease.

TO be honest, I really didn't know where the story was going with it's self as there was no specific "battle" or "antagonist" that the characters had to face. Instead they kind of fought among one another, and as I invented conflict, my characters personalities began to meld with each other making them boring and indistinguishable from one another.

There was a very good reason for this.

While I wasn't able to admit it to myself at the time, Mick, the "idea" book that I used was merely a glorified journal in which I would work my issues and problems using wooden characters and convenient plot points to basically map out what was troubling me inside.I was so disconnected with myself that I didn't quite get how "parallel" the issues were to those I didn't quite understand in myself.

Although I would be lying if I said creating the story was a waste of time, as it did serve to both stimulate my creatively and did serve as some kind of warped therapy and comfort, I'm slightly sad that it proves to be an utterly useless mass of ideas.

But it also kind of a linking light that indicated my tendencies to stray from myself and reality, which is another conversation all together.

There is much to be said about the subject of art, but I'll leave it at that for now.

This is my first official post in a journal for nearly 3 years...

Been a long long while.
I this journal is going to be much different than the last journals I have kept, as I;m starting to understand the value that is honesty. If it gets too hairy I can always kill this so why not be truthful in my thoughts.

But first, lets begin with a little exposition. I'm a freshman in college, seeking out a degree in sequential arts. My current projects are designing a dating sim and working on a comic book about a redneck and a prostitute being pursued across country by mobsters.

I'm unemployed and in a relationship with a man that lives over 5000 miles away.

I manically go between being content with my life and being ill and scared of it.
THe more time that passes the more it feels like an unseen hole opens in my chest, revealing truths, feelings and fears it seems I have inadvertently been running from for some odd seven years or so. The thoughts and feelings have only become stronger and more painful in the past 3 years as so much has changed in my life in the way I live it and with the people I share it with.

I'm both lonely and overly stimulated with people...it's a weird and strange place to be.
But I'll unload myself as time goes on, as there is certain to be a lot of shit to get off my chest.

We'll see how long I keep this up and how much I'm actually brave enough to admit.

Test test test