Tag Archives: pain

Pain Map

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Be gentle. You have no idea about the weight of other people's burdens.

Be gentle. You have no idea about the weight of other people’s burdens.

I’ve never applied for any type of disability, but The Man has 3 pins in his knee, which resulted in a medical discharge from the Air Force, and he did have a hang tag for many years. We only used it when we were absolutely out of spoons, but even so some vigilante once left a note on the windshield accusing us of not being handicapped enough. It’s not a contest, people. You don’t want what we have. Also, the picture on the sign is just a symbol: there are disabilities other than being a paraplegic confined to a wheelchair.

This was the hardest comic I’ve ever scripted. Fibromyalgia is a subject I don’t care to discuss much (see panel 2). Adolescence taught me to never expose any weakness. Whenever the subject came up, doctors dismissed it and no one sympathized, or cared, or, I suspect, believed me. Most people don’t know that I have a chronic pain disorder; I try not to let it dictate my life, and when it does, I try to make sure that it doesn’t dictate other people’s lives. But the reality of my life is that I do have a chronic pain disorder. Invisible diseases exist, and you can’t judge someone’s level of disability. Clearly, I’m better off than many, because I’m still generally able to hide the problem, but that doesn’t give anyone a right to question its existence.

If I bring it up in person, you better believe there’s a reason that information is being shared: I have limits. I only mention it here because of consumer demand for a continuing series of comics cataloging all the excruciating reasons I’ve failed to summit the heights of my potential. It’s all about telling the most horrible parts with brutal honesty. I’m not complaining and I’m not looking for sympathy. I just need you to understand that this is the truth.

Opening Pandora’s Box: Meet My Demons

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From left to right: Chronic Pain and Insomnia, Foggy Delusion, Insatiable Desire, Crippling Self-Doubt, and Winged Hope

From left to right: Chronic Pain and Insomnia, Foggy Delusion, Insatiable Desire, Crippling Self-Doubt and Depression, and Winged Hope

Felt like working with my hands and taking a break from the tablet and webcomics, so I reached for the Sculpey, and, as inspiration tends to steer me, went to the weirdest place.

Sharp spikes, massive fangs, throbbing veins, bloodshot, wide-awake eye

Sharp spikes, massive fangs, throbbing veins, bloodshot, wide-awake eye

Here we have some metaphorical, 3-dimensional representations of my demons: Chronic Pain and Insomnia, Foggy Delusion, Insatiable Desire, and Crippling Self-Doubt and Depression. And then, because I have read the classics, I added Hope, who is either the blessed relief vouchsafed mankind by kindly deities, or else the worst curse in the box. Either interpretation is considered correct. It simply depends on your philosophical outlook.

General cloudiness, tentacles of disordered thought

General cloudiness, tentacles of disordered thought

Now I can also make 3-d comics about the physical embodiments of all the emotional handicaps that have held me back in life. Ha ha. Although first I guess I better make a Monica figurine for these guys to plague.

Greedy gaze, hungry mouth, probing tongues

Greedy gaze, hungry mouth, probing tongues

To tell the truth, working on the computer all the time kind of makes me lazy, both in terms of the way I lean on the myriad available tools rather than my own artistic sense along with the overall degree of creativity I expend on a particular idea. I might try to get some stuff done on paper, with a pencil, in the near future.

Formless hopelessness, one hand covering shame, the other reaching out for help

Formless hopelessness, one hand covering shame, the other reaching out for help

There’s a school of thought that suggests welcoming in weakness interrupts its power over you. If you accept problems, instead of combating them, you can move on with your life.

Gossamer wings, sweet curves wrapped in sunshine and warm breezes

Gossamer wings, sweet curves wrapped in sunshine and warm breezes.

I sort of started storyboarding a comic about depression, but it almost feels exploitation and derivation. Everyone does depression comics, right?

I’ll write a depression comic. Later.

A Green, Leafy Mandala

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So refreshing...

So refreshing…

Chronic pain is the absolute worst.

I couldn’t get in to see the only massage therapist I even trust to work on me anymore, because she’s so good she’s usually booked 3 weeks in advance, so I went to community acupuncture, which is something I do about once every other year. The Man has had great success with it for his neurological headaches, which no other treatment can even touch, but somehow it’s only very moderately useful for me. Sometimes it causes extreme, electrical pain, which is not good in a community setting because it’s unfair to other people if I’m screaming in the quiet room. When the needles go in all right, I can only keep them in for about 15 minutes before my muscles start to spasm. The relief is usually temporary–in this case, it lasted about an hour.

Apparently he released something else inside of me because about halfway through the treatment I was overcome with a tidal wave of sorrow–something about the generic Chinese-sounding new age music they play struck me as inconsolably sad–and tears began to stream down my face.

That part actually was OK.

I managed to get about half the office cleaned today but made no progress on the comic even though it’s a really simple, one-panel comic that I should have been able to draw in an hour. I spent an hour last night trying to write one word (part of the image rather than the text) and erasing it over and over because it didn’t look right. I suspect the template is too small, as I’ve had trouble getting word bubbles to look legible in the one-panels in the past.

Chronic pain also makes me stupid. Like, when I talk the wrong words come out of my mouth. I was trying to tell the acupuncturist about my disc problem and I said, “It’s between L4 and L5,” when obviously, based on the location of the pain, I meant “C4 and C5.” He knew what I meant, but it was bizarre that my mouth referenced a completely different part of my body than what my brain wanted to discuss. Later, talking about arranging my office, I said “shelves” when I wanted “drawers.”

I am still beating The Man in Words with Friends, though.

He just remembered that we own a TENS unit, which is a thing we both tend to forget until we’re incapacitated. It provides a good measure of relief. Maybe I can get the comic started. I think it’s a good gag; I described it to The Man and he laughed, even though he was trying not to because he doesn’t like to admit that I’m pretty funny. He likes to be the funny one. But there can be room for 2 comedians in a marriage: George and Gracie, Lucy and Desi. Of course, the woman is usually the funnier one…

Lame blog post. I usually don’t talk about chronic pain but sometimes that’s all there is.

As for this mandala, it would make a pretty cool T-shirt.

This Is Your Trigger Warning

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When I say I feel your pain, it's probably because your pain makes me feel my pain.

When I say I feel your pain, it’s probably because your pain makes me feel my pain.

This is what we talk about when we talk about post traumatic stress. Obviously, this is pretty personal; most of my comics are pretty personal, but this one is deeper. I’m not sure I’m ready to talk about what happened in panel 3 here. A lot of people already know about it already, and it might come up in some other form later on. I don’t have any problem telling you if you ask. I just don’t want to write about it in my art blog at this time. But it did happen, and I was diagnosed with PTSD afterward. This was 16 years ago, and while trauma fades, I’m not sure it ever gets erased. What’s it like? It’s sort of like this, what I’ve inelegantly drawn here.

Panel 1, of course, riffs off the famous scene from the classic 1964 James Bond film Goldfinger. Bond does not die. He also does not show any outward signs of PTSD, although some might argue that the drinking and womanizing are symptoms.

Panel 2 is not my story, but it did happen to my friend, whose father came home broken from Viet Nam. She told me he would wake up in the middle of the night, mistake her and her brother for Viet Cong, and threaten them with a gun. So war traumatized him, and then he passed that trauma on to his kids.

Panel 3, as I said, is more or less something that happened to me in 1998, and I’m still fucked up about it, even though I’ve had therapy and go for long periods of time without thinking about it at all.

Panel 4 is basically the 9 of swords from the Rider-Waite tarot deck. Some people refer to this card as “The Dark Night of the Soul.” I think it’s a pretty universal image.

Panel 5: I wasn’t anywhere near New York on 9/11, and I didn’t really know anyone there, but this was the first time I learned that people with PTSD get to re-experience their PTSD if they hear about other people’s extreme trauma. Like a lot of Americans, I had a rough time of it that month; I had to have therapy and leave grad school for a week in the middle of the semester. I couldn’t bring myself to draw the plane hitting the WTC, so I just used a screen grab.

The guy in panel 6 did not die. He was in the coma for about a month, and he spent a year learning to walk and talk and eat again, and then he spent 5 or 6 years getting his head on, and now he lives independently, which is a pretty big deal, considering we spent 3 days not knowing if he was going to survive.

This is, by far, the most morbid thing I’ve posted in this blog. I hope I can be funny again next week, but I just don’t feel funny right now. The longer you live, the more likely you are to experience trauma, meaning the older you get, the more likely it is that you and the people around you are suffering these invisible personal catastrophes. My big one was maybe only 15 minutes of my life, but it gathered up all the small hurt from before and it amplified all the small hurt that came afterward. And my situation really is nothing, compared to some lives. It’s hard not to feel my own trauma when I hear about someone else’s, but I also can’t turn away. People want to tell me, and I want to honor their pain by listening.

‘Tis the Season

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Although Christmas decorations that come out before Thanksgiving enrage me, when it comes to holiday bulletin boards, I do have to start early. I always do Halloween/All Souls, which leaves me with 6 weeks before winter break, so I can either scramble to do something sort of late autumny followed immediately by something early wintery (why is “wintery” a word, but “autumny” is not?) or I can stay on the one-every-6-weeks or so schedule and encapsulate the entire holiday season into one comprehensive thought.

Here’s my thought for the holiday season 2014:

Don't worry; be happy

Don’t worry; be happy

Originally, and for many weeks, I had intended this bulletin board to somehow feature hands. First I was thinking of a photo of people with different skin tones making a sort of hand mandala, but I don’t have access to that kind of paper anyway, so I considered another idea. Before I did any of the above paper cutting, I first cut a piece of brown paper into the shape of two hands forming a heart, like so:

Like this, except, you know, more cordate.

Like this, except, you know, more cordate.

Then I cut the big red heart to fit inside the finger heart and made some rough cuts for the flames, at which point I laid everything out on the tab and realized that the hands were going to obscure the fire. By then I had already settled on the quote (I just Googled “joy quotes,” because that’s what I always end up with for the holidays anyway) and I figured the flames were going to look cooler than the hands, but I thought I could reposition the flames to make it work. At that point, I rolled everything up into a couple tubes and took them home, intending to cut all the letters at night. Instead, I drew Dragon Comics, so that when I went back to school Wednesday I was no further along than I had been on Monday.

For about 30 minutes, I fine-tuned the flames so they were not all identical, and pasted the colors together. I lightly affixed the heart to the bulletin board and arranged the flames underneath it, stapling and gluing in various ways I have learned best keep paper stuck to cork in a windy courtyard. I went to add the hands, saw there was no way to make them work, and that they didn’t look that great anyway, and discarded them. Instead, I hastily cut and paste the lettering, which is all very freehand with only the scarcest guidelines or regard for size.

I think the font offers a sense of joyful abandon.

Total time: about 6 hours (although I do spend a lot of time kibitzing with the librarian while I work).

Joseph Campbell was a great thinker, and I would hope the entire world could become familiar with some aspects of his work. He certainly did a great deal of research into the human condition, and with it, what makes people happy, and what makes them miserable. Understanding culture, and using it to maintain our humanity, is a more favorable choice than not understanding culture, and being crushed or dehumanized by it. He’s probably a pretty good example of a self-actualized human being, and a man who was able to find his life’s work in doing something he loved, and apply his life’s work to making the world a better place. I think that makes him a hero, even if his hero’s journey might not have been quite what he would have described as classically heroic.