Anniversary

Its coming up on the one year anniversary of NNc, and it's been quite the year for a lot of reasons.

All of the difficulties of this year really ripped away the bullshit. We're more aware now than ever of the things we hid from ourselves as a country, and with the loss that's occurred, I feel much more vulnerable than I ever have. It's a little funny to think back on the beginning of this project and how vulnerability was such a difficult concept for me to grasp, but now, at the end of these twelve months, it's really all that's left.

Keeping that in mind, however, I'm trying to use my fear as fuel, and to continue to put my work and myself out there. When I went through the worst times of this year, every time I talked to my mother, my partner, or my therapist, they all had the same recommendations: It's time to go to work.

So that's what I'm going to keep doing. The hiatus is over. Here I come.

Fleaze

So, I'm going to be MIA for a while.

I don't really know who checks these, or who cares enough about checking these regularly to look at the blog to see whats up, but either way, here's whats up.

I lost a very dear friend of mine just over two weeks ago. Whether she realized it or not (I sincerely hope she did), she was a great inspiration to me, and one of the driving forces behind why I even started this endeavor.

Our friendship was founded in books: we talked about all sorts of literature together, but hilariously enough, we mostly shared a slightly guilty pleasure of young adult fiction. She was constantly hungry for lessons and for words, so even though she was pushing herself in her education as a nursing student, she still wanted a back log of books for the off chance that she may have 15 minutes away from a nursing book to read a different book. Every break she had from classes she had a stack she would tell me about, and even with that stack she always asked me for more.

It's slightly silly to say, but at the bottom of the millions of reasons that I loved this woman was the love that she gave to each book she borrowed. She kept them wrapped in plastic bags within her backpack so the dust-covers didn't get torn or bent. She never dog eared pages. If she had observations to share with me, she never left margin notes, she would wait and be bursting at the seams to talk about it the next time we saw each other.

.....

I've had many jobs in my almost 3 decades. I've made many friends at those jobs. I've been very pessimistic about those friendships, because almost all of them just faded into the past as soon as I worked somewhere else or they worked somewhere else. But she took care of friendships like she took care of books.

I have so many more feelings to share about this person who truly changed my life. This person who truly changed me.

I will miss her every day.

.....

I haven't wanted to make much of anything lately, and I've especially not really wanted to be funny. But I've been reminding myself of how funny my friend was. How she, as her partner so lovingly and perfectly said at her memorial, could be funny without ever being mean. And I want to be like that.

I'm taking this opportunity to take a break, at least from consistent posts. I feel like not many people care that much about it, but if you do, thank you. This time will be spent making as many comics as possible, with as much of her inspiration in them as possible.

F

Motivators

I feel as though I have become wealthy in so many awesome friends with so many awesome goals. There are so many creators out there: friends who are producing music, going down new career paths, being great parents, or following worthy causes. For the longest time I took those efforts as something to compare myself to in the negative: What was I doing with my life if these people I loved were doing the more meaningful things. But now I see it as a challenge in the positive. We can all be an awesome, weird, eclectic super hero team that motivate each other to push it to the next level.

I don't need squad goals, I've already got the squad.

-Fleaze