The very ___________ caterpillar

Very tired. Very shaky. Very grateful.

It’s been several despair-ridden and frustrated months, but I’ve submitted my dissertation and come wobbling out into the comparative sunshine of post-submission life. One of my first goals, naturally, was to start making diary comics to address the last few months of my life. What I had not expected was to sit down to draw only to come up completely blank. To write pages and pages of notes but find myself unable to generate a single image to illustrate them.

To try to access a deeply-ingrained part of my creative self and run up against nothingness.

It was unnerving to say the least.

Each day I sat down with my notebooks and wrote, trying to figure out what I was trying to say. Part of this particular block doubtless had to do with some of the constraints I had set for myself, namely that I wanted to limit this first dip into processing to a single page in my diary book. I did not feel like I had the energy or confidence to attempt a multi-page comic this soon; I still have not nailed down what the arc of this experience “looks” like. I have not settled on a guiding image/metaphor upon which I might hang the details of this incredibly bizarre and singular undertaking.

Yet my notes are full of images:

• “I feel like a cow trying to paint a cityscape.”

• “I feel like an archaeologist digging on a minigolf course.”

• “My brain is a dry creek bed that hasn’t seen rain in years. Also all the lizards are misshapen.”

Part of me loves these images (lizards and all) and I suspect I will return to them later, but they were not the story I needed to tell in the immediate aftermath of what people kept assuring me was a significant accomplishment.

Over the past several months, as unease and frustrated discouragement took over my life, I emotionally and psychologically shut myself off from my surroundings because I felt completely at my limit and the only way to prevent being pushed to breaking was to not make room for ANYTHING else. It might not be the best approach but it’s a common response to this particular type of overwhelm. And somehow thinking about this brought me, finally, to a useful image: the life cycle of a caterpillar. What if, I asked myself, the caterpillar went through this whole multi-stage process only to emerge not as a beautiful creature but as a malformed and bumbling little mess of a creature: not exactly beautiful, but ALIVE.

At last, an image that addressed the distress and discomfort I’ve experienced but still left room for a bit of humor and optimism while also acknowledging the mess I had made of myself. Once this clicked into place, the comic essentially drew itself…

Next stop? Butterfly.

(I’m so happy to be back - hello, new subscribers!)