“Meg, my little flower, my little bird, my little nut, Meg. What exactly happened here? I thought you were gonna [draw the comic] for the [TF drive], and here I am, kind of [TF]-less.”
--Hades, Hercules (1997)

Things were going relatively well this year and then my art output fell off a cliff. I’m writing this to try to explain why.

Firstly, by now you should know I’m a teacher for my dayjob and I just changed schools. You’ve probably noticed that teachers need to be in some time before classes start to get everything set up. At my old job, this “sometime before” was “any time during the previous 2 weeks”. New job demands 3 weeks in full (meaning they check that you’re doing it in-person, work-from-home is not acceptable any of of those days).

I misread as 4.

So I show up on the day I’m supposed to start showing up, believing I have a full month and pace myself accordingly. Then, halfway through my “month” I hear “classes start next week, right?”

I’ve never felt such panic before.

This singular mistake meant I spent the entire semester playing catchup because, in case you don’t know, the fall semester is always the one with the most “things you have to do”. I didn’t sleep, didn’t do my usual self-care, all in the name of meeting my obligations.

Now, I fully accept responsibility for my mistake, but I did need some moral support to keep me going. I tried leaning on my online friends… it backfired. They were too busy with their own problems. They made me feel worse. And when I tried to talk to them about that, take interested in their problems, they kind of disappeared.

I even tried talking to people at work…but of course I was rewarded with “more work” (not to mention there’s a few fundamental differences of opinion I don’t think I can get past). This is why I couldn’t tell you if I ever did catch up or just barely met the deadlines, because of these unforeseen obligations.

And, of course, this wouldn’t be complete without the car breaking down a couple times and a few firing threats, because when is it ever just one thing?

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