"Get Mad" - A short comic about picking yourself back up from rock bottom

Full comic here:

https://www.behance.net/gallery/87456625/Get-Mad

This comic is a true story (of course without identifying details), and once again the message is still harrowingly relevant to me almost 2 years after I made it, albeit for a different reason.

It was just a small comic that I made in two weeks detailing something that had happened to me, but it became a bit more when I realized the emotional core I had inadvertently written in:

In order to heal, in order to move on, I had to let myself acknowledge the sadness I felt and express it.

Something I'm very conscious of in theory, but terrible at in practice. Sometimes you think you've internalized a message, only to realize that you've still got a lot to learn, and that's exactly what I reminded myself of a week ago.

I've been perpetually burned out from University for the past two months, and with exactly one week of actual vacation between the semesters, and the rest of the semester looming over my future, it's clear that I won't have a break for quite a long time.

That realization really does weigh heavily on me, and I feel hazy all the time. The worst part was the way I internalized the struggle and labelled it as my default state. The term "The New Normal" gets thrown around a lot, but it really applied to how I felt about it. When I called it that, it became impossible to feel justified in feeling sad about it.

But I really, really hated the way I felt, I can say as much with hindsight. It just didn't feel like it at the time. Worst of all, I realized that the path I was going down guaranteed that that would actually be how I felt for most of my time.

And under normal circumstances, that realization would put my mind into overdrive, searching for the solution. And sure, it did, but only for about 10 seconds, and then I was back to despair again. This happened a few more times, until it became almost embarrassing to consider the possibility that things would get better again, because clearly that was never happening.

I did get out of it though. I had lived with the feeling for so long, I had rationalized my pain to be a problem that my head needed to solve, not an inherently emotional road block laid out for me.

The day I finally got out of it (at least partially) was the day I closed the blinds, sat in my room all day, read through my collection of comics, and put on my favorite Record by MisterWives and sang along to the lyrics. When I got to the Life is Strange Comic series, I finally managed to cry, and I felt a tad lighter inside.

It's been a week since then, and I wouldn't say im out of the mud yet, but every few days I can finally break free from the cage around my heart, and think about how my future after the pandemic can look like.

Thank you for reading this far If you got here, it would mean a lot to me to let me know :)

If you like emotional comics, you should check out my previous one called "Life Is Photography", the link to which you can find on my profile here as well. I'm also currently working on my longest one yet, titled "The Abyss", which hopefully will be done in 3 months.

- Mezix