I had to overcome a fear that I wasn't good at writing because school made me think I was bad at it.

Wow! That's definitely a lot to go through over the years but I'm proud of you for making it through all of that and being so dedicated to your work!

(Warning about some mentions/discussions about mental health issues, slight allusions to self harm, and slight allusions to suicidal ideation. Apologies for the mini-autobiography as well )

I got the idea for the initial version of my comic back in 2012, and began work on it almost immediately. It was extremely pantsed, which led to some... Oddities let's say. Some ideas were great, some weren't. Some jokes landed like a passenger plane and others landed like a fax machine dropped from an apartment window. Plot threads came out of nowhere and ended abruptly or got forgotten as I just followed whatever seemed the most fun to draw or write at the time. It was very cooperative, with the in-jokes from readers getting incorporated, and most pages being streamed while I was drawing them.
It ended around 2014 when I graduated high school.
During the initial run, I was extremely depressed and had a lot of thoughts of "giving up on life" so to speak. I also got something of an internet stalker during this time, because of the comic and the degree to which I made myself friendly and available to anyone who would give me attention. I became a lot more withdrawn online after that and am still quite wary of sharing too much about myself online or using much social media to this day. (Though I still like to be friendly and make friends online. I'm just a bit more careful with it now.)

Since then:
-Dragged myself in and out of mental sinkholes. I still carry this casual "ah maybe I'll just give up on life" mentality, but it's more like a casual thing if that makes any sense. It's an annoying passenger in the back of my head, and for the most part I know how to ignore it now. It isn't healthy, and I've been working on seeking help for it, but I'm not sure if it will ever go away.
-After high school had an odd limbo period where I realized my parents had no intention of helping me get to college, so I got delayed a few years while I figured out how to secure financial support for that. (Scholarships, grants, loans.) At the time, my living environment was extremely toxic and I swore I would never live at home again.
-Moved a decent bit away after I got all of that sorted out to go to college, spent about 3 years studying robotics engineering.
-Got to be a part of some research and robotics competition teams and travel around the country for said competitions. Failed at several romantic relationships because I still had a lot of mental and emotional baggage to sort through.
-I wrote a couple drafts of a novel in my free time, but the pieces just never came together right.
-I fell pretty flat on my face after a couple years and sunk into an EXTREMELY dark place mentally and emotionally speaking. This was caused by really screwing up on one of my research projects, despair over the state of the world, sabotaging a potential relationship because I hated myself and couldn't open up, and realizing the novel I spent many many years on was still an unreadable mess and just wasn't working. I also realized that a lot of my unhealthy worldviews were reflected in it and that I wasn't sure I would ever WANT to share or finish it if it was like that. I pushed away many of my friends and was self isolating, too. Not a great time and I'm not proud of a lot of what I said and did then.
-After I started SHing as a stress response I sought out therapy and got on medications. I dropped many of my classes and clubs and started doing creative work again, trying to find something light and fun again. This was around the end of 2019. Things were really looking up.
-Picked Redux back up again around the end of 2019 start of 2020. Then 2020 happened.
-Everyone got kicked out of the dorms and I didn't really have anywhere to go. One of my older sisters who lived across the country offered to let me stay as long as I needed to, so that happened.
-Spent about a year in the Seattle area doing online classes and working on my comic. It was actually really nice and I figured out the kind of adult I wanted to become and the sort of life I wanted to build for myself.
-Moved back to my college when the dorms opened back up so I could finish my degree
-Finished my degree and tried to find a job before I got kicked out of the dorms again. (Still working on my comic).
-Didnt find a job in time, had to move back in with my parents.
-Went back into a bad mental space, managed to find a WFH job which pays really well but it had a 1 year probationary period so I couldn't risk moving out and then having to move back in if they decided I wasn't a good fit.
-Really regressed back into bad habits while working from home and living with my parents. My brother dragged me to an emergency mental health clinic to get me back on meds.
-Managed to adapt to my job really well! The meds helped immensely, and I got retained about a month ago.
I just moved into a new place and I'm still recovering and adjusting. The house is still a disaster zone of unpacking but I know I'm building something a lot healthier and hopefully more permanent here.
-My comic is still living there in the back of my head and I'm still sketching pages while I try to get myself in the headspace to work on it. It reflects a lot of the bad things I see in myself and in some of my situations, but it also is a lot more goofy and optimistic than my previous work. I never finished the 2012 version, and I want to see this one through. It's been 10 years but I'm still not giving up on it.

If you read all of that, thank you

Here's to everyone who's had to fight against their own brains to make it through this, and for all the creatives who won't give up in spite of what the world decides to throw at them! When I have a bit more free time I look forward to reading your work, thespiritinme.

I think up stuff and write. Don't really have to go through anything when I'm making things up.

Written more than a 100 stories since 1991. Mostly ghost written for clients, and published over 25 under a few pen names.

I read up on a whole lot of subjects, and that makes me think up stuff all the time.

oh I am so glad someone else started also their story so long ago. I started mine 2010 XD so yeah it went through a lot of editing until I got to this point now today. But ya my ride was similar, family issues, depression, no motivation etc. so yeah I can relate. But hey now we are here and we dip our foot into the water and get our stories out there =D

I have similar issues too although I haven't really worked on my current story for too long, probably only about a couple years. I started writing stories when I was in middle school, they're crap stories but I've always loved writing. Writing is the only thing that keeps me sane throughout my teens to adulthood. I've never tried publishing a novel before but I do want to publish a novel one day.

I love books but I almost never have the energy to read them. I've been trying to train myself to read but I don't know, I think it's the way my brain works. It's a lot harder for me to read novels than comics. Even then it's hard for me to read comics too, so I guess it's a me issue most of the time. But when I do get into a good story regardless if it's comics or novels, I would not want to stop reading it until I finish it. It's normal for people but it's actually crazy for me cause then I have to find something that gives me the same/similar experience.

I don't get it. Check what out?

Quite a lot, this will be long, I'm so sorry, I talk a lot xD What today is my comic started in the end of 2008 as a death note fanfic when I was 12/13. I was already a depressed kid, I just didn't know about it. And writing was my refugee. Writing and drawing was all I had. I started this fanfic after my best friend at the time showed me what BL was and I was mesmerized, I was like "what magnificent genre is that, why is this so good?", it was love at fisrt sight, so I had to make my own too. Right there, that girl created a monster, I never stoped creating BL afterwards xD

2009 I changed schools, my depression got way worse. I spent almost 6 months not talkings to anyone in school, you see, I have social anxiety and I got to know it only in adult life, so I spent all my timing there drawing, writing novels (my fanfic and others), and reading manga. A teacher that was kinda of a tutor of the class even pushed me to the side and asked me what was happening, why I had no friends, if it was needed to call my parents to bring me to a terapist to help me go through all this. That day I cried a lot after that talk (yeah, in class even xD). Eventually I was accepted in a group and I got friends, I'm friends to them to this day, so yay.

I don't rememeber when, I decided to transform my fanfic to an original, so I rewrote everything, recreated all the characters. At this point I was in high school already, and dealing with depression, suicide ideation, but I can't remember much of this time of my life. I remember I tended to isolate myself a lot. And made what today is my best friend online, which may be important in the future.

After school is where the chaos begins and my mental health declines. After school I stoped writing novels for good. I also stoped drawing because of depression. I was pressured to make a university that I didn't want to do, so my mental health was fucked. I kept going to uni for 4.5 years. I dissociated a lot, so I don't remember a thing about those years. Yeah, today I know I have dissociative identity disorder, what makes my recolection of things really foggy, specially traumatic events. What made me stop going to uni was a suicide atempt, that no one at home knew about (even though we all live together lol), and that best friend I talked about saved my life talking to my mom about it. So that's when I started my treatment, finally. It was 2017 already at this point. I stoped going to university altogether, but I didn't start drawing again 'til something tragic happened...

In 2018 I started working with my mom in her beauty salon. I was making my treatment with my psycologist. Things would get better. Until my father died. It was chaotic, it was really early morning and my mom called me to tell me my father had a heart atack and it was bad, and it was for me to be ready to wake up my sister, and I cried after we hang up. But after that I didn't cry anymore. Everyone, literally everyone kept telling me to be strong for my mother and my sister, cuz I'm the oldest. No one cared for me and what I felt. That day I took all the pills we had at home, in the funeral I was so out of it I don't remember a thing. After that, my dad had some money at the bank, and my mom gave me and my sister our parts. With that money, I bought an ipad. That's when I started drawing again. About 7 months after my dad's death.

I kept drawing here and there, not thinking about coming back to write novels again. My mental health was unstable, I had a couple more suicides atempts in the meanwhile. Until 2020 came. I was reading a lot of webcomic for a while now, and I finally thought: I want to make one. What I was going to talk about though? And I rememberd that story I had that I loved, that one that borned as a fanfic and acompanied me through my teens. But as it was it wouldn't work anymore, I wanted to make it more real, more personal. So I though: why not make my character have depression as I do? I can tell my experience with it. So it began. I started writing the script with the passion I had as a teen, like I never had stopped writing. And in starting it made wonders to my mental health, omg I can't even begin with it. It was awesome. But then, the end of 2020 came....

I don't really remember what happened, again, dissociation. I just remember that in january 2021 I was so bad, my mental heath was so so bad, I had a crises and my body just couldnt fuction properly. And my mother took me to my psychistrist. She made me go outpatient in a mental hospital. And I'm still to this day, yeah, almost 2 years, I'm totally unstable, my depression comes and goes so fast and so deeply and it affects my work so much, so so much... I can't work anymore, so I just make my comics nowadays. Obviously I have good days, but I barely can work on my comic sometimes, and that's my passion project. I'm like disebled for now, ultill it all goes away.

I try to use my experience with my mental health in my comic to make it real, to make it representative of how chaotic it is and stuff like that. And even though sometimes I can't even draw a single panel because of my mental health, I keep trying to work on it for the few people who reads it and believes in my story, I can't give up now, I'm working on it for 2.5 years now. If you count since the begining, I'm working on it for 14 years. I can't stop now. I went through a lot with my mind and this story is still in it, so it's worth trying to tell it.

I'm sorry for the wall of text and thank you for those who read it xD It's hard trying to remember things because of DiD but the key things I think I can.

Currently I'm going through pain from a torn tendon in my shoulder while drawing.