On top of a shelf in my office, there are six large portfolios that contain over 500 pages of CARRIER BAG.
Listen - this stage of my life was pretty gnarly. I’ll try to keep it brief, and as undetailed as I can.
CW: suicidal ideation, medical trauma
Maurine Pyle, my mother
She Had To Go
In May I finally got Covid. My mother had entered hospice care the week before and it was looking like the conclusion was coming up fast. I had driven down to see her from Chicago to Terre Haute, IN back and forth 3 times in the last two months, and it was looking now like I would not have another chance to do so. My Covid was not a big deal, I quarantined with the thought that I maybe I could drive down and sit with her one more time before she had to go - but a few days into my quarantine period she died with only a local friend at her side. I had to call about 50 or 60 people that day to let them know. I started working on the legal side of things when someone dies. I only know this because of my records. The month before she died I had started my new Instagram comic, CARRIER BAG.
It started as a cute doodle, and pretty quickly turned into my next project. A little space traveler and their faithful quadruped crash-land on a barren, easily drawn planet. They begin to encounter strange things in the desert, they meet a friend, something happens, I didn’t know what. Like FEND, I just designed the main characters and started immediately with no prep. I had seen people make really effective comics using the multipage swiping function. Perfect little page turning mechanism. And If I drew simply, and worked small, I could probably do a weekly comic. I decided to size down to 5x7 image size - FEND was 11x14, so this was not unchallenging, but pretty quickly I found a rhythm with it.
I found that working smaller freed me from many things that can slow your average comic down. Can’t get too detailed, can’t spend too much time on one panel, if a page looks like shit, just start it over - it’s only 5x7 and I can fill that space very quickly. I rarely started over - I was really in the habit to stick with mediocre drawing and make it work - but a few times it was pretty bad and I did redo pages. I also made a 5x7 panel border stencil out of paperboard so iI didn’t have to rule any panel borders out.
A couple of weeks later - sleeping poorly, drinking heavily, working long hours, immune system brought low by Covid - I developed Shingles on my face ha ha, Good lord. If you don’t know what that - Shingles is a viral infection that lies dormant in your body after you have childhood chickenpox. It normally never activates, but I was physically weakened to the point where it was able to flourish. A painful burning-hot stripe of blisters crawled from the top of my head, across my brow and into my left eye, damaging my vision in that eye permanently. For nearly two months my head pulsated with a toe-curling nerve pain, radiating from pole to pole all day across my face. Like someone pushing a sharp pencil into your forehead with the flat of their hand in several spots at once. I was unable to work, could hardly sleep or eat. but of course - I was still drawing.
Making Art in Hell
an excerpt from the last issue of CARRIER BAG
I can never fully thank my wife Alexis for taking care of me during that period. Couldn’t have been fun to be around lol! a large sweaty man in her apartment shouting “ow my face!” “aghh! fuck!” every 17 seconds. I didn’t leave the house for a few weeks, I think. There is no treatment for Shingles - you just have to learn about pain management, and you hope it’s brief. Mine wasn’t brief, but after a week or two passed and the pain was not subsiding, I started drawing again. During this period of CARRIER BAG - I look at it now and honestly I don’t know what the fuck is going on.
CARRIER BAG had started out cute, but much like all of my other projects pretty quickly I found it was my new favorite way of processing some of the unpleasant things that I was going through. It’s loaded with personal references, artistic references, some visual metaphors but at a certain point when I was laid up in bed in a lot of pain - I don’t have any idea what I was trying to communicate. The egg and the bird? The woman in the casket? what was I trying to say in regards to those paintings in that Louvre-esque hallway? I can only guess! as I was coming out on the other side of the Shingles attack, the story begins to slow down and decompress a great deal. The action becomes more moment to moment and the story begins to make a bit more sense (to me).
After weeks of working on the story and trying to get it to slowly bend towards a conclusion of some kind, I managed to land on a satisfactory ending. My face healed, my eye didn’t, my life had to continue so I went back to work. The Shingles, of course, had been ultimately a good thing - this is deep deep retrospect - but the event, however traumatic, severed my connection to alcohol and cigarettes. I have no choice but to view it all as a 50/50 trade off. I don’t know how I would have stopped otherwise, but I was smart enough to know when to knock it off with the self medicating. But as I stopped self-medicating, I realized that it was probably time to start regular-medicating.
It was around this time that I took a chance on letting professionals treat my mental health. I got a psychiatrist and a therapist and I started doing what they suggested I do. Having now been in regular therapy sessions for over a year, I don’t know how I lived without it. Horrible thoughts don’t just sit in my brain anymore - they’re dealt with and discarded. Do you have insurance? are you unhappy? heed my advice! Complicated situations are untangled, most of everything you’ve been so upset about is probably not your fault as it turns out. In those early weeks of intense therapy sessions, I started another instagram swipe-comic called KRUX. A little mountaineer character hanging on to rocks and ropes by their fingertips. This series went nowhere fast. KRUX was definitely me, living life on a rocky ledge over a long, dark fall.
My journey finding a proper medication for what had finally been diagnosed as clinical major depression, PTSD, anxiety etc. There are a whole galaxy of options. I was cycled on and off of a lot of different depression and anxiety medications over a short time. Slight improvements but I would continue to slide down. Not sure why I reacted so badly to most medications that I tried- the human brain is still a mystery to all who inspect it - either it was my anxiety and depressing spiraling out of control, or it was a bad chemical interaction, there was no straight answer. I started having panic attacks at work, so I had to stop working again. A pit in my stomach materialized - it felt like a ball of ice was revolving in my abdomen. I could not shake it. I was having the thoughts. You know the ones I mean. How long can you live with this feeling? it had only been a couple of weeks of true spiraling. I could not eat or sleep or leave my house. I started having nightmares that would shake me awake directly into a full, sweaty, panic attack. My girlfriend, my therapist, my psychiatrist all said it was time do the next thing. I was deeply terrified of the next thing.
Compass
This part is about luck - at the time I wouldn’t have characterized it that way, but I got extremely lucky. I had been in contact with a friend, we met up for bad pizza and he gave me some life changing advice. It’s not finding-five-bucks-on-the-ground type of luck, it’s the luck of talking to the right person at the right time, my friend Eliya.
Eliya had been dealing with some very difficult mental health problems himself and had found a course of treatment that was administered at a local Chicago mental health facility called Compass Mental Health Center not too far from my apartment. He described what they were experiencing there in some detail. It was a notion that I had not considered - a partial hospitalization. You go in in the morning for classes and treatment - and leave around noon. Not like a mental ward that some of you may mentally picture - but a daily visit to a classroom-like program with breaks to meet with individual therapists. I took this idea home to my girlfriend, and then to my therapist. My decline was progressing and I really couldn’t afford to let it go much further. I talked to these people about the program, checked with my insurance company, and decided that this option was better than dying. Perhaps the most powerful realization of my life? I was so down and out i’m surprised that i was able to be convinced to do this program - but it was a new lifeline and I grabbed it with both hands. I will forever be grateful that Eliya reached out to me for that dinner and explained what the program would be like. I hope that if there’s someone reading this needs this realization that it’s not a scary place. It’s a pretty warm place.
I called Compass and began the onboarding process. They confirmed that I could benefit from their treatment program - insurance approved and it would begin in a week. My employers were very understanding and I was allowed the time off to complete this process. The week leading up to it was the worst week of my life. I had my usual anxieties, but now it seemed like the fear that lived in me felt some of it’s own existential dread and really ratcheted up its protective measures. Nightmares, panic attacks, uncontrollable tears, anger, frustration, starvation, suicidal ideation. With support from my girlfriend I was able to finish out that week of work (which felt like 1000 years) and began my work at Compass.
The Program
Compass is in an office building on a quiet street near a bowling alley and a soccer field. The exterior is beige and unassuming - it was winter and cold as hell as I walked in. The whole operation there is just a lunch room, 4 or 5 small classrooms, and a row of offices. I learned the first day what it was going to be like: a combination of cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavioral therapy classwork, art therapy, group therapy, individual therapy sessions and weekly psychiatric consultations. My therapists all consulted with each other on my situation and approached my issues holistically. They were all kind and thoughtful, they respected everyone and seemed to be trained to do so. Friendly, mellow vibes that I really appreciated.
One of the best aspects of Compass was the group therapy sessions. I talked with other people going through similar situations. I heard their stories (or parts of them, details are not really allowed) and I told mine. I met all kinds of different people as well. Heard how common this struggle is. Felt less alone as we talked and had lunch together in the cafeteria. I surprised myself by speaking up and sharing - i was there to get through this and tried to be as present and involved as I possibly could. I listened to my therapist and psychiatrist and tried to follow their advice. I was honest about myself for what felt like the first time in my life. Some really bad things had happened to me and as I listened I learned that they weren’t my fault - I was victimized in some cases. I was a child in some cases, an adult in others. I learned to not listen to the terrible advice that I gave myself - advice that I would NEVER give to a friend. I wanted to be a friend to myself and I learned that I wanted to LIVE.
The program was 10 weeks. Week by week I worked and began to improve. My psychiatrist slowly and carefully cycled me off of the old medication that seemed to be exacerbating my symptoms, and after consulting a gene test for medical side effects, I was put on an antidepressant and an anti-anxiety med that within a few weeks began to kick in. By the middle of the program I was back to exercising and eating and sleeping. Smiling and laughing. Enjoying food. The ball of ice in my belly slowly melted. I wanted to get married to my girlfriend and start a life with her, but now I could feel myself feeling like I could live long enough to do so. Her help through this process made it all so much easier. I had goals, finally.
I completed their program, and a 12 week zoom meeting so-called “bridge program” afterwards. I started working again. I asked my girlfriend to marry me at Horner Park near our apartment - our favorite place to hang out. I couldn’t have done it without the help from Eliya and my therapist, but also I did it myself. The sense of accomplishment, the sense that I had changed my course using my faulty willpower was a pretty incredible feeling. I was sober, smiling, happy. It was an incredible time of my life.
Back To Work
After that fresh and shiny-new feeling, life continued. I got back to work at my job with new skills to handle the stress that goes along with working in the research sector. I won’t and can’t say that my troubles were over - they will unfortunately never be over. I need to keep track of how i’m feeling and use these skills to manage what issues that the medication cannot. I refer to the printed materials from these classes often when the occasional wave of depression hits me. I have new language that I can use to describe how i’m feeling. I have my memories of the stories I heard from others and I remember the look in their eyes. I want to keep this experience close to me forever.
I wish I could say that my artistic energy came back with after I had finished the program - It really hasn’t. I took most of 2023 off from drawing except for a few pieces, and a couple of paying jobs. My new goals are to have scheduled drawing times to chip away at my ideas. My next comic is about the future of christianity. I am an atheist, but I love the idea of Jesus, and I enjoy the history of christianity. I grew up with my mothers interest in Christian mysticism. Her friends were a motley crew of psychic nuns, christian communists, tarot card readers, seers, people who saw visions and swore that they spoke with the man himself - it’s an interest that runs deeply and I want to dig into with it. I don’t want to force this project out, I’ll just let it go where it wants, like usual. The only difference is now I value seeing friends, spending time with my wife, reading, sleeping, cooking, looking at art, more than I need to anxiously spin out piles and piles of drawings. I think that this new life will lead to better art in the future, but for now I like where I am.
Thanks for reading.
11/15/23 Blue Ridge Mountains in the early evening - Asheville, NC