Merrily We Blog Along

Every once in a while, a friend of mine will reference something to me that’s funny or strangely worded.

“Haha, that’s great! Is that from something?” I’d ask. 

“Yeah, it’s from your comic strip, heh. You don’t remember that?” 

And I peer back into my mind and feel really alienated and sort of betrayed by the feeling... that I honestly can’t picture the comic or the image. I don’t remember it in the slightest. 

Actually, come to think of it, I have this feeling all the time. When I am feeling especially self-indulgent, I’ll reread some past comics of mine and will sometimes be surprised by the punchlines. This isn’t a sixty year old man looking back on his twenties. I am twenty-seven and having mental gaps from things I wrote five years ago. And these are the things I have kept; there are many drawings and comics I vaguely remember but couldn’t prove existed. In fact, my high school art teacher would actually use me as an example of a good artist in that I drew compulsively and threw away more art than I kept. And it isn’t like the world lost the Library of Alexandria when I destroyed those things, but, to me, I think I have been systematically destroying myself in this action of “spring cleaning.” It’s like I was trying to destroy evidence that could link me to a crime. And maybe I thought I was guilty of something -- of not being virtuoso, splendid, or sublime.  

Over the years, I have destroyed a lot of myself. From 2012 up to a few months ago, I was drinking every night and was waking up every morning hungover. I was checking social media with blurry eyes. I, for example, had somehow glossed over the fact that a close friend had gotten cancer, had wrestled with treatment, had gotten worse, and finally died. And I kept myself away from that funeral and a wedding of two mutual friends of the deceased. And that guilt ate me up like Baptists eating egg rolls at a Chinese buffet one hour after service. I got worse. I was isolating. I had gotten up to about 300 pounds because my only pleasures were beer and fast food. When I was transitioning from working a job at a sandwich shop in Peoria to working as an art director for a startup in Saint Louis, I didn’t handle myself with any dexterity whatsoever. I tried to put new wine in old wineskins. I tried to fake it ’til I made it. I tried to not be that person who was slowly self-destructing. I failed.

In June of this year, I was at 310 pounds and was not sleeping. Mind you, I don’t sleep very much at all, but this time it was because I couldn’t breathe. I felt like something was weighing down on my chest and throat. I couldn’t let myself continue this way; as hard as it was to face, I hated myself and was trying to punish my body, my mind, and my spirit. 

Being hungover all the time and always tired and depressed, my brain was dull and immobile. It was like this:

For years, I had felt like I wasn’t myself. I felt like I had ingenuity and style, but it rusted inside of me. Then, close to the 4th of July, I started drastically changing the physical things in my life. I stopped drinking. I started exercising daily and began a diet. Since then, I have lost over fifty pounds. I hope to lose seventy more, and this blog will also be a place to track that progress. I started taking vitamins and even though I still can’t sleep very well at all, I at least feel better suited to face my day physically. My body is not getting in the way of my feeling like myself. My thoughts are far more lucid, and I don’t have to endure everyday as just another mile in the slow march toward death. That’s bleak. It should sound bleak. That’s where I was, and that’s what I meant by feeling self-destructive. 

I don’t fully know why I imposed these “dark ages” on myself. I don’t claim to know how I function. But this blog is addressing the next thing that needs to change for me -- production. I need to start creating comics habitually. I will not feel whole until I put to work all these uninvited forces that have visiting me for the past ten years. I will introduce them all to you here on this blog. I will explain what is inside of me. 

And this also means I need discipline. I will vow to update this blog daily (even if it is just a small little blip) because I need to make honest strides towards my dreams or I’m afraid I will dip into a creative coma again. The most horrible thing I can imagine is a parent outliving their children, and though that is miles away more crippling than losing out on your art, in many ways, not answering your calling to the point where it stops calling is ... heart-shattering. 

So this is the altar-call. My commitment is to do the following with my foreseeable future:

1. I will conquer my fear of reading (this, in itself, deserves its own blog post) and will read 100 books in 2016. This may seem laughable to you if you’re a kindle-kinetic wunderkind, but I am by no means an avid reader. This is daunting to me, but I need to set my bar high. 
2. I will make strides to complete the first stage of six comic projects which will be explained in the next post on this blog. 
3. I will journal for myself every morning and blog every evening. 
4. I will continue to lose weight or at least get to a healthier place for my height and build. 
5. I will stop watching Netflix, Youtube, etc, for the rest of the year because, cheese and rice, I am dependent on that, and it’s robbing my concentration. This is pretty monastic, but I know myself -- I crave distraction from the negative thoughts. I have to address those negative thoughts and solve them. Or silence them actively. Or at the very least, understand them and know from whence they arrive.
6. I will be more responsible with money.
7. I will be more responsible with my job, my commissions, and all that jazz. 
8. I will have maybe 10 people that I’ll ask to keep me accountable for these things which I’m listing. I’ll try to live up to my own expectations of myself, but I think I’ll need encouragement.
9. I will not isolate for days on end. That will ultimately be my undoing if I let it go like that.
10. And this one is hard -- I’ll be mindful when I’m happy, sad, or angry. Because it’s been a blur for too long.

So... the long and the short of it is this. I’m done destroying the bits and pieces of myself that I don’t like, and now I’m gonna work towards taking pride in who I am. And for me and my personality, that requires productivity and art. 

I am gonna have everything I ever wanted. I am gonna dance in golden dance halls.

I am a leopard, dammit! Nothing’s gonna stop me now! 

Oh! and welcome to the blog, LOL! 

Sincerely,

Billy Fore