This week’s comic is my first in… a while.

I’ve made no secret in these blog posts how I’ve felt ‘stuck’ when it came to making comics. Whether it’s feeling trapped by the exhausting pressures of social media, discouraged by the state of the world and the evident failure of beliefs I once held about the power of art to effect social change, or simply just dissatisfaction in my line art vs my landscape paintings, comics just haven’t been forthcoming for me, even as I have resurrected this blog and done my best to post regular updates.

This past May even marked the 10th anniversary of Life of Bria, and I was so busy with sumo wrestling training that I didn’t even mark the occasion!

Just as I remember being that care-free girl after I first came out, I remember when I first started making these comics, and how excited I was to go into my art studio every day and just… draw. I felt so lucky that not only did I get to be myself, but I also got to do what I wanted to do. I am sad to say that I haven’t always kept that energy up over the last 10 years.

In addition to my falling out with comics, I’ve felt generally disillusioned and burnt out for a long time. I feel like a bitter, jaded, middle-aged woman in a world that is leaving me behind (not an inaccurate description of reality imo). But the real event and resulting feelings that this comic came out of had me wondering about where exactly that carefree girl I once was thought she would be when she was my age. I know many aspirations she had didn’t come true – both for better and for worse. I am definitely living a very different life than what she imagined, and that’s fine; we shouldn’t feel imprisoned by our past selves. But one thing I know she didn’t want was for me to be sad. To be bitter, hateful, mistrustful of others, and to not believe in herself. Those are all things that I have felt far more of than I think she wanted for me.

That girl 10 years ago did what she did because she wanted to be happy. And she was.

She was also very sad at times.

The first years of transition are very difficult, and she went through them mostly alone. During periods of my life where I remember myself being my happiest, I know for certain I was often quite depressed, as well. Dysphoria was a constant, as well as dissatisfaction with my art and career, and sadness about so much of my past being trapped in the closet. I carried on through those difficult times, though, because I had hope for the future. I hoped one day I might like myself and my body, just as I hoped one day we might live in a kinder, more sane world.

But, just I wrote about recently, I’m still me. And this world is still the same cruel world it’s always been. In fact, just as I keep getting older, the world just seems to keep getting more cruel.

But 10 years ago, when that scared, but hopeful, girl first came out, she was prepared to lose everything. She was prepared for everyone she knew to leave her, to never have any opportunities again, and to never “pass” as a woman in eyes of the people around her. While the woman I am today doesn’t have the benefit of youth and the wide-open hope and potential that it holds, I can say that none of those terrible things came to pass, and that in many ways I am living a far better life than she was fully prepared to lead.

The time in my life when I first came out felt like the “end” of something rather than the beginning. I had been through so many trials and adventures leading up to coming out, and my admitting my gender and taking steps to live life as who I wanted to be felt like a culmination of my entire life’s struggles up to that point. In a grand, heroic narrative, that time was the conclusion of the story, with the happy life that resulted being the “happily ever after”.

But, as I also wrote about earlier this year, there are no happily ever afters. Life just keeps going. And while we can’t expect to be happy all the time, happiness is something you have to keep working at. You can’t just reach what you believe to be a conclusion and then rest on your laurels, you have to keep watering that plant, giving it sunshine, pulling the weeds, etc.

Most of all, you have to allow yourself happiness – your thoughts shape your experience of life, and it is far too easy to fall into a habit of shooting happiness down before it can form. Perhaps we might call that “depression”, but as I’ve learned from returning to daily martial arts training, “you are what you do” and a little bit of consistent effort adds up over time. So, for me, one of the first steps of maintaining the hope and joy of my past self is to nix happiness terminating ruminations on things that I either cannot change or cannot know for certain. Starting from a belief in at least the possibility of happiness is essential, and having a point in your past to look to where you know that happiness was possible for you is quite useful for this.

I really do want to come back to making regular comics. I want to be able to feel like my art and my voice matters. Most of all I want to fulfill my younger ambitions of writing more graphic novels. I’m still not exactly sure what that will look like, but I do know that it can’t happen if I don’t believe in myself, or think I’m capable or worthy of happiness. Nihilism is a useless belief, because if it ends up being true, then the outcome is no different than had you not believed in it. So you might as well not believe in Nihilism and act as though your choices do matter, just in case.

If all those struggles I went through really did culminate in me coming out and living some kind of happily ever after, then in order for all those struggles to matter, I need to keep going. I need to keep that hope alive. Of course, I believe transition was neither an ending or a beginning, but simply a continuation, and in order to honor ourselves – past, present, and future – we simply have to carry on.

Here’s to 10 more years ❤

Please help me not be homeless!

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Thank you!