As you know, the long-running plot of my life centres around my battles across the ages with my ancient foe, Time Blindness. The familial curse I carry causes me to become easily lost in what I’m doing for months on end without fully realizing just how much time has passed, much to the detriment of my personal and professional relationships.

Once again, in our latest episode, this battle continues…

At the time I last checked in with this blog back in October of 2025, I was in the middle of rehearsing for Faye’s Room, a theatre production I have alluded to in previous posts but didn’t really talk much about in detail. Theatre work is an innately social art form that involves very intense and sincere emotional investment and connection. While I’m not certain I fully believe in the introvert/extrovert binary, I do know that I am the type of person who usually needs to recharge after social interaction. So the (relatively mild by industry standards) rehearsal schedule of one month of six hours a day, five days a week, followed by a show schedule of three weeks of shows every night except Monday, but two shows on Saturdays, left me so completely drained both during and after that I found that I could barely even write messages to people. So I spent the end of 2025 focusing on building myself back up and prioritizing using my limited energy on my teaching duties and local community initiatives.

Nonetheless, working on Faye’s Room was an incredible experience that I will never forget. It was easily the most elaborate stage production I have ever worked on, with the most opportunities for me to stretch my acting muscles. I got to play two very disparate characters – Mina, the fun ADHD trans mom who tries to help the main character, as well as The Professor, the evil inner critic trauma ghost who torments her with of all of her perceived failures and shortcomings (“Still hiding away from the world, I see!”) There was a motorized rotating door that was used to signal the shift from normal reality into the extra-dimensional mind space of the main character, and we performers had to coordinate with hundreds of different sound and lighting cues.

This was a show that I had been involved with since its inception when I read for these two characters as part of the LEAP play-writing festival (whose poster I also have designed for the past four years), and one of the great challenges I faced was not getting too attached to ideas about the characters as the show evolved across different versions of the script and different casts. When you’re reading a script for a table-read or a staged reading in front of an audience, all you really have to create your performance is your voice – something that worked very well for me as someone with a background in voice over. But once the show comes to a full stage production, and movement and physical performance comes into play, the real crux of acting comes not from the lines themselves, but from what you are doing in between the lines. Your cast mates will have impulses and motivations that they will be acting out as they perform their lines, and in order to keep the scene and characters alive, you must respond to those actions and motivations, rather than just acting according to your own internal script of how your lines should be delivered. You need to respond to whats going on around you, physically, verbally, and emotionally. Where you are looking, your body language, little movements indicating that you are (or are not) listening to the dialogue being spoken by others, little stammers of trying to break into the conversation before your line is delivered – all of these sorts of things are what really sells a scene and keeps you truly present in the moment. And your fellow actors? They’re going to be doing things a little bit differently every time. So you can’t get too locked down. Every show, every scene, every line is a little bit different every time. If you get too stuck in your head about how a line is delivered, it’s not always going to mesh if it’s being said in response to another character’s line and that actor has decided to take their delivery in a different direction. This is really why we call it Live Theatre – because it’s alive, and so you have to be alive in your performance, too.

This is what I love theatre for. It keeps you on your toes and teaches you to perform under pressure. You need to connect and coordinate with your cast mates and you have just one chance to get it all right in front of a whole bunch of people. It’s the next best thing to fighting! I consider theatre a vital part of my martial arts training and I know my time on stage has made me a better teacher and fighter, one who is able to command a situation and act without fear under pressure.

Throughout all this, I kept up my training and teaching, achieving some new heights to my fitness, improving my grappling skills under the tutelage of coach Sony at Praxis Grappling, and being graded by Kudo Japan alongside my fellow Kumakai instructors to evaluate what belt we should be placed at within the Kudo International organization – no word back yet of how we did.

Buff Aunt Bria’s Queer & Trans Karate Club is still going strong after a season of training, with some truly excellent regular members showing up each week to improve their skills. Classes are still ongoing on Monday nights at 6:30 PM at 826 Pacific St in Vancouver. We are operating on a rotating schedule of class topics, with the first week focusing on strikes, the next week focusing on kicks, and the third focusing on the clinch and grappling (rinse and repeat). By the time this comes out, our next class will be Striking 😉 In addition to regular training, for the past few weeks we have been having some highly successful class field trips to The Cellar boxing gym – a radical, volunteer-run space with LGBTQ boxing classes and BIPOC nights, that I highly recommend anyone in Vancouver looking for a gym go and check out. I plan to bring whichever students from my Monday class who wish to come with coach Sony and myself to train over there each week, and I hope to build a long-lasting relationship between all three of our clubs.

Lately, after a long dry period of artistic block, I have been very focused on making art. I once again have coach Sony to thank for inspiration, as this all started with making up a new piece of art to thank him for all of the great training he’s given me. I really feel like all of the painting I have done this year has really leveled up my art and I am excited to apply these new skills to some upcoming projects.

I have decided that 2026 absolutely has to be the year I return to Starfist Gemini. My ancient foe, Time Blindness, has delayed me for over six years now, and after all of the growth and preparation I have undergone within that time, I don’t believe that anymore perfectionistic ADHD procrastination is going to improve anything. Everything I have done in that time was necessary – from painting, to acting, to training in martial arts – all of it was necessary preparation to be able to execute this comic that is so deeply a part of me. But now there is nothing to it, but to do it!

So, much like how I think the pressure put on us by performing in front of an audience is useful for developing the capacity to act under pressure, I want this blog post to be an official, public announcement to keep me accountable and not succumb to my usual distracted Time Blindness. There needs to be consequences to me not acting on this – serious consequences that I actually care about and can’t just hand-waive away with my usual persistent demand for autonomy refrain of “Pfft! You’re not the boss of me!”

Therefor, I have resolved that if I do not start releasing new pages of Starfist Gemini by my birthday in June of 2026, I, Sabrina Symington, must quit making comics forever.

There is only one comic I really, truly want to make, and if I can’t even bring myself to make it, then what am I even doing here?

So there you go, I will now need to be accountable to you, dear reader. Everybody in the theatre is watching, and I only have one shot to get it right. It’s so easy for me to get distracted and forget about things, but I’m not likely to forget about this if my entire career is on the line! I’ll be posting more updates from the process of moving on this project, as well as on a few other projects I’ll be working on at the same time.

AND ONE MORE THING!

My wife has been preparing these past few months for her theatrical workshop and fundRAIDer for Gaza, The History of Anti-Fascism. This will be an expanded reprisal of her incredibly popular workshop that she presented at CampOut! 2025. The sheer amount of research she has undertaken in preparation for this is breathtaking, and since I missed the first iteration as my karate workshop was on at the same time, I’m very excited to see what she has in store. If you happen to be in Vancouver and are free on January 25th, I highly recommend you come to the Beaumont at 316 West 5th ave. at 3:00 PM. Admission is entirely by donation to any of a selection of charities in Gaza.

The art and community initiatives that I create are funded in no small part by YOU, dear reader!

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Thank you to everybody who has made what I do possible!