So when I was nine or ten years old, I started reading the comics in the newspaper, and then started creating my own. And it was the same time in my life where I was starting to go through puberty and starting to, you know, develop like, some of my mental health issues. I became a really anxious kid, and one of the ways that I coped with that was to write in my diary. And I remember trying to sort of establish the writing voice in my diary, similar to what Ann M. Martin did in the Babysitters Club, where she would describe all of her friends, and she would talk about the sort of interplay between them, and how long that they had all known each other.
And so I tried to write my diary like that. Like I really was a writer who was describing everything. And that quickly fell by the wayside when I started illustrating my diary entries. And so I have almost a perfect record of my life illustrated between sixth grade and the end of my college years. I would go home every day after school, after work, after anything, and I would need to write it down, and I would need to draw pictures and illustrate it.
And a lot of times there were word balloons coming out of the characters mouths, and you know. So but I never considered myself a writer because I was like, “Well, nobody wants to read about someone’s real life. That’s not writing. That’s not storytelling.” I didn’t know. I thought, “I don’t have a very big imagination so there’s no way I will ever be a writer.” And I thought at the time, “Maybe if somebody else would write comics for me, I’ll be able to do this for a living.” But as you know, there also just kind of weren’t graphic novels back then.
It was not a format that was available to me, so I just kept sort of doing what I was doing, and eventually I figured out how to make it work as my job.
It was a great way to manage my anxiety and to process everything that had happened to me during the day. And it was almost like I couldn’t move on until I had written it down. An then I was able to close that page, and say, “Okay. That’s done. That’s what happened.” And it was also useful to refer back to couple of years later. I had a habit of re-reading my diaries, and oftentimes I would go back and go, “Oh, that’s what I was dealing with right now.”
I just didn’t realize it at the time. Or, “Oh, I didn’t know that this was something that was gonna change, or that I felt like I was stuck in that friend group forever, or that I was always gonna have this terrible teacher,” or whatever. But I don’t know. I gave myself the benefit of like, a rear view pretty early on in my life. And so I think that was something I was practicing again to aid me in my career in the future. And I still have those diaries. I still have access to them. They will never see the light of day, but they’re there for me, and I think that’s really valuable.
