From my Bleed-Throughs diary comics project, that lasted February through April 2014. I drew this in the waiting room of my therapist’s office.

From my Bleed-Throughs diary comics project, that lasted February through April 2014. I drew this in the waiting room of my therapist’s office.

David Bayles and Ted Orland’s book Art & Fear emphasizes how it’s more important to keep working, and keep finishing projects, than to worry about whether anything you make is “good.” Anne Lamott said in Bird by Bird, her book about writing, that finishing something is like putting an octopus to bed: You’ve been fighting with it for awhile, and you got most of its legs under the covers, and two or three keep swinging around, but who cares because you’re both tired and you both have to go the hell to sleep: You’re done. Lynda Barry writes at the end of “Two Questions”: “To all the kids who quit drawing…come back!”

With the knowledge that I could play rudimentary guitar and how long I had been afraid to try, I decided to acknowledge fear more often. It had been the unnamed fear that grew into solid mass, and kept me weighted down to one place. Once I spoke a fear, it lost its power over me. I began to be able to move through it. ♦