Excerpt from my three-month diary comics project, Bleed-Throughs. February 18, 2014, drawn on the Chinatown bus while going over the Walt Whitman Bridge, on the way from Philadelphia to New York.

Excerpt from my three-month diary comics project, Bleed-Throughs. February 18, 2014, drawn on the Chinatown bus while going over the Walt Whitman Bridge, on the way from Philadelphia to New York.

2014.

In 2014, by then in that punk house that I still live in, I became obsessed with Drake and the poet Walt Whitman.

I got into Morrissey and the Smiths in high school. Together, Drake, Whitman, and Moz formed a trifecta of creative reactions to hurt, and ways of building oneself in opposition to marginalization: Walt and Morrissey against queerphobia, and Drake against anti-black racism.

2014 threw me into projects. I made piles of comics, and music with my bands See-Through Girls and Wolf Thistle. I organized a comics tour, and developed more and more confidence in my work. As far as I figured, my name was practically in Elvis lights.

Jane Smiley points out in her book Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel that what she calls the “literary persona” (that is, the public persona) always has things figured out more than the person who crafts that persona. The “Annie Mok” onstage and on Twitter gets fiery, but for the Annie Mok who burrows in her blankets, goes to therapy, drinks too much coffee, and spends too much money on CDs—that fire can threaten to burn me out.

I need both people, but I believed that I was the person onstage. My inventiveness, confidence, people sending me nice notes on ask.fm—I learned that these things can’t fly me across the rivers of grief that I just have to swim through.

On February 18, 2014, I attended my friend merritt kopas’s workshop Queering Play at NYU Polytechnic. I drew a comic about it, “Shadow Manifesto, Part 1.”