IS IT A MOVIE OR IS IT THE REAL
A comic about the thoughts in my head.
The comic
----------------------------------------------------------------------
IMG It's all in your head
About the comic
----------------------------------------------------------------------
I have a fairly anxious mind, which means I spend a lot of brain
cycles simulating social interactions. One such cycle that occurs
again and again are conversations involving characterizations of
people in my life. My brain will form a character of a person that is
a slight skew of their actual self. That character will talk to other
characters, or it will talk to me. In either case, it produces
thoughts that are intrusive, incorrect, and uncomfortable. I know to
disregard these thoughts because over time I've been able to identify
them deattached from reality. Still, I'll sometimes get carried away
by the thoughts and experience feelings associated with the thoughts,
only to later realize that they are not real. The best strategy I've
developed for coping with these experiences is to visualize the
thoughts as puppets whose control panel is in my hand.
The comic I drew captures this experience. The orange and green
characters are saying uncomfortable things about a blue guy. In the
last panel, it's revealed that this blue guy was puppeteering these
characters all along. The orange and green characters weren't really
saying mean things. The blue guy was moving them to make it look that
way.
The title of this comic is "Is it a movie or is it the real". The
title is a play on words, where "real" can be substituted or mishead
for "reel". This is to suggest the importance of understanding the
source (or container) of an experience. It's like this: when I'm
watching a movie the events happening on screen feel reel, but of
course, they're not real. The movie is contained on a reel of film (or
another a container like a MP4 file or streaming service). Looking at
the reel, it's clear where the movie is coming from: not reality, but
some artifact, some /thing/. The reel is the thing that
compartmentalizes the movie aside from real life. If the reel wasn't
there, it might be difficult to discern one from the other. It might
be possible to get carried away by the movie without realizing it's
it's apart from reality, merely a representation and not the actual
thing. Identifying the container of a thought (e.g.: the container of
anxiety, or depression, or fear) helps me sort through thoughts. I'm
better able to label them thusly as artifacts of a feeling or
mood. They're not real, they're merely reels...