Frozen like a microwave burrito.

Gripping my Apple pen, I begin to draw rough panel sketches of yesterday for the newest episode of The Perpetual Suck.

Art is the only thing I’ve ever been good at, until I guess I sort of stopped being good at it. This—creating webcomics—started as a way to process what happened with Jack. I’d always done my own passion projects alongside my animation classes, drawing fanart of my favorite ships and posting it to my anonymous art Instagram. I built a small but loyal fan following who showed up in the comments whenever I posted original character art. I’d toyed with the idea of a webcomic or a graphic novel, but it was too time-consuming when I was in school, and focusing on it fully was too much of a risk.

A master’s in animation would allow me the opportunity to do art with a steady paycheck. Webcomics would not.

But then Jack happened. She stomped into my life in thick-soled work boots and a Carhartt jacket and she shook up all my carefully crafted plans and ideas about what my life should be, and then she left me alone to figure it all out in her wake.

So I drew our story, or something that vaguely resembled it. Instead of posting it to Instagram, I uploaded the comic to Drawn2, the online community for web-published comics. Within a week, the first episode had twenty thousand reads. My small fan base exploded into a hungry mass of readers who wanted to know what would happen between the two girls at the center of Snow Day.

And then fans did find out what happened, and they were disappointed.

And then I lost my job.

And then I started a new series loosely based on my life in Portland, and I called it The Perpetual Suck. Some readers followed me to that story. Most didn’t. It doesn’t really matter to me either way. I don’t post my webcomics for the likes or the followers or the praise. I post it because even if I’m not good enough to do art professionally, I don’t quite know how to stop processing the world this way. Drawn2 is the one place my art doesn’t have to be perfect, because no one knows it’s mine. It’s the one place my work is allowed to be a draft instead of a finished product.