I JUST WANT TO DRAW GAY SEX FUCK

I have a job now. Great.

It doesn't pay me a living wage. Awesome.

More than that, I've realized that throwing hours of my life away for barely enough funbucks to justify it has not fundamentally changed my creative practices because I'm too goddamn scared to do anything in the first place.

Writing this comes from realizing I'm at a standstill in all my projects, yet again, because I'm terrified of people judging me.

I've been regularly entertaining the idea of disappearing my entire online identity and presence so I can start over.
I've contemplated running away from everybody I know in-person and never speaking to them again.

Obviously, I don't like living like this. I don't think most people could.

I don't have faith in psychiatry to help me here. I maybe never will.

So, what method do I have for keeping myself sane and untangling this mess? The same thing that is why I'm so worried and frustrated and closed-off - my weird sexual fantasies.

I'm not sure what to say about my relationship to my weird sexual fantasies. I have them. They're based in my wants, some needs, and are fantastical in nature. They reflect some of my subconscious as much as they do my conscience. It's basic shit.

And by all accounts, that should be enough for me to feel safe about letting other people I know brush up against my mindscape. It's nothing special to a fair amount of people - but it's also still got that word "weird" in the front of it.

Even so, I'm fairly certain that a lot of people would be able to hear about them and shrug the stranger elements off without a second thought. Others might just be amazed by the variance of the human condition.

Great. But that still makes me feel like I'm a freakshow!

The obvious solution is to never let this stuff out from under the wraps - but that'd require I manage to never, ever let out a single hint of what I'm into. Thus far, this has mainly been possible by disappearing from everyone who gets to run up too close to it.

And frankly, that's only as far as I know. I think more people are able to guess what I try to keep under wraps than I'd ever hoped.

So then there's always the fear that I'm showing too much, too soon, or too prominently. And there's always that worry that I'm too obvious and everyone's being polite but secretly scorn me for it. There's always the nightmare that it'll happen the other way around, even. That the moment I share it, someone kindly deposits it on the doorsteps of people around me who don't need to see it.

I don't want people to feel like they have to listen. I don't want to bother people. I don't want to scare people. I really, most of all, don't want to force anything on anyone.

And still, I'm sick of terrifying myself with possibility after possibility. After worrying myself so badly to the point I'm creatively stunted and miserable, maybe I just have to trust that people have the decency to look away if they don't like it.

Fear making me reluctant to talk is not a problem caused by the people around me. Running from friends because I'm convinced they'll stir up shit about me is obviously not fair to them. I can't assume everyone is part of the nebulous populace where these horror stories happen regularly.

Even if I'm still scared to hit the moment where I have to eat these words, maybe it's still better to get thrown out on the curb than keep eating myself alive.

All of this to say that I'm in the process of peeling off some bandages and seeing what happens next. While this post was originally written when I first started to promise myself these changes, my life's been such a mess that nothing really came out of it. Just shows that I'm still hilariously bad at commitment.

But I really have to embrace being gawked at sometimes.

I'm drawing more again even though I'm scared. I'm slowly confiding in friends again. Somedays, I feel present again. Maybe, in the future, I'll just laugh whenever shit like this gets brought up to me.

It's already been a really, truly embarrassing process. Even posting this is so embarrassing that I couldn't manage it at first. But someday, I won't be the only thing holding myself back.