October 7, 2021, marked ten years that I’ve been making content for Age of Animus. That’s over twenty percent of my life. On the day, I put up a special picture I drew to commemorate the occasion and said I’d write more on this milestone on Monday. Well that’s today and yes, I’m writing my first blog in over a year. In two years, I’ve written exactly two blog posts and one of them was for the eighth anniversay of the website (the ninth anniversay got no love).
Creating this content has been a part of my life for so long, I can’t really imagine NOT doing anything for the site. I still have story ideas for strips that date back years. I’m finding it a little more difficult to come up with new mash-up ideas but one theme will carry me through almost a quarter of the year.
The ten years haven’t always been pretty. I’m pretty sure I’ve said before that my brain isn’t a fun place to be sometimes. For a while, it wasn’t a fun place to be most of the time. I was really going through the motions and not even very well. I wasn’t doing any house cleaning or maintenance. It got to the point that I had about two inches or more of trash on the floor, I could barely get to the couch in the living room because of junk I had left everywhere. I’ve never watched Hoarders, but I figured I would have been in the running to be featured. I barely had functional plumbing, and I was heating myself with two small block heaters in the winter because the furnace didn’t work and I couldn’t be bothered to call a plumber or a repairman because there was no way I was going to let anyone into the house in the state it was in. Things had spiraled out of control and I had no motivation to get myself out of it. I had put up a wall between myself and most of my friends. I would go to bed at night and a part of me hoped that I wouldn’t wake up in the morning.
My birthday in particular was rough day of the year for me. It was symbolic of another year I had let myself spiral. For some people it’s New Year’s, for me it was my birthday. I didn’t want to see another year go by. I can’t even say why I was feeling that way. I had friends (for some reason they put up with me), I had a job with a good salary. I had the things I needed for a happy life. I just wasn’t happy.
Then almost two years ago exactly, I came home after dark and saw that a piece of the roof overhang had fallen off the house and some of the insulation had spilled out. The house was now literally falling apart and I had reached my lowest point. I could no longer live there. I needed to get out. I went in to work the next day and told my team leader that I had been unwell mentally for a long time and I needed to start getting my life back in order. I took two weeks off and started cleaning the trash out of the house. I found an apartment and started moving the stuff I was keeping from the house to the apartment. All this time, I was staying at my mom’s. The plan was I would finish the move in the spring. And then Covid happened. I spent the rest of year in a holding pattern. Then in February of this year, my neighbour offered to buy the house. That was the last push I needed to complete the move.
So what does all this have to do with Age of Animus? Well, working on this website was one of the few things that I clung to. Creating content made me feel good about myself even as the rest of my life was falling apart. I would come up with a good punchline and it was proof that I could still laugh. I drew a mash-up that I thought was good and it was proof that I could produce something nice.
I’m doing better now. There are still times when it’s not fun to be in my brain, but they’re not as intense. Seven months into living full-time in my apartment and it’s not a dump. I actually had my family over for a Thanksgiving lunch today. I started exercising and eating healthier at the start of the summer and I’m down thirty pounds. I didn’t even cringe about being wished a happy birthday this year.
And I’m still creating new content. I opened up the new store with TeePublic to put my work out there. Ten years and Age of Animus and I are still here. Here’s to ten more!