All Eyes on Me

Sigh. Intercon time again, and because I'm still so consistently slammed, I'm not even running anything this year. Made that choice in an effort to feel less burnt, but now I'm sad I'm not doing much at this event that I've always enjoyed. It's been harder and harder to participate in Intercon has time has gone on, and it's not showing any sign of changing. 😔

Kevin Conroy passed.

Batman. My Batman. The Batman. One of the single most important, influential performances of my life.

We all have the pieces of art that shaped us, became part of our DNA. Batman: The Animated Series is one of those for me, in my bones in a way that shapes the way I move through the world. It shows up in my own art in a thousand small ways. There would certainly, certainly be no Mrs. Hawking without it. Mrs. Hawking came out of his version of the bat.

I’ve kind of given up on Batman films and television anymore. Even though he’s probably my all time favorite superhero, I just kept running up again and again against the fact that, even if they’re interesting or good… they aren’t him. They’re always kind of unsatisfying because he was Batman. Nobody was ever better, or more right. Every time, especially if it was an animated vocal role, I was like, “Why don’t they just get him?” So I quit even giving them a chance, because I knew they would never measure up.

Kevin Conroy knew how to differentiate the voices in a way that was full of meaning. He knew that he was his truest self when he wore the mask, and that Bruce Wayne was a charming façade. He had the wit to make Bruce seem a silly, inconsequential man so that people would dismiss him and leave him to his work. He knew when to let Batman break down due to his essential tragedy, and when to take a light touch— because as coping mechanisms go, being Batman is pretty cool. He made Batman.

While there are many famous actors I would enjoy meeting, for various reasons, I always said there were only two I would LOSE MY SHIT in front of because of the degree to which I admired their work. One is David Hyde Pierce, whose Niles Crane is another one of those in-my-bones characters. The other is— now was —Kevin Conroy. Because he was Batman, my Batman, the real and only Batman. The one who shaped the rest of my artistic life.

Mrs. Hawking stands on the rooftops above the city because he did first. She knows the mask is her realer self, because he showed what that looked like. Everything she knows, she learned watching him. He was vengeance. He was the night.

Batman has passed. There’s no more Batman.

Having some feelings. It’s taken a few hours to really settle in. But I couldn’t not, given... well.

I don’t really have words for what he gave me. I know in real life he wasn’t a great person. But he made something that changed me. Built out of nothing a lot of who I came to be. If you know me, it’s great deal of the person that you know.

It’s a little silly. But it’s a bit too hard to separate out. Seeing as this is something even twenty-five years later I’ve never quite managed to put down.

I don’t really know how to talk about it.

Had a couple disappointments recently that have knocked me down a bit. The big one was being forced to cancel Mrs. Hawking's spring shows at the Watch City Steampunk Festival. It was the right decision, for the sake of keeping people safe by not gathering during the spread of COVID-19, but I'm pretty bummed. I work hard to make it so that Mrs. Hawking sticks in people's minds, but a lot of the times it feels like it doesn't really stick with anyone when it's not right in front of them. I worry about what progress I've made being lost if we go that long without having a show. I know it's a small thing in the grand scheme of things, when so many people are suffering way worse, but this project means a lot to me, so I'm still sad. We're going to do something else in the interim, but I haven't settled on what it will be yet.

We also got word that our pitch did not win the contest we entered. It's not the end of the world; the prize was to get a year free of a program that gave you access to film industry professionals, with the possibility of getting signed to representation. It was cool to get as far as we did, but it would have been nice to get in, as it’s pretty expensive normally. It was just a disappointing thing to hear to right on the heels of the show getting cancelled.

I’ve been trying to sort of jumpstart myself. I was doing pretty well in quarantine until this. So I’ve been trying some stuff to jolt myself out of being down— specifically, trying some projects that are really outside my typical style.

More on that soon.

As I mentioned near the beginning of the month, I am not doing well now in terms of mental health. Haven’t been for some time now. I am more or less keeping it together, taking care of my commitments and responsibilities about as well as I ever do, but I’m pretty ragged mentally and emotionally and it’s been hard to feel this lousy all the time.

My willpower is so shot right now. It makes it hard to take a lot of steps to take care of myself, to build habits that will make me healthier. I am basically a sugar vacuum, completely unable to curb my intake of my two worst eating habits, Coke and chai lattes. I’ve been trying to stick to a social media diet, as all the sad things in the news make my anxiety skyrocket, but I have no discipline to keep myself off of it. I think both of these things are really hurting me in my efforts to manage my current mental state. I feel like a small child that needs a nanny, to pack her a healthy lunch and pry the smartphone out of her hands.

I have managed a few positive things. I’m lucky that I can basically always make myself keep exercising, so at least that hasn’t fallen by the wayside. I’ve even instituted a few new good things. Since Inktober 2019, I’ve been drawing almost every day. Lately I’ve been doing portraits of people’s faces, usually somebody in a television show I’m currently watching. I’m not very good, but I am getting noticeably better even over the course of just two months, which pleases me.

And I’ve been managing to make myself read a little from a book most days. My focus for reading anything long form has been HORRENDOUS in the last decade, after being a voracious reader as a child, which is a source of extreme frustration and shame to me. I keep trying to get back in the habit and failing at it; I think I’ve managed maybe one or two books a year in the last ten. But I saw an article recently that recommended setting a ridiculously low bar for anything you wanted to make yourself do that didn’t come easily— like setting a timer for as little as ten minutes a day. This has helped me get into Daughter of Empire, Pamela Mountbatten Hicks’s memoir, slowly but surely, as sometimes I find I can continue past the ten minutes. I really hope I can keep this up. I’d rather read books slow as molasses than continue not reading them at all.

And I’ve been buying these little precut packets of carrots, celery, and snow peas from the grocery store. They’re cheap and I can throw them into my bag in the mornings. Even though I can’t seem to curtail my sugar habit, I am at least upping my vegetable intake. I tend to consume my sugar drinks on top of a basically healthy diet, but this counteracts when I don’t have time to cook for myself, as is often the case lately.

Overall I’m still pretty down, low in emotional fortitude and feeling weirdly raw. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how while I have a lot of basically good structure in my life, I have been unable to make any meaningful change to it in a very long time, and it makes me frustrated and sad. But it would mean a lot to me if I can get these things to stick. Even if they don’t fix how I’m feeling, it would be nice to feel like I was making some kind of forward progress— that change for the better was somehow possible.

Chris Evans did a new picture editorial recently. It really struck me, and not just for the expected reasons. It drove home how... grown up he's been looking lately. Even in a way the one for Italian Vogue didn't manage.





I think I know what he's doing. I bet it's similar to what Brad Pitt did in the mid-2000's, when he was trying to get people to see him as more than a pretty boy and consider him for different, more mature sorts of roles. Evans has not been in a ton of very good movies, and most of them have in some way played off of his beautiful boy-next-door image. He's leaving his Captain America role. I've heard he wants to transition to directing. You get so nailed into "types" and "niches" in Hollywood, I think he's trying to get people to see him as a more mature and serious artist, to give him a chance to start a new stage of his career.

It makes me wistful, in a weird way. It's a noticeable shift. I mean, he used to do stuff like this:





This is hardly a bad change. He still looks phenomenal, and like a Grown Man in a way he didn't always before. He's still built like a beast— look at his arms in the first image, the shape of his trunk in that second. But those are expensive, mature man's clothes, and it looks like that beard is here to stay, and I technically prefer him clean-shaven. I joked that he's probably not going to be taking his shirt off as much anymore, now that he's a Grown-Up Serious Artist. I'm going to miss him as Captain America, which has been important to me in large and small ways.

And he's nearing forty. He's too old to ever play Aidan, even if I ever do manage to get that made. Honestly, he was probably too old even when I first wrote it. But this makes it seem final in a way it never did before. And that makes me sad.

It's stupid. All things must change, and life goes ever on. But even dumb dreams are tough to let go of.

I've made an effort recently to seriously cut back on my social media use. I can't abandon it entirely— it's the only really effective way I have to promote my creative work —but I think excessive exposure to it is adversely affecting my mental health. My depression has a tendency to make me lapse into it as an endless source of bullshit input when my brain can't seem to latch onto anything substantive. And I get no joy from scrolling dumb meaningless shit on Facebook or Twitter, yet I do it when I feel bad anyway, and end up feeling worse with the time I waste. So I'm allowing myself to post things, check notifications once a day, but no scrolling through random feed stuff. I lose a ton of time to it and end up feeling bad.

I'm also trying to change my relationship with my smart phone, and I think the social media stuff is part of the problem. I've been reading articles and talking to people about smart phone addiction, how it destroys focus, and depresses enjoyment and engagement in other things. And as bad as one author had it, I compared my usage data to his and mine was actually worse. That was depressing to see. I've been struggling with attention issues and an inability to get engaged with things I would normally expect to enjoy, and I think this addiction at least makes it worse, even if it's not totally responsible. Recently I had some of the worst inability to enjoy or get interested in something that should have made me happy in ages, and it was such a terrible feeling I've resolved to do something about it. I don't know if just cutting way, way back on social media is enough to undo any damage, but I figure it's a place to start. If nothing else, I hate how hard it is for me to read books, or anything longform anymore, because I can't rouse the interest or focus. Even an improvement on that front would be a little victory.

I am a person who lives with mental illness. That has been clear since I was about nineteen years old, and has been a significant problem in my life on and off for the intervening time. The name of the illness and even the number I have has been disagreed upon by various parties in a position to offer an opinion— I've heard anywhere between one and four, and a corresponding range of diagnoses— but the one that's pretty indisputable is the moderate depression that has waxed and waned throughout my adult life. It's been a big enough and constant enough presence for me that I very much feel the daily reality that is being mentally ill.

I know it's common among other mentally ill folks to object to the use of the word "crazy." It's been dismissed by those people as offensive, even ableist. But I have never felt that way, and honestly do not even feel like the way most people use "crazy" refers at all to the symptoms of mental illness. It's much more a synonym for "absurd." People bust it out when they can't see how something could possibly have logically happened, when someone or something is unreasonable, ridiculous. Even when people call each other crazy, I don't feel like they're often actually implying that they think the person is mentally ill— instead, as stated above, being beyond reason or absurd. As someone whose life and behavior are definitely impacted by mental illness, I really feel as if the language has evolved here away from the original meaning the word may have had.

Now I admit I may not have the kind of conditions that inspire people to call you that word. I am highly functional even during severe attacks. Maybe if I had a personality disorder or something that caused more extreme behavior that I could not cope with as well, I would feel differently. But my illness definitely impacts the way I perceive the world and the choices I make in reacting to it. It's a very present part of my life. So I kind of resent the idea that my situation is not "real" or "serious" enough to have an opinion on this. I know I can't speak for every mentally ill person, and other people can decide what's acceptable to themselves. But as far as I'm concerned, it's a word that refers to something else because of the way the language usage has changed over time.

Today is a heartbreaking day. The meaning has been stated by much smarter people than me, but I am stern in my resolve to resist and not give up hope that we can right this grave injustice.

One thought that gives me hope is the conviction that I do believe this blast of reactionary conservatism is an extinction burst. It is VERY common, including when dealing with the behavior of an abuser, that when efforts are made to push back against and stamp out the bad behavior, the perpetrator doubles down and explodes with a final effort to try and overcome the resistance before flaming out. The way of life where white supremacy was taken for granted is going away, as is the ability to remain ignorant and insular against the wider world. The people who don't want to grow and evolve into the modern world are lashing out against all the changes. But the world IS changing and no one can stop it. The fact that Clinton won the popular vote and the evidence that millennial voters were overwhelmingly more liberal confirms to me that viewpoint is dying, and is just privileged by the outdated relics of the system. We ARE moving toward a more progressive world, even with this enormous travesty occurring. So, if we can survive, I believe we will truly move past it as a society.

The only problem is surviving. And that's what frightens me. I'm afraid we won't survive. Individuals who are not privileged under this regime are certainly at risk, but I'm talking ALL of us, not just as a nation, but as a species. If we have a nuclear war or an environmental apocalypse, we won't get the chance to see what happens after. And I'm afraid those are real possibilities. God help us. I truly do believe this is the death knell of this particular form of atavism. But the earth has to hold out for us to get there.

I am going home for Thanksgiving this year. That's a bit of a change of plans, as my family has come to my house for the past few years, but I guess the price of not having to clean is having to travel. It's a bit complicated, involving trains and handing off my car to my brother, but I'll be there for a few days. I haven't been doing so well mental-health-wise lately, so honestly the whole idea makes me tired, but I'm hoping that I'll be able to rest and relax at least for a little while I'm home.

I've been turning over the idea of a new writing project recently, in the effort of breaking out of my comfort zone and giving myself something to encourage me on the subject of my creative work. I've started to feel kind of low about it, and I think I have to try something new. Maybe the next week with no lessons to plan or rehearsals to hold and minimal essays to grade, I'll have a little time to work on it. We'll see.