Dark Passengers
A poem about anxiety, a comic about a bird
This week’s comic and poem are inspired by: my familiar spirals of doom, and the messy reality TV icon (and best-selling author) Stassi Schroeder who coined the term “Dark Passenger” for her anxious, rage-and-shame-filled self. Stassi’s Dark Passenger emerged every time she took tequila shots or felt hurt and abandoned (one usually accompanied the other, more about her show below). Mine appears around the same time every month when I play the anxiety-ridden game of “am I dying and is the world ending or is it PMS”.
Well of course I’m anxious. Who isn’t? At this point, living without anxiety requires total apathy or iron-fisted optimism. I have neither. I do wonder though, about when anxiety became a normal part of our every day lives. When I’m in the throes of it, I try to imagine a caveman (cave-person?) sitting at the entrance of their cave-home, trying to self soothe, taking deep breaths before facing the mastodons and wooly mammoths outside. It always makes me smile.
While most of my anxiety coping mechanisms are “healthy” (movement, music, meditation, drawing, spending time with plants and pets) — others might make you worry, or worse, relate. Background TV became a big thing during the pandemic, when thousands of isolated people discovered the magic of having low-stakes television programming as a way to drown out their (anxious) inner monologues. I sometimes joke that I was raised by a television set when my mother was at work, but in truth, I still find streaming a good-bad show the most low-effort (but temporary!) way to drown out anxious thoughts. These days, it’s Vanderpump Rules, an epic reality saga about the wait staff at SUR (which stands, of course, for Sexy Unique Restaurant).
I like to tackle the things that make me anxious with bite-sized effort, a little bit of exposure therapy at a time. For a very brief period, I tried to approach my days with Huberman-style shock treatments: wake up, face the sun, take an icy shower, dive into physical and mental work. But reader, it was not for me. I need an hour (or two)
of wandering the house and cuddling pets with my coffee. I can tackle mountains of chores and work and emotional weightlifting and exercise drills, but chances are I will need a reset nap either before or after.
On the subject of icy showers and cold plunges, I’m currently developing the brand identity and logo for a practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Giovanni Capuano whose work with Qi, acupuncture, moxa, cupping, the human body and energy pathways have opened up new ways of seeing for me. TCM has long advised against extreme temperature therapies, particularly cold exposure and Gio’s work focuses on finding the most balanced approach for your body, not based on what the trends are saying.
Enough chats, let’s get to the art.
May the wooly mammoths and mastodons always be your allies.
More soon,
Nish
