One of the weird things about being transmasc is that, if you go on testosterone, sometimes your body just makes too many red blood cells (??????) and you need to get rid of the extra blood somehow. One common method is blood donation. Which is good—I should be giving blood more, plus I get a little Coffee Bean gift card at the end (5$! Woo hoo!). But on receiving today’s gift card, I was disturbed to recognize it as identical to one that had been sitting on an ottomon near my work desk—the place where all the “I’ll get to this in a minute, right after I get some work done” items get tossed—for some time. Every couple days, I would notice it and think, “Where did that come from? How long has it been there? I should spend it soon.” Well, now I knew where it came from, and apparently it had been sitting there for eight months.

This was meant to be the year I took reasonable breaks from work to focus on myself—on having a nice, pretty office to work in, to do self-care, to go out now and again. Instead, the opposite has happened. I’m not sure how, but taking time off of animation work to focus full-time on this comic has made me even busier than I was before. Of all the “fun home projects” I meant to take up this year, I’ve completed exactly one (a weirdly large accent wall). At this point, it’s become a joke to say to myself, “This week is gonna be different!” only for each week to find a new way to give me more work. I think there’s a way to change it? There must be. People do more work than this. People have families. I just can’t figure it out for myself.