Looking through my Babylon 5 art folder because I thought of Londo and G’Kar last night randomly (probably because of the similar nature to ‘this is clearly a romantic drawing where we are both bleeding out from slit throats’ to Nny and Edgar), and it’s always a little wild to see things I made when just eyeballs deep in a thing.  There’s enough that I didn’t remember making some of it, a lot that is just weird inside jokes, and more than a few bits complete embarrass me.   

It used to be that I was embarrassed by Everything I made, no matter when I touched it, and the Babylon 5 was one of the vehicles I used to push through the weight of what I called my ‘shame passenger,’ which was largely internalized voices of my dad and my ex telling me how pathetic and childish and cringey all the things I was passionate about or even just mildly interested in were.  I couldn’t even make things for myself.  I was too embarrassed to put something on paper even if I promised myself over and over that no other human being would ever see it.  I was just crippled by it.  

So it’s obviously (I hope?) a lot better now.  But sometimes, the thing I get hung up on is still the stuff that was the most passionate, or the most sincere, or the most vulnerable, or the most personal.   That sounds like a lot, but it’s still less than it used to be. And I guess there are just different things where the expression feels different or safer?  I still feel ridiculous having too much sincerity for the things I love.  

I still feel like I’m childish at Every Turn.   ‘Ugh, you are STILL on this thing you liked 15 years ago? Aren’t you over that?’ haunts me as much as, ‘What are you doing with this new cute cartoon made for children?’  There is no winning it, so it feels like the obvious solution is like, if no one wins everyone wins, so do what you want, you know?  And in a lot of cases, I’m able to make that conclusion, but some things still are like this death grip of paralyzing embarrassment.  I actually felt my cheeks get hot looking through old things this evening.  I’m fairly sure they were things that were only ever shared with like two people, but for some of them I feel mortified to have done that much. 

I do remember when my appendix almost exploded that I had this burst of confidence.  Once they hit me with pain medication in the ER and I could think of something other than how much I wanted to vomit all my organs, I remember looking at my brother across the room and immediately thinking, “If I had died from appendicitis, I would have regretting not posting all that writing/art,” or something similar.  And I went home and once the pain meds stopped keeping me in a heavy haze, I was like, “HERE, have all this shit I’ve been ashamed of for YEARS!  Sequins for everyone!”  And I posted like, cutesy drawings from serious manly sci-fi franchises and fanfiction I’d been hiding for years.   I envy the perspective emergency surgery gave me, haha.  I think it’s receding with more time between me and the event, though. 

This was going to go somewhere, I think.  Mostly, I was just struck by how strong my shame reaction was to something I had once actually freely shared with another human being.