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There was a point, a lifetime ago, when I realized that the me inside my head and the me in the real world looked very different. This is, literally, decades in the past — I was in art school at the time, and spending every second week drawing a comic strip in which I appeared as a character alongside my best friend of the time, and the two of us had managed to get our self-caricatures down to, if not a fine art, then at least a practiced one due to all the practice we’d had. (The drawing, after all, was merely there as a support to the writing, despite the fact we were both art students.)

But then… I changed the way I looked, not thinking about what that would mean for the strip.

When the strip started, I had a beard and, midway through its run, I shaved it off. (I feared I looked too old, too hippy-ish with it; this was the Britpop era, after all, and hippies were decidedly not in back then.) I remember thinking as I did so that I’d no longer have the scribble at the bottom of my cartoon face, but beyond that, not giving the strip any choice… until people started telling me that I didn’t look like myself anymore.

They were right; I’d not realized — because I didn’t look at my own reflection closely, I suppose — that the shape I believed my face was had been the outgrowth of my unkempt beard, and that the blockhead I’d been drawing didn’t actually match my naked chin, after all. The me I’d been drawing was… well, nothing like me at all.

Upon realizing this, I initially felt self-conscious about it: How could I not have noticed? and Did I not know what I actually looked like? What kind of artist am I? Looking back now, it feels like an important lesson in a need to keep checking in on myself that I entirely missed the point of, in the flush of youth. After all, why keep track of how you’re doing when there’s a new Blur single to fall in love with…?

So, I put together a resume for a thing recently. (By the time you read this, either it will have happened, or I’ll know that it’s not happening; either way, I’ll probably be okay with not calling it “a thing” anymore, but right now as I type this, it’s best to be vague so as to not jinx anything.) It’s always a strange, sobering experience putting together a resume, in large part because… well, they always feel like they tell an entirely different story than my lived experience.

That’s not an admission that I’m lying on a resume, I quickly want to point out. The discovery that my old university has no records of my MA degree because information from that period was lost due to an accident, and knowing that I have no copy of that degree after moving countries, made me almost take that off the resume because I was so self-conscious about the idea that I couldn’t back up a claim; that’s how awkward I am about the idea of making sure everything on my resume is factual and honest.

What I mean, though, is that resumes seem sequential and ordered in a way that life just isn’t, in my experience: the story it tells is that you did this thing, and that automatically led to the next, and then the next. You learned skills in such a way that feels intentional and purposeful in an attempt to get to some imaginary next level, or new position career-wise, whereas the reality is that things just happened and suddenly you’d picked up all these abilities because you needed to, just to do the thing in the first place.

Putting a resume together feels as if you’re looking at an alternate version of yourself: one that’s more purposeful and filled with intent. One who knows what they’re doing at all times, as opposed to the me typing these words, blundering from one situation to the next with good intentions. What would it be like to be them, I think to myself when I look at my own resume. What would it even be like to talk to them?

If there’s been a running theme in my life over the past few weeks — the past few months, perhaps — it’s that things have just kept happening, and time has sped past without me being fully aware of it. Just the other day, I made some reference to someone that I couldn’t believe that it was the start of April already, to which they gently reminded me that it was actually the middle of April.

Reader, I quietly shuddered.

Is this old age, or the sign of a busy life? The answer could be “both,” of course; certainly, I’ve had a particularly non-stop time of things recently, with the metronome of my life seemingly amped up to “Spider-Man levels,” where it seems to fluctuate between work drama and personal stuff at alarming speed, with something always happening in one of them to occupy my mind. (Not even necessarily bad things, or bad things for me, at least, but just things, and things that need to be acknowledged and addressed by me in some manner.) I fully understand the idea of “The Parker Luck” now, that there actually is balance in my life, it’s just that the balance is “something will always be happening that needs your attention in one part, while everything else backs off.”

The only time this gets to truly be an issue is when, like last week, it involves me getting overworked, specifically. Last week, I worked from 7:30am through 6pm (ish) for a couple of days in a row due to a confluence of events — it wasn’t intended to be that way, but things happened and it was the best course for everyone — and found myself feeling the effects of it for a couple of days afterwards; it wasn’t helped by the fact I was also worried for a friend’s health during this time, and all three added together to lead to a sleepless night between these two days, but I spent the next two days in recovery mode, feeling low-key sick and as if my brain was an overworked muscle.

This too might simply be the result of getting old, of course, but there’s something else that comes with age: recognizing your limits far more easily. On that second night after, I climbed into bed at 9pm and was asleep almost immediately, crashing out for a full nine hours. I can’t control the speed of events around me, but I can at least know when to call it quits for the night and hide under the cover for a bit. That feels like something approaching progress.

But seriously: how is it the middle of the month already?

At some point in what I have taken to relatively unselfconsciously taken to calling my “career”, I became someone who obsessively takes notes, especially during the (increasing) number of meetings and calls that I end up taking on a fairly regular basis. It’s become second nature: if I am on a call of some kind, I’ll end up scribbling away, longhand, in a spiral-bound notebook, as if I was back in school and making sure I had all the important details from a lecture, or whatever.

I’m not entirely sure when this started happening, but it’s fairly clear why, at least: so’s that I could keep track of any and all necessary developments that I’d need to either remember later, whether it’s because I need to do something about them or because I might need to remind someone else to do something about them. (In some cases, it’s simply paranoia about whether or not I might need to know things later; the number of times, especially in my first few months at ReedPop, where I realized I could remember being told a piece of information but couldn’t remember the information itself was… not zero, shall we say.)

There’s only one problem with this new habit: my notes are, very often, indecipherable, even to me.

I don’t mean that in the sense of, “I can’t read them,” because a lifetime of reading comics means that my notes are almost always in ALL CAPS and perfectly legible. What I mean is that, for whatever reason, the words I choose to write in the moment might not have any particular meaning to me even days after I wrote them.

Take, for example, the notes I made from a recent editorial meeting for Popverse:

• STARTING TO WRITE 3RD BOOK
• ESSENTIALLY FLAT MOM
• NEWS IMPORTANT INCREASINGLY
• BREAKOUT
• LIVESTREAMING 1 WEEK???
• DONE AT 7:20

I have no doubt that each of these things meant something at the time. Now, though, I have no idea who is starting to write a third book, or a third book of what. I can make a guess what was “essentially flat” month-on-month, but I might be wrong, and I’m assuming MOM is “month-on-month” and not, you know, mom. (But whose mother is essentially flat?!?) What is the breakout? What is livestreaming in a week — and is that what that note means, or is it something livestreaming for a week? What was done at 7:20? Everything is lost in a haze of bad memory, with these notes just serving to confuse the matter.

Maybe I should just accept that some things are meant to be a mystery, for now and forever.

I’m very familiar with the concept that we end up looking just like our pets, in no small part because I should be so lucky — if I had the deceptive baby face of the old dog Gus, I’d be thrilled; if I had the unavoidably adorable charm of Alfie, or the inexplicable charm of Ging, I’d be similarly excited. I think you get what I’m saying here; I think all of my (many) pets are at the very least cute, if not downright beautiful, and I can only wish that my own physical features matched up to their standards.

Instead, though, what I’ve found myself thinking about with increasing, concerning regularity across the past few months, is what I would be like were I suddenly transformed into an animal — how my personality would show up in my behavior, how I’d interact with the world at large.

What brought this on, of all things, was watching the two dogs interact with the backyard when they go out to piss or shit, Alfie, the younger of the two by some distance, attacks the world and collapses all over it energetically, investigating but with such enthusiasm that he’s a perpetual motion machine just moving and moving and moving until suddenly it happens, whatever the it of the moment happens to be.

I feel much more in tune with Gus, who cautiously circles where he wants to go and then waits, patiently, crouching or with his leg cocked, as if knowing that something has to happen eventually if he can just… get there. I watch him when all of this is going on, and I think, that would be me if I were a dog, if I had to go through everything a dog has to go through to go to the bathroom. And maybe it’s true; I feel as if there’s some accidental attempt to self-compliment hidden in there, a “I could be as patient and zen as he is,” when I’d likely be grumbling and unhappy with the discomfort.

Whether or not I’ll ever end up looking like any one of my pets, I remain unconvinced, but I’ll say this: I’m pretty sure I could learn from their approaches to life.

When I was a kid, we’d go to the library once a week, as a family; me, my older sister (for awhile, both of my sisters before the oldest got too old to think it was cool), and both my parents. It was something I looked forward to intensely, this weekly pilgrimage en masse; no matter what else might have been going on in my life, it was always a highlight of the week — a chance to find new things, new words and new worlds, and new thoughts to go inside my head.

I had favorite books I’d return to time after time, of course, but more than that, I had favorite areas of the library where I’d find new things every single week; even though I’ve not been there for more than 30 years, I could still draw you a detailed map of where you could find books about movies and TV shows — making-of type things, that I was obsessed with — or the books about art, whether it was art history or how-tos. I could take you to the exact shelf where Jonathan Carroll’s books were, which I returned to time after time; I could tell you where the music section was, and even more than that, where you could find the cool and weird music if you really wanted it.

(A sudden reminder how old I am; I can remember when the music section was primarily made up of vinyl. Not even cassettes — vinyl.)

I was in love with that library. It was one of my favorite places in the world when I lived in my hometown, somewhere that felt safe and exciting at once; somewhere that I felt safe to be myself, even when I didn’t know who that was. I loved it so much that, when I was back in my hometown last year, I went all the way to the walkway leading to the library, but daren’t walk up to the doors themselves. I knew that it would have changed from the way it was when I was a kid — it should, that was more than three decades ago — and, at the same time, I knew that it would break my heart to see it any different, even after all this time.

Because I am a responsible adult who, very importantly, doesn’t want to get in trouble with anyone thank you very much, I spent part of the last weekend doing my taxes. It’s a chore that has become the most depressing second nature imaginable in the many years that I’ve been living in the U.S., and one that without fail leaves me in a melancholy mood with one simple question: Why don’t I have more money?

Not in the sense of, why don’t I earn more money generally, because that’s a thought that I keep to myself during the work week, especially on those more stressful times; instead, it’s when I do the math about how much income I get, and how much I spend to pay rent, pay bills, etc., I’m always left thinking, surely I should have more in my bank account for the two minutes before I remember things like groceries and eating.

This year was worse than usual, because of the multiple international trips I took, and the dent they made in my bank balance. (On the one hand, yes, the flights were paid for my work, but once I was there, I paid for the majority of my accommodation and all of my domestic travel, and that really piles up when you’re there for two or three weeks at a time and criss-crossing around the country all the time.) I added up all the incoming money I had, looked at the outgoing and then… took a quiet moment to myself.

The other thing that traditionally happens when I do my taxes is that I promise myself that this is the year I’ll be better with money, that I’ll save more, that I will be conscious of everything I could and should be doing to prepare for my future. This year, thankfully, I put that to the side; I’m old enough now to accept that shit will happen no matter what I plan, whether it’s pet medical expenses, family medical expenses, or, you know, global pandemics dramatically impacting my ability to make a living. The best you can hope for is… well, the best you can hope for.

Tax season is a time of year where you come to terms with how powerless you are about your own finances, or else you want to stare out a window wordlessly for a few hours.

I’m trying to work out how best to describe the recent Seattle trip for this year’s Emerald City Comic Con. It was a particularly odd one, for all number of reasons — having almost no sleep the first night because the dinner I had that night not agreeing with me, and then feeling exhausting and increasingly out-of-it the next day to the point where I was asleep by 8:30pm set a very strange tone for what proved to be a very strange trip, in the end — and one that felt perpetually out of whack for reasons I couldn’t quite put my finger on, entirely.

Something that only added to the feeling of disconnection was the fact that, even more so than most Emerald City Comic Cons, on this particular trip I didn’t really exist anywhere that wasn’t the hotel or the convention center. It was a combination of having a busier than usual schedule — breakfast meetings! Evening panels! — and the weather being impressively bad, with freezing temperatures and enough rain that I didn’t particularly want to wander through the streets in the early morning, as I’ve done in the past; instead, I worked a lot, and as such, I existed at either the convention center or in my hotel room. The rest of Seattle didn’t really exist, for all intents and purposes.

It’s a lonely way to be, which is ironic, given that I was definitely at my most social that I’ve been for a long time at the show; I got to see a lot of friends and almost-friends, and I got to have a lot of good conversations, but in a strange way, that underscored how strange it felt to be working at 10pm in the hotel room and sitting in bed afterwards, my brain still turning over and feeling the silence surround me almost tangibly after failing to find anything to watch on TV, knowing I wasn’t ready for sleep just yet, but I also wasn’t up for anything else, either.

On the final day, one of the people I work with said something along the lines about the whole thing having felt like it had happened out of order, with that last day feeling like the first. The days weren’t the same for me, but I knew what she meant; the entire trip felt like it was jumbled, collapsed in on itself and rebuilt in a hurry. Even a week later, I’m unsure whether or not I enjoyed it or not.

Whatever the reason, February always ends up feeling like a curious rush by the time the second half of the month rolls around. It’s something that happens every single year, so there would be a sense that I’d be on some level used to this rhythm by now, and yet… nope. Every single year, I feel taken by surprise and thinking to myself, where did all the time go?

There’s a cheap answer to this, of course: I get lured in by the fact that February is shorter than the average month, which I remember intellectually and forget in every other way every single year. That’s hardly an explanation, though, especially given that it’s not that much shorter; it’s two or three days, which isn’t really any kind of amount of time that should make that much difference, especially year upon year. (As proof that, occasionally, my brain decides not to work properly, I submit the evidence that upon starting this paragraph, my brain went, it’s only 28 days normally, that’s five whole days shorter than the usual month, almost an entire week. I then… well, realized how bad my math was, if nothing else.)

I blame all the fault at the feet of January. January, my regular enemy, is such a difficult month every single year that, when February rolls around, I’m just so grateful to make it there in one piece that I almost lose track of time and common sense. Sure, there might only be four weeks in February to do anything, but those are four non-January weeks, and that means everything: they’re going to be less cold, less dark, and less shit merely by not happening in January, and therefore the sky is the limit. Or, at least, that’s what I end up telling myself in that way that our beliefs are spoken without any words.

I like to think that, if I did use words, I’d realize how ridiculous it sounded at the time. But then, I like to think that without using words as well, so what do I know?