It’s taken me a long time to write this, partly because I don’t know how to tell you about it but also because my hands are so fucked up just typing this sentence took me a while. In March of this year I suffered from a psychotic break, and I say suffered because it was three weeks of truly exhausting and horrifying hallucinations. I had never experienced anything like that before, and the worst was that it culminated in me jumping from a second floor balcony, fracturing my cervical spine C5 and damaging my spinal chord. This left me paralyzed from the neck down for about 2 months, in which I couldn’t yet make sense of what happened to me, and was still hallucinating the doctors and nurses were trying to kill me. My dad took me to live in his apartment in Mexico City, where I one day regained consciousness just as if I had awoken from a nightmare. Six months later I moved to my mom’s, where I’m living now. I can walk with a walker and feed myself but I still need help for doing basic life stuff. I don’t hallucinate anymore but I’m terribly depressed. I used to not regret anything about my life and now I feel like I regret everything. My Alienation book came out in April and it's like all the effort I put into making it amounted to not very much, as I couldn’t enjoy anything about its release. Well, I did enjoy
this
review of it on The Comics Journal by my friend Patrick Kyle, but I was also a special guest at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival and I missed it.
Hopefully I’ll make it for another year, as I’m supposed to get better in a year or two, hopefully close to how I was before (or better) so I can draw and dance and ride my bike and swim again. Here are some paintings I did right before I lost my mind that really show the kind of crazy darkness I was getting into.
