Two things.

Firstly, I’m sorry that this is one of those comics that kind of requires some outside context to be completely parsable. Sometimes, a goofs podcast sucker punches you in the gut in the last two minutes of the episode and you spend the entire week in a weird existential funk that you’re also convinced sounds like some stereotypical millennial mid-twenty-something bullshit, so not only are you in said funk, but you’re painfully self-conscious about the funk. The funk is not fresh, nor groovy. And, honestly, you’ve been thinking about all this stuff for a long, long time, so really the podcast episode just brought it all up to the surface, and also you’re deeply empathetic and introspective about this stuff generally, so you’re probably doing a fair amount of projecting. And also also you’re overworked and having a weird bout of insomnia and keep waking up at five in the morning for no reason, so you’re functioning on four hours of sleep or less every day and have so, so much stuff to do.

So, comics like this happen. It’s been a week. But I promise next week’s will be funny.

Secondly, an interesting thing happened while I was working on this one.

At some point today, I was chatting with a friend of mine who’s been going through some rough stuff, and they echoed a lot of the feelings I’d been struggling with myself: the fear of being directionless, of the uncertainty of the future, of the what the next step should be, and if they could even take it. Logic would say it’s likely something everyone struggles with, but when you’re in the thick of that cloud, it feels like you’re completely alone and isolated. But the coincidence struck me, and I realized that the advice I was giving them was advice I should be giving myself: give yourself permission to feel it in the moment, and then keep moving. Is it terrifying? Absolutely, holy shit, it’s the one of the scariest things about being a human being, because there’s basically no metric to know if you’re doing it right (which is a fallacy, there really isn’t a right at all, but the impulse is there). You only get to live one life, and some days that fact is freeing, and others it’s a fear that sits in the pit of your stomach.

But, to quote something a friend said to a fictional portrayal of a real person in another world…on Twitter (don’t worry about it): you take it one hill at a time. And when you need to, you ask for help from the people you love. They might not be able to, because a lot of these things don’t have answers. But they can at least offer company, and sometimes traveling together makes all the difference.

Anyway. I know the comic’s a little bleak, but sometimes you gotta make a bleak comic to see the hope on the other side. Or something like that. I dunno, coping is weird, I’ve been flying by the seat of my pants for years.

Thanks for reading. See you next week.