The Adventures of Snail Brain and Pain Banana

coming a long, long time in the future, if ever.

It’s Disability Pride Month, which makes me feel like I should be generating a ton of content, doing activism, or at the very least participating in my local library’s Disability Pride March. Instead, I’m just trying to continue to survive, a 24/7, 365 kind of job that doesn’t leave room for much else. (And, both fortunately and unfortunately, there is so. much. else.)

Still, in the midst of all the Else, I was able to finish a comic I started two months ago.

first draft of Pain Banana

I really do think about these little banana guys every time I have a pain flare, and I thought it would be cute to draw them. So I did, and then they sat around collecting dust on my desk, like many of my ideas do.

I don’t really know, anymore, what’s normal creative process versus disability timeline. I feel like maybe a decade ago I would have powered through with this idea in a matter of days and been done with it. But I don’t know, maybe not. Despite the whirlwind of my brain, I’ve always tended toward slowness in making. It took me nearly ten years to write A Different Kind of Same, and most of those years my health was stable. All of those years I was young.

But I am definitely moving even slower these days. Parenting plays a role, too. One of the biggest things about parenting that I was unaware of was how—————impossible———it is——to—just a minute goddammit!—string together an uninterrupted chunk of time and focus. It didn’t matter so much, before I had kids, that my brain liked to spin out and flitter. I had hours and hours and hours to let it wander and reign it back in. These days I squeeze creative work into small pockets, in which my mind rarely has time to settle. ADHD medication helps, but I haven’t been taking it recently because it also gives me a false physical energy, entices me to do more and more, which leads to catastrophic crashes (like the one I had last spring.)

Oh, also perimenopause.

The point is, my brain is basically a slice of Swiss cheese on the hood of a rusty Camaro in Phoenix in August.

So I made that sketch, let it fester on my desk and in the back of my brain, did a bunch of other stuff that had probably been festering since like February or March, and then for some reason completely unbeknownst to me, I woke up one day in early July like IT’S TIME FOR PAIN BANANA!

flesh tones didn’t make the final cut, thank god. it looks like a guy in a banana suit.

That makes it sound like I sprang straight out of bed, landed at my desk, and cranked out the finished version.

I did not.

I drew a pencil sketch of the above banana first. As in, I spent ten or fifteen minutes one day drawing the image above. The next day (or maybe two days), I traced it with micron and tested colors.

Then it sat on my desk for a few more days.

Eventually I drew some panels and sketched out the whole thing. That was also several small chunks of time over the course of several days, and also sat on my desk for a while.

Then I finally spent about an hour and a half—over four days—doing the final version:

All this to say, it took me two months to do about five hours worth of work on this single page comic.

You might be asking yourself why do this at all? Why put the effort into something that moves so slowly and yields so little? And the answer is: I want to believe that everything I make and share has worth, even if it isn’t my best work. Even if the outcome doesn’t necessarily outweigh the input. A creative practice, however slow, however small, sustains my spirit. I’d like to think that someone, somewhere, will now picture their pain the way I picture mine, and it will make them laugh. Or maybe they’ll picture it completely differently, in a way that never occurred to them before, and it will help them through the hard days. No matter what, I can say with certainty that bringing an idea to life, following it through to fruition, feels good.

And yet, I’d like to feel just as much joy in the process as I do in the completion. Is that even possible? I suspect it might be. And I suspect it will involve my brain learning patience.

These last few years, my body has forced my brain to move more slowly than it ever has, and my brain isn’t happy about it. But I’m hoping that, someday, it will make peace with this pace. Maybe, someday, it will move with the patience and purpose of a snail. Maybe it will stay firmly rooted in the present, approaching each leaf of thought with curiosity. Maybe it won’t strain and stretch to be finished. Maybe it will find all the joy it needs in the simple act of being.

Until then, it is excitedly shouting at me that I need to make Snail Brain and Pain Banana an entire comic series.

this is the first time i’ve ever drawn a brain, and i’m glad it doesn’t look very realistic, because that would make this image even more disturbing.

What kind of cheese is your brain like these days? Are you still a sharp cheddar, or are you rolling with a baked brie? Do I need to do a cheese-brain comic, too? I hope whatever’s happening inside your head is manageable, if not downright enjoyable. I’ll admit, some days there’s a freedom to the Arizona Swiss situation.

As always, thank you for reading! If this essay spoke to you, please consider liking, commenting, and/or sharing. And if you haven’t already subscribed yet, please do! All my posts are free. If you’d like to become a paid subscriber, there are several options, all of which include a free sticker. (It’s not a banana or a snail, I promise. Unless you want it to be, in which case it definitely is.)