I was in therapy this year, examining the cognitive distortions I'd created for myself. It was a productive time, and that's how this story came to adopt them as a theme. There are a few Jane is latching onto: emotional reasoning ("I feel I've been rejected, so I have"), noticing only failure (Mar hesitated, didn't text back right away), disqualifying the positive ("sure, we were kissing just hours ago, but that doesn't count"), catastrophising & minimization ("this will destroy me; I still have time to run away"). To be honest I have my doubts about psychology and its failson brother internet self-diagnosis; it's too easy to assign problems and histories to oneself that are more flattering than corrective. But learning about these behaviors really did help me, and I'm grateful to have entered the dark tunnel and had these conversations.
12 thoughts on “#815 + 816 – there’s a third option, right?”
bryanew710
Seeing this kind of internal battle from the outside hits home. I'm dealing with some stuff I'd kept down for a LONG time, and it's painful to watch even a comic book character doing the same crap.
peakpointmatrix
Can someone give me the number to the UGLY? ad please.
Mattinqq
I absolutely love the tunnel lighting here. One of my favourite pages Valerie's done on this comic.
kat
I hate to be "that person", but it would be psychology, not psychiatry. Psychiatry has done a lot for me that psychology could not.
granulac
ah you're right – that is what I meant.
Mauricio Lemos
The last bubble with the shape of "higher subconscious" Jane speech but the color of "actual Jane" speech was a way to communicate that she convinced herself, right?
cwbuecheler
I think it's the opposite. I think it's a very world-weary "Yeah" to the sudden silence from the higher subconscious. As in "Yeah, I'm right, and you've got nothing to say."
I don't think she gets convinced to go until a few pages from now when she sees Mar's bat mitzvah photo on Facebook.
cwbuecheler
Oh, wait, I see, you mean she's convinced herself everything's shitty. That seems plausible. I still think Jane's just reacting to the silence from the higher subconscious, though, rather than the voice changing color.
Joe
ah, the big boob ad. if memory serves the logo of that cosmetic surgery clinic that advertised on the subway 2010-2015 was an outline of a butt inside an outline of a boob. simpler times.
neptune432
I was thinking the tunnel was a metaphor for Jane's "one-track" mind, only thinking in a negative and self-defeating way.
TRA
The scenes with just the dark + the lights are just AMAZING!
Fantastic!
wykstrad
I just realized that if you invite someone to a place named "Pacific Standard" at a certain time, and are not careful with how you write the time and location, there is a chance the two of you will arrive 2 hours apart.