My wife is asleep in the next room as I'm writing this. We've got a comfortable place to live with a well-stocked fridge. We both have decent, stable jobs that allow us to work from home. And despite the insane amount of chaos in the US and around the world, this has been our status quo for a few years now. I have a personal comics library that numbers in the tens of thousands, and the room I use as my home office for work has had to become a kind of 'satellite comics library' because there is physically not enough space in one room to house all my comics material.
Historically, writing has been a solitary art form. You'd write out your story or article or whatever and send it off to be published. If you were talented enough, it would see print weeks or months later and if you were supremely talented, someone might comment on or ask you about it later still. That's changed a bit with the internet -- the speed of publication is nearly instantaneous and feedback is sometimes almost too readily available -- but my work has a tendency to not inspire people enough to comment on it. (I spend more time dealing with spam on this blog than I do reading/responding to actual people.) But I was just talking with someone about how some of my work does get referenced on Wikipedia, and the occasional links from established outlets like The Beat and The Daily Cartoonist are always appreciated. Plus, I'm still riding high off the notion that I wrote a book that was nominated for a frickin' Eisner Award in 2021! That is absolutely mind-boggling to me!
I wonder sometimes what my teenaged self would think of current me. I suspect there'd be some level of disappointment at not being professionally employed in an expressly creative field and having instead "sold out" to "the man." But being an award-nominated writer, having run several marathons, being an extra in an Avengers movie (that there even IS an Avengers movie!), appearing as a character in dozens of comics, having a smart home more advanced that the one Bill Gates ostensibly had in the 1980s when I first heard of the idea, surviving a lightning strike, literally saving the life of a drowning cousin, being able to 3D print almost anything I want out of my utility closet... Fifteen-year-old me would probably not even come close to recognizing current me; what I've been able to do in my life, both in terms of the technology at my disposal as well as my personal skills and talents, is well beyond whatever I might've dreamed of doing. I've never had a formal "Bucket List" but if I had, I would've had to re-write it several times over with the number of Bucket-List-level items I would've checked off.
I harbor no illusions about how awful this year has been for so many people. US citizens are being killed or disappeared by a federal government that's openly supporting genocides in other countries. They're actively pursuing policies that undermine citzens' health, finances, informational security, emotional well-being... They're making every facet of life as awful as possible for as many people as possible. The only way you can even try sugar-coating what is going on is by outright lying. The damage being done right now is, without hyperbole, destroying the US and I don't see the United States surviving as a country beyond 2030. (I have, in fact, been publicly saying this since 2017 and I have yet to come across anything convincing enough to change my mind about that timetable.)
I see/hear the struggles some my own friends and family are dealing with, and I help when/where I can but there's only so much I can do. The fact that I was born when I was or graduated when I did or bumped into the right person when I did or whatever random collection of happenstances separated my situation from theirs years ago has led us to very different outcomes with different active and present concerns. From raising trans children to paying for the roof over their heads to even finding a job to begin with, they have challenges I do not. I do have challenges of my own, certainly, but I've also got flexibility in a lot of other areas they don't have to be able to deal with them.
Tomorrow, my wife and I will sit down for what will no doubt be a delicious meal. Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry relish, pumpkin pie... a lot of the foods you might expect for a Thanksgiving feast. There is seemingly no end of awful things going on in the world right now and there are no doubt many more to come. But I am thankful for where I am personally in my life. The friends I have, the things I've been able to achieve (or were priveleged/lucky enough to stumble into!), the safety net I've been able to craft for when things do go sideways... I remain thankful for everything I have and I can only hope you have some things to be thankful for as well.
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