Creating humor from my anxieties is an enormous driving force in my cartoons. My anxieties can take on a life of their own and follow me like my own shadow. I’m often overwhelmed to the point of despair, having such a companion as this, but here’s the up-side: Without my anxieties, most of my cartoons would never have been drawn.

     The above cartoon, the first of a short series, is based on a real “vacation” that nearly incapacitated me. Turning my fear of pain and discomfort into a parody or caricature of true horror, I console myself, treat myself to a smile, and realize, once again, the worst of it is (temporarily) in the past. There is no part of this story of the Grand Canyon trip that is not true. I wish I’d been able to draw this BEFORE the trip, but it wasn’t until after the trip that I could tackle it. The trip itself was wonderfully beautiful and exhilarating, but the anticipation of all the horrors that were possible nearly crushed me. The day before we boarded the plane to Phoenix, I was carefully weighing the option of falling down a staircase and breaking my leg, just to relieve myself of the inevitable terror of the Grand Canyon.

       In the last decade or so, I’ve come to accept that there is a part of me that will always find anxiety somewhere, and that I will struggle to overcome it. Sometimes I win, sometimes I don’t. I try to go easy on myself when my anxieties get the better of me, and I try to reclaim my ground by drawing an honest story that makes the whole scenario laughable. It doesn’t really matter if anyone else finds it funny; I’m not drawing this for anyone but me, and I think it’s helping. I would be a terribly boring cartoonist without my anxieties.