A piece confronting anxiety
By Richie Ocean
Content Creator (Visual Arts & Design), The Continuist
An Ode to Feelings was born as an act of self-defiance against the anxiety that made me feel incapable of doing anything one weekend. Instead of avoiding this feeling, I decided to look it in the face and to do something with it. This piece originally ended after the seventh panel. However, I was inspired by Joshua Whitehead’s discussion of his book, Jonny Appleseed, as reparative reading (https://roommagazine.com/interview/coming-home-interview-joshua-whitehead) to turn my own work into an act of reparative drawing. Thus, An Ode to Feelings concludes, not with a heavy heart, but with love, which suffuses the piece and becomes a salve to the soul. This comic was composed in marker, scanned, and digitally edited with a pink tint.