Chuck Mullin - Bird Brain: Comics About Mental Health, Starring Pigeons

Bird Brain copyright 2019 by Chuck Mullin. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever withoutwritten permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews.

Andrews McMeel Publishing

a division of Andrews McMeel Universal
1130 Walnut Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64106

www.andrewsmcmeel.com

Bird Brain was originally published in Great Britain by Unbound.

ISBN: 978-1-5248-5961-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019940389

Editor: Melissa R. Zahorsky

Art Director/Designer: Tiffany Meairs

Production Editor: Amy Strassner

Production Manager: Tamara Haus

Ebook Developer: Kristen Minter

ATTENTION: SCHOOLS AND BUSINESSES

Andrews McMeel books are available at quantity discounts with bulk purchase for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail the Andrews McMeel Publishing Special Sales Department: .

To Mum, Dad, and Ezra

for believing in me from day one.

To Cort

my top tier biscuit.

To Rhi

because I said I would. Thanks for breakfast!

To you

for opening this book.

Contents

INTRODUCTION

Anxiety is a wild ride. Often, there seems to be an assumption that if youre mentally ill, you just sit around and cry all the time. There is a certain amount of that, true, but thats not all there is to it. Sometimes, I walk around and cry!

There is also a slew of complex emotions and experiences that accompany anxietynerves, fear, tentative happiness, the arduous business of forming human connections, the never-ending struggle to convince yourself that you deserve to be content, and so onusually all experienced concurrently to form an unmanageable cocktail of emotional despair.

I first started experiencing anxiety when I was around seventeen, as the prospect of jetting off to university (where I knew no one except my then-boyfriend), and fending for myself, began to loom over me like a giant blimp full of killer bees. (Side note: Dont ever, ever, ever, ever, ever go to university solely to follow a romantic partner. It rarely works out well.) Initially, I thought I was undergoing a completely understandable case of nerves. Nerves that just permeated my entire being 24/7 and suddenly made me hate myself for every awkwardly strung together sentence that left my stupid, gross mouth.

The fact that something wasnt right began to hit home one evening when I went with my flatmates to the universitys first freshers night. As soon as I entered the campus club, it was like being submerged in water. I couldnt breathe. There were too many stimuli: too many bright lights, too much noise, and too many people. Way too many people, who I felt were all suddenly fixated on me, sneering at me, at how I looked, how I moved, how I simply existed. Its funny how anxiety makes you feel like youre simultaneously the most important and the most insignificant person in the room. Id never experienced this tsunami of emotion before. I was probably standing in the entrance for all of a minute before I calmly walked out into the smoking area, hopped the security gate preventing people from sneaking in, and ran all the way back to my flat to bury myself under my bedcovers. I promptly cried myself to sleep. It was 10 p.m., and I had been at university for eight hours.

Over the next few years, I experienced a steadily increasing number of these episodes, not only in densely packed environments but also over the most inconsequential matters. I couldnt engage in basic conversation without feeling like I was sweating out my bodys entire water content. The thought of having a social interaction I wasnt prepared for sent my heart rate into overdrive.

I tried to brave the doctor and counseling services, but it was almost as if there was a physical barrier preventing me from getting help. I had no idea where to begin if I attempted to talk about what I was going throughI didnt even know why the hell I was feeling this way in the first place. So I did what seemed like the only reasonable solution to this dilemma and kept all my feelings bottled up and squashed down in the deepest parts of my brain.

As a consequence of this repression, I became weirdly talented at presenting a well-adjusted persona to the world. Id navigate through social situations with apparent ease, all the while internally screaming and looking forward to when I could get home and cry into my pillow. I think I told maybe three or four close friends about it, but only through rambling WhatsApp messagesnever in person, unless I was absolutely shit-faced and couldnt keep the bad feelings in their bottles.

Eventually, despite feeling as though I couldnt hate my life any more, I graduated from university and became increasingly disillusioned with where I was headed. I felt stuck in a full-time retail position, in an incredibly wealthy area where basically every customer was an arrogant toe-rag constantly in Can I Speak to Your Manager mode.

Ive always loved drawing, and so, to give vent to some of the internal pressure, I began doodling silly comics about the existential nightmare that was my life. I didnt have a working scanner or a working art program, so I took terrible quality photos of the comics to upload to Tumblr and then to a Facebook page I had created.

One day I was waiting to meet a friend in the town center and was idly watching a pigeon pecking at the floor. A middle-aged couple walked by and immediately started talking about how they hated pigeons, calling them dirty little rats with wings.

Ive always loved pigeons; I find them cute and quirky and feel like they have an undeserved bad reputation. Pigeons used to be revered for their uses in sport and as messengers, and were a valuable source of food, but once better alternatives presented themselves, everyone just released their domesticated pidges en massethats why city areas are so densely populated by them. So it made me kind of sad to imagine a pigeon being able to understand this couples insults and feeling terrible about itself. When I went home, I made a comic about it, and people seemed to really like it.

The positive reaction to this comic inspired me to start using pigeons to represent myself in all my future comics about mental health. Its weird, but theres something reassuring about projecting yourself onto something generally disdained and getting an encouraging response to it. You think that if people like this strange little depiction of yourself, then you in your entirety might actually be liked after all, despite your annoying brain trying to convince you otherwise.

You may also be wondering why I draw pigeons with floating eyes. The answer is because I think its funny. Also, why not? Why does anyone do anything? Dont worry about it. Its all fine.

So, several comics and existential episodes after this decision, here I am writing this introduction. For this book. A REAL BOOK. That I went and drew and wrote myself. Its a bit surreal, and I am trying to play it cool, but my skeleton is ready to vibrate out of my skin with excitement. Thank you so, so much to everyone who has ever liked one of my drawings or sent me a lovely messageyou are the reason Ive been able to keep on doodling, and sometimes the reason I even bother doing anything. I wouldnt be here without you.