Hmm, been a while since I’ve done a serious self-portrait. God knows I did a gazillion of them in school while getting my bachelor’s of fine arts. But, add something extra, and it can be a lot of fun, and you’re your own source of reference to boot. In addition, I ended up spending waaay longer on this than I’d planned. Aaaanyway though…

A while ago, my feelings got hurt. I mean… I wasn’t just hurt, I felt excluded, snubbed, unappreciated, and all around generally offended. Now, I’m doing loads better now, thanks to the help of a few folks, so I don’t say this to get sympathy; truth is, if I felt that way, that’s my own problem, but that’s how it is. Of course, my natural response to this is to dig myself a nice, deep hole, curl up in a ball and wallow in my own melodramatic worthlessness. Thankfully, I have WilliaM to say ~So what, who needs THOSE effers, anyway? You can either continue to be stupid and insignificant, or you can DO something about it. Now get up off of your damn ass and BE somebody.~

It’s hard for me to talk about WilliaM without sounding like a nutjob. Basically, I use him as a psychological defence mechanism. I mean, frankly, WilliaM is, at the end of the day, just a character. But he’s useful and means a lot to me. The character WilliaM and I have a very odd symbiotic sort of relationship, rocky as it may be. Out of all of my various characters (which I have spoken about before, as facets of myself), he’s the most ‘independent,’ as it were. While many of my characters are planned and, sometimes, formulaic in their actions down to the point of being boring, WilliaM pops up in my head, does his own thing, and doesn’t give a crap what I think of it.

He was basically born of social anxiety, and has, at times, been the embodiment of those things that hurt me, and yet simultaneously, been a shield between them and I. This is because he is, in his own way, a safe means for me to confront what upsets me in the world, as well as a representation of my own inner asshole (which I like to pretend that I don’t have), and as such, is a source of strange, sometimes very bad advice. Think of him as being somewhat like a cartoon shoulder-devil, though, while his ideas aren’t always the best, he actually does have my best interests in mind. In a way, he’s almost like a id-spawned impulse; I can choose not to act on it, but just can’t help having it.

While WilliaM is sometimes the nagging doubt in my head telling me that I suck at this or that, it’s also part of what pushes me to do better… and when I’m criticized despite having done my best, this is the character that tells me that folks can go do something vulgar and anatomically implausible.

And sometimes, in spite of myself… I like what he has to say.