Posting this here since a lot of my old jthm art applies to this—
I’ve been struggling with paranoid thoughts lately, mostly because of my old fanart and my perceptions of using it to cope with trauma.
So here’s a cautionary tale about using fictional characters to cope.
There’s a voice that constantly haunts me, an inescapable auditory hallucination that speaks in riddles and fills my head with the worst thoughts imaginable. I started applying this face to Jimmy, because the voice reminds me of him, crude, ugly and a monster with no morals.
It helped a lot at first, being able to apply a face to one of the voices I’ve been struggling with for so long, but after months it started to take a drastic turn from coping to completely feeding my delusions, writing everything they say down and over analyzing it in an attempt to figure myself out. At some point I didn’t even consider it fanart, just my intrusive thoughts and the voice being projected onto this character.
Suddenly everything starts to get blurry and I can’t tell fiction apart from reality, I start to get extremely paranoid because now the character is suddenly a piece of me but no one else knows this, every comment about them and every controversial opinion feels like an attack on me personally, but I’ve put myself in this situation in my attempt to cope with fictional drawings that don’t exist.
Now everyday I still hear the same voice but it’s stuck to this fucking cartoon character that I hate and I have a hard time drawing him constructively without overthinking about how much time I spent losing myself over it.
If you’re already having difficulties coping with reality, please tread carefully when bringing fictional characters you enjoy into the mix. It doesn’t always help and learning the hard way fucking sucks.