IS IT A MOVIE OR IS IT THE REAL
       
       A comic about the thoughts in my head.
       
       
       The comic
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 (IMG) It's all in your head
       
       
       About the comic
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       I have a fairly anxious mind, which means I spend a lot of brain
       cycles simulating social interactions. One such cycle that occurs
       again and again are conversations involving characterizations of
       people in my life. My brain will form a character of a person that is
       a slight skew of their actual self. That character will talk to other
       characters, or it will talk to me. In either case, it produces
       thoughts that are intrusive, incorrect, and uncomfortable. I know to
       disregard these thoughts because over time I've been able to identify
       them deattached from reality. Still, I'll sometimes get carried away
       by the thoughts and experience feelings associated with the thoughts,
       only to later realize that they are not real. The best strategy I've
       developed for coping with these experiences is to visualize the
       thoughts as puppets whose control panel is in my hand.
       
       The comic I drew captures this experience. The orange and green
       characters are saying uncomfortable things about a blue guy. In the
       last panel, it's revealed that this blue guy was puppeteering these
       characters all along. The orange and green characters weren't really
       saying mean things. The blue guy was moving them to make it look that
       way.
       
       The title of this comic is "Is it a movie or is it the real".  The
       title is a play on words, where "real" can be substituted or mishead
       for "reel". This is to suggest the importance of understanding the
       source (or container) of an experience. It's like this: when I'm
       watching a movie the events happening on screen feel reel, but of
       course, they're not real. The movie is contained on a reel of film (or
       another a container like a MP4 file or streaming service). Looking at
       the reel, it's clear where the movie is coming from: not reality, but
       some artifact, some /thing/. The reel is the thing that
       compartmentalizes the movie aside from real life. If the reel wasn't
       there, it might be difficult to discern one from the other. It might
       be possible to get carried away by the movie without realizing it's
       it's apart from reality, merely a representation and not the actual
       thing. Identifying the container of a thought (e.g.: the container of
       anxiety, or depression, or fear) helps me sort through thoughts. I'm
       better able to label them thusly as artifacts of a feeling or
       mood. They're not real, they're merely reels...