FaD strip: quality time

something i was having trouble articulating in tender mercies was the desire to delegate basic tasks and self-care to a part of my brain that very much does not like to be parented or looked down on at all.
at the same time, it felt important to stay on the topic of trying to move the issue forward, as the sensation of just reappearing in your own life 5 years later where everything is different is a very unpleasant one.
it was confusing because i felt like i'd been caring for physical needs for a long time, but it felt like there was some critical mental need going unmet combined with a low stress threshold and many coping mechanisms that weren't available anymore.

after thinking on it some more, i decided i didn't need to have it all figured out to progress on the issue. if i had a depressed kid who was shutting up in their room all the time i wouldn't just let them do it unaddressed for months. i would help make sure the basic needs were met -- food, hygiene, social interaction, etc. -- with whatever ways were useful to them. i realized i could apply this kind of care to anybody i cared about and not just a child, i just needed to figure out how to have a conversation that didn't sound condescending.
...and i also realized that i think that... being CONSCIOUS is one element of human needs, and it's a really complicated one with a dissociative disorder. dupe has a notorious streak of derealization symptoms severe enough to manifest as consistent psychotic symptoms, and i thought maybe the turbulence was making it particularly difficult to get their feet back on the ground while sticking the landing.
so i set what i thought was a reasonable goal and expectation with the offer to help meet it, and it's been working out okay so far. it's not perfect and certainly didn't fix anything huge in terms of processing issues but that's not really what i was looking to do anyway. it does fix what feels like a huge invisible weight on my shoulders that was slowly getting heavier and heavier.
i get a feel that somebody can act like an asshole because they want to... and then somebody can act like an asshole because they're all messed up from some kind of basic needs not being met. i don't really feel like it's fair to hold the way somebody acts while deprived of basic needs to continue functioning to their character. i just felt like i was consistently getting met with the latter, so something was wrong.
anyway, don't know if that's helpful to anybody ever, but, i state it on twitter, a lot-- even if parts of your brain are structurally dissociated from you you can always spur them into action either intentionally or unintentionally. it's best to try being intentional if there are issues. it has definitely been extremely useful knowledge to me since the disorder is first and foremost presented as "uncontrollable" to patients (or else Why Would They Act Like That?)

that aside there was an alternate palette i was considering that i uploaded with this one, mainly switching out the use of blue for gray. although it has its own unique charm, it puts way too much emphasis on dupe's colors specifically, and i originally only kicked it around because i was unhappy with the contrast between the green and blue in the third panel's thought bubble.

also, the effect in the last panel was based off of animal crossing's joy emotion:

i didn't look up a reference while sketching, so you can see what i remembered vs. what i didn't. i thought it was interesting that i remembered there were wavy radiation lines, but not the shape they took, and still i remembered there were motion lines coming out from the head, even though they're a pretty unremarkable and small detail of the expression. overall i think the end result still looks a lot like its own expression.