FaD strip: no pain no gain

here's a messy strip i've been wanting to do for about 10 months. i get migraines a lot because of my sleeping arrangements for the last few places, but i frequently react to pain by dissociating so that i "don't feel it" anymore.
the way people talk about dissociation and therapy for it made me think that attempting to accept pain exists was all i needed to do and it would turn on like a light switch, but instead i'm frequently left feeling like "this is probably what babies are learning" instead. feels very new and unidentifiable (and terrifying) sometimes. the problem is that pain still exists even if you're not aware of it, so i would just wonder why i was in such a bad mood/unable to focus for days on end instead.

anyway, i added the tertiary line colors (the darkest ones before black) to the green and gray segments way too late and... in the future i will probably remember this comic explicitly to hurry myself into fixing up the palette when it's not feeling quite right so it doesn't end up like this one.

ETA: i should mention, this is a common solution to migraines caused by back issues; there's a sore spot somewhere in the first to fourth vertebrae (your neck), and when you rub it and press it back into place for about 30 seconds, it resolves the migraine. for me it feels like a burning head rush (very bad) after rubbing it, but it's definitely worth it, it's just easy to interpret as dying or something very wrong during that brief window.
in this comic, the pressing was pretty short, but even slightly massaging it helps with the pain a lot -- down to kind of a bad headache instead of a migraine. at the end you can see the gray anesthetic aura is still there, but much lighter... that's because the problem wasn't necessarily entirely resolved, but i interpreted it as resolved. the anxiousness about dealing with pain as a sensation still makes me tend to just reduce pain down to tolerable and interpret that as completely gone.