Meet Grandma Cat! This is the first time I tried drawing her. You can see the date is January last year. I started drawing Grandma Cat because I was struggling to draw anything at all. I have been struggling for a few years at this point with anxiety and depression and things came to a head in the fall of 2023 when my dad had a major medical emergency. I am not close to my dad, and have not been for years. It’s a difficult and complicated story, but the short, sanitized version of it is that my dad and I don’t see eye to eye on a LOT of things, and we had been fighting ever since he had a heart attack several years earlier and then fought against me and my sister as we did our best to help him and take care of him and our mom.
Anyway, after years of struggling with my dad and dealing with more problems and more fighting, I started having anxiety attacks. And that made drawing anything incredibly difficult, impossible in fact. I’d been working with a therapist, trying to deal with the anxiety, and talked about focusing on things I enjoyed, things that made me happy, even if they were jut small things. That led me to think about webcomics that I love – Cat’s Cafe, Floaty Space Cat, Purr.in.ink, Marengo Comics, and others. After a bit of thought, I decided to try drawing a simple, one panel comic with a simply, cozy message. Nothing fancy, nothing brilliant or hysterically funny, just something that reminded me of the things I enjoyed, big or small, and gave me a cozy, warm feeling while I was drawing.
The result was Grandma Cat. A cozy, huggable older cat who enjoyed living the slow life. It was still hard to draw, as it turns out, but with a lot of time, and several episodes, it did get easier.
I am feeling better these days, although I am still dealing with anxiety and depression. And I’m still doing therapy. There’s a lot of stressful things going on in my life, but I am learning how to deal with them, and Grandma Cat has been a big part of that. I hope you enjoy her adventures.