99% of “mysterious disappearances” esp of people in their 20s who start acting weird for 48 hours and then vanish are not mysterious, thats just when a lot of reality-obliterating mental illness tends to kick in and it’s pretty easy to get a short circuit in your brain that makes you go family guy death pose in joshua tree national park. it’s not any less tragic, it’s just a documented phenomenon and not particularly predictable. its a big reason the medical advice is for people with a family history of schizophrenia to completely avoid weed and psychedelics. “people just go crazy sometimes” is a principle of human health that used to be a lot more accepted prior to the american midcentury and to a certain extent thats a healthier way to conceptualize and prepare for the risk, as opposed to the modern assertion that anyone acting weird is dangerous and broken forever.
you should have a rough outline of a plan for if any of your loved ones experiences psychosis, it really does happen a lot. UTIs can cause psychosis. taking drugs, even safe drugs, or prescription drugs, can cause psychosis. i was once prescribed a heavy regimen of vitamin D because i was deficient, but the doctor never told me to stop taking it, so i moved to california, stopped being deficient, and developed vitamin d toxicity with downstream hyperparathyroidism which triggered significant hypomania that was undetected and uncontrolled for yeeeeeeears. i just slowly got Weird and started making impulsive decisions based on slightly out-of-gamut beliefs. i drove cross country by myself to have a love affair. the love affair was real, the series of decisions leading to burning down my life in pursuit of it were based on not great brain function however. etc. you see what i mean. churchill mentioned depression being the “black dog who stalks us” (one reason for Churchgrim’s multi-referential name) but theres another, stealthier dog called Insanity and it’s closer to some people than others but man it sneaks up on you. every time i see one of those “guy gets weird and drives into the wilderness forever” missing persons stories i think “yeah i could totally pull that off”
“van gogh cut off his ear what a lunatic” you are 3 nights of bad sleep, getting unexpected upsetting news and taking a substance as benign as coffee at the wrong time away from doing the same hope this helps
Your first mistake in art is thinking you draw men and women inherently differently
I’m serious, this is genuinely not a joke. There’s no wrong way to do art but you do make a mistake when you think that you draw men and women differently without any overlap or gray area, like they’re two opposites and that’s how they’ll always be FOREVER. Treating two genders as vastly different is absolutely the incorrect way to think about things and considering how anatomy is one of the first things you practice when you start drawing human or human adjacent characters, it becomes harder and harder to unlearn as time goes on
When learning to draw, you need to understand that there’s more body types for ALL genders than just “flat as a board with no hips” and “slightly thinner waist with larger chest”
“sure there’s purple haze in the sky, and they say maybe we’re running out of time. but i don’t care, ‘cause you and i know that love is all we need to survive.”
