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I’m going to be on a podcast with Josh Woll – who has a really cool Substack about being sober and creative. Right up my alley really.

This is the write up:

Tiffiny Yaxley, aka The Graphical Bear, has been drawing since she can remember. In recent years her comics turned into something bigger: a way to process the messy emotional work of getting sober.

She stopped drinking in May 2022. What followed was a flood of emotion she hadn’t expected, and the realization that what she’d been living with had a name. Her answer was to draw it. Once she could see a feeling as a strip on the page, she could set it down and keep moving.

In this conversation we get into:

• Why drawing a hard feeling as a comic makes it possible to put it down
• What surfaced when the numbing stopped, and how she learned to name it
• Charts, graphs, and the comedy of plotting your own life’s variables
• How her Friday nights, and her friendships, changed shape after she quit
• Doing things because you love them instead of to impress the room
• Finding community and asking for help without losing the humor

Her work is proof that the honest version of your story is usually the funny one too.

I’m feeling stoked to be able to share my story with a new audience and also share something different with my existing connections who follow this blog.

I hope you are able to tune in (it’s gonna be recorded live OR check it out after we record.)

Link to Josh’s Substack here

Finally, I know it’s been a really long time since I posted here – or drawn a comic for that matter. I needed to take a break from drawing after finishing the book, it felt like a good time to pause and work on other endeavors. It’s been nice to focus on other stuff, painting, sports, life…but now I’m starting to feel inspired to draw again and you can expect to see some more comics in the coming months.

Thanks for reading!

-Tiff aka The Graphical Bear