Hi. I’m Jason Adam Katzenstein.
And today, we’re gonna draw some intrusive thoughts.
Weren’t we?
[bright acoustic music]
So Jason, for this episode,
you proposed talking about drawing thoughts.
I have a lot of thoughts,
and we were talking about intrusive thoughts specifically,
and so the sort of thoughts that maybe everybody has,
but perhaps the more anxious among us fixate on.
And you don’t just depict yourself having these thoughts,
the avatars for yourself
having these thoughts in your cartoons,
span inanimate objects, fictional characters,
historical characters.
It’s a therapeutic impulse, I think.
It gives me permission to be more vulnerable
if I can give the thought to inanimate objects
or historical figures or fictional characters
because if somebody else is thinking it
then I don’t have to be responsible for the thought.
I can really probe the deepest darkest parts of my psyche.
[bright acoustic music]
This is a cartoon about an executioner
who apparently sleeps in executioner garb
and is worried about whether or not
he remembered to lock the dungeon.
Have you had some sort of experience
with disastrous consequences?
It’s actually that I haven’t
had the disastrous consequences.
I’d say that if you live with somebody with OCD,
chances are the door is locked,
but that will not preclude this person
from checking over and over again.
I like, too, that it’s this classically
sort of scary character who you humanize
both with this very relatable thought,
but also with like those super cute sheets
and that little little mug and that tiny book.
I really wanted to stress the contrast
between what is heightened and strange about the situation
with the things that are more mundane,
and so that’s why I took a lot of care with the sheets
and the mug and the shading
to make it feel like anybody
who is having trouble tossing and turning.
Your characters don’t look like you,
but they think like you.
I think they’re all self portraits.
I think we’re all making exclusively self portraits.
One interesting component
of all of these thought bubble cartoons
is that they do incorporate your handwriting.
I just always love seeing work
that looks like it’s done by human hand.
I made a font out of my handwriting because-
It’s so much work.
Yeah, yeah.
Having the font of the handwriting made it easier
to change every single word between drafts.
I learned to make a font out of my handwriting
by treating Google the way I often do,
which is as if it’s Ask Jeeves and I just typed in
how do I make a font out of my own handwriting?
I found this website, Calligraphr.
What you do on this website
is you can download a template,
and the template has every letter in the alphabet
and they are lightly on there,
and you quite literally just draw over them
in your own handwriting.
Then all you have to do is upload the template
back to Calligraphr,
and it’ll turn your handwriting into a font.
Voila, you can write.
[bright acoustic music]
We have a fire hydrant who is just sitting on the sidewalk
wondering do cars just hate me?
There’s a person walking by.
There’s a car who is a respectful distance away.
This one comes right from therapy.
[Emma] Yeah?
In OCD group therapy,
we make fun of each other’s obsessive thoughts,
and it’s a tactic that people use
to make those thoughts have less power over each other,
and so it helps you separate yourself from the thought,
and all of a sudden this thing that felt overwhelming
gets to be something that you can laugh at.
That’s just some therapy being paid for
courtesy of The New Yorker that week.
Tell me about the decision to frame the hydrant
with a car and a person.
Part of what’s funny or heartbreaking,
take your pick about this one,
it’s not the fire hydrant is completely alone,
but that just nearby is a car avoiding the fire hydrant
or a person that’s not even looking at the fire hydrant.
So it’s about feeling those feelings
while you’re in a crowd
and you’re surrounded by objects and people.
I like that there’s no villain in this cartoon, though.
But it doesn’t seem like anyone is intentionally
trying to hurt the feelings of the hydrant.
As it is in life,
even the villains don’t go around thinking I’m the villain.
So here we have a lamp and a little side table.
I’m definitely not trying to do a literal verbatim copy
of the thing in front of me.
I think that it has more life
when you can see some of the mistakes,
some of the hesitation.
One thing that I am realizing as I draw this
is that my passport is actually hidden there
in that bottom drawer,
and I have this fear
that I leave for the airport without it,
and so I’m going to invert that situation.
And rather than me feeling upset
about having left the passport,
the passport is upset that I have left it.
[bright acoustic music]
So here we have black hole,
and the black hole is thinking
I’ve absorbed all matter within my gravitational pull.
I should be happy…
It must be liberating in some ways, though,
to make a joke about something
that you’re not so steeped in knowledge of.
I took the one thing I know about black holes,
which is they suck things in,
and the one thing I know about moving the goal post
for what you consider to be a successful and happy life.
So tell me a little bit about the backstory for this one,
if you remember anything about what inspired it.
I do remember what inspired this one,
and it was selling my first cartoon to The New Yorker.
I achieved this dream
and then it didn’t solve every other problem in my life.
Of course, these are things
that I have worked through in therapy
and learning to laugh at these thoughts
has been a way of managing them
that has been really helpful to me.
I’m glad this one sold.
You know what, though?
I’m at a place where I love making these cartoons so much
that it’s no longer for me
about whether or not they sell or are published.
I also just love the medium so much
that I’ve learned to stop marking success by
is this one that was published in The New Yorker
and started to market more by is this one that I’m proud of.
[bright acoustic music]
You don’t always need to approach the blank canvas
with your complete premise already in mind.
You can let the drawing take you
to weird and wonderful places.
I can’t, for the life of me,
tell you why this fish is skateboarding
or what this thing could possibly be if not a pit,
but when I do find out the answers to these questions,
I’ll have some new cartoons.
Sometimes I just don’t even worry
about any of it making sense,
securing the knowledge that drawing
is the most fun thing in the world,
and eventually it might lead me toward an idea,
or it might lead me to a dead end,
but ultimately I’m gonna have a lot of fun in the process.
[bright acoustic music]
