DR. ANXIETY OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE GREEN LANTERN, a thread:
I’ve had an anxiety disorder all my life, and undiagnosed OCD, but the two never manifested themselves to the extent that they were debilitating until the winter of 2019, when my fixations began 1/

To revolve around my (irrational) perceptions of high blood pressure, heart arrhythmia, heart disease, you name it. I obsessed constantly. I checked my pulse hundreds of times a day. I lived in a *constant* state of fear, dread, and with a sense of impending and looming doom 2/

Until this point, I had never been a big Green Lantern fan. Beyond adoring John Stewart in the classic cartoon, the cheesiness of the mythos never really pulled me in. I was a casual fan, the sort that would say, “oh cool,” when they popped up in an issue of something else 3/

I was reading, but nothing beyond that. It was until this newfound manifestation of my disorder that crippled me (and some days still tries to) that I found a lot of resonance in the simple but powerful core themes that the GL represents. Enter, Jessica Cruz and GREEN LANTERNS 4/

She has an anxiety disorder. She has agoraphobia. It was then that the notion that GL’s have the “ability to overcome great fear” started hitting me. I related to it. I found empowerment in it. The power to overcome the seemingly all-consuming fear I was dealing with 5/

Therapy helped, too, of course. And I am still in regular therapy. But I have since become a huge fan of many GL characters, the wild cosmic stories, the grandiosity of the universe as it is depicted, the weirdness of the mythology, the constructs, and mostly the ever-relevant 6/

Theme of overcoming fear. Comics, even the sillier ones (which GL unabashedly is), matter. They can change lives. Or at least make the daily struggles easier. /end thread