Does burlesque give you inner peace because it has the same lack of control? Because a lot of things seem to happen on your tours lately, like murder hotels!

Yeah, being on tour, being part of something so much bigger than me as an individual, collaborating on stuff, traveling in a small space with other people and no independence — I get very little say on where I am or when or what I do. So having no opportunities to take control, I can relax the way little kids relax because their day-to-day destinies are more or less controlled by other people.

At one point, I took a nap in a stranger's house and woke up to find myself completely alone. Everyone else had gone to a movie without me. I didn't know where I was or when everyone would be back. I was hungry, but didn't know where to find food. I was powerless, but it was stressing me out more. I found myself getting angry at everyone else for leaving me behind, even though I told them to go on without me. So even though I was mad at them, I kept it to myself until I realized I was being irrationally upset, and within a few hours, I was completely over it.

This sounds kind of like exposure therapy: You wanted to get over things getting to you all the time, so you put yourself in an environment where "anything that can go wrong does…."

Plus I've found that dwelling on bad things can make more bad things happen, just because being so distracted by the bad things causes you to miss out on some good opportunities for good things. Like, I recently had to take down one of my comics (I Was Kidnapped by Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space) that I'd been working on for years because of disputes with the publisher. I'd been going through all this conflict with them, and it was upsetting. I'd cry for a half hour, and then I'd get up and do more work, looking to the future, getting my mind off the misfortune. And I set up some good work, so that literally one hour after I took my comic off the Internet, I got an email saying I'd been accepted into Smut Peddler, an award-winning comic anthology I'd been dreaming so hard of getting into. But if I'd let myself fall deeply into worrying about the loss of this other comic, I'd never have submitted to Smut Peddler.

So this has basically been a journey helping you learn to manage your depression?

I had the twins: depression and anxiety. I've found the anxiety much easier to get rid of, and the depression is something that will probably always be here, because it's a chemical thing, but I've learned to control it and not be consumed by it.

But yeah, being on the road has done so much more for me than therapy ever ever did. I'd talk to counselors who would ignore the things that were really bothering me in favor of talking about things they felt more comfortable handling even though I considered them minor problems. I'd try avoiding the problems, which only helps for so long. I had a period of time, right before I started working with SHFB, where I went completely numb. The house fire didn't really magically get rid of my anxiety overnight, and it was a really “up and down” time for me emotionally.

I found myself living in a motel for months, and it was the worst time of my life, even more than the actual fire itself. I couldn't be loud because the other occupants would complain, so I just got quiet. The bed was uncomfortable, so I was barely sleeping. The motel was in a part of town that had no trees and just asphalt and cars and shopping malls as far as the eye could see. It was at a point in my old day job at a TV station where I was very unhappy with the work I was doing. I would go from my small, windowless hotel room to my small windowless office to work and then back to my small windowless hotel room. … When I was in the motel, I very much had this feeling that everything would be better once I moved back into my own house. It didn't quite work out like that. It helped for sure, but there was still a lot to fix.

I got laid off from my TV job, which was another thing I couldn't control that gave me peace in the lack of control. I'd wanted to quit, but I felt like if I did, I would come to regret it. Being laid off meant it was completely out of my hands and there was nothing to regret. Super Happy Funtime decided to start shooting some real music videos, as opposed to taking video during shows, and they needed people who knew the ins and outs of production, and they'd heard I did good work on that front. So I was helping out behind the scenes with the burlesque, learning even more about how they operated and what they needed. By the time I joined up as a permanent cast member, they knew how hard I could work, they knew what I could do.