It takes a particular kind of person to find the places where humor lies in a situation as bleak as going through rehab for alcoholism. In this case, it takes a cartoonist. Julia Wertz is a former-member of the now defunct Pizza Island, seven lady cartoonists (including Kate Beaton of Hark! A Vagrant and Deana Sobel of Philip the Sea Lion) who shared a art studio in Brooklyn for two years. Her own comic, Museum of Mistakes (formerly The Fart Party) is largely autobiographical, so, after she went into rehab in 2010 sending cartoons and letters to her friends back on Pizza Island was only natural.
Wertz recently found a few of them, and decided to post three of the less personal ones on the internet. To paraphrase Ladies Making Comics, they are as hilarious as they are honest.
I feel compelled to amend these sentences from her first post regarding the letters, so they will be put in proper context:
These aren’t my best bits of writing but that should be forgiven considering I felt like my head was full of bees and I hardly slept at all because my roommate had one of those ocean sounds machines that sound more like rocks being dragged over glass and I’d ask her not to turn it on but she’d do it anyways after I fell asleep and blahblahblah. Anyways, enjoy? I certainly did not.
Says Wertz about the whole experience:
I’ve gotten a lot of emails asking whether or not rehab actually works and I don’t know how to answer that question because it definitely works for some people and what I learned there was invaluable, however I didn’t stay sober after rehab. I’m sober now, but rehab wasn’t a cure-all for me. Despite that, I would never want to discourage anyone from going, in fact I think everyone should go to rehab just to learn how to be a less shitty person. I’m more than happy to answer any personal emails about it, but I just wanted to put that out there to address similar and/or public ones.
You can read two more of her letters from rehab here and here.
(via Ladies Making Comics.)
