Time & Perspective Quote by Julie Doucet

Burnout lands here not as a buzzword but as an aesthetic crisis. Doucet doesn’t frame quitting as a failure of nerve or a lack of ideas; she frames it as the logical endpoint of a medium that can devour its maker. “Completely sick of it” is deliberately blunt, almost anti-mythic. It refuses the romantic story of the suffering artist and replaces it with the bodily truth: exhaustion, irritation, the sense of being trapped inside your own output.

The telling detail is the monotony of “all the time.” Comics, especially the intensely personal, hand-built kind Doucet is known for, aren’t a single act of inspiration; they’re a grinding sequence of decisions, panels, lines, revisions. When she says she “didn’t have the time or energy to do anything else,” she’s describing how the form can colonize a life. The subtext is about identity: when your work schedule becomes your personality, the page starts to feel less like expression and more like enforcement.

Context matters. Doucet emerged from alternative comics scenes that prized authenticity and autobiographical candor, but rarely offered sustainable conditions - financially, psychologically, physically. Her statement reads like a quiet indictment of that economy: the culture wants relentless production, then calls it devotion. The final line, “That got to me in the end,” is understated and devastating. It’s not a dramatic exit; it’s erosion. Quitting becomes an act of self-preservation, a refusal to let a beloved craft become a totalizing relationship.