Time & Perspective Quote by Lynn Johnston

There is a quiet brutality in the way Johnston frames selfhood as something you excavate, not express. “A long time to become the person I am” rejects the pop-myth of instant authenticity; identity here is a late harvest, earned through weather. Then she swerves into body-horror imagery - “ugliness,” “rotten flesh” - language that sounds almost too raw for a cartoonist, which is exactly why it lands. Cartooning is often treated as gentle, even quaint. Johnston reminds you that the “funny pages” have always smuggled in grief, divorce, shame, and mental illness under a readable line.

The metaphor does two things at once: it admits damage without romanticizing it. “Fallen away” suggests shedding, not being miraculously cured. “Rotten flesh is gone” implies that parts of the self can become toxic over time - habits, coping mechanisms, a story you told about who you had to be. It’s not a makeover; it’s a debridement.

Then comes the real pivot: “the seed is there.” Not a fully formed flower, not a triumphant new identity, just potential - small, stubborn, alive. The final sentence, “I can touch that now,” is the emotional thesis. The win isn’t perfection; it’s access. After years of noise and protective scab, she can finally make contact with the core that existed before the damage, or perhaps underneath it. For an artist whose work builds intimacy panel by panel, that “touch” is also craft: drawing as a way to reach what language alone can’t safely hold.