The UncAngie
by
Angela Adee Andriesse
Details from Cartoon Panels
Artist Statement
The UncAngie is an autobiographical comic about masking, late autism diagnosis, and what happens when a survival self starts to fall apart. For most of my life, I relied on a social "mask" to move through the world as acceptable-friendly, high-performing, and easy to read. That mask kept me safe, but it also required constant maintenance, and the cost was disconnection from my own body, needs, and interior life.
In this comic, ritual appears in the everyday practices that regulate me— repetition, pattern, and coping strategies that kept me functioning inside systems that were never designed for my nervous system. Some of those rituals were harmful. Some were restorative. All of them were attempts to create stability, to mark transitions, and to survive.
UncAngie is my uncanny double— the familiar made strange (Freud 2023). She holds the parts of me I learned to hide: the sensory truths, the stubbornness, the "too much," the unfiltered self that wouldn't translate. she is not a persona I invented so much as a version of me who returns once the mask stops working. Through her, the comic explores the fragmentation masking produces and the slow work of becoming whole.
Healing here is not a tidy redemption narrative. It's practice. It's learning what softness feels like, what my body is asking for, and what it means to live without disappearing. The UncAngie is a world-making project: a small, defiant insistence that a livable life can be built from the materials of rupture-through honesty, visibility, and the ritual of returning to myself.
References
Freud, Sigmund. 2023 (1919). The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock. Penguin Classics.