Inktober 2023 Day 31

I never thought this was how Inktober would end. It’s been a bad day for my PTSD, so I’m just quickly posting this and going to spend some time taking care of myself.

Journaling Series: Journaling When There Are No Words

The intro post to this series is here, journaling for mental clarity is here, journaling through fear is here. Journaling to clear your mind is here. Journaling to work out choices is here. The 5 year diary is here. Travel journaling is here.

There are times when there are no words, or words are not enough, but you still want to put marks on paper, because pens are a comfort, pencils are a comfort, paper is a comfort, just the sound they make as they meet is a comfort. Beyond doodling mindlessly, copying down a passage from a favourite book or a poem, or just practicing your handwriting or repeatedly writing down a mantra, here are some things you can try doing:

1. Pick an object or a photo and draw it without looking at the paper, and without picking up your pen (blind contour drawing). You need zero artistic skills for this, and the result doesn’t matter, just your focus on your subject and the movement of the pen or pencil on the paper.

2. Pick up a pen and then list 10 things that you see around you in that pen’s colour/the ink’s colour. This is a variant of a stress reducing exercise that I do regularly (find 10 objects in a certain colour in the area around you), and it helps ground you in the moment and take your mind off things. It’s best to choose an unusual colour for this (not black, blue or brown, but pink, purple, yellow, etc) – something that’s a bit more challenging to find. You can also do this with a pencil and then just pick 10 things in/with a certain shape (triangle, zigzag, hexagon, etc).

3. Pick a pencil, a pen and an eraser, and sketch them. It doesn’t have to be accurate, and nobody cares if you don’t get it anywhere near “right”. These are simple objects to sketch (basically rectangles and triangles smooshed together), they are readily available and usually don’t carry too much emotional baggage with them.

4. Put on some music with no lyrics, grab a piece of paper and some pens, and just sketch the piece. Go abstract, vary lines and shapes and colours with the change of tempo, instrument, etc. I love using Oscar Peterson or Thelonious Monk tracks for this, but it’s best to do it with tracks you already know and love.

I’ve been using a combination of all of these lately. Sometimes they help, sometimes they don’t.

Inktober 2023 Day 27

Three rocket attacks today and I’m getting ready for an uneasy night. They’re sending them in large waves so Iron Dome missed a few and there direct hits and more wounded people today.

In better news the stray black kitten that my mom and brother saved is back from her stay at the vet’s (she had to have her tail removed after she was run over by a car). She’s so friendly and fearless the vet thinks that she belonged to someone who threw her out (a common fate with black cats in particular). But now she has a great forever home and she’s having the time of her life:

Adopt, don’t shop.

Inktober 2023 Day 26

Spent a few hours at the office this morning instead of just working from home. It was nice to get to see people face to face after three weeks. Got caught by a siren attack a few minutes after getting off the bus so I sprinted to the shelter in the middle of a heatwave. There was a direct hit near my parents’ house just as they were bringing home a new stray 4 month old kitten that had its tail amputated after being run over by a car. She’s black, cute, and was terrified by the siren and the booms of the rockets, poor thing. I hope she settles in and the other cats there accept her.

One of my parents’ cats, Ninja, bird watching. She’s the mom of my two cats.

Living Through Difficult Times and Inktober Day 25

I had a phone call with an old friend today, and he asked me what I do to stay sane these days. I told him that I’m back to my chemo routine:

  • Wake up in the morning, take care of my cats and my plants.
  • Do some form of physical activity: run, gym, Nike Training Club workout, walk, something. This is non-negotiable since without it I get very depressed very quickly.
  • Work as best as I can.
  • Have a conversation with at least one friend. Messaging and emails don’t count — phone calls, zoom calls, face to face only. Yes, it makes a difference. I hate making phone calls too — it’s still worth it.
  • Talk to my family as much as possible.
  • Cuddle my cats. They’re very cuddly, and it helps. The little one in particular is velcro.
  • Journal, at least two times a day (morning and evening). These days I go for a midday session too. Write what’s going on and what I’m feeling to process it.
  • Read. It’s always been a comfort to me, and while most people can’t read during treatments and many can’t bring themselves to read anything but the news now, I’ve always found comfort in books.
  • Build Lego every night. It’s the best meditation ever. You can’t feel scared while building Lego. Your mind can’t race while building Lego. There’s only the Lego. And in the end you have something cool in your hands that you’ve built.

It worked then, and so far it works now.

Inktober 2023 Day 24

Had a rough day, topped by a serious rocket barrage at 17:00.

Yesterday we had the first quiet day since the war started, and clearly Hamas was making a point (the point being we won’t be allowed to live in peace here, ever, while they’re still around). They are doing everything they can to pull us into Gaza, because they know it will be a bloodbath, and that’s what they want (if you don’t think that Hamas wants as many Palestinian civilian casualties as possible, you have been living in an alternate reality. They’ve done everything they could to prevent civilian evacuation, including threaten doctors with guns, and they’re hoarding food, water, medical supplies and fuel because they’ve planned this for months in advance, they knew what was coming, they planned for this reaction, and they don’t give a shit about the people of Gaza — they only want dead jews, and as many of them as possible. You are welcome to check on their official charter, if seeing what they did on Saturday and the amount of hostages they have, including over 30 children, some of them babies, isn’t enough).

I saw a doctor that I used to follow on social media bother to create a post with graphics on how horrible we are for deliberately bombing a hospital and how that’s inhumane. She spent hours on those graphics. She spent very little time corroborating the information in them (it wasn’t true. The hospital was a victim of one of the many failed Hamas and Jihad rocket launches). She hasn’t retracted them. She has posted nothing about the hostages (not even the children, the women, the disabled, the sick and the elderly in Hamas’s hands). She’s a “feminist gynaecologist” but wrote nothing about the rape of women (some of them dead, raped after they were brutally murdered) as an act of weaponising sex. She wrote nothing about the Israeli hospital, deliberately hit by rockets while it was taking in hundreds of casualties, the vast majority of them civilians. She wrote nothing about the pregnant mother who was butchered and then had her belly carved open and the baby beheaded too. She wrote nothing about the babies abandoned to die in the fields, or the families burned alive, or the “gas the jews” protests, or the paramedics and doctors targeted by attacks while they were trying to treat and evacuate the wounded — including muslim doctors treating Hamas terrorists.

The post is still up on her feed. It has about 40 thousand likes. It hasn’t been retracted. She’s still posting about women’s health, social justice, rights for minorities. Just not all minorities. Some of us need to learn to be butchered in silence, apparently.

I unfollowed her and everyone who liked that post. If you show me or tell me who you are, I tend to believe you.

For those that survived so far, here’s a sketch of my cat being all melodramatic because it was hot and I hadn’t turned on the AC (I was afraid I wouldn’t hear the sirens, but he got what he wanted in the end).

Here he is all like “look, I’m melting!”

The gym opened today after 16 days, but no pool, no showers and no sauna. They blocked the showers just in case people wouldn’t follow orders. We have 90 seconds to get from the gym and into the depth of the parking lot across the street if there’s a rocket attack while we’re there.

Inktober 2023 Day 23

No rockets last night and so far no rockets today. Could this be the first quiet day we’ve had in three weeks? The north and south weren’t so lucky, of course.

Went on a short run within running distance of a shelter, and saw some monk parrots and a crow scrounging for treats in the grass. Small moments of normalcy in the madness we are living in now.

A young woman I work with was drafted on the terrible Saturday of the 7th of October and has been on active duty ever since. I sketched her today, to cheer her up. I hope she gets to come back to the office safe and sound and hang the sketch on her office cork-board.