Category Archives for InkTober

InkTober 2017: Day 3 – Poison

The word ‘poison’ conjured up so many images – most of them literary. There was, of course, Juliet. According to Shakespeare, she pretended to end her life with poison because she couldn’t see any other way to be with Romeo whom she fell in love and married after knowing him for only a few days. Then she really had to end her life after, unbeknownst to him, her grieving new husband found her temporarily lifeless body and ended his own life because he couldn’t live without her. Definitely a tragic tale and probably Shakespeare’s best known. However, I prefer a more ancient tale of doomed young love that involves a slightly more complicated love story that ends in a similar fashion found within the pages of ‘Tristan and Iseult’. A medieval tale that became popular in the 12th century.

My mind then jumped to modern fairy tales where beautiful young girls tend to get poisoned just because they are young and beautiful. I immediately thought of the two immortalized by Walt Disney and idolized by little girls everywhere: ‘Snow White’ and ‘Sleeping Beauty’. Snow White became an orphan. However, instead of loving her, her stepmother envied her for her beauty, goodness, and youth. That envy grew into hatred, which… you know where this story goes. Then in Sleeping Beauty’s case, she was poisoned because her parents made a faux pas and left a rather important (and powerful) person off the guest list for her christening. Rather than letting it go, that slighted guest allowed her anger to consume her, so she cast a spell that of course involved poison and voilà: the beautiful, very much-loved, young girl was put in a coma.

I apologize for my glibness.

These stories are all beautiful and at the same time sad, but they tell us something about the human psyche too. As long ago as medieval times – and probably before humans had written languages – we’ve been obsessed with love, violence, and death. ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and ‘Tristan and Iseult’ are passionate love stories where violent incidents bring the main characters together and then end with their tragic deaths – albeit by their own hands.

Similarly, violence is inherent to fairy tales where we see children, men, and women repeatedly threatened by all manner of actions that can, and often do, result in their deaths. Even more interesting is that fairy tales are styled the way they are because they were written originally for adults, which makes sense when thinking about what kind of story would keep adults entertained.

I had no idea this is where my thoughts would take me when I started thinking about this post. Nonetheless, writing about this makes me wonder, whether telling these stories to children and young adults – I was introduced to ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in ninth grade – doesn’t somehow poison their thinking and normalize violence with very little effort.

This is probably the kind of thing I should think about while savouring a good glass of wine…

 

 

InkTober 2017: Day 2 – Divided

Divided: that’s a loaded word for me. For a long while, I’ve been feeling that my life is divided. It got that way four years ago, on the day my illness showed up. I didn’t know it then but, since the first moments, it divided time into before and after illness. I’ve tried not to think of my life that way, at least not from a negative perspective, because I know that my life is greater than these two dimensions. However, the truth is, I have to acknowledge that my life is not the same.

It may never be what it was before the day two extra-strength Tylenols weren’t enough to soothe the pain as it grew in my lower abdomen. It may never be the same as it was before I lost control of my trembling body. Trembling that became uncontrollable shaking because the pain was so overwhelming. My life may never be the same as it was before the ambulance ride that took an eternity to get me to the hospital emergency room. Before the months of multiple doctors’ misdiagnoses or the reluctant surgeon’s year of waffling about whether she could or would ever try to help me by doing the surgery she trained to do. Nor may it become the same, as after illness, since finally having surgery didn’t result in the end of any of my pain.

The interesting thing is that the space I occupy now is nowhere near after illness. It can’t possibly be when there are moments when all I can think about is freeing my body of pain and when that pain-free time will become permanent. My current existence is probably better characterized as ‘since illness’, which is an altogether different division. So far, each pain treatment I’ve undergone has delivered negligible short-lived relief or completely failed; and if the ongoing pain treatments are any indication, I may never achieve an after illness state.

Yet, I must continue living without losing hope, or my sanity. I have to keep myself grounded to avoid causing myself unnecessary grief because, as I’ve been taught: suffering is wanting something other than what exists in the present moment. Therefore, looking back at what was in my past (before illness) or what’s in store for my future (after illness) is unhelpful.

My life didn’t stop because of my illness. Although I fully accept that it changed, there’s no need to divide it into pieces and compartmentalize events into good and bad. I will, however, continue to live in the present, mindful of focussing on each moment as it comes.

The image I’ve chosen today to illustrate the word divided is a pie. We divide whole pies into slices to feed others and ourselves. If a thing must be divided I prefer to look at the possible positive outcomes from its division.

 

InkTober 2017: Day 1 – Swift

Last year, I participated in the month-long InkTober challenge for 2016. It was the first time I did something like that. It required me to draw something every day and I put my twist on it by using the daily prompts to inspire mindful writing to pair with the drawing I posted. Drawing something, every day, was challenging but it was also fun. However, it was a challenging month – for a few different reasons.

The first was that, in my opinion, my artistic skills were not very strong so it was an opportunity to improve. Mustering the energy to complete the challenge each day was often difficult because of my health. Some days it was exhausting to divert energy from coping with my pain to concentrating long enough to draw – and write – something then post it online, but I got it done. It was also difficult to figure out what to draw each day, even though the challenge provides a single word prompt for each day. The words from the prompt list (e.g. fast, noisy, collect, hungry) were sometimes difficult to depict in a line drawing, but I managed to figure something out each day.

I ended InkTober 2016 feeling that I accomplished so much, that this year I’ll be using the challenge in the same way. Today is the first day of InkTober 2017 and the prompt is ‘swift’. Here goes…

The first thing that came to mind when I read the word ‘swift’ was a horse: a wild horse. I envisioned a wild horse running across unending green prairies. There was just one problem. I had no idea how to draw a horse in motion the way I could see it in my imagination. So I went searching online for a photo that might help me figure it out. Thankfully, I found something better. On Pinterest, the treasure chest of everything DIY, I found a quick visual step-by-step tutorial for a galloping horse. About 30 minutes after drawing a few basic shapes and lines, I had drawn the horse I wanted.

Looking back at what I was capable of drawing last year and this drawing for my first entry of InkTober 2017, I feel that my skills have grown. I’m looking forward to seeing where I’ll be in 30 days…