Tag Archives for sketchbook

Illustrating Pain

I write a fair bit about my use of art, in particular, doodling and drawing, to distract my thoughts from the pain I feel. In the past, I’ve also attempted to draw representations of how I think my pain could look. I haven’t done that in a while because the concentration it takes is not always available to me and the meditative value of unplanned, spontaneous line drawing has become a large factor behind why I do so much of it. No measuring, no choosing of a complementary colour palette, just grabbing a pen or pencil and allowing my hand to move it across the page.

About a week ago, as I was scrolling through the feed of one of my creative connections on Instagram, Dana “Jonesy” Jones, I saw an illustration she created to symbolize her back pain. I commented that I could probably fill an entire sketchbook with only illustrations of my pain. I’m actually positive that I could fill multiple volumes. However, to start with, I decided to create just one page.

For about a month, I’ve been riding the wave of an intense and lengthy pain flare up – I define a flare up as pain I measure, on the very subjective pain scale, that stays above 7 or 8 consistently – so this idea came at an ideal time. Thanks to Dana’s inspiration, I sat down and focussed on what I felt in my body: The sharp edges of glaringly bright colours trying to cut through the deepest layers of my flesh to burst free of their confines, which might, unintentionally, free me. The overlapping of sensations that are indistinguishable as they land simultaneously and pound the life out of every nerve they touch. Even on a “good” day, this pain keeps wrapping around itself and within me.

Here’s a glimpse of how I imagine my pain looking during this flare up…

 

 

Falling Away

I’ve had a terrible time in recent weeks: extremely erratic sleep, high pain levels, low mood, swollen legs and feet, and tears. As terrible as it’s been, I’m always conscious, and working at accepting, that when one has to save their energy to cope with intense pain every day, other things in life sometimes need to fall away.

I’ll use a recent situation to illustrate my point: The sink in my bathroom was replaced. What started out as a small leak became a major undertaking when the exact location of the leak couldn’t be isolated. I noticed the leak months ago. It caused a constant slow drip of water into the cabinet under the bathroom sink. I had to remove all the toiletries and other bits and pieces stored in the cabinet because the drip became strong enough to splatter and get things wet. To prevent water damage I also placed a small container on the spot where I saw the drip landing and pooling on the bottom of the cabinet.

Shortly after I placed the first call to the resident maintenance manager, he came to inspect the leak. After his inspection, he assured me that it was a minor issue he could probably resolve within an hour. He returned the next day with all his plumbing gear and a replacement part for something on the sink’s main pipe. Can you tell I know nothing about plumbing from that statement?

As promised, within an hour he stood up from under the sink and declared the leak fixed. Unfortunately, the next day when I opened the cabinet doors and knelt on the floor in front of the empty cabinet ready to replace the shelf paper and refill it with my things I noticed that an area of the shelf was wet. I was not happy about it.

I placed another call to the maintenance manager. He found it unbelievable that his work had not resulted in a permanent fix of the leak. He returned to my home and fiddled under the sink a few minutes longer than he had the first time. This time he said the issue was not a pipe at all. It was the sink itself, which due to age and erosion had sprung a leak on its bottom. This time, to complete the repair, the sink had to go and a new one installed in its place. When this would happen or how long it would take was up in the air. The maintenance manager first had to check his inventory to see if he had a spare sink that would fit then schedule a time to do the work.

As I said before, that was months ago. While I waited, I moved all the things that once filled the cabinet under my bathroom sink to the hallway outside my bathroom. All those things sat in uneven rows I had to walk past many times every day for months: bottles of shampoo and conditioner, jars of hair gel, bottles of lotions, soaps, hair clips, makeup, and more. I passed it all in the hallway every day and tried to pretend it wasn’t there driving the neat freak inside me crazy. I didn’t fuss or make a complaint about the length of time it was taking to fix what started out as a small leak. Instead, I waited patiently for the maintenance manager to buy a new sink and complete the repair.

This story about the repair and eventual replacement of my sink is akin to what my life has become. Since my misdiagnosis nearly five years ago, I’ve had to allow many things to fall away and become less rigid about who I am and what I find acceptable. I no longer fuss or complain about my circumstances, nor do I push my doctors to do something to make me better NOW; as I did with the doctors at the beginning of all of this. Doctors whom I did not trust, with good reason, since I soon learned they misdiagnosed my illness. Much like waiting for the arrival of a new sink, there isn’t much I can do to hurry things – namely the changes in my health that I desire. Even though treatments continue to be unsuccessful, I believe my current doctors are looking for answers and doing everything they can for me.

I now bear the inconvenience of delayed deliveries, the disappointment of canceled plans, and last-minute rescheduled appointments or treatments as if they were displaced bottles of shampoo and lotions because I understand that sometimes $h!t just happens and I have to roll with it. Still, the most significant thing that has fallen away is any unreal expectation(s) that the first attempt with newly prescribed medication(s) or treatment(s) may instantly cure and make all that ails me better because sometimes the fall from the height of unrealistic expectations hurts more than the pain itself.

Besides, the intensity and wide arc of the moods and emotions (anxiety, anger, agitation, sadness, and more…) don’t serve me well either. In fact, they worsen my pain. Therefore, allowing them and so many other things to fall away is necessary to cope better with my illness. Furthermore, I’m finding that the more I relax about things, the less likely I am to have a pain flare up, which is a small comfort when a body always has pain.

Falling Away
Falling Away
Falling Away - Cropped
Falling Away – Cropped

 

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…