Hope is a discipline

I log onto my forsaken, archaic LinkedIn account and scroll to peek into my old world. I do this to remember why I left. I remove every “connection” that I see engaging with some of the more egregious right wing content. There isn’t a purpose to this but I indulge myself. I log off and instead go to scroll the pancreatic cancer subreddit, a place I find strange familiarity and comfort lately. I feed my need for knowing more about things that are, in reality, unknowable. I nurture the illusion of this process making me a more capable caretaker. 

I lie down to sleep for a few hours, because the late afternoon sun in my bedroom makes for the best naps and because I have given up on a regular sleep schedule despite the best suggestions of people who love me. 

Earlier, I am in the ER. I’m in the same room, and with the same RN, as three months ago — the last time I brought someone here to be seen. I spoke to this RN just last Friday, one of our now-frequent calls about the care I help provide since the three-months-ago visit. Today I’m here for a different person and a less dreadful reason and he says jokingly “we have to stop running into each other here!”  It’s a quick visit, the wait is more boring than fear-filled. But what if it wasn’t? This could have been so much worse. I have so much love for people who are so fragile. Soft animal bodies. 

Though mine feels more like calcified mass and molasses lately. My mind is full of snapshots of things big and small that threaten to break me individually and together.

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Something ends that I thought was only beginning. I’m mentally rewriting the list of things that I was looking forward to. I quite literally write poetry to get grief out of my system and eat cake that my sister brought me. I go through denial and bargaining inside my own head. I watch myself do all this and feel what I can only describe as deep second-hand embarrassment.

I read about another Palestinian journalist who was murdered by israel. He was 23 and he wrote his own obituary in advance. 

I re-read the book Bitter by Akwaeke Emezi which always reminds me that there are many roles in a revolution. I listen to it as an audiobook this time, and I delight in how well narrated it is. A few hours in I realize the narrator is the same person who narrates my favourite night time meditation. I consciously enjoy the small comfort of finding this connection.

I scroll past an image I’ve read about in the last couple of days — one that has been making gleeful rounds on russian social media. It’s a Ukrainian child’s skull on a russian soldier’s rifle, he is posing for the photo. Ice runs through my veins every time this happens. I try to assess how bad of a sign it is that I can’t look at a sunflower without thinking of a head on a spike now, and I wonder if planting the tall row of sunflowers in my yard is a good idea. 

I then wonder if the embroidered illustration that I’m starting work on can be finished by next month’s deadline for an upcoming art show. If it sells I’ll spread the proceeds among a few fundraisers for the Ukrainian front lines. I think guiltily of the group chat full of Ukrainian activists with rad politics that I joined just before my life got more unruly than usual, another commitment I disappeared from in the last few months.

I let myself ruminate on how I would be doing so much more if approximately a dozen things were different in my life in this moment. I remind myself that a theoretical reality and a theoretical body doesn’t exist, and I refocus on what’s doable now.

I finish writing the one-pager on covid safety that I started when I was sick with my week-long cold, the worst I’ve ever had. It’s rough and spotted with white out and isn’t polished at all. I love it. I photocopy it and realize I wrote content too close to the edges so the copies are cutting off. I try to fix the scaling too many times. I am annoyed and I decide to just manually write in the missing pieces on the photocopies. I think about the people I love who watch me do this kind of work and never engage with it, or engage with it and do not change their behaviour.  I feel like a nuisance for continuing to be too disruptive about this. I feel like a failure for casting fewer ripples about this.

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After we get back from the ER, I do my weekly testosterone shot. I think about the mitigations I’m putting in place for the likely event that access to this medication gets cut off at some point for me and other people like me. Some above-ground stuff. Some anarchist calisthenics. This reminds me to register for the workshop coming up on feminizing herbs for trans girls. 

I stay up late writing this because I feel despair seeping out of my skin lately and everyone I know is dealing with their own devastations in all spheres, from personal to communal to global to existential. I remember a dream I had where I told an artist I admired that their writing is so illustrative and to-the-point, that they don’t over-explain to their audience. In the dream they told me that I can simply try to write like that too. I don’t overthink this before hitting publish. 

I have to wake up early tomorrow. I’ll just try to keep going again.