A small SM detox
Hello friends,
Hope you guys are finding hope and keeping well. I have been feeling overwhelmed, unmotivated, sad and restless, to add to it I have had constant headaches, and I wake up in the middle of the night to find my brain very active, chattering, planning projects, talking to folks, basically doing everything except resting.
So I decided on a digital detox, I signed out of Instagram, turned the internet off on my phone, decided to check Twitter only in the evening and see how it goes.
One of the things I realised about not being on Instagram and not creating for Instagram meant that I could create without worrying about the number of likes. It isn’t like I worry about that when I draw but I don’t post everything because some things aren’t Insta-worthy. Off late, I had even stopped drawing those. When I told this to my friend, he said, “Our enablers are also sometimes our prisons.” I think it is true. So this break feels good, I don’t need to be jealous of folks and constantly compare, I don’t need to catch up on memes or look at food and try it at home, I don’t need to be available, my brain feels freer.
I did a lot of drawing and I was easy on myself when I did these. I am sharing some.
Here’s how not to talk to folks when they tell you something personal. Stop negating them. Stop making them wrong.
In September, I am going to start a project on gender based violence in intimate relationships (one I have gotten a grant for) looking at surveillance and how womxn’s spaces are taken away and how that could be a precursor to physical violence. I have been working through my own experience, reading, writing and watching videos of other people working in the space and I though this needed to be said.
While making this, I was reminded of Meena Kandasamy’s account in the Outlook where she talks about the violence she faced in her marriage. I had to read it to finally admit to myself that what I was facing was abuse. I didn’t use the word because abuse happened to other people. It would mean questioning something that was so dear to me, something that made me feel I was finally worthy of love, something I wanted to save but something that was constantly dehumanising me and taking away my voice and space. Something I was deeply fearful of.
This piece gave me a vocabulary and made me feel less alone. Violence is extremely isolating. I wondered why I was dealt this, was I not worthy, why is that others have it easy, could I change it so I finally come out as someone who is after all worthy, just had to struggle to get there. To separate self from what one faced has been years of work.
The piece is extremely triggering and is only available to subscribers, I’d recommend you read Meena’s book, When I hit you. (It is triggering and may not be a pandemic read).
Since my work for the next month will be emotionally taxing, triggering and difficult, I have started another project, a happy one, where I am drawing folks as colouring pages. I have drawn two and they are available for free. Here’s the first one and here’s the second. I am not someone who owns a printer and if you are like me, maybe you can download a few (when I make them) and get them printed together. Do let your friends know about it.
I leave you with this:
Take care of yourself.
Warmly,
Indu