I have been coloring a lot lately. In coloring books. They are “adult” coloring books, so the designs are more complicated and intricate than my old Little Mermaid coloring books, but I’m struggling to stay within the lines just like I used to as a kid, and I feel silly for needing to do this instead of creating something of my own from scratch. I used to knit and crochet as a way to calm down, but I haven’t had the mental energy to focus on a project like that. When I received a handful of gift cards for Chanukah, from my students, I decided to buy coloring books and markers, as a way to de-stress. And they worked. I’ve always needed distractions like this to help with anxiety, but since the presidential election in the United States, and then even more so since the inauguration of our current president, the anxiety in the air and the onslaught of news each day has been overwhelming me.
I haven’t been writing much about our current political climate, in the United States, in Israel, or in the world at large, because there’s too much to process each day, even each hour sometimes, and I feel like I have nothing to add that hasn’t been said a hundred times already. I’m frightened, and overwhelmed, and feeling helpless, and all of the suggestions for how to take action have overwhelmed me even more, because they assume I have resources (like energy and money) that I don’t have.
So, I color. I’m on my third coloring book, and I’ve graduated from simple markers to gel pens in every shade. I started with pictures of animals in general, then birds in particular, and then I moved on to abstract designs. I’ve also been watching tons of Hallmark and Hallmark-like movies on YouTube, and the combination of the movies and the coloring have been helping, somewhat.
I’m still writing and teaching and going to my Hebrew classes and taking care of Tzipporah and going to doctors’ appointments and listening to podcasts and Israeli music and forcing myself to watch and read the news, but I’m depending more and more on my hours of coloring each day to help me organize my brain, following the lines someone else has created and trying to figure out which colors will make the patterns become clear to me.
I wish I was up to doing something more. I wish I could get more writing done each day, or knit a few sweaters, or go out into the streets, or just fix the world snip snap, but this seems to be what I can do for now. It feels selfish to spend money on pens and coloring books instead of sending that money to various organizations supporting reproductive rights or immigrants’ rights or children in Ukraine, but I can’t help anyone else when I feel so lost. I wake up feeling like everything is out of control and the world is breaking apart like pieces in a kaleidoscope, and then I turn on a Hallmark movie and open a coloring book and I feel a little bit more together and a little bit more capable of doing the things I need to do.
I don’t know how everyone else is coping. Maybe there are even people who don’t feel stressed at all by the current state of affairs, though I don’t know them. People keep telling me that we just have to survive through the next four years, but I don’t have confidence that I will survive four years of this, or that this will only last four years, and that level of fear makes it hard to plan ahead. If the rules change every day, and I have no idea what the new rules will be, it’s hard to believe that I will ever be able to play the game. I remember this feeling from my childhood, where the only way my father could feel safe and secure was if he pulled the rug out from underneath me, or someone else. His security and mine existed on a seesaw, and that’s how it feels with our current president, that the things that make him feel better will inevitably make me feel worse.
I wish I could fix this, or go back in time to prevent it somehow, or create a world of my own that I could crawl into and avoid the news completely, but I don’t know how to do any of those things. So, I color, and I get by, and that’s the best I can do, for now.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
rachelmankowitz 