When life looks like scribbles

These past few weeks have been really difficult for me for a few reasons. Tal has become really busy, and I have been left with not much going on. This gap has been incredibly difficult.

Tal recently started a new job. He’s been getting up at 6 a.m. to go to the gym, commuting an hour to work every day, working long hours, then commuting back another hour. By the time he’s home around 7 or 8 p.m., he’s exhausted. It’s difficult for him to give me a lot. The time and playfulness we once had is dwindling, and it’s been really difficult for me. We used to go to Jiu Jitsu together, and now I’ve been going alone because it’s always after he gets back from work and he’s too exhausted.

I started school recently, and I’m supposed to be starting my internship at Sheba Hospital. Unfortunately, the onboarding process has taken a while, and I haven’t been able to work for a few weeks, which has left me in a bit of an in-between state. It’s been tough because I feel like I have so much energy to give. I’m eager to learn, to connect, to grow—yet I’m struggling with where to put that energy.

I’ve thought about starting to advertise myself as a social work student who is providing my own counseling sessions combining talk therapy with movement and creative arts, or working for another organization, I also want to continue working on my own writing and art, but I’m not sure how many hours I should dedicate to each of these things since I don’t know how many hours I’ll be working at the hospital once that starts.

And on top of that, I’m still doing CrossFit and have started to get more into Jiu Jitsu.

As someone who craves deep connection, meaning, and purpose so badly, I have felt incredibly alone and lacking. I know what I need, but taking the step forward in deciding how to act on my needs has been the difficult part.

And because of all of this, lately I have been feeling more numb and more disconnected.

Yesterday I was focusing only on the lack in my life. Lack of connection. Lack of meaning. Lack of purpose. Lack of friends. Lack of a partner around. And now, lack of any emotion or any thoughts in my mind.

I went to go write and I couldn’t. I went to go read and I couldn’t. I went to go learn Hebrew and I couldn’t. I went to try to work on building a website for myself and I couldn’t. I went to go cry and I couldn’t. I tried to talk about things and I couldn’t. I tried to close my eyes and rest and I couldn’t.

Often when we are feeling numb, disconnected, and foggy, we feel as if we can’t do anything. I didn’t know what to do, so I decided to try something I learned in my creative arts class.

It’s called the scribble game.

You take a piece of paper and a marker and close your eyes. Then you scribble randomly all over the page. You open your eyes and make things out of the scribbles based on the images your mind sees within the shapes you made.

I was at a point where I felt like I had nothing in my brain. I felt like I had nothing going on in my life. I felt empty. I felt foggy.

I looked at the shapes and thought, how the hell am I going to do this in this state of mind? I was lacking all thoughts, creativity, and emotion.

But slowly, slowly, things began to emerge.

I started to feel present again. I started to feel motivated. I started to find images within the scribbles.

And eventually, I transformed the scribbles into a full, colorful, flowing picture.

And I felt like this was such an amazing metaphor for the very things I was experiencing in that moment.

I started with what looked like merely scribbles on a page. It appeared to have nothing within it, just simple lines scattered.

Just like in life, I too looked at my life and only saw scribbles.

But what I didn’t see was all of the beauty lying within the scribbles that my brain hadn’t colored in yet.

When we continue to feel numb and disconnected, we struggle to color those things in, and it makes us feel even more numb and disconnected. It’s too heavy for our brains to handle, so we detach.

But if we can start to feel safe to feel things—to have emotions, to become present again—our brain can slowly see how there actually are so many things lying within the picture.

It’s just our brain that needs to color them in.

And once it starts to see one image and color it in, it feels safer to continue doing so, because it starts to see things not from a place of lack, but from a place of having.

In life, our perspective completely changes based on what we see and what we look at.

Just like in my own life, when I begin to see that I actually do have connection, I do have purpose, I do have things going in my life, I can start to gain the motivation to see the canvas that the scribbles in my life can become.

And that makes me more and more motivated to actually be able to turn those scribbles into actual images.

I have a loving partner. I have a lot of opportunities in front of me. I do have connections I will continue to grow.

Once I began to see the scribbles in my life as baselines for the images to grow, I actually gained the motivation to start coloring them in.

Sometimes life feels like a page of scribbles. It’s uncertain, random, chaotic. But the images are always there; they’re just waiting for us to look closer and color them in.

When we start to see what’s already here — the people who love us, the opportunities around us, the small moments of beauty we begin to create more.

perspective isn’t just how we view life; it’s how we create it. The more beauty we notice, the more we create, and the more we create, the more beauty we see.

We can turn a page of scribbles into a beautiful canvas simply by learning how to see.

(The image in this post is the one I made that day — the product of one very insightful scribble game)