Hands on - Hands off

I guess you can call this a hands-on exercise. For some reason that I haven't discovered yet this was actually one of the exercises I looked forward to the most while waiting for the blog (It could be as simple as that it was easy to remember and easy to interpret)

So what can you learn about me from looking at this image? Well, besides from the obvious (that I like doodling and using a lot of colors) I've got small hands and very thin wrists (I'm not SURE you can tell this but I really do), I don't bite my nails and I usually don't wear nailpolish anymore (only when I'm dressing up for some reason) I've got a silver ring in the shape of a rose that I call my "divorce ring" and consider as important as a marriage ring. I got it from my mom, my brother and my sister-in-law the day I moved in to my own apartment after the divorce and it symbolizes A LOT to me, strength in myself, the people that still love me, freedom, a commitment to stand up for myself and never do the same mistaken again (at least next time I will invent some new mistakes LOL) and much, much more. And yes, my hands DO have black outlines... at least they did after doing this drawing. LOL





If the former was a hands-on exercise the later is just the opposite, It can't be more hands-off than writing with your mouth. LOL And since there wasn't much room for the red, pink and purple colors on the first drawing I decided to only use these colors this time.

On the right side it says "Fia" and "Det här är svårt" meaning "This is hard" (which it really, really was!) And the left side says:

Att skriva så här gör att jag känner mig väldigt tacksam över att kunna använda mina händer och beundra dom som inte kan och ändå är k r e a t i v a

To write like this makes me feel very grateful to be able to use my hands and admire those who can't and still are c r e a t i ve

Even while it's a strange sentence grammatically (even in Swedish) it's very true.

I have a quite limiting disease called CFS and even though I learned to live with it many years ago it's still good to be able to feel grateful for the things I CAN do instead of missing the things I can't.

And I truly admire everybody that no matter what life throws at them not only manages to go on with their lives but can actually remain creative as well (for me creativity is one if the big differences between "surviving" and "living")

This also reminds me of a girl I got to know back in 98. She was paralyzed but was able to type, very slowly, with the help of a stick she held in her mouth. To speed this up she wrote what I use to call "chat speak". This is always hard to read if your first language isn't English and since this was during first year online my English REALLY wasn't what it is today so it was VERY hard for me to read what she wrote. But I decide that if she could use as much time and energy as she did to write something I should at least be able to put as much time and energy in to reading it.

Now, we were never THAT close, forum friends mostly that also exchanged some mails and I no longer remember why we lost touch. But writing with my mouth makes me remember both her and my other friends at that forum.