#15: "Using fun pens to write lists for boring jobs" and other low-energy coping mechanisms

Plus a couple of dates for your calendar and some things I am working on

Trust me, I am just as surprised as you are that I’m in your inbox today. I last posted on Substack in early Jan after a solid few weeks of semi-consistent posting (regular, but never-on-the-same-schedule). Despite wanting to jump back on to Substack for weeks, and having many ideas, I have had very little motivation to write anything of substance, so 'free and infrequent’ this newsletter shall remain. That said, if you’d like to subscribe to it as is, never knowing what you’re going to get, please go ahead and do so here (I always forget to add this button to my posts so I am so proud I remembered today).

I started writing this edition of Copy & Cake just after Valentine’s Day. It was a post that was meant to highlight a bunch of things I’d been loving and hating in February but then I got sidetracked by another task and didn’t finish it. Its incompletion gnawed at me for the entirety of March, and I dipped in and out of this post, constantly deleting and restarting it, always changing the title, point and content of this particular edition. Meta’s piracy, AI in the arts, and safeguarding creator careers? Too much of a sore point right now. The (possible) onset of perimenopause and how I am feeling about it? No, not while I am still figuring it out. My skincare routine? Difficult, given it’s currently non-existent. Truth be told, what you’re currently reading has gone through so many iterations that I have had to delete reference points and events from this draft simply because they’ve passed and/or are no longer relevant.

I could attribute this aimless, disconnected approach to this newsletter to a bunch of things, but in truth I think it’s just the one thing: a pervasive sense of resignation in the face of so much suffering and uncertainty. There’s a lot happening, be it the rising cost of living, the effects of the Trump presidency, the prominence of AI discussions as a threat to many livelihoods, and the ongoing attacks on Gaza (and its medics and journalists). I don’t think we were designed to withstand the magnitude of this bad news cycle, the visuals coming out of the war zone, and the indifference and gaslighting that has come out of those intellectualising a genocide, like there’s any way you can.

Thankfully, there are calls for culturally-informed trauma responses to the mass suffering of Palestinian communities in the wake of the war, but practitioners in the field know this suffering is so deep-rooted and intergenerational that it can’t be healed by merely compartmentalising the events of the last two years. Then, on a less impactful but still consequential level, there’s the extension of that suffering as it pertains to the broader diasporas of Arabs and Muslims who are only now realising the conditions of their acceptance, respect and humanity in the west.

I fall into this latter category. I can’t tell you how many times I have cried this past week, just watching footage from Palm Sunday processions in Lebanon and Palestine. I can’t tell you how many times I have wallowed with friends over the precarious futures of places and communities so sacred to us, and the gap that widens between us with each passing event. I can’t tell you how many times I have thought of my mother, who lost her father in Lebanon last year, but who was prevented from observing culturally and religiously-significant mourning rituals by the bombs that fell on her homeland amidst the Australian government’s ‘Do not travel’ warnings, which came swifter and firmer than any condemnation of the nation doing the bombing. Or how many times I have thought of the friend who built a successful speaking career from the depths of her suffering a shocking personal trauma, invited to an academic conference in Beirut — all expenses paid; a career highlight — but who declined to attend, because being she’d be a stone’s throw from her own ancestral village and be unable to visit it.

How does one emerge from these experiences unscathed? Spoiler: they don’t. There are moments I tune back in to reality — tentatively, carefully — but for the most part, I have disassociated. This is a defense mechanism; my way of coping, but it’s not a longterm strategy and it doesn’t benefit the collective. But it’s what I am capable of right now: reduced working hours, declined speaking engagements, time at home where the mundane minutaie of everyday life and parenting distract me (and only just).

I call these attempts at maintaining a sense of normalcy my low-energy coping mechanisms. They’re simple and mostly free. They’re twee and totally millennial, I think. But most importantly, they’re also habit forming, comforting, manageable. They suit me. It really is the little things. I’ve listed them below but I’d love to know what your low-energy coping mechanisms are. Are there any I should add to my list?

The coping mechanisms:

• Spending less time on social media

• Icing my face as soon as I wake up, turning my face to the sun at least once a day, turning lamps on instead of overhead lights, washing my bedsheets any chance I get

• Putting on face cream most nights. Looking less like a banshee has a surprising effect on my feelings

• Prioritising protein at meal times even though I sound like a gym bro (Hot tip: putting these protein bars in the fridge makes them taste kind of good)

• Roasting fruit, eating it with yoghurt like it’s dessert

• Looking at pictures of people in gardens and fields. Looking at Nancy Meyer-inspired homes. Watching AD House Tours (I love this one and this one)

• Making pots of tea and drinking them as a sort of time-out ritual, with a slice of honey toast or a biscuit (or three). Switching out my tea cups, so I am using the good ones

• Lighting unscented candles; watching the flame

• (Light) weight training while watching a movie. It stops me capping my workout at 30 minutes if I am feeling lazy and sometimes I can go beyond my self-imposed 40 minute workout limit

• Putting my friend’s birthdays in my Google calendar so I never forget them

• Curating wishlists (mostly books, sometimes puzzles and purses)

• Pinning outfits with basics I already own

• Writing up menus for dinner parties I’d like to host when my kids are older, from the cookbooks I keep colour-stacked on my coffee table

• Poring over magazines like it’s 2004 and I am in my first year of uni: hungry for the industry I want to get into

• Sending and receiving memes

• Sunday walks in the sunshine with good friends (hi Karima!)

• Talking my feelings through with people who share similar values, even though our ethnic/religious/political affiliations might feel different

• But also: not talking about my feelings at all

• Safeguarding Sundays as a day of rest

• Trying new recipes (I made this delicious fish dish earlier this week; I will be trying to make maamoul for the first time on Good Friday)

• Watching a day time movie I’ve already seen before

• Watching a night time movie, with a mocktail

• Donating things I don’t use or like anymore; not replacing things that break

• Not writing, even if it’s my job to do so

• Unsubscribing from email marketing

• Watching cleaning videos on Instagram

• Using fun pens to write lists for boring jobs.

Photo by Tirza van Dijk on Unsplash

Some things I have been working on

• It only took two years post-PhD to publish some research but last week I proofread my chapter from the forthcoming book The Public Child: Media Power, Strategic Silencing, and Children's Rights in Australia, edited by Camilla Nelson, Denise Buiten and Jodi Death. I wrote about my work running creative writing workshops and what I learnt in my practice, especially in my time as the writer-in-residence of Sweatshop Literacy Movement. Drawing on bell hooks’ concept of ‘talking back’ to challenge the practices of domination, my chapter examines the role that literacy plays in enabling young people from ethnic communities in western Sydney to process their experiences of racism and marginalisation through affirming creative writing workshops that centre and encourage their public voice. It argues that literacy and critical thinking programs catered to culturally and racially marginalised (CARM) students, particularly those from Arabic-language backgrounds, run by arts practitioners from within those communities, reflect cultural assets pedagogies that create a third space (based on Babha’s concept of the same name) where elements of their private and public selves are no longer binary elements but equally viable parts of who they are.

• I am also contributing to an essay on the history of Australian YA literature for an academic compendium on the genre, writing about the evolution of ‘multicultural’ literature for teens in Australia. Multicultural literature in this country has a short history but understanding it is essential to discussions of who gets to speak, how they get to do so, and what constitutes our national identity. It feels like I am finally putting some of my PhD to good use and I look forward to finally creating a researcher profile, something I have neglected to do for ages.

• I wrote about my take on the LattoufvABC proceedings for The New Arab in late February, released my latest picture book in March, and am currently putting some finishing touches on another picture book out later this year.

Some things for your calendar

• I’m back at Omar Sakr’s A Western Sydney Book Club this May, discussing award-winning author Melanie Cheng’s new novel, The Burrow.

• Pop Tuesday May 6th into your diaries because I am launching Tegan Bennett Daylight’s new YA novel, How to survive 1985 at Sydney’s Kinokuniya bookstore from 6:30pm.

• Plestia Al-Aqad is coming to the Sydney Writers Festival, and you can catch her in conversation with Sara M Saleh here.