#firefly project

[vinhteer]

observationals + Theia <33

[vinhteer]

Some ocs I've been working on!! These drawings are from february

[vinhteer]

Some kind of firefly warrior suit design I was trying to come up with a few months ago!

[hooray-cancer]

Pen Pals and Procrastination

I…am…writing! I have posted a lot to this Tumblr in the past few days. Three posts a day! For a few reasons, I think: if you put a monkey in front of a typewriter long enough, sooner or later he will get bored of reading about far-off presidential elections and problematic TV shows and start writing his own blog posts (although that can take a very long time).

Also, I’m trying to get in the habit of write-a-lot-and-edit-later so I can take advantage of NaNoWriMo. Or NaMemWriMo, since I intend to actually make progress on the memoir project that I’m so scared of these days. It feels like pulling teeth just to get myself looking at what I’ve already written.

Also, I’ve been procrastinating.

I don’t remember if I have written here about the Firefly Project. It is run by the head of Art for Recovery at UCSF, and it is a really cool idea: match high schoolers and med students with cancer/life-threatening disease patients, and coordinate a year of pen-pal correspondence, with an in-person meet-up only after a number of letter exchanges. I signed up last year, feeling less-than-confident that I would be alive for the whole cycle. But I survived, and I got two med student pen-pals out of the process.

My two pen-pals were very different from one another, or at least our letters went in very different directions, but in both cases I was able to express myself in a way that was satisfying and therapeutic, and I got to know a couple of interesting people who were very much my peers, separated only by medical luck of the draw.

So I signed up again this year, and last week I got my first letters from my new pen-pals, again a pair of second-year med students about my age. Replying should be simple enough, introducing myself and whatnot. Yet for some reason, I am feeling terrified of replying. Perhaps it is because their first letters were pleasant but not too revelatory, so I am afraid of clobbering them with my “tale of woe.” Or I have told my cancer story so many times that I’m all burnt out.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll finally get around to writing those letters. I really really should, because they’re due at the end of the week and I have plans to go under general anesthesia on Monday morning.