Welcome to the Asylum

I don’t have the fortitude to check out the comments today, but the post is here.

Eliya

I met Ziv in 2011 while growing up near Tel Aviv. We were both 14 and I saw her crying because her boyfriend had left her. Trying to help, I said, “Don’t cry. You are young, pretty and you will have a good life ahead of you.” She eventually messaged me on Instagram and we started hanging out together. I learnt quickly that she has the most beautiful soul and her love for me was like nothing I had ever experienced. Later we moved in together and we were together every day until October 7, 2023.

Part of my job was organising festivals and we spent many weekends with our friends, listening to music, drinking and having fun. The Nova festival, held in the Negev desert in southern Israel, was something we were all looking forward to. Even after we saw the missiles in the sky that day, we thought, “Ah, this is Israel. It is a normal day.” So we carried on dancing. It was only when I got a call from my aunt, who was also at the festival, that we realised something was not right. She was screaming, saying that someone in her car had been shot. I said to Ziv, “We should get out of here.”

We drove with Ziv’s nephew and his girlfriend, heading for the main road, but there was a police roadblock. We turned the car around and drove maybe five minutes until we saw a bomb shelter — a common sight near the border. More people joined us in the shelter, but we were all talking and joking. Although it was scary, we had seen it before.

Then suddenly the terrorists were outside the shelter and they were going to kill us. A grenade rolled into the shelter and exploded. Another grenade and we are fighting, picking up the grenades and throwing them out of the door. It was like this for 40 minutes until the terrorists fired a rocket-propelled grenade.

I don’t know how, but my mind was still working. Ziv fainted and I knew the only chance to save her was to bury her underneath the dead bodies. Two of those bodies were her nephew and his girlfriend.

The bullets were still coming into the shelter and I was shot in the leg, but then I was dragged out and loaded onto a truck. The last thing I saw was a terrorist pointing his gun into the shelter and firing a hundred bullets. I was sure Ziv was dead.

I was driven to Gaza and thousands of people were on the streets celebrating. I was more scared of these people than I was of the terrorists. The terrorists wanted to keep me alive, a hostage for negotiation. Those ordinary people wanted to kill me. They wanted the respect that would come from killing a Jew.

I was held for 505 days. In the tunnels was the worst — no light, no sleep, beatings, being stripped naked so they could laugh at us, no food, no water. There was a wonderful day when we realised we were so far underground that there was damp on the walls. We would lick the walls. At least we had a drop of water. I put my trust in God. I knew they would not break me.

The days blurred into one, but when we heard a rumour that Donald Trump had been elected it made my group of four hostages very excited. Two weeks later our captors told us three of us would be released. Just three, not four. I was lucky enough to be one of them but knowing one of us was still in captivity filled me with guilt. Alon Ohel was freed eight months later.

Then I saw my family. And Ziv. She was alive. It wasn’t real, but it was. Of course then I found out what had been happening in the world. The marches celebrating the murders and rapes, babies being slaughtered. The only reason people can mock is because we are Jewish. If it happened to other people they wouldn’t.

Even after I was released I didn’t allow myself to continue with life. How could I see a doctor or start my therapy when the other hostages weren’t free? The 20 remaining living hostages were released last October.

It has taken a long time but Ziv and I now try to think about the future. I bought an engagement ring before October 7 and have now had the chance to propose. We will marry this summer and build a family with many children in Israel, in the land where they tried to kill us. For me, that’s the biggest victory of all.

Ziv

The bomb shelter we were in on that day in 2023 — on Route 232 near the Kibbutz Re’im — is now known as the shelter of death. The first grenade exploded and the sound, the smell, the dead bodies… not even bodies, arms and legs and blood. I was scared like I have never been scared before. I peed myself three or four times.

The last thing I remember is holding Eliya’s hand and him covering me with dead bodies. I think I heard him scream, saying he’d been shot. Then one of the terrorists began shooting into the shelter — a machinegun. So many bullets. I could feel them hitting the bodies on top of me — thum-thum-thum — making the bodies shudder and move. And then nothing.

I woke up at 11am and the attack had started at eight. There was me and six other survivors in the shelter, and we had no idea what was going to happen. Would the terrorists come back? We sat with our dead friends for seven hours until we were rescued and taken to a hospital. I tried to call my sisters and they said they had seen a picture of Eliya. I thought they were lying, trying to make me happy, but then I saw the picture on the news. He was alive but he was in Gaza — a hostage.

I cried myself to sleep every night but each morning I would tell myself that I would make sure Eliya came home. I was part of the delegations travelling around the world, telling people about October 7. When he was finally released and I saw him again, after 16 months, he was so thin, my Eliya, and like a ghost.

When I was a child I heard people talk about the Holocaust and how much people hated Jews, but I thought that people had changed. Then I saw marches all over Europe, defending what had happened. People would stop me in the street and say Hamas is not a terrorist group, they are fighting for human rights.

Of the people who were murdered, we knew 48 of them. [Official figures put the death toll of the October 7 attacks at 1,200.] My nephew and his girlfriend are gone. I suffer from PTSD and still have nightmares. When I tried on my wedding dress, there was nothing, no happy tears. October 7 changed us, it changed everything, but we have hope. Our wedding is going to be our moment. It is our present from God.

if you start a new medication and suddenly feel like you understand the universe, call your doctor. several relatively common medications can trigger mania or psychosis in a small, unlucky percentage of the population.

psychosis is often a combination of positive symptoms -- things that are there that normally are not, like hallucinations or delusions -- and negative symptoms -- the absence of normal things, like inability to feel joy or a lack of executive functioning.

there are people who are very aware of their symptoms, even while deep in an episode. there are people with little to no awareness of their symptoms, even when they are between episodes.

Mania is not always Euphoric. It can also be Dysphoric, which is characterized by negative feelings such as anger, anxiety, and paranoia. its still mania.

Melencolia I. Albrecht Durer. 1514. Engraving.

"The winged personification of Melancholy, seated dejectedly with her head resting on her hand, holds a caliper and is surrounded by other tools associated with geometry, the one of the seven liberal arts that underlies artistic creation."

"In medieval philosophy each individual was thought to be dominated by one of the four humors; melancholy, associated with black gall, was the least desirable of the four, and melancholics were considered the most likely to succumb to insanity. Renaissance thought, however, also linked melancholy with creative genius; thus, at the same time that this idea changed the status of this humor, it made the self-conscious artist aware that his gift came with terrible risks."

this has been mercilessly review bombed and called “propaganda” despite it being documented footage from that day and comprising the testimony of survivors and responders. I can’t imagine any other victims of such atrocities or any other documentary subject being maligned this way.

please don’t traumatize yourselves by watching if you do not feel able to, we all know what happened and we’ve been grappling with that terror and pain ceaselessly, but if you do want to bear witness or support these survivors, victims, and filmmakers, amplify it however you can.

Mentioning the hostages is propaganda.

Saying the hostages should be returned is propaganda.

Saying Hamas killed civilians is propaganda.

Saying Hamas raped people is propaganda.

Saying Hamas took hostages is propaganda.

Saying any of the above was bad is propaganda.

All of the above is also justifiable resistance.

If you disagree with any of the above, you are justifying genocide.

Probably if any civilians died, the IDF killed them.

Hamas attacked because Zionism, not because Jews.

Whatever Hamas did do means that Israel was oppressing Palestinians in ways that are equally bad or even worse.

Palestinians tried peaceful resistance. It didn't work. This was their only option.

Hamas attacked to Free Palestine. Israel attacked to commit genocide.

Nazis don't hate and want to eliminate Jews, they are Jews.

A concentration camp isn't a place where a marginalized group is imprisoned for medical experimentation, slave labor, psychological torture ("re-education"), and frequent arbitrary murder for funsies.

A concentration camp is a war zone where you can't cross the border without the permission of the neighboring country, which is charging $5,000-$10,000 per person who wants to leave.

Egypt charging refugees thousands of dollars to leave during a war is not war profiteering; it's fine; we don't need to protest it or demand it stops. We just need to help with all the GoFundMes we can.

Colonialism isn't when one country invades others, defeats them in warl

Poland didn't start the Holocaust with 3,300,000 Jews and kill 3,056,000 of them. Certainly not partly because the Polish government and civilians joyfully helped the Nazis hunt down almost every single Jew in the country. Poland DEFINITELY didn't make it illegal in 2018 to say that Poland shared any responsibility "for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich."

Obviously, the truth is that the 148,000 Jews who emigrated from post-Holocaust Poland are privileged white settler-colonialist oppressors; made up the vast majority of Israel's population (which by 1949 was 1,174,000); and should just go back to Poland (where there are currently about 5,000 Jews left).

Colonialism itself isn't when a powerful country invades others, uses genocidal rape, torture, and murder on everyone it doesn't enslave, and sends its resources back to the empire. That's just silly.

Colonialism is when people who have been enslaved, raped, tortured, murdered, and chased from country to country in between, for hundreds and hundreds of years, flee back to their homeland.

That's also white supremacy, surprisingly.

You can criticize hypocrisy without making homophobic jokes or using homophobic nicknames.

And if YOU feel YOU can't, that's just a fucking skill issue.

You can talk about the fact that it's really fucked up that his frequenting of gay sex workers was an "open secret," as was his sexuality full stop, without making jokes that boil down to "hahaha look at the faggot."

What's new in ties and shirts. General catalogue for 1910. Grace Bros. Sydney. 1910.

Hey like...

It was a hillside, viewed across a gully. The recorder was on one ridge, looking out over the hills. It was late at night, and that mattered not at all, because the picture was ablaze with light. There was so much fire.

Fire's noisy, you know, if you haven't seen the recordings coming out in their hundreds from that nightmare. Fire roars, it screams as it devours all the oxygen it can get to and makes it into more of itself, so at first I couldn't hear the airplane. When it appeared, engine roaring, very low over the ridge, there was only a moment to understand what it even was before it dropped its payload of water on the burning hillside, and all at once the picture went out. The fire went out. The screaming brightness was replaced with gentler dark. In an instant.

The airplane was one of the Canadian Super Scoopers, piloted by a Canadian fire pilot of incredible skill--you know what kind of mastery it takes, to fly a plane that size, that low to the ground, at night, in a place where it's being buffeted by horrific and uneven fire-spawned updrafts and turbulence, carrying a payload of over fourteen thousand pounds of water, and then to dump that weight and still be able to fly straight instead of being suddenly slammed around by the weight change? And this was a person who with others like him had come to California to fight a fire that had nothing to do with them, for no reason other than human fucking decency.

When I saw the video the first time I burst into sobs. I have cried more than once thinking of it since, feeling again that incredible relief as the light went out. My home was on fire. I couldn't be there to do anything about it; it doesn't belong to me anymore. And here came brave strangers to save it.

Yeah, therein lies my reservation with it: my dreams are really important to me and I usually remember a lot of them. I keep a dream journal and I use it for inspiration in my art. I took a class in college called Psychology of Dreaming because I wanted to learn more about why I have the dreams I do. And I even value my frequent and vivid nightmares; my first tattoo was based on a nightmare I had.

So that's a hard decision! When the nightmares are really bad I have said "I would give up dreaming altogether just to get rid of these," but now that the monkey's paw has curled I'm scared to follow through.

Valuing your dreams does make that decision tricky- if you have any kind of "sense" about if you'll have nightmares, Prazosin is a one-night-effect kind of thing. No weaning off, just take as needed and it works for that night. I've found myself with a sort of 6th sense on what nights I'll have nightmares or not, so it's worked for me, but guesswork on stress might also be able to?

[ID: Photos of an oxidized copper plate, an oxidized copper pipe, and oxidized pennies. End ID]

it's mouth season