I love the romance of rebellion; I could drink the beauty and glamour of courage for days. But lately, it hasn’t been enough. I don’t think it ever was, for me. I’ve started to think about resistance as slow, banal, steady work – stitch by stitch rebuilding, reworking, remaking.

Jahit in Malay means ‘sew’, jahat means ‘bad’. Pen- is the suffix that turns them into nouns: penjahit is a person who sews, penjahat is a person who does bad things.

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Antid Oto – italian for antidote – was one of Leon Trotsky‘s earliest pen names. I also love the Malay word for it: penawar. A few months ago, I started taking regular walks and making drawings afterwards as a way to deal with worry, procrastination, hopelessness, writer’s block, internet rage, and digital distraction. I’ll post a series of them here, one every other day, for as long as I keep making them.