I'm tired of living through history

also, I miss my cat

Friends with Words is a newsletter about language, culture, and identity, created by a Russian-born, Israel-based essayist, linguist, former world traveler, and single mom.

If you’re disillusioned by the current state of humanity, but still secretly hope that curiosity can fix the world or at least make it a less horrible place, this space is for you. Welcome.

Dear friends,

I tried several times over the last few days to sit down and write something coherent, or write something, anything at all — but every time I try, I’m overcome by the urge to curl up in bed and doze off and shut out the world. Or I find myself watching the news. Or scrolling through memes on Facebook.

Or asking ChatGPT existential questions:

But since I’d promised myself to write and publish something here every Monday for the rest of my life (which will, hopefully, include many more Mondays), I’m publishing something (potentially incoherent) anyway.

The After

Last Thursday night, we woke up to a siren. Normal, kind of. We ran to the safe room, thinking it was a missile or two from Yemen, as usual. But almost immediately after the first siren, my phone emitted a hitherto unheard menacing sound: another message from the Home Front Command app that said:

“Because of the likelihood of a significant threat, follow the instructions from the Home Front Command that are being transmitted in these moments on all news channels.”

My heart dropped into my pyjama pants.

I mean, imagine being woken up at 2 am thinking it’s your routine missile(s) from Yemen and suddenly being told to turn on the news urgently?? The news that you hadn’t watched for the last six months, at least?

By the way, this second alert was labeled ‘Extreme alert’, while our usual missile alert is called a ‘Critical’ alert. I am picturing a bespectacled kid who is doing his army service as a copywriter for the Home Front Command app, being like “Hmm… what’s an adjective that’s more alarming than ‘critical’ that is going to get people out of beds, many of whom have by now been desensitized to ‘critical’?”

Turns out this wasn’t a missile attack. We were woken up because we attacked Iran, and the Home Front Command wanted people to be ready for a potential immediate retaliatory attack.

I spent the rest of the night scrubbing the kitchen.

The retaliatory attacks started the next night. During the first one, as we settled in our safe room, my sister called me from her own safe room and said, “So this is much better, isn’t it?”

She was alluding to the previous ballistic missile rain from Iran (in October 2024, when we weren’t officially at war with them yet), that caught us outside. A highly unpleasant experience.

Being at home was much better than lying in the ditch by the side of the road.

Plus, I was acutely aware that we have it much easier than most people in this country. Safe rooms only became obligatory in every apartment in Israel in the early 1990s, meaning that most people don’t have them, and have to use a common bomb shelter in the basement of the building or a few minutes away from their house.

Since then, every night has felt like Russian roulette. A few missiles inevitably pass the defenses, ruin entire blocks, and injure and kill people.

It’s scary. There are sirens and booms for what sometimes feels to my sleepy brain like the whole night.

We started sleeping in our safe room, all of us (normally it’s my son’s room).

Before and After

I’m walking around with a sense of déjà vu. It’s another one of those before-and-after moments that disrupt the usual flow of time, so most things that troubled you before appear bleak and insignificant in the after.

In the era before last Thursday, I was mostly worried about my cat, who had wandered off 10 days ago and hasn’t come back. I’m worried about her still, but now that the world has changed again, that we’re losing people every day, I don’t know how to locate this private sorrow on the global scale of events.

School is cancelled for the foreseeable future. My daughter finished 4th grade one month early. No gatherings are allowed. There is no one outside, just like at the beginning of COVID. Just like during COVID, I’m vowing every day to start making sourdough bread and do woodcarving with my kids, and failing miserably.

Just like immediately after October 7th, everybody who hasn’t been called to the reserve duty wants to do something to help. People make meals for soldiers again and organize donation drives for people who have lost their homes.

Just like after both of those events, a group of teenagers in a heartwarming post on Facebook offered to help anyone who needs help with babysitting, shopping, cleaning, or anything else.

Black humour has started pouring in.

Someone posted on FB: “Does anybody know if Zara is open today? I am sharing a shelter with my new neighbors, and I wanna look pretty.”

It’s funny, but I caught myself choosing my sleepwear more carefully before going to bed these days, because, like, if a missile hits my house and they have to rescue me from the rubble, I want to look presentable — especially if at that point I’m still alive and capable of feeling self-conscious about my worn-out pajamas.

Living through history

We are living through history — again. Everyone here knows this war was unavoidable (Iran was weeks away from a nuclear bomb, which the Iranian regime vowed to use to destroy Israel), but man, I’m so tired of living through history.

How much history can a person live through anyway?

When I was little, my grandmother would tell me stories from her childhood and youth, all of which happened against the backdrop of some global horrors. She was born in 1913 and lived through the Russian Revolution, then the First World War, and the Second World War.

I always thought, listening to her, what a hard life she had, what a terrible childhood. I felt lucky that I was born long after history was over.

Well, history is back full force now.

My daughter was four when COVID started. She was eight when October 7th happened. And she’s almost 10 now that this new war has started. She doesn’t remember a childhood without disasters. Or maybe that’s not how kids see it, I don’t know.

Here is to hoping this will end soon, with as little loss of human life as possible, and that these events will ultimately make the world a better place.

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