Peg Kerr's Journal

Like so many women, I am constantly on the lookout for a better purse solution.

I carry too much. I have upsized and I have downsized, looking for the right balance between having enough of the things I use constantly with me when I need them, and ease and comfort. I am extremely picky about having a well-organized purse, because I never want to have to root around for what I need. Everything is in a consistent pocket. I like purses with a key strap so I never have to hunt for my keys.

For the past several years, I have (to the wonder and probably faint derision of my children) carried TWO purses: a technology purse (with my phone, iPod and tablet, and charging cords and plugs) and a financial purse (wallet, checkbook, and everything else). This was rather embarrassing. And the purses were heavy. This week I decided (yet again) to rethink and try to do something about it.

The underlay of this card is a soulcollage card I created in 2008, a 'Committee card' (i.e., representing an aspect of myself) called the "Bearer of Burdens." This is the post when I first created it, and I blogged about it further here in 2011. I was always the sherpa for my family, the organized and prepared one, the person who carried the tape measure, the dental floss, the handi-wipes. Part of this was because of the sheer fact that I was the ONLY member of my immediate family who DIDN'T have ADHD, and so I would often have to whip something out at a moment's notice to save the day.

In the lower right I have put a picture of the new rather large tote purse I found this week (and spent too much money on). In the sky above the camels, I have placed pictures of EVERYTHING I am now carrying in the purse:

• pens and checkbooks
• a quilted cup cosy (shaped like a corset) for hot coffee cups
• a Stasher bag with charger, charging cords
• my iPod touch
• keys
• a card case where I keep my credit cards
• my tablet for reading (which I am constantly whipping out to read from whenever I'm stuck in a line)
• dental floss
• redacting tape for making corrections in my checkbook register
• mini Stasher bags with charging plugs and earbuds
• tweezers (I HATE the little hairs that grow out of my chin and pluck them out the instant I feel them)
• mini tape measure
• chapstick
• a dental squeegee thingummy for irrigating out the food particles that get caught in the hole where my wisdom tooth used to be
• a card case for business cards for my employer
• a checkbook register
• my phone
• a string bag for purchases
• a utensil case with bamboo utensils
• cough drops
• wallet
• kleenex holder with handkerchief inside
• brass nameplate I wear at my organization's events

To the right, I have placed pictures of the items I've removed from the purse in the hopes of making it lighter (with the red x's over them).

• a Moleskine notebook
• a manicure case with nail files and a compact mirror
• my old wallet
• my old worn card case

It IS lighter, which is a relief, and well-organized, but still, it's ridiculously big. I will try to be mindful of removing just what I need to a smaller purse when I am going out for a limited errand--except that I hate switching things back and forth. I'm always afraid I'll absentmindedly leave my wallet in the wrong purse and then won't have my driver's license when I need it.

I'm reminded of the time I watched Fiona emptying her (much smaller) purse on a table in front of me, and I inquired, rather baffled, why she had a plastic cockroach in her purse.

"The more important question," she informed me loftily, "is why don't you carry a plastic cockroach in your purse, Mom?"

Purse



Click here to read about the 52 card project and see the year's gallery.

Here's a new card I made tonight that I quite like.

I've taken the Strengthsfinder test, and my very top strength is "Strategic."

The Woman Who Copes Ahead - Committee Suit
I am the One who plans ahead to make the future as successful as possible. I can instantly plot the best path through the maze. I am the Ant who brings in the harvest, who keeps an eye on the clock and the calendar, who saves for emergencies and retirement and always remembers to pay the insurance bill. I am gifted, wise, confident, and clever. My family benefits from my foresight and organization.

Yet it is important, and it arises out of a number of conversations I have been observing unfold over the past couple of years.

I would like to say this is a Council Card and not a Committee Card (i.e., an aspect of me), but I don't want to be as oblivious as the subject of my card by denying my own privilege. I could have avoided the whole issue by making the subject a white man, but I wanted to remind myself pointedly of my own personal privilege rather than to sooth myself with the idea that 'this is about someone other than me.' Therefore, I made the subject a white woman, like me. I will identify the card with both suits, a bridge card.




Privilege - Committee/Council Suit
I am the One who is unfairly advantaged over others due to race, class, gender, education, sexual orientation, country of origin, or other characteristics outside my control, yet oblivious to that advantage. Instead I assume my success is due to my own personal merit.

This seems to me to be one of the most uncomfortable cards I've made. I also hesitate to even post it, given how raw emotions are over the recent shooting in California (and yes, I have been reading the hashtag #yesallwomen over on Twitter). But I'm going ahead anyway.

Who was it who said art should afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted?

I was so frustrated when I couldn't seem to pull a card together last night. Tonight, I made several stabs at two or three other ideas before settling on this one, and I'm quite pleased with it, because it simultaneously addresses two of the things that are bothering me the most, although I only saw that when I added the last element.

( The Woman Who Hates Other People's Paper - cut for NSFW image )
The Woman Who Hates Other People's Paper - Committee Suit
I am the One Who burns incandescent with rage at the burden of other people's paper. I am poised at the point of destruction yet stymied by hesitations.

I wanted to do a card about how frustrated I've been about the clutter in our home, chiefly because Rob has tendencies to hoard. He was working with a therapist about it last year and started making inroads, but that all stopped dead when he developed cancer. Obviously he was too sick to do the work that he finds so difficult, so I bit my lip and just put up with it again. Now he's starting to feel better and I'm pushing him to once again deal with it. The clutter in the house is affecting both my and Delia's mental state, especially.

I found the paperwork monster, which was perfect, and then had several choices for images to serve as his antagonist. One showed a woman in a calm, controlled tai chi pose, pushing out. Another was a woman pulling something with a rope, and I figured I could bury the end of the rope in the throat of the monster.

But I kept returning to the image I finally chose, the woman with the torch.

Forget pushing or pulling--she just wants to burn that fucking thing to cinders. She wants to destroy. That image felt closest to the emotion there--primal rage.

I pondered whether I should put other items in a pile around the monster's feet. Clothes, odd household objects, etc. The clutter that's bothering me isn't just paper. I started looking through my folder of images of objects, but I didn't really have enough pictures of the right sorts of objects, and the proportions would all be off.

And then I ran across the image of the paper fortune teller, which fit perfectly in that bare corner. It also perfectly captured the agonizing difficulty that Rob has when he trying to figure out whether to throw away an object or not. I am held back from that moment of destructive fury, of wanting to burn because he says, 'I'll deal with it, it's my stuff." And so recognizing the justice of this, I step back from just throwing stuff away to give him the chance to do it -- and he then dithers and frets and ends up just putting everything back in the boxes, saying, 'I'll deal with it later.'

And then it struck me--if I left the monster just a paper monster and not a paper-and-household-objects monster, then this card was simultaneously about my job. We have a trial coming up, and I am the secretary doing the filing for this case, and I am being buried alive in paper. I just want to either burn the paper or burn my bridges and quit the job -- and yet I hesitate, afraid of job hunting, afraid of the consequences. I've had this job for 21 years. So I stick with the monster I know, dithering (just like Rob), as the torch keeps burning, burning, burning in my hands.

Man, no wonder I've been getting so depressed. They say that depression can be rage turned inward.

I have not been posting much because as you know, hey, cancer. But more than that, a cascade of Bad Events over the past few months (i.e., Rob's cancer), including a few more I haven't even talked about here have made things to start to feel pretty rough after almost a year of feeling quite good.


The Wave - Committee/Council Suit (Bridge card)
I am the One who can see it, in the distance but coming toward me, like a gigantic wave rising over the landscape, a doom I cannot escape. I want to flee, but I know that it's hopeless to even try. I just stand, paralyzed, knowing exactly what will happen as I watch it tower above me, crystal drops scattering like poison, and I wait for it to smash into me, sweeping me away to drown in cold nothingness.

>>>

For me, this card is about the vulnerability of fearing a recurrence of mental illness (specifically, depression in my case). I suppose it could be about anything you see coming toward you that you fear but cannot stop. Actually, now that I think about it, it would be applicable to cancer treatment, too, after you've received a diagnosis and before you start treatment.

It's also a reference to something I found in Tolkien's letters which he eventually worked into his fiction: he had a troubling recurring nightmare for years about a wave coming toward him across a landscape:

At the climactic moment of the Lord of the Rings, Faramir says to Éowyn that he is reminded of a "great dark wave climbing over the green lands and above the hills, and coming on, darkness unescapable. I often dream of it." The couple are as yet unaware of the passing of Sauron, but the symbolism is apt. Tolkien puts into Faramir's words a recurring dream that had troubled him since childhood: a "dreadful dream of the ineluctable Wave, either coming up out of a quiet sea, or coming in towering over the green inlands".

Tolkien felt that this 'Atlantis haunting' was symptomatic of a tale of universal mythic applicability, a theme "so fundamental to 'mythical history'--whether it has any kind of basis in real history…that some version of it would have to come in [to his legendarium]". Tolkien's version of the Atlantis legend was the tale of the downfall of Númenor, explicitly identified with Atlantis in many of the versions of the story that Tolkien wrote. The first was in the sketch for the novel The Lost Road, drafted around 1936 but soon abandoned.

Original reference here.

This is one of those cards where I found one image (the central one) and knew immediately I would make a card with it, but I had to wait several more months before I could find other images that would go with it. I found the second two images within the same weekend, and then sat down and immediately made the card.

This card is probably related to The Bearer of Burdens.

The Woman Who is Stressed I am the One who is overwhelmed with more than she can handle.

I have been thinking about this.

My family has some problems that have just seemed absolutely intractable. Some of these problems I talk about in public. Some of them Elinor Dashwood is talking about in smaller locked groups on this blog on Livejournal and Dreamwidth. Some I talk about only in person, to just a handful of people.

We are trained to want the happy ending. Let's face it, happy people and winners are culturally preferred. Everyone appreciates a winner.

People in pain? People who can't get it together? People who continue to hurt, even when the people around them, the people who love them, keep trying to help them find their way out of the morass that surrounds them? Not so appealing.

I don't know quite what to do when I can't report the happy ending, both to myself, to my family and friends, and to readers of this journal.

I'm ashamed in a way. I am rather scrupulous at self-examination, and this is what I have been mulling over lately.

One of my soul collage cards is a Committee card (i.e., an aspect of myself) called The Bearer of Burdens:

The Bearer of Burdens - Committee Suit I am the One who is dependable, who bears the unbearable weight. I keep moving forward steadily through the desert that no one else can cross. I carry all that I need with me using my own inner strength. I can carry the burdens of others as well as my own.

I have been thinking lately that when I started walking across this desert, I had no idea that the journey would be so long. You keep going and going and going, reasoning, okay, this can't go on forever; sooner or later you have to get to an oasis, and you'll be able to lay this burden down. But I haven't been able to do so. And after awhile, you start to feel like a fool and a sucker for continuing to trudge forward, but what is your alternative when all around you all you see is a sandblast of desolation? Who else would pick up the burden? And if you stopped now and try to go back, who's to say whether or not you wouldn't end up just walking farther than if you just keep going in the direction you're going? There is no one to tell me. No one.

I lost one of the most important relationships in my life, I think, because the other individual, for reasons that elude me even now, said, "I'm not going to stick around any longer with you on this journey because I'm just tired of waiting for you to get to the oasis." Look, I'm tired of it, too. But I can't find any other way out of this desert than to keep walking.

I would never have believed, three years ago, that Rob would STILL not have a permanent job. I never would have believed some of the other things are still going on that I am struggling with. I can't believe I'm still walking through this desert, and the fear keeps stealing up that it looks as though I'm on the brink of dying of thirst. But what the fuck else am I supposed to do? There are no maps. No vehicles swooping down to pick me up.

I am sorry. I have no idea how long it will take or whether I will ever find the cool waters and restful shade I long for, or whether I'm even destined to get out of the desert at all. I might die of thirst out here all alone, but I have no idea which ending will happen. If only I knew. If I knew that it wasn't going to work out, I suppose at least I could put the burden down and just rest as I waited for the ending.

But I don't. If there's any chance I'll ever see the end of this desert, there isn't anyway I'm going to get out of it except under my own power.

So no, I cannot report the period of unemployment has ended, the marital and mental health problems have been solved, the house has been cleaned and the financial picture is more stable. I'm sorry, and it's getting downright embarrassing, but I just can't. The future may involve foreclosure, bankruptcy, homelessness, hospitalization, divorce. It may involve none of these things.

I don't know how this will end. But I can't see any alternative but to keep going.

(Edited to add: The ironic thing is, I am also actually on both sides of this divide, within my own immediate family.)

The Bibliophile - Committee Suit I am the One who loves the written word. I am erudite, knowledgeable, curious and intelligent.

This was one of those cards that was so easy it almost seems like cheating. The picture of the library came ready-made. The only thing I added was the large book on the table in the foreground.

I love books. I inhaled them as a kid, and I wrote two of them as an adult. My Masters degree is in English language and literature.

The library on this card reminds me of the beautiful libraries I saw when I studied abroad in Cambridge, England, one of the happiest times of my life. I remember those little green lamps there.

The Girl Who Reaches Out in Wonder Committee I am the One who reaches out to explore the world. I see beauty and embrace it with joy. I see love and touch it with the awe of a young girl. My senses are open to wonder. I see harmony and magic in the simple and ordinary.

This card is sort of a meta-card captures a feeling I have felt welling up in me about Soulcollaging itself. I have been feeling so desperate for so long because the fiction writing stopped, and as readers of this journal know, this was acutely painful for me. When I found I could Soulcollage, one of my primary first reactions was profound relief, that I hadn't totally lost my creativity. I don't know why it was so important to me, but it was. As I started putting cards together, I realized I was using the same process I'd used when writing short stories, and the realization was very exciting, and tinged with awe. See? Here is art. Here is beauty. I tried to capture that feeling in making this card, to acknowledge that there is still that part of me that sees and recognizes beauty and wonder. I was so tremendously relieved to discover that it wasn't gone forever, as I had feared.

I made a very deliberate decision to use only girls. I had a number of pictures of little boys doing creative things, and some of them were very good, but for some reason this card seemed to need to be a female card, not just a card about the creative child. Perhaps because I associate femininity with creativity--I still feel that being a mother (i.e., creating a baby inside myself) is one of the most remarkable creative things I've ever done. And I am, of course, the mother of daughters only. Perhaps that is related, too.