Peg Kerr's Journal

As I said in my last post, my sleep has been insufficient, and that is dragging me down in all sorts of subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways. There is nothing ostensibly wrong with my life (well, aside from the fact that I'm not working enough hours, I'm a widow who misses her husband, I'm in a new and satisfying relationship but finding a way to combine households with my person isn't easy or obvious, I feel increasingly unsafe in my neighborhood, the nature of politics in America, climate doom--you know, all the usual things).

Ordinarily, I just sort of live with these things. But with the drag of not enough sleep, it hasn't been easy, and I am feeling much more fragile than usual this week.

I'm trying not to let myself slide mentally, honest. But I have no margin to spare.

A woman (Sleeping Beauty) in a splendidly embroidered medieval dress reclines in a bed, asleep under a sunny lead-paned window. Foreground, lower left corner: the silhouette of a seated woman in profile. Overlay: a frame of broken glass.

Fragile



Click here to see the 2023 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2022 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2021 52 Card Project gallery.

As I mentioned in my last entry, I had a lot of fun this week creating a new mood set for my journal, based on quotations from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. (You can see the mood set here).

This dovetailed in an interesting way with a personal Emotional Intelligence report I received this week, based on a test I took in preparation for a staff retreat. I won't go into much detail about it--it's rather personal--but as I remarked at the retreat, I had a strong emotional reaction to reading my emotional intelligence report.

Here's a graphic from the report which shows some of the emotions that the assessment is evaluating:


There were some things in my report that confirmed my understanding of myself. My emotional self-awareness, for example, was my highest score, in the leadership range. This made sense to me, given my years of therapy, my psychology degree, and my vast experience with journaling.

But other results were disconcerting and rather gave me pain and even a sense of shame. They challenged my own conception of myself.

I have often struggled with my relationship with my own emotions. They have often felt like they were Entirely Too Much. For many years, for example, I would have gladly excised my periodic bouts of depression from my own personality were it possible, although I gradually did come to understand the gifts that depression can bring and no longer feel the same way. But aside from that, I regretted all the times that strong emotion (whether anger or depression or embarrassment or whatever) seemed to interfere with my wish to live a strong, dignified, happy, serene, and ethical life.

But doesn't that get right to all the musing I have done over the years about my favorite theme in literature: choosing the heart of flesh over the heart of stone? A heart of stone, after all, feels no emotion.

I don't want that.

I do believe that self-complacency is something that must be continually challenged, and I did some thinking about how the kaleidoscope of emotions in the mood set was what the report was measuring. I thought about one of my favorite moments in Pride and Prejudice, the point on which the whole book turns, when Lizzy reads Darcy's letter. She realizes that she has allowed her emotions to mislead her, blinding herself with prejudice and that she needs to rethink everything. "Till this moment," she exclaims, "I never knew myself."

Both Lizzy and Darcy take their painful self-knowledge, and their new insight into their own emotions, and use it to earnestly work at improving their own characters. Only due to their willingness to do the necessary inner work do they eventually find their way to their happy ending together.

Image description: Background: various Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice quotations: Hope was over, entirely over / I do not know when I have been more shocked / I am excessively diverted / I did not think Caroline in spirits / I am sure Jane will die of a broken heart / I was ready to die of laughter / My dear, do not give way to such gloomy thoughts / I was never more annoyed / Have a little compassion on my poor nerves! / what delight! What felicity. Center: An Emotional Intelligence wheel. Overlay, center, semi-transparent: Till this moment, I never knew myself.

Emotions



Click here to see the 2022 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2021 gallery.

This collage attempts to depict a mental state: rumination - the state of turning thoughts over and over in the mind. The word is derived from the class of animals known as "ruminants," of the suborder Ruminantia: cloven-hoofed, cud-chewing quadrupeds such as domestic cattle, bison, buffalo, deer, etc.

Of course, it would be nice if one could dwell on wonderful things that makes one happy. That's not the way it usually works for me.

In my experience, it's about the state of mind you get into when you can't stop yourself from dwelling on all the ways in which you are the absolute worst. All the things you have to do and haven't done, all the people you've hurt or offended or annoyed. All the foolish, all the clueless, all the inept, all the embarrassing. Over and over again. Chewing the cud, as it were.

It's tied to depression, naturally.

Minds are annoying, occasionally. Mine certainly is right now. (But I rather like this collage.)

Image description: A sketchified woman (Peg) holds her hand to her temple in the lower right. She looks sad and preoccupied. Above and behind her arises a chaotic thought cloud, indicated by disorganized lines and symbols. A black and white cow stands to her side, eyeing her quizzically.

Rumination



Click here to see the 2022 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2021 gallery.

I went to Minicon 54 this past weekend and it was good.

It was good last year, too, my first after Rob's death, which sort of surprised me. And then I fell apart spectacularly the day afterward. I feared that this time, too, grumbling to myself that I didn't have time for a grief storm, what with work heating up so much right now. And I really didn't have one.

This was the first time I faced Minicon without ANY of my family. Fiona and Delia bailed this year.

Had breakfast with Jane Yolen both days, and really, what an excellent way to start any day.

I decided quite deliberately to sign up for panels in order to keep myself busy, and that worked well. One was on the tie between mental health and creativity, and how creative people can use art to keep depression at bay. I brought my soul collage cards and talked about them, and people were definitely interested. I put out about forty or so for people to look at after the panel, and quite a few people lingered to see them, which was gratifying for me. Adam Stemple was also on that panel, and he brought some research with him that fit with everything I've thought about the subject: creative people ruminate, meaning, they think deeply and repeatedly about certain subjects, turning them over and over in their mind--but rumination can also be at the root of depression.

Another panel I thought was extremely interesting, with lively discussion, was about assumption of commonality. I may have derailed it a bit when the moderator got to me and I started talking about how I'm concentrating these days on trying to see beneath the assumption of commonality, and trying to deconstruct my own privilege by noticing how we are different, and I brought up one of the examples I'd learned about in my racial justice task force training: many of us had checked into the hotel for the weekend and found, as always, the little samples of shampoo that the hotel provided. I said that I had always assumed that was a nice, welcoming gesture--until someone pointed out that those are always, always, always, hair products for white people. Black people have different hair with different textures that often require different hair products. That had never occurred to me until it was pointed out to me. Anyway, the discussion was respectful, interesting and thoughtful (to me at least), and I enjoyed it very much.

Also was on a fanfic writing panel with Naomi Kritzer, Lyda Morehouse, Ruth Berman, with Katie Clapham as the moderator. Got to talk about Alternity, which was fun.

I bought too many books. I also discovered another reason to miss Rob: he was the one who kept the mental inventory of what books to buy next in the series we both collected.

I bid on something in the art show, the only time I've done so in all the years I've gone to Minicon. Wouldn't you know, it ended up being the only item in the entire show that went to auction (it was a dishtowel with mathematical symbols, with the value of pi woven into the number of threads in the stripes; I'd wanted to get it for Fiona. I met with the other bidder and we worked it out, and Fiona is now the proud owner of an overpriced dish towel that she will love very much.

Eric stopped by the hotel briefly to see me on Saturday night. I got to introduce him to a few friends in the Green Room. Minicon in the evenings is not quite what it was a decade or two ago, however. He didn't stay long, but I was touched that he came out to see something for himself that is, after all, quite important to me and part of my personal history.

The hardest part came at the end, sitting through Closing Ceremonies. I was a bit teary when I walked out--not just because Minicon was over, which always brings me down a bit, but because Rob and I generally went our own separate ways at Minicon, but we always, always sat together at Closing Ceremonies, so that is when I miss him the most.

This came up in my Facebook memories feed today: Rob and I sitting together at Closing Ceremonies at Minicon 46 in 2011. Rob, of course, is wearing a Minicon shirt.

Week 17: Biopsy
After the second of two biopsies, Rob hovers at the brink of awakening.



I took a picture of Rob right right before he awoke from the anesthesia, after a double bone marrow biopsy. Something about his posture, the angle of his face, the lighting (and the suffering of which he never complains)...something made me think of religious iconography. (Which would certainly bemuse Rob, as he is an agnostic.) A saint in a religious trance or something. Religious ecstacy.

That impression and that word, 'ecstacy' triggered a memory of an image I'd had stashed in my soulcollaging cache of images, "The Ecstasy of St. Teresa," a central sculptural group in white marble set in an elevated aedicule in the Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome (google it to see). I flipped that image and scaled Rob's down to fit in with it. Note the angel holds an arrow, indicative of the sharp point just used to do the biopsy. It pleases me that the arrow is pointed at the site of the cancer.

Week 18: Yule
Light a candle, sing a song.



There is a Peter Mayer song about the winter solstice called "The Longest Night." ( Here are the lyrics )

I've always loved that song, especially given that I'm vulnerable to Seasonal Affective Disorder. This card is trying to juxtapose the thoughts of this song with Christmas (the wreath) and Solstice (the diamond candle), which fell during the same week. "Yule" is a concept that would encompass both of them.

Although I like the concept, the card just didn't turn out to have as much impact as I'd hoped. Just not vivid enough or something.

Week 19: Hogmanay
The year comes to an end.



THIS card, on the other hand, turned out SPLENDIDLY. I had a great deal of difficulty, however, managing a decent scan of the card, because it is difficult for scans to capture the way it glitters. It's much more scintillatingly impressive when you hold it in your hand than I can convey here. "Hogmanay" is an old Scottish word referring to New Year's Eve (and I resorted to it because I'm limiting the titles of these cards to one word, and "Newyear' just didn't look right to me). The monks are a reference to the poem I wrote and posted earlier about our trip to Mayo Clinic the day before New Year's Eve, and the silver light and the glittering spindrift was made from nail polish. The very same nail polish, as a matter of fact, that I used in my New Year's Eve manicure. I think they captured the sense of the 'icy spindrift' (and the cones of silver light) extremely well!

And the Chinese fortune was from the fortune cookie I opened on New Year's Eve. My family has been gathering together and eating Chinese every single New Year's Eve for years. Perhaps this fortune was a wry commentary on the job hunting process.

An interesting article, a review of a book about literary fame here.

The always wise Jim Hines (jimhines) has a pithy list outlining the nature of depression, here. Much of it looks extremely familiar.

I have been busting a gut laughing at the Twitter hashtag TedCruzCampaignSlogans. Especially now that on the first full day of his campaign, CNN has pinned him into admitting that he, the tireless hater of Obamacare ('We must repeal it!') is going on Obamacare himself now that his wife has left her employer, Goldman Sachs to join him on the campaign trail, and so his family has no healthcare coverage. The delicious, delicious irony.

Fiona and I went to see Next to Normal tonight. This song was the one that made me bawl. In it, the husband, Dan, is trying to convince the wife to sign a form giving consent to undergo a scary medical procedure. She is at the hospital and he has been living at home.

I am in exactly this position. We signed the papers a couple of weeks ago. Now I sit at home alone, waiting and hoping while Rob is in the hospital.




I listened to the soundtrack after I dropped off Fiona and drove home. A single light was shining on the porch when I reached it, just as this song was playing.

The Midlife Journey - Council Card
I am the One who responds to the Call or inner restlessness or new freedom by sailing away from the familiar and secure, in hopes of new energy and purpose. I can only leave with the support of those who love me.

This is related to a whole mess of cards:

The Call

The Hidden Passage (I really like the fact that it even looks like the same woman.)

The First and Seventh Chakra cards (the Tortoise and the Swan), as well as the swan patronus cards. (Well, okay, those are turtles in this new card whereas the chakra card is a Tortoise, but, um, close enough). The idea is that first chakra, The Tortoise (security needs) up to the Seventh Chakra, the Swan (connection with between myself and the rest of the universe) bless this journey.

I see links to Trustworthiness, too, with the linkage of hands (which is meant to show that this journey is very much supported. I am not intending to cut myself off from the people I love by taking this journey. Instead, it is (perhaps wishful thinking) very much supported by them.

Even the Silence card is related (which also has the bird)

Of course, what the woman wants to escape from is this and this.

I like this card very much, aesthetically, and it is getting at the heart of what I've been struggling with the past two weeks. I want to leave my job, my career. But how? How can I reconcile that with my security needs? How can I care for my family?

Another title for it, I suppose, is Midlife Crisis.

Upon a little extra reading, in which I was trying to remember which tarot card this reminded me of, I was tempted to stick six swords through the composition. It does resemble the Six of Swords card, in that it resembles that boat, beginning a journey. The Six of Swords card is sometimes called the Slough of Despond card....except the boat pushing away from shore suggests hopefulness, a movement toward something new.

Making the card was a better way to spend the afternoon than diving into the abyss that threatened to swallow me. I got out of bed, managed to choke down a little bit of food, and made something artistic rather than brooding.

I've really been in a funk, which is one of the reasons why I've been quiet here.

Rob is done with chemo (yes, I know I need to write something on the CaringBridge account) but he is still mighty tired, and I haven't noticed much in the way of improvement yet. He is starting physical therapy to regain his strength. They told him at his first appointment that it may take months to recover from the fatigue.

Fiona has successfully transferred, to the University of Minnesota, and is taking classes there now. She is living at home, and commuting in with me in the mornings, which is nice. It just takes me about an extra five minutes or so to drop her off. I know she'd rather not live at home, but she has no job (she lost hers, since it was an Augsburg work-study job), and she didn't have time to arrange housing on top of arranging for the transfer. So she's at home for now.

Delia is still mulling college options. She was five for five on acceptances--and then got turned down today by the place she wanted to go to the most, the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire. It was also the most reasonably priced, which is going to be a significant factor. The letter said it was because she didn't have credits which we KNOW she had. We are going to try to reverse their decision but, yeah, we don't know if there'll be much hope.

As for me, well, I'm still studying French every day. The last couple of days I've been feeling really lousy, emotionally, but I don't particularly need to go into details. Just a lot of things seem awfully hard right now.

The terrible weather really doesn't help.

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.