Entry 6: Get away

To the beauty and weirdness of Carmel (more beauty than weirdness here).

Entry 5: No amount of deep breathing can improve this situation

Help! I am entangled in a doom loop Bluesky, The Guardian, AP News hell that I don’t seem to be able to escape. I want to turn off the worry sometimes, stop the flow of information, to turn to art, to be out of my thoughts and at least briefly unaware of the sorry state of our nation, currently run by a group of cowardly, pathetic people who bring destruction and shame upon the U.S.

I canceled my Washington Post subscription, have left the rest of the Bezos universe mostly behind, am disentangling from Meta to a slightly less successful extent. I am supporting independent journalism (shoutout to Marisa Kabas, the journalist behind The Handbasket, to Chris Geidner, behind Law Dork, as well as to Issac Saul’s Tangle News). I give money. I boycott. I anticipate protesting. I dream of tagging Cybertrucks with swastikas, something to remind the purchasers of who and what they are supporting (alas, I lack to chutzpah to take this one on and mainly “tag” the tin can trucks and tinder Teslas with strong looks of disgust).

And then there is my job, where I listen, take in pain, help folks make sense of senselessness, provide hope, hopefully make space for self-love despite all the messages of unworthiness that so many of us absorb from day one.

Deep breaths. Deep breaths. Deep. Breaths.

Entry 4: A return to the way it used to be

I feel like I’m looking at her through a steamed-up windshield, my breath hot in the car, raindrops colluding into rivulets on the glass. There she is, a fuzzy outline, obscured movements, gestures like caricatures of human movement. The car idles. It chugs. If I unlock the door, I am afraid she will turn to vapor, will dissipate as she reaches for the lever.

Perhaps this initial image is a turnaround. It is me on the outside as the car glides past in the rain, arc of gutter water against my legs. Is that you, Jenna? I cannot hear. She is something familiar but no longer reachable. My eyes strain to make sense of what I see through the glass.

I was a little girl once, frizzy halo of knotted blonde hair, spitfire youth, fighting against her as I joined with her. We overlapped for years, were one and the same, with roles reversed. Mother, child, artist, pragmatist. None of it makes sense anymore. We are changed. I am changed. What does it mean to let in the full human being when I am a ghost?

Entry 3: The losses accumulate

This may be quick and it may be less than artful. I don’t really want to write. My brain is sludgy. However, I don’t want to let this blog wither, and there are sad things afoot.

Last Wednesday, after several days of worry and unanswered messages, my husband found out that a lifelong friend of his had died. M lived alone in a European city and worked in an academic field. He had a strong research presence but no connection to an American university and was essentially a contract researcher who worked out of his home for a European scientific institute. Because M had not updated his emergency contact information for his employer, when he was found dead in his apartment (unclear on how long he had been there), no one knew how to contact his family. It was only through my husband’s outreach to the consulate that anyone in M’s extended personal network found out about his death.

My husband and I are getting older, I know, and losses increase as time goes on. But I think of the small crew of humans we are connected to in this life, family members, childhood friends, former coworkers, friendships formed in person or across the ineffable electronic pulses of the internet. Over time those connections disappear. It all feels so unfair, not just for M and his family, friends, and colleagues, but for my husband, too, who has lost all his immediate family and now his closest friend.

And the world continues to burn. In the face of all of it, focusing on our connections to one another feels like an antidote to despair.

Entry 2: To drift

Trees in the wind outside my bedroom, 4 February 2024, a year ago.

OK. So maybe it wasn’t norovirus after all. And I thought it was getting better, but…

Tuesday, after days of malaise, zero appetite, a fever, and pain increasingly located in the “lower right quadrant” of my abdomen, I went to urgent care. Urgent care sent me to the emergency room. Tuesday was sheets of rain weather in San Francisco, the most rain that has fallen in the city in over 130 years. All around was flood and tree limbs bent in the wind, puddled intersections and inside-out umbrellas. Lucky for me, the city is also bounteous with hospitals. Since we are relatively new here, my husband and I sat in the car and read emergency room Yelp reviews before making our choice, adding a particularly ridiculous and random feel to the day. We picked a well-regarded emergency room that wasn’t that far from our house and set off on our appendix adventure through rain, wind, and worry.

The day is fuzzy to me now. Triage. Waiting. Hearing the moans and pains of others. Since I was only in real pain when I moved or someone poked me in the lower right quadrant of my abdomen, nothing felt particularly urgent to me about my situation. I was wheeled off for a CT scan, where the fellas were surprised that I did not have an IV, billed as an integral part of the contrast imaging process. One failed attempt at an IV later, we went for a “no contrast” scan. I was in surgery to remove my appendix laparoscopically a few hours later (with an IV despite my “wiggly” vein). Luckily, my appendix was not perforated, so the procedure was straightforward, with no complications. I spent the night in the hospital.

I am fatigued. Grateful we went to the hospital and to have medical care. In some ways happy to be distracted by something so basic, and to be able to take days off from work to recover (though I also don’t get paid for time off and am concerned about the effect of unexpected time off on clients). I have thoughts about the chaos of hospitals, where there is too much going on, no one has what they need to sleep uninterrupted, and there is a feeling of being more of an object, a problem, and less of a person. I wonder about those years of intermittent stomach problems that I had, which I now suspect might have been recurrent appendicitis. I learned that there may be a genetic component to appendicitis and remember my dad’s story about getting his appendix out in the first semester of his freshman year of college. I wonder about that connection, so close to the eighth anniversary of his death. I tear up with grief and despair for the way things are right now, nationally, globally, environmentally.

Why not welcome the fatigue, the excuse to rest and take space, to hole up on another rainy day and watch the magnolia outside, in full bloom in February, sway in the winter wind, to drifit in and out of sleep?