Author Archives: janaremy@gmail.com

back in the day…

Monday I went to lunch with an old LDS friend, someone I’d known back in the days when most of my time was spent corralling toddlers and keeping house. Because she was on her way to Italy and I just returned, we planned to discuss travel. But instead we talked mostly about change. I wondered if she would recognize the now-me, and how different I would seem from the Jana of twenty years ago.

She said I was still the same person, but suggested that maybe my years spent as a mother-of-young children and as a dutiful-Mormon-wife were more of an aberration from the “real me” than is my life now. So I’ve been thinking a lot about that since we met and I’m not sure. I think I have changed in some pretty fundamental ways–that was the major insight that I had while ruminating on my life at Cape Cod last year and that feeling has persisted since then.

Just like I look back on the essays that I wrote when I was a college freshman or even the blogposts that I wrote a few years and cringe a bit at my naivete, I do the same when I reflect on some of the decisions that I made in the past. I don’t have any regrets, per se. But my lens is not the same as it was before, and that change means that I make decisions differently and hold other priorities than I used to. It feels right to see an evolution of behavior and choices in myself, instead of stagnation.

But perhaps the biggest change in me is that I used to be afraid of change. And I’m not so much anymore. Maybe it’s just a phase that I’m going through and eventually I will find a familiar path and will no longer want to deviate from it. But for now, I’m enjoying the exploration and the traveling. It feels right to be trying new things, even uncomfortable ones. And it’s a liberating feeling to not be constantly measuring myself against the expectations of a church, a community, or a relationship that doesn’t fit my values. In general I feel more present and alive to my experiences and possibilities than ever before, which seems right to me at this mid-stage of my life.

 

Jana, PhD

Yesterday I finished those last final steps to doctorhood.  Afterwards it was more than surreal to walk out of the Administration Building and across the quad, recalling the time just over 20 years ago that I first walked across that same space…at the beginning of my freshman year at UCI.   So today when I walk across the stage to be hooded by my adviser, it will be the close of a long and circuitous journey that began in 1989 when I aimed to become a physician because of my medical history, and ended when I became a professional historian who researches the history of medicine.

Being a doctor doesn’t make me feel any smarter or more worthy.  Instead, it’s a testament to the fact that I persisted and knew when to call something “good enough” to be finished (after 35 years of school, one would think that it was definitely time).

As I thought about all that’s happened to bring me to this point in my life, one small story from nearly three decades ago stood out in my mind.  I was 13 and was nearing the end of my chemotherapy treatments for bone cancer.  There were warnings given to me and my parents that the treatments would have cognitive side-effects, including memory loss.

Yet that spring, as an ailing 8th-grade cancer patient wearing a wig and walking on crutches, I won my school spelling bee.  I then went on to the district level and won that match, and moved on to the state championships.

The details of that experience are dim in my mind now.  I would imagine that it must have been tedious for the audience to watch me stand up and use crutches to walk to the microphone each time I had to spell a word.  Or perhaps the judges allowed me to remain seated for the competitions because of my limited mobility?  I don’t remember.

But even though the details are fuzzy, the thought that keeps bubbling up about that moment now, is one of persistence.  I just kept at it.  Kept doing my best at spelling each word slowly into the microphone whenever it was my turn.  I wasn’t thinking too hard about what I was doing, I was just doing it.  I didn’t let the doctors’ predictions or my own self-consciousness at being a one-legged-and-bald teenager bother me.  I just spelled.

Today I’ve got the urge to take that fragile-yet-determined 13 year-old me in my arms and tell her a few things…

I want to let her know that someday she’ll be walking confidently across a stage to earn another award because she worked hard at something, and kept at it even in complicated circumstances.  I want to tell her that she will be rejected the first time she applies for graduate school, and will be rejected from most schools the second time–but what matters most is that she found one match among the many attempts.  I want to tell her that during her years of coursework she will sleep less than those years when she was caring for a newborn, but that she ought to get up when that alarm rings anyways.  I want to warn her about how tough it will be to TA and tutor and do odd jobs to pay her tuition, but remind her that she can do it even while keeping things balanced with mothering and gardening and researching.  And I’ll tell her that when she does have funding she ought to make sure to work and write everyday, that it’s a luxury she can’t take for granted. I want to explain to her that getting your PhD isn’t about doing things perfectly–often it’s about doing things as good as you can while facing down the fear of failure (oh, comprehensive oral exams, I am looking at you right now). I’ll leave some of the hardest parts out–about the drug-resistant infection that would persist for so many months that there were fears of losing her other leg and about the unraveling of her marriage. Instead, I’ll remind her that she will find true friends to support her through the long dark nights ahead, and remind her that there will always be roses (and roses and more roses).

Most importantly, I will tell her that by the time she’s earned the PhD she’ll be stronger than she’s ever been before, more satisfied with her life than she could have ever imagined, and more sure that there are great things ahead if she’s willing to just keep at it, everyday.

*Photo is from my recent visit to Tuscany, where we stayed in a villa with so many blooming roses that their petals lined every pathway. 

 

Meeting

Monday morning I found myself in Zurich, as an unexpected but pleasant detour on my Europe trip. It was the day that the full force of jet lag hit me, so I was walking around in more than a bit of a mental fog. Fortunately as I breakfasted with a local friend (@chanson), she showed me the sights without my having to think too deeply about where we were headed…

And for lunch I met with a friend that I hadn’t seen since I was 14–someone who knew me when I was diagnosed with cancer, lost my leg, and underwent chemotherapy. I asked him what he remembered about that time because my memories are so dim and fragmented. We talked a bit about what it was like as I lost my hair and became sicker and sicker.

“it was just so sad, we were all so sad,” he said.

Then he recalled a clear memory of seeing me in the hallway at school one day, when someone was carrying me because I was too weak to walk. He said that even though I had to be carried around the school, I was happy.

“You were always happy,” he affirmed. And then the conversation moved on to a different topic.

It wasn’t until later that evening, long after I’d moved on from Zurich and was on the next leg of my trip through the Alps, that I remembered that May 21st, that Monday that I met up with my friends, was the anniversary of my cancer diagnosis. 28 years ago. 1984.

Lots of tough things have happened since then…many long dark nights and many days filled with fear. But I’m still happy and expect that I always will be.

dedication

I was filling in the template for my dissertation file last night.  As I typed up the dedication page, I was pretty humbled by all of the people that I wanted to name–those who listened and read and helped and were just there when I needed them. (really friends, you are amazing and I owe you so much…)

But as I thought about what it meant to me to do this degree and how it impacted the lives of the people around me, I realized that getting a Ph.D. is probably the single most selfish thing that I’ve ever done.  I did this for me.  Not for my kids or for the money or for my parents or for god.

For.  me.

almost there…

Ten years ago I took the first steps to something important, this becoming-a-doctor thing.  It’s so close now, that the last step is consuming all of my mental energy and my discretionary time.  In the midst of it all I’ve left emails unresponded-to, missed appointments with friends, and have been a bit short-tempered in situations where I would usually be calm.

I’m told, by others who’ve done their PhDs, that this is normal.  The end is hard and intense and time-consuming.  For me, it feels a lot like when I’m almost to the top of a rock-climb and I’m exhausted and my whole body is shaking from the effort to get there.  At that point it’s all I can do to keep focused on what’s in front of me and take it one step at a time.  If I get distracted by anything other than reaching the top, it’s likely that I won’t have the energy to do that one last push to get there.

So…I apologize for my flakiness in the meantime.  Just a few more weeks and I’ll be on the other side of this and life will go back to photos and paddling and poetry and time-with-friends once again…

Life with the (digital) natives…

The other day Catgirl told me that there was a story in the newspaper about one of her school events.  She reported to me that this story was in the New York Times, which I just happen to subscribe to on the weekends.

Why do I describe to a newspaper, you ask?  Me, who is more cyborg-digital than just about anyone else on the planet?  Because there’s nothing else quite like reading the paper on weekend mornings over coffee.

So she grabbed the Times, excised it from its plastic wrapper and realized that she had no idea what to do with it.

Where is it?  She asked, holding the folded paper and gesturing to what seemed to be some kind of magical miniature kitten hiding within its folds.

I explained that she would most likely find a Table of Contents on the first or second page.  She kept turning the folded thing around in her hands trying to figure out where the ON button was located.

Her brother grabbed the paper from her hands and started gently unfolding it like origami, all the while explaining:

“My cultural knowledge tells me that one is supposed to grab the pages on each side and pull them open like this.”

And with that he succeeded in unlocking the mystery that is the newspaper, as a pile of advertising supplements fell at his feet.

Catgirl eventually found the Table of Contents and noticed that there were obituaries listed.  She seemed to find that fascinating, but still had no idea where she’d locate the article about high school students that she was seeking.  Within a few moments she gave up, leaving the newspaper in a folded heap on the dining room armoire (which, incidentally, holds a television set that we’ve never bothered to examine since moving into the house where we’re living this year).

 

the wild west (of the internets)

Recently, I received an email from someone in the marketing department of an institution that I’m affiliated with.  Turns out, he was expressing concern about some of my web activities that didn’t carry appropriate institutional branding.  He explained that I was “going all wild west” and doing things my own way instead of following policy.

Boy, did I get a kick out of that message.

Because I realized that what I like most about the various digital spaces where I play, is precisely that they are all “wild west.”  As soon as such venues are codified and monetized, they lose their appeal for me.  I need a place to play and get messy and make mistakes.  I don’t much need a place to play by the rules.  I already have plenty of those kinds of places in my life.

For example, lately I’ve lost interest in Twitter.  While I still auto-tweet some blogposts and post photos of what I’m eating, I don’t generate much new content there nowadays.  Instagram, which seemed a lot of fun for awhile, lost a lot of its appeal when it was bought by Facebook.  Ditto for Gowalla and Brizzly (Gowalla I miss especially–I liked it early on when I was earning badges and toting items around wherever I traveled).   I though maybe Pinterest would be my new digs, that is until Ann Romney joined.  That kind of killed it for me.  I dabbled a bit in Storify until I realized that it was cross-posting all of my stuff to Facebook.  Ugh.  Hate applications that go there.

So…I need a new online frontier.  Anyone have any suggestions for me?

Note: photo above taken while I was on a western road trip two weeks ago–driving from one end of California to the other…

make me smile…

Heather’s post about her changes in blogging since her marital separation got me thinking about how my blog has changed over the past couple of years.  That, and the recent attention that my Mother Work post* garnered from various media outlets made me remember a time when a lot of what I wrote here was meaningful and interesting and widely-linked.

A huge change in my blogging practice is due to working full-time.  Gone are the times when I could devote an entire morning to composing a blogpost.  Added to that, is the fact that I’m not getting as personal anymore–for so many reasons.  And, I’m working so much in ‘auto-pilot’ mode most of the time, that I’m not sure that I even have many deep thoughts to share anymore.

So, instead, I post random bits of poetry and some photos, my travelogues, and the music that’s driving my day.  Because they make me smile and that happiness seems worth sharing with you.

These days I feel more like a magpie who’s pulling at random bits of string and shiny things to feather her nest, than I do a writer with something important to say.

*That Mother Work post was the product of a two-hour middle-of-the-night writing jag when I just couldn’t sleep.  Those nights are few and far-between now that my alarm is ringing at 6am.