Journey: Release and Renewal

There is a lot to unpack since my last essay. I’m very grateful to have peacefully finished the fall semester. Not only did I fully enjoy both of my classes and receive very thoughtful and positive feedback from the students, but I also found myself available to engage with some of the changes my university, college, and department are going through. There was space opening for new ideas and vision, something that was not accessible to me for quite some time. I guess nothing cures burnout better than a cancer journey… In October we made our first trip out of town in eighteen months, to Boston. It is one my favorite cities on the planet and now when our son lives there, it is a whole new experience. It was only for three nights but I felt it truly filled my batteries.

During the last week of the semester, I underwent a planned double surgery—to remove my chemo port and to repair a small hernia that was found almost by accident last year. It never bothered me but since the port removal already required anesthesia, the surgeon suggested taking care of it as well. Physical discomfort often triggers an emotional stir in me. This time was no exception. I was very nervous in the days leading up to the surgery, anxious that something would delay it. It went as planned but rather than a sense of joy and relief, I found myself overwhelmed by grief. I was grieving these two very long years that turned my life upside down, changing everything I ever thought about the world and myself in it. I was grieving the physical pain I had experienced on so many occasions, but even more so uncertainty, fear, worry that took a grip of my body and mind for the longest stretches of time over the last 23 months. On top of it all, I was grieving my parents’ experience with my dad’s advanced lung cancer. He’s been getting chemo since October and is facing a plethora of health challenges. No two days are alike and sometimes, not even two hours.

There is strange harmony in the intensity of challenges at the micro-level of a person and the macro-level of this planet right now. It also affects countries and various institutions in them (including Penn State). It is indeed everything everywhere all at once. Things are changing rapidly and often at an enormous price. We need hope to un-paralyze ourselves from despair; we need peace to gather strength to move forward. Both appear scarce at the moment. The world is unpredictable. Perhaps it always was but now we get to watch it on the big screen. No peeking into the future: we don’t get a heads-up, personal or collective. It requires trust and the ability to flow with what is; both are quite challenging for me.

“Katerina is a ray of light in the dark kingdom” is a famous quote from Nikolay Dobroljubov’s 1860’s article about a well-known (tragic, of course) Russian play by Aleksandr Ostrovsky. It’s been an inside joke in our family for years, in reference to my light in various contexts. It fit with my naturally red hair, a golden auburn that for the last decade I colored a couple of shades lighter because of the appearance of grey hair. After losing my hair during chemo in the summer of 2023, I don’t feel like dyeing my newly grown hair. Adding more chemicals just doesn’t feel right. So now it’s a mix of grey, brown, white, and a bit of that original gold. Over the last two years I got an intimate experience with the kind of darkness I had never known before. And light is seen the most in the dark, anyway. So, after two years of darkness the (continuous) task at hand is to release all that is no longer serving me, let it come to the surface, let it unravel and finally let it go to make space for the new. New light in a new day.