Nancy's Musings

My rejection from teaching at BYU-Idaho is a big deal to me, but mostly as another nail in the coffin of my academic career. Emotionally, I fight a lot of "nobody wants me" feelings, and the constant employment rejection is a concrete manifestation of that conviction. But as I wrote in my last post, I'm not here on earth solely for or at other people's pleasure. I have a lot of student loans. My debt increases about $1,000 every two months since I achieved my PhD. I need and want to make money, but normal revenue streams are not available to me. I make what money I can at freelancing, babysitting, and odd jobs, but the time-to-income ratio is insufficient for long-term purposes. I have known for a long time that I should write novels for my mental health, so I'm going to put more effort into trying to sell them. Last year I polished a short thriller titled This Prison . I contacted a few agents about it, even, and collected some rejection. I'm more hesitan...

Trigger warning: if this is gonna make you sad, you might look at pictures of kittens instead. I am not a mental health professional. I'm just me, and my experiences are individual, and not intended to be generalized. If this doesn't help you, throw it away and find something that does. A few months ago, my congregation heard a really amazing presentation/lecture on suicide in our community. Since I have been suicidal (mildly, and not recently, thank God), I prepared myself to listen by writing down some notes and memories. I thought maybe somebody might find them useful. I identified three justifications that my sad/scared brain found to push me toward self-harm and suicide, and I also identified the tools and truths that my strong brain found to help me keep going until I could see light again. Reason 1 (a lie) : I am a burden on others, and a net loss in life. Even knowing that it's a lie, my brain actually still believes this. For those of us with certai...

This poem by William Wordsworth (Romantic poet, friend of Shelley and Coleridge, brother of Dorothy Wordsworth) has been stuck in my head for several months now. Beginning with the bodily metaphors that describe energy expended in unfruitful pursuits, we can hear the frustration of a poet who cannot find any harmony between the wild, dangerous, and stormy passions of nature (imagine the intimacy between sea and wind!) and the sordid onanism of capitalistic production and acquisition. In other words, Wordsworth is complaining that we waste energy in "Getting and spending" (ln 2) and are too preoccupied with such dull things to experience  Nature (a loaded term for Wordsworth, but I'm not going to bother to unpack it here). And then he writes, "I'd rather be / a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;" (lns 9-10). Wordsworth is looking to ancient religions jealously and resenting Christianity for inoculating him against the sublime - the terror and wonder in th...