It’s Personal - Carolyn CC Hart

I woke this morning to find a message from the editors at Ad Anima, the literary journal published by the medical school at UC Irvine. They shared a link to my personal essay “Mirror,” which appears in volume 2, issue 1. Ad Anima is hosted by eScholarship, the open source academic platform created by the University of California. The permalink is: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9td069f7

It’s always a happy thing when my writing is published. But this time, it feels more bittersweet than joyful. The calendar year narrated in “Mirror” was incredibly difficult for many reasons, including the situation revealed in my essay. I spent most of 2017 organizing the first IASAS symposium Synaesthesia: what is the taste of the color blue?, which took immense time and attention, and left me exhausted. My elderly Jack Russell Terrier died that autumn, and I was still adjusting to the end of my career in the health and wellness program at Twitter. And then there was Ruth, the person at the heart of “Mirror”, someone I will never forget.

The feeling I have on this publication morning is a mix of regret and gratitude. At the time I knew Ruth, I wish I’d had a better understanding of how to negotiate life as a neurodivergent person. I made promises to Ruth that I couldn’t keep, and I am still filled with remorse over that. I don’t expect that shame to ever completely dissipate. But I am grateful for the intersectional community that surrounds me, the writers, researchers, family, friends, and fellow creatives that keep me keeping on.

We all make mistakes. To err is human, at least according to Alexander Pope and probably The Pope as well. But AI makes mistakes too, including Google Gemini, which just gave me the most fantastic example of a degenerate loop. I was searching for a quote about regret, hoping for something inspirationally regenerative. I expected I’d have to sift through the internet shallows, but Google dredged up a tiny existential breakdown in real time, sampling the same token (the numeral 2) over and over:

Instead of an AI summary about regret, I got a cautionary tale about knowing when to stop generating, a live demo of regret in action. Perhaps this is my sign from the universe to stop ruminating about Ruth…

My favorite saying about regret isn’t a quote at all. It’s a single word and an image that spans two pages in Shaun Tan’s remarkable book The Red Tree (2001). This picture book for grown ups follows a red-haired girl as she moves through a day that feels unmoored from meaning. She is not so much doing things as being carried through them, adrift, disconnected, and steeped in a kind of persistent despair. Each image places her in strange, symbolic environments that externalize what cannot easily be said: the weight of sadness, the distortion of perception, the sense of being small inside an overwhelming world.

One of the moments depicted in The Red Tree has the girl standing at a window. The viewer sees through reflection that a magnificent and fantastical airship is passing overhead. Yet, she is sequestered in a room, sealed in by a padlock stamped with one word: REGRET

On this gorgeous March day, I will not let regret overtake my joy. I’m delighted to see “Mirror” published, and so happy to share the link with my friends, family, and fellow synesthesia researchers. Today I will remember Ruth in our moments of mutual fondness. And I will take the words Ad Anima…”to the soul”…to heart.