The thing is, maybe what I have been trying to do here, is to find a conclusion to some stuff that has to do with how my mind works. And the ways in which it works differently from the "accepted norm" (difficult to tell what that even is; it's not me, that much I have found out). That might not have been so apparent in what I was writing, but it is what is underlying a lot of my doubts, especially those about recent activities.

I'd really like to move on from that, and I've not given up hope that I might do that soon. Then eventually, these slightly strange posts whill sink down to the bottom of the pile, and nobody will know about them unless they search, and if they are interested enough I am happy for them to know. Even now, I don't know if anybody at all is going to read this :)

About six weeks ago, I realised something that had briefly been on my radar before, but I had then dismissed (partly because somebody I thought must be in the know, dismissed it). There's a pretty high chance that I have Asperger's syndrome, or at least something that goes in that direction. Something "on the spectrum". I hesitate writing this, as it is so much associated with the male form, which is quite different. Or, because the male version is the one that is generally known, I should rather say, the female expression is different from the male. It is much harder to recognise, because women are — or become? for cultural reasons? — much better at masking it.

The masking is actually a necessity, because as a female you can hardly survive if you don't somehow manage to fit in socially. I for one have spent an enormous amount of energy just on learning social cues and appropriate reactions etc. I think I have over time developed it so much that it feels natural now, "second nature"; I am mostly not acting now (I used to do that a lot). Still, there's always a fear of losing that ability again, and sometimes it temporarily happens. I liked how somebody said you have to become "bilingual". Yes, I feel that's what it is. And — much like I often think in English now — I can feel quite at home in social situations (not always, but most times) because I have been exposed to them so much now, although they still exhaust me. And there is value in being bilingual in that way. There is value in your brain working differently even. But it is hard, and I am not sure if I will ever feel I completely fit in. I fit in within my family, that is a good start. I also have quite a few really good friends who "get" me. (But the number of times I walked through the school gates, and kept having this same thought "I am from a different planet" — do many people think that, I wonder?)

[Edit 30/06/2015 I have been socialising a lot recently and enjoyed it so much, that it seems quite unlikely to me now that I might be autistic. So I can't uphold my diagnosis. - And yet there were times in my life, where I really did go in that direction, definitely as a child and in my teens.]
[Edit 03/07/2015 Last one, I think! Reading about how much autistic traits can vary, and how some things that are easy for neurotypical people often are just harder to learn - not impossible! - for people on the spectrum, another explanation could be this: I just have some autistic traits (enough to make my life a misery at times!), but did eventually learn to socialise and enjoy it, and have always been interested in other people. So would hesitate to call myself Asperger's, but do have quite a few autistic traits. And it makes a lot of difference having found this out, explains so many things, in case you wonder why I go on about it ;) Oh, and if you want to know more, this is a really valuable book - not just for parents of autistic children: Congratulations! Your Child is Strange Only slight criticism: it only uses the male gender, or neutral "the child" to describe autistic children, there is no indication they could be a girl, too]

Popular belief would probably have it that I should also be a good coder then. And for some aspects that is true I think, and there I might be more apt than average. But there are other aspects, where I struggle more than most developers I know. It is hard to describe what it is. And I don't know if I will ever overcome that enough, or manage to develop a stragety to cope with it, so that it won't be a problem anymore. I think it would not even have to be a problem. It is not good for developing confidence I guess, maybe that is the main effect.

Anyway, that's it for now, and now I will probably not write about it again. I will also call it 'wrong-planet-syndrome', because everything else is too much associated with a certain stereotype that gives a wrong idea.

I feel my approaches to things are subpar, especially when it comes to 'executive functioning', where I have to sort things out, organise etc. It can go well for a while, and then something, even quite little, goes a bit wrong, and I become insecure and find it difficult to handle it (or I just plainly don't know how to).

But then, it might not even be true. The one thing that is true is that I am somewhat unusual. And if you look at my role in the technical community (which is always what this reasoning is about), I clearly do not have the skills or experience of some. Same conclusion as last post, I am not that unequivocally part of the industry. I don't have the same access to businesses, to money etc. as other people who run technical meetups. And I feel this is coming more to the fore now than before, as people get to know me better.

But then I find one of the compelling reasons to stay is exactly the fact that I am different. Because that way I might help other people who are untypical too. And there's loads of them! I think some people feel more at ease with me than with other tech people, perhaps because I am a woman, or because I am not as secure or assertive as others.

What I feel trips me up at the moment is my technical expertise. All the inassertiveness and insecurity would be fine if I was a better coder, and generally knew what I was talking about. The thing is I do know a lot about a lot of topics, but I just have not got the experience to always judge things very well. And then it's not only technical expertise, it is soft skills as well. I could be a lot better at those!

I will have to see if I manage to just have enough of the things needed to keep this group going - I have so many ideas for it, too. But there is not much time left. I think I will have to change a few things. Soon.

For one thing, that I should actually earn money as a developer. I guess I've always wanted CodeHub to be of real value to people who have been learning to code, or have been running their own projects, and wanted to take it one step further, and get a job at a web agency, or the IT department of a larger firm. And I feel I could do this better from the inside, actually being part of the industry, rather than myself being somebody who is still waiting to make a proper entry into that world. But it is not such a clear-cut thing. There are big businesses on one end of the spectrum, small agencies and one-person businesses on the other. Is there a distinct point, a certain size or turnover, where you can be considered "part of the industry"?

I have worked for direct clients, and I have worked for two agencies, although one of them just briefly. I have earned money with developing websites, therefore I can call myself a professional for sure. Perhaps what is nagging me, is that volume-wise I have done less than others who've been part of the web dev world as long as me. Then also, towards the end of last year, I gave up my regular freelance role to join somebody at a startup who was going to mentor me. This was going to be an unpaid work experience up to the moment I was producing some work of value to him. But that moment didn't come, the work relationship ended earlier than that. It's difficult to put into a few sentences what went wrong. Ultimately I was perhaps just not up to this kind of work yet, but I also was not quite aware what was demanded of me. This does not do the whole situation justice, but is the best way I can describe it at the moment, if I want to keep it brief.

At the time I was working towards giving a talk for Women Who Code. I saw this as an opportunity to teach myself some new stuff. I had just learned about ReactJS (at the startup), and as I quite liked it, I experimented with it, and with Node. - This reminds me how a year before, I had made a big effort to learn Python. I went as far as even doing a course on using Python for linear algebra (I just thought, I'd look into it, then really enjoyed it and continued with it). I also at the time wrote the underlying classes for placing Minecraft blocks in a LOGO turtle manner, in 3D! - Anyway, I prepared for that talk, and I started to organise various CodeHub events. After I'd given the talk, I just continued studying and organising, saying I'd start looking for a job again soon. But it was so easy not to!

Okay, so much for justification for not having properly looked for a job. The thing is, tomorrow I am starting one. That is, I am starting on a project. And once more this came through somebody else, they mentioned me as a potential fit for a role. Unsurprisingly, it's PHP. But not only. Front-end work, too. I see a real challenge in it: To not work extra hours that I don't charge for, and not work till deep into the night, or even till the next morning, as I have so often done before. Either I can do it in an adequate time (and the thing is I have to allow myself enough time! I keep thinking I am to slow; but what a trap to then squeeze the last energy out of you by working through the night; how silly), or - well, I will just have to give the whole thing up! I mean, coding, running CodeHub, everything to do with that. It just wouldn't make sense anymore.

The last few weeks were stressful somehow. It seems like my body at some point decided to turn itself into a little Cortisol factory. I could feel it so strongly. Especially in my lower arms, they start to tingle like mad. And it is only slowly subsiding now. How did it even come about? - One thing was, I had started to build a new website for myself. I wanted to have something like a CV that I could show people, and I wanted to include all my volontary activities in it. Also, I'd pose myself the challenge to do this website with very simple means. But I would use JavaScript on it. In fact, I wanted it to run as a single-page-app. But if people did not have JavaScript enabled, I wanted it to be a site with several pages. I'd use PHP and JavaScript to render the same templates that I wrote in Mustache, and the data would be in JSON files. This all worked great and in the beginning I made good progress. Until I tried to build this slidey thing. Or more precisely, until I added event listeners to do the slidey thing. No jQuery, all vanilla JavaScript. I somehow managed that, although not quite the way I wanted to. And then the content! I had made a list of what I wanted to include, but it took so long to then properly write it! Now I have become so exasperated that I feel reluctant to touch the whole thing. But then, not very much is missing now, so fingers crossed I will finish it next weekend.

Next pain point: Code Club (not CodeHub!). The afterschool club I ran for the past two years, and which I'd wanted to give up now (wasn't coding part of the curriculum now, anyway? My son's reply: "If I play tennis at school, that doesn't mean I couldn't also join a tennis club". What can I say? Well played..) I knew this was going to be the one thing too much. And still I gave in to my children begging. "You can't stop Code Club." I really had not been aware that they liked it so much. So in the end I scheduled 6 weeks. The first week went brilliantly! But the next week already went a bit wrong, the computers started playing up, there were networking problems. Most of them showed a blue screen once they'd started up (a process which itself took absolutely ages) We were doing 3D games programming in the browser. This is a fantastic book for teaching children to code, I think. Alas, each week there seemed to be something wrong. First, the same network problems. Than the week after the IT person had re-installed windows from an old image. The networking problems didn't happen anymore. But Chrome was missing now, and we needed that or Firefox to run the Code Editor. So we painfully had to first install Chrome everywhere (I am surprised the system allowed it all). The amazing thing was that each time, even if I'd spent ages sorting out problems while the children had started to do all kinds of nonsense, once we got a few computers running, they did actually get down to coding. They were still interested. They did want to do it.

In any case this grated on my nerves, and hard as I tried to see it as a partial success, it did not feel great.

I could go on now, but it is getting too late. I can't turn up too sleepy tomorrow!

Tbc..

There must be thousands of blog posts now where people share their stories of how they managed to become more productive. There's usually a list of tips. And a lot of them are really valuable, like turning off distractions, especially online distractions. But what is a bit questionable in my eyes, is when "time off" is just seen as an opportunity to recharge the batteries. When it is just a means to an end, and the end is to become ever more productive. And I have seen this viewpoint being expressed several times.

Against productivity

Then today, I saw two tweets that were posted in quick succession by two different people. One was pointing to a post on Medium wirtten by Quinn Norton which I could relate to very much. It is called "Against productivity". I could quote endlessly from it. One thought I've had myself is that this demand for productivity started with the industrial revolution. It is not entirely a recent thing. It is just that it has come to a head now. It might be time to stop and think, is this really how we want to live.

And then there is this about the American dream: "I began to think no iteration was quite as vile as this one. Despite all the greed and hatred of the past iterations, no version of the dream had been so mechanical — so dehumanizing — as this dream of productivity."

And the other tweet? It linked to an infographic of "Take back your mornings" - take back your mornings to be more productive. What else?

Productivity paradox

The tricky thing is that on the other hand we are probably happiest when we are productive. When we create something, when we finish a difficult task, when we have done something that makes a difference to others, or even just to ourselves.

I often get restless because I do a lot of "unproductive thinking". I have this habit of "philsophising" all the time. And I most certainly overthink things. It is not always totally useless, sometimes I might be able to see some connections that others don't, and I might get some useful ideas. But on the whole, it often seems a bit too much. And of course it keeps me from being efficient!

So for me, I think the real challenge is to not get too distracted (and the online world really can be a bit of a problem, here) to keep myself from working on some things, that I then do finish and can feel okay about. Also, to not get disheartened by what I am thinking.. although that's not entirely avoidable and maybe shouldn't be. - Act on the good ideas that pop into my head. And ironically you can become distracted from putting good ideas into practice, because you are asked to do so many other thing. Be productive, be busy! And then you forget what it is worth getting busy with!

No "Getting things done" != Getting no Things Done

At least for me, there will always be a tension between the things that I'd like to accomplish and what I do in reality. But I do feel a lot less bad by now, about "wasting" some time by just thinking about things, about life in general, about how the human mind works, about how society works (haha those are the high-brow ones, I am not telling you about what else I think ), without seeing an immediate benefit of it. Perhaps that is something that we have to learn again. That when there's no immediate outcome that doesn't mean that nothing positive has happened in the meantime. And it would be good to accept that; in ourselves, and in other people, too.

People have always got things done, and got some amazing things done, before both the "positive thinking" and the "productivity" industry.

It makes me feel uneasy, because I find it difficult to let go of depression - or perhaps, rather the idea that depression plays a huge role in my life and will always continue to do so. It might be a weird case of Stockholm Syndrome. It has been a companion for so long — and when it wasn't there, the fear of it —, what might a life without it even look like?

The thing that for me personally has come out of the Geek Mental Help Week is that I gradually realised how well (although not necessarily always happy) I have been recently. This was not, because I read other people's articles and thought "They are so much worse off than me". It was rather all the stuff I scribbled down and didn't publish in the end. At the same time, when I was failing to get my article together, the old panic — and I get this panic a lot — resurfaced again. I was scared that I might have actually triggered a bout of depression by focusing so much on it, and it would turn into a prolonged period of depression, and eventually major depression.

(The next bit is a record of some experiences from my 20ies, skip if not interested in that)

I had a few of those in my teens and twenties. For example, a very dark month during my time as an ERASMUS student in Pisa, which was otherwise the happiest year during my studies. One day, I sat on the lawn in front of the leaning tower, and was struck by how my life had become just as wonky as that tower. The German term for crazy - "verrückt" - literally means "shifted". I thought how apt that word was. My reality had shifted, it was as if I was living in a different dimension, and I could not find my way back to what felt normal and familiar. I also remember bumping into some people in the canteen during lunchtime, and finding I could just not coordinate anymore the necessary parts and processes to properly say "Hello". The muscles, my voice, my motivation - I could just not get them to play together in a proper fashion.

Or that time when I joined an acting group. I'd been meant to play a leading role, but decided against it when dates of some of the performances clashed with an excursion I wanted to do at university. Instead I became 'assistant to the director'. Except I was not much help at all, had no initiative, and was more of a burden than assistance, despite spending loads of time at the rehearsals. Instead I smoked like a chimney. I often felt almost paralysed and started calling this state my 'strait-jacket'. When I helped at the performances, I remember being almost completely mute and at some point I thought: At least, if somebody else is feeling insecure and not good about themselves, it might make them feel better when they see me. Sort of, "if you are no good, you can still serve as a bad example". That was really the only use I could find for myself!

But I did not get professional help during those two (and previous) episodes, I somehow came out again. In Italy, one day I suddenly started feeling this rage, not directed at anyone in particular, just rage. And then I gradually got better. In the second case, I had a meltdown where I ended up crying in the director's arms. Again, very gradually came out of it. And then I was an actor in the next play, and had the time of my life! Just neglected my thesis a bit, mmh.

The first time that I got help was after I'd fallen in love with a PhD student at the place where I did my Master's thesis, and it didn't work out. I had shared a 'transcendental kiss' with him once (it really was that, and for him too, I know that!), but mostly tried to 'act cool', while at the same time I started to believe it was my destiny to be with this man. I accumulated all kinds of 'evidence' for this, too. And we did get quite close to.. okay, let's leave that. And then, well, he went off to South America, but came back a year later for his viva. I knew he had to come back, and I waited for him, and I waited for him to realise that he loved me. So much arrrrrgggggggghhhhhhhh. If I could tell my twenty-something-old self just one thing, if I could tell any girl just one thing: DO NOT WAIT FOR A MAN (unless I mean there are valid reasons, like you are already together and waiting for him to come out of hospital or something). DO YOUR OWN THING.*

I didn't very much do my own thing at all. I spent a whole year after leaving university, hanging around. Among the few things I got myself to do was once working for the post-office, and once writing an article for the local pages of a Munich newspaper (I thought I could become a science journalist eventually; but I only managed to write one article about genetically modified tomatoes). I met the PhD guy again, when he invited everyone (including me) to a pub after his viva, on which occasion he uttered the unforgettable words: "I don't love you. I could never love you". (He could be quite dramatic, just as me). That was when this whole world that I had built up in my head, collapsed. And a month later, I collapsed, too. One night, I could not sleep at all, and it felt like I had pins and needles all over my body, while my mind was completely numb. The next day I went to my parents' house. It was my mum's birthday. When she walked across the lawn to greet me, I cried and just pointed to my head. - I stayed at my parents' house for some weeks. I got to see a doctor and was prescribed Amitriptyline, and when that stopped working after a while, Fluoxetine. I got therapy, too, and eventually started crawling back out of the hole..

I've not had it as badly anymore since then. I just know I never want to go back there. That's why I sometimes get a panic when low moods persist for a bit. Perhaps it is the panics that keep me from getting it.

Depression versus Crisis

There's one thing I am not quite sure about. Because, you see, up till now, I was thinking: I keep having bouts of depression.

I just started describing what happens then, but find there's no point in going on too much about it. Because in a way I probably feel a bit ashamed about what triggers these bouts, when there are people who have real problems, like losing somebody they love. What is a kind of confidence crisis, where I suddenly believe I am an inadequate person, against that? And yet, they do happen. They follow a certain pattern, and I get distraught, I cry, I have negative thoughts. When my husband comes home, he helps me - challenges the thoughts and otherwise is there while I 'go through' the crisis. As for the negative thoughts, reading David Burn's book (which I believe is the best book you can read about cognitive distortions) has helped a great deal, but there are moments when all the insights I've gained are flushed away in one big wave of all-too-familiar thoughts and emotions.

The question is, what is meant by the term 'depression'? Robert Sapolsky says in his lecture on depression: "Right off the bat, we have a semantic problem". He then goes on to make a distinction between 'everyday depression' (that we all experience every now and then), 'reactive depression' (somebody reacts badly to something, is impaired for a few weeks, then gets out) and 'major depression' (somebody reacts badly to an event, slides into low mood, and weeks, months later has still not got out).

Elsewhere I have read that depression can last any amount of time, sometimes just half an hour, and there was no distinction made between different types. So, I will just make a distinction here for myself: Depression which is also a biomedical condition, versus a crisis with depressive symptoms. Or, in short: Depression versus Crisis.

Because, you see I do keep getting these crises, and they follow a certain pattern. And they are problematic in some ways, in what they prevent me from doing, and in keeping me 'locked down' in an unhelpful thinking pattern. But can I call them depressions? - And might there not be a way to challenge them, and make them become less frequent? Also, there is actually a part of me that can come across as quite confident. What if I managed to focus more on that?

And then there is this: Like, I am convinced, a lot of other people, I am so bogged down in things, and feel the pressure of all the things I am supposed to do, that often it can be difficult, to just feel happy or even just okay for a while, when in reality, there would be enough reason to do so.

On Halloween night, just after I had submitted my — I think now, pretty strange — post for Geek Mental Help Week, I kept feeling so calm. And suddenly there was another, very powerful, feeling that I had not known before. I can't quite describe it. It was beautiful. Like some sort of veil had been lifted from me. And I just felt well.

Since then I think: What if I could indeed give depression up? What if it was - by now (and for now) - my choice?

Coping strategies

So, this is a brief summary of the things that helped me, and keep helping me:

Acceptance

There are various different aspects to this:

• Accept that your current experience is what it is.
• Accept yourself fully
• Even accept your inner critic (before you tell it politely, but firmly, to shut up: "I know you mean well, I have heard you, now please go." - ha, I only just remembered this; I don't really do this. But I will do now!)
• Accept that other people behave in ways that irritate you, or that you might find hurtful. Try not to immediately criticise them, but understand that there are reasons for them acting like that that you might not know of.

I could go on. By far the most important thing though, is to accept yourself, and develop self-compassion. You cannot be kind to others, if you are not first kind to yourself. This is such a simple rule, and yet it took me so long to come across it, and still longer to make any real progress with it.

Find out what makes you feel good, do more of it

I once saw a tweet that said something like this: "Three most important factors for good mood: Good sleep, exercise, meditation". Recently, I have managed to have a better sleeping pattern (although it's pretty much down the drain tonight). And I started to go running. The latter is probably the external factor that has helped by far the most in my case.

Likewise, the advice could be: Find out what doesn't make you feel good, do less of it. But I am not good at that at all so far! I want to try and do that though. For example, not spend so much time on the computer when I am not working.. And have boundaries between different aspects of my life. When I am with the children, I want to be with my children, not start writing emails from my phone. When I cook, I stick with the cooking, and don't go to the computer inbetween to check emails and Twitter.. As I said, I have not been very good with this so far, but then I was maybe never as aware of all this as I am now.

Mindfulness and CBT

Probably, the single most helpful thing for me has been Mindfulness and meditation. Be present with whatever you are experiencing (see 'Acceptance' above). Recognise that your emotions, and your thoughts, are just passing events. This is a very short but ultimately of course insufficient summary. You have to really experience it, to feel the benefits of this approach.

I have not specifically had any CBT (Cognitive behavioural therapy) recently, but would count the David Burns book mentioned above as such. And it really did help, too, and still helps when I remember doing it, to discover how certain thoughts and beliefs you have, are distorted.

I just realised that what is missing from this list, is what many others have put first: "Talk about it". It is missing from my list, because I have already for a long time been able to talk about it. But, of course, it is helpful. Although there is caveats to this. You might feel, you can't keep going on about it all the time, you don't want to become a burden. Also, talking might not always help as much as you'd have hoped. Still, if you never talked to anybody about it, if you just cannot 'sort it out' by yourself anymore it is important to do that, rather than suffer in silence.

See also "Resources" below.

Can I help others?

I'd hope so.

And I'd hope that writing this all down, in whatever convoluted ways, might help someone besides me, too. I also hope that the Geek Mental Help Week, well - helped. What I can see coming out of it: People feeling less alone, and seeing mental illness as less of a weakness (as some successful and well-known figures in the web industry talked about theirs). Also: Pointing out how helpful talking can be. How helpful psychotherapy can be.

For me, there is a wider, almost political dimension to this: If we don't just 'medicate the problem away' and recognise that it is not just a medical condition, as the so often quoted broken leg is, we might be better able to change the conditions that make us depressed in the first place. - What I mean: If it was just this illness that comes out of the blue, and you just take some drugs and it goes away again; then nobody might start to question why so many people suffer from it, and ask themselves if there's something we can change.

If we manage to accept that we don't always have to be productive, if we collectively managed to move away a bit from the maniacal pace at which the tech industry is moving. If we recognized that there is no point trying to learn all the new things, putting yourself under that pressure. If instead we managed to fully accept ourselves, with all our 'shortcomings', that would mean that we'd have more time to think, to properly see things, and, as was said in one of the contributions to Geek Mental Help, to properly see each other. And we might not be so easily manipulated by corporate interests.

Or you could put it this way, perhaps: To fully accept yourself is a revolutionary act. - I am sure somebody must have said that before me!

Should I stay or should I go?

Just to finish off on a personal note. I do have some (not insubstantial) doubts about all this. This whole post, my opinions expressed in it. My ah so brillant 'advice'. Do I have the authority to write any of this? Do I have the authority to give advice? Even to wonder if I could be out of the 'field of vision' of depression for a while?

Especially, within the tech community, what authority do I have? The thing is, for a long time I really didn't know if I even belonged. I felt so unsure that any of what I was doing was any good.

I am not as unequivocally commercial as most people in that community. You need to be 'commercial' if you want to properly earn money. And I don't need to (or feel the need to) earn as much money as others, as my husband is the main breadwinner. This might at first sight, be a big advantage I have. But my situation comes with its own set of problems. Foremost, in my case, really bad confidence. And I probably do manage to do less (although on the other hand, possibly more than some people think!) than somebody who works full time. Less in volume, that's clear anyway. But less in terms of skills? Well, that's an interesting question, and one I don't really have an answer to at the moment.

Then, I also have certain ideas of where I want to be heading. I want to become good at programming and be able to make applications. To "hack".

A lot of my above-mentioned "crises" revolve around that: Does it make any sense what I am doing? Would it not be better to give it all up? Just take any job, so I can earn some money in addition to my husband's (It could even be things like database entry, online editor; something to do with the web or technology, just not as ambitious?)

Basically: Am I doing the right thing?

And again, this seems so self-indulgent. What kind of problem is this?? Compared to people who have to flee their home country? Who experienced physical and emotional abuse? - But then, everybody has to deal with their own life, and if that is what you find difficult at the moment, it just is.

I am just starting this experiment. I have left my "regular freelancer" role at an agency, and started something new, where I work together with somebody who is my mentor. I don't want to write about the ins and outs of this at the moment. It does look like we both benefit from it, which is what I'd always wanted from a mentor relationship. That is a good start. The rest we will see.

The important thing for me will be: I will give myself permission to just learn and code, without asking myself if it makes sense, and if I will be good enough. Just for three months. No looking at the outcome. Just throw myself into it. It is an experiment. I hope to write about it soon, and it will hopefully be positive.

Then there's CodeHub :) Don't let me get started on that!

Resources

- Robert Sapolsky video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc "It's a biochemical disorder with a genetic component with early experience influences where somebody can't appreciate sunsets."

- The Mindful Way through Depression
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112588.The_Mindful_Way_through_Depression

 
- Feeling Good by David Burns
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46674.Feeling_Good

 
Self-Compassion / Self-Acceptance
- Self-Acceptance project: http://live.soundstrue.com/selfacceptance/
- Lovingkindness by Sharon Salzberg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38215.Lovingkindness



* There is a passage in the book "La mort heureuse" (A Happy Death) by Camus, where the protagonist says to a woman called Catherine: 'Ne renonce jamais, Catherine. Tu as tant de choses en toi et la plus noble de toutes, le sens du bonheur. N'attends pas la vie d'un homme, c'est pour cela que tant de femmes se trompent. Mais attends-la de toi-même!' (I wrote this from memory, there might be mistakes in it. I think I had an English and a French version of this book for some reason, I did not read the book in French, but have always remembered this one sentence). — 'Never give up, Catherine. You've got so many things in you, and the noblest of all, the sense for happiness. That's where so many women go wrong. Don't expect life from a man. Expect it from yourself!' - And yes, it's kind of ironic that a man had to tell me that.

And then I'd also started to pen an article for it. For two weeks I collected a lot of thoughts, quotes, resources. Next, I ordered them and started to string the whole thing into a narrative. I sat the whole of Sunday in front of my computer. I had tried to write this 'witty' article about all I knew about depression. But I made a mistake. I thought I could take myself out of it, write about my experiences objectively, from a bird's eye's view. It didn't work, and I felt very disillusioned and frustrated.

Instead I am publishing the below for Geek Mental Help Week. I wrote it about a year ago, and while I put it on my blog, I never tweeted about it.

Perhaps this is my way of saying "Here I am, and this is what I've struggled with and sometimes still do. If it is similar for you, you are not the only one."

I think for me, and many others, the web has always been about connecting, too. You can reach out to others in a way that was not previously possible. For me, this week has been about exactly that in the end. The likes of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, can easily make us forget that we can communicate in 'long form', too, and how liberating and comforting that can be.

I also felt reminded of a post I had read during the summer holidays, Everyone I know is broken-hearted by Josh Ellis. I found the last three paragraphs quite moving. "I don't believe anymore that the answer lies in more or better tech, or even awareness. I think the only thing that can save us is us. I think we need to find ways to tribe up again, to find each other and put our arms around each other and make that charm against the dark." Perhaps initiatives like this can be a step towards that.

Here is my post from a year ago:
(- I felt tempted to edit this and move things around, it might be a bit clunky; but after this week's difficulties with writing I am just leaving it as I wrote it back then)

About loneliness and becoming an apprentice bodhisattva

(from 24 November 2013)

Quite recently, I started re-reading parts of a book by Kamalamani. The book is called "Meditating with Character" but is about much more than meditation! Yesterday I hit on a few pages that I felt the strong urge to photograph and tweet, just because I find them so relevant to the current state of (world) affairs. I am posting them here instead.

Then today I saw a link to an article called "Life of solitude: A loneliness crisis is looming". This article is very strongly related to the message about connectedness in what I read yesterday. Furthermore, it is about a topic that is very close to my heart: Loneliness, and in a wider context, something I would call "social pain".

Social pain is something I have been thinking about quite a lot in recent years. Partly, because of the role it has played in my own life. But also because I increasingly realise how much it (or fear of it) shapes the way we live, the structure of groups, organisations and so on. And last but not least, because of its seeming prevalence in today's 'connected' age.

I think the main insight for me is that social pain can be just as excruciating - and actually has a strong physical component - as what we call physical pain. I have sometimes had this thought: The pain of pushing two children into this world without pain relief, and smashing both bones in my lower leg (on a separate occasion!), have not come near the social pain I have felt in my life. But then that comparison is flawed. Because that physical pain was limited to brief periods of time, of course. So really you would have to ask, would living with constant pain be preferable to social isolation? That isn't a good comparison either, as constant pain in itself has great potential to make you depressed. A recurring pain, cancer with chance of survival, loss of a limb? - It is difficult to answer. I do think anyhow that social isolation ranks pretty high on the list of undesirable and painful things.

As Brené Brown puts it, "We are hard-wired for connectedness". In other ages, we were born into structures that provided that connection (but had of course all sorts of other problems we don't have these days). Now, it is not so clear cut. Often we have to create our communities ourselves, and in many cases we might feel a stronger connection with people in those groups than those we were born into. But we have to find or create them first, and the way there can be full of anxiety and provide some pain in itself. Yet I believe it is always worth to persist in this.

I have below written down something about my own experiences of isolation and rejection. I did not do this to get your sympathy. It is rather to illustrate what effects an experience like that can have. Perhaps mostly, to say: Look after your children. And I could add: Look after yourself and each other, because we really are all interconnected.

As far as I am concerned, I am actually genuinely happy with where I am now, so in a way, I can now see what happened to me as a necessary step to this point. - And then of course I am grateful for all the good things that have happened, and the people I've met. And for the plasticity of the brain.. - Still, I would never wish upon my children the isolation I felt. I could not bear knowing them in a situation like that. (I think my mother was simply not aware of it. Moreover she has had more trauma in her past than I've ever had.)

Now I just feel I want to move on from all that, and instead become an apprentice bodhisattva as described in the pages below.

So, I leave you with this excerpt from Kamalamani's book, and below that, the thing I wrote about my early years (but really, don't feel compelled to read that!)

From Kamalamani's book "Meditating with Character" - Chapter 4 - Why embodiment matters

My story (part of it, by far not all)

One line that struck me in the article about loneliness was: "Inside every lonely adult is a kid eating lunch by herself on a bench." I am not a lonely adult anymore, but I was that kid. When I was 5 my family moved to Paris, and I was sent to a nursery there for a year. It's a commonly accepted notion that children pick up a new language quite naturally at that age, but I didn't. I can't really explain the reasons, I guess I was just quite shy. I was also - probably still am - quite sensitive and an introvert.

It did not take long for the French children to move from initial strong interest in the newcomer, to finding it really odd that I could not understand them. They also bullied me on occasion - stepping on my toes, putting sand in my mouth *. But I also remember a girl who held my hand and was friendly to me, and how immensely comforting that was. Still, the overwhelming feeling of those days was that of isolation. An extreme isolation. I could not put a name to it then of course, but it was definitely painful. I ended up developing a survival strategy. That strategy consisted in completely retreating into myself, to "live in my head". I also completely stopped talking for the hours I was in the nursery. (I did not have the right language to talk with!)

When people have psychological problems, often it is partly because of survival strategies that are not helpful anymore. Those strategies have started to get in the way of a healthier behaviour and attitude. It took me an incredibly long time to realise that in a situation where I ended up feeling excluded, it was often me who took the first step towards that exclusion. It was my old survival strategy of shutting everything and everybody out that made me appear "weird". The shutting out happened as a reaction to the slightest sign of rejection or sometimes just apparent lack of interest. - The thing is I had never learned very well to read my "peers'" attitude towards me, because I was so isolated and did not interact with them very much. I did have my siblings, but those were people I already new!

Back in Germany, I was able to develop friendships, but often had difficulties with groups of people - to become integrated in a group. Then in my teenage years, a further difficulty presented itself. My beloved mum, at roughly the age I am now, was struggling with mental health. As one consequence, she often seemed to despise me. Any criticism was never put into words, but rather delivered as a turning away from me, of not paying attention and not talking. That way it was difficult to understand what was actually wrong with me. But from some strong reactions (silent disapproving glares in my direction mainly), I gathered: I must not appear clever. I must not praise myself, not say anything that could even be construed as self-praise. I must not be selfish and self-absorbed (the latter is pretty difficult, I can tell you, if you keep trying to find out what the heck is wrong with you!). Oh, and I must not talk so much! That was also difficult to achieve, because I was still very quiet at school, but then bursting to tell things at home. In fact, any kind of enthusiasm seemed to be kind of repulsive. While as a result of this episode I pretty much lost the ability to feel pride in the things I do, I am glad to say I never lost the ability to be enthusiastic **.

Possible 'costs' of all this: Many periods of depression from teenage years on, some prolonged and heavy. Various antidepressants over the course of a year - that is now 15 years ago, thankfully, and I've not needed them since, though often craved to go back. Two to three years of therapy - some in Germany, some here. The final year of therapy was really helpful by the way. Low confidence. For a long time, the belief that I was actually a bad and selfish person. - To be fair, the self-absorption is still pretty pronounced, although I might get better at that, too. It sometimes makes me sad to think how much better I could have used all that time and energy I lost. And yet, on the other side, I think it helps me to understand other people better, and that could be helpful in some way.


* Oddly, I quite liked the boy who put sand in my mouth before and after the event. When my parents were looking for a baby name, I suggested "Stéphane" because I still 'fancied' that boy. I did get a brother a bit later, and he was called Stefan.

** My mother is a lovely person, and I have far more to be grateful for than to complain about. She was very stressed and ill.

Work, learn, teach, document

I currently work for a design and web agency for a couple of days per week; mostly doing PHP, sometimes Javascript, a little HTML/CSS and some server stuff, too. It is quite varied and can be challenging, but also rewarding when you work something tricky out. I will work on a website for one other client soon, but otherwise I want to focus on just that one job, so I can dedicate time to some other things:

One thing is learning, in a somewhat structured way. I am interested in the following questions
- What are the things any seasoned web developer should know?
- Is it possible — and sensible — to be good at frontend and backend development (including basic sysadmin)
- More than specific skills, I believe there is a certain approach to technical things that makes you a good developer; when faced with a task, you need to research, evaluate, learn new techniques, apply, analyse, etc. to get to a sensible solution; does this come with experience, or can part of that be taught?
- How can web development be improved by applying software development skills? Programming for the web is in fact software development, but it is not always being treated that way; and in simple cases it can be overkill, admittedly


To be fair, if you have a lot of experience you will most likely just aquire the necessary skills with time. On the other hand, I guess it depends on how varied the environments are where you work. You could end up doing mainly the same thing for a long time.. In any case I feel I would like to know more than I do, and also be more aware of what I know!

So, what I'd like to do is something like this. Pick little projects where I can learn, or learn more about, some aspect of web development, then do those and document what I have learned. And also: Create workshops!

I remember reading something by Vitaly Friedman (editor of SmashingMagazine), where he said that at some point he decided to take a certain time out, I think it was 9 months. In that time he learned a wealth of things, sure more than I could do in that time. I do anyway totally understand this decision. I also feel very attracted by models like the Hackerschool in New York, and Hackership in Berlin. I would very much like to do something like this. Three months seems unrealistic at this point, but who knows..

In any case, if nothing totally dramatic happens in my life, I should have some time to dedicate to learning, documenting - and organising 'learning events'. That is another thing. Organising that should actually not take that much time, especially because I have two people helping me with it. Still it occupies quite some space in my head, because I keep thinking what the best way to do things is. If we want to do events in the evenings, should they have a prescriped format? Would some topics work better than others? - I do think that possibly there should be some constraints of some sort, but perhaps that is something we can sort out as we go along. What is almost more disconcerting is the inner hurdles I keep facing occasionally, but maybe I should not go into that too much. It looks like tonight I might actually post some things, that's what counts.

So, I am looking for some kind of plan to put all this into practice. Flexible enough to leave some breathing space, but with enough structure to give me the idea that there actually is a plan and I am making progress of some sort.

The biggest danger is always demanding too much of yourself. Then becoming frustrated that nothing worked out and becoming so demoralised that you stop doing anything! I will try to forego this, by treating this all as an experiment. That's what it is, really.

Establishing a new habit

One reason I am somewhat hopeful that I might be able to change some things — and especially establish a writing habit! — is the totally unexpected successful installation of another habit that I'd not even have dreamed of!! For the past 10 days I have been going running for about 5 miles. Every day. My husband had told me to go on a "jogging lent" for 40 days. Apparently I need orders to establish a habit. Well sometimes perhaps.. But just seeing that I can do that has been great. And the running has been great, too. Also, I have been sleeping normally recently. Could I cut out the constant sleep deprivation and still write code? I very much hope so.

There are a whole lot of other things I wanted to write about, but I can do that another time, or it might even be better to leave them altogether actually. Yay, I have written a blog post. That hasn't happened for a while! More, more, more!

Where

We have been meeting at the Big Chill in Small Street. They have been brilliant there, we can have a big room upstairs with wifi, coffee and tea. It would in principle be possible to have the room in the evenings as well, don't know what time it gets loud though!

Intentions (dumped into Evernote one night)

• There's social benefit to it, and learning/knowledge benefit
• there's also the benefit of teaching something to advance own knowledge as well -> give people platform to try speaking to people
• "safe" place where people don't need to fear they appear stupid
• Provide space to exchange knowledge, best practices, opinions; also simply to network
• Help a beginner become intermediate; a "home-alone-worker" a team worker

Some people said "just put it out there and see what happens" but I rather want to plan it carefully, and want to start with a distinct intention and concept; it might still develop into something different from what I envisioned, that's absolutely fine.

I like this from the OTS website:
"Encouraging people to coach, whatever their skill or experience level, lets them see how rewarding and valuable teaching others is."
 

Possible topics

• Git/Github - There's quite good workshops here that we could just take as is perhaps http://opentechschool.github.io/social-coding/,
  http://opentechschool.github.io/github-from-scratch/
• Linux/Unix
• Extending Wordpress ?
• Creating a single page app with e.g. Angular
• Website performance
• Introduction to Python for the web; again good workshops here: http://python.opentechschool.org/
• Tools for Frontend Development

Next steps

So the next steps would be:

• Clarify questions about format of workshop
• Contact people who might be willing to do a workshop
• Talk to people at Big Chill to clarify possible times (will go there 21 Jan)
• Put it out there (Blog, Twitter, Underscore!)
• Set dates for workshops, find coaches/speakers, open for registration

Questions

I have been wondering most about

• Target audience, how many people out there
• How to attract speakers/coaches, what could be incentives
• Format of the workshops; Should we aim at similar format each time; have guidelines? I like these http://opentechschool.github.io/slides/presentations/coaching/

More on Format
Different options:

• OTS style: Take one of their workshops or create one along those lines; look for coaches; then allow registration of 4 times as many attendants as coaches
• Have one speaker; they provide workshop, possibly also to a bigger group; basically they can choose the way they want to present it
• Could also have workshops where one builds on the other; have a certain sequence; but probably not very practical

So, I have been thinking about this a lot recently. There is a lot I haven't written down, some more 'philosophical' thoughts about learning and teaching in general. Also the way web development is done these days. I think it has got too complicated, and a lot of the complication is due to a) accomodate design decisions and b) provide maximum level of functionality/power to editors or website owners, that might often not be needed in the end. Just one example WYSIWIG editors. But, let's not go into all this :) And, how would I want to change that with a series of workshops?? I will be glad if this will get off the ground at all for the moment!

The location by the harbourside was great, and the lack of internet was not really a problem, with phone tethering and MiFi as options these days. There was also a good mix of people, at different levels of JavaScript skills, and from different backgrounds; next to front-end developers, people from software engineering who were keen to learn more about web technologies. Many of the presenters also stayed on after they had spoken and followed the other sessions. I had not been sure at first whether to attend this event because I am not really a candidate for the user group as I neither live in Southville, nor am I that proficient in JavaScript (when are you a Javascript user?) But I am glad Gicela and Nigel convinced me to take part. Also it turned out that there were a lot more people outside that category, in fact, the workshop might not have run otherwise, I guess!

So here an overview of the presentations:

Node and the Express framework

Jack Franklin kicked off the workshop with a session on Node and the Express web app framework, which is available as a node package. He started with using node's REPL, showing that you can run normal JavaScript and execute files in it. This included a script to set up a server and make content available through it; you wouldn't normally write that yourself, though, as it would be part of a library. One of the nice things about writing JavaScript server side is that you can use all the latest JavaScript functions and don't need to worry about different browser implementations. We also installed a sample Express app, looked at the structure including the package.JSON file to install dependencies, and wrote some code to set up some pages in it. You can find lots of information about JavaScript on Jack's blog JavaScript playground. He has also recently published a book on jQuery.

Modular JS

Next up was Nico Burns. He explained the benefits of writing modular code and the different methods available (AMD, CommonJS, EC Harmony). The presentation made perfect sense to me, and I could see the benefits of this approach especially in large projects. But when it came to restructuring some code that we were given, and make it modular, I struggled a bit. Luckily in the sample code we got, there was a folder with a solution included, and by transforming the original script into multiple files that depended on each other as in the solution, I could understand the structure and how you got there.

Socket.io

Mark Withers introduced socket.io. Web Sockets are one of the new HTML5 APIs, and not fully implemented in all browsers (for IE only from version 10). They enable a persistent connection between client and server as opposed to the HTTP request/response model. This is important for real-time interaction, for example in multiplayer gaming. Using a library like socket.io, you can achieve such a connection across browsers, as it falls back on technologies other than Web Sockets in browsers where those are not available. The practical example involved writing a script that sets up a server (using the Express framework from before), and binds two sockets to two different ports of that server. Next was a client-side script that enables the client to connect to one of the sockets and communicate through it, while receiving the web page through the other socket. In the example, the server sent a message to the client which was then appended as a list element on the page, among other things. The sample code is available on Mark Withers's github.

XMPP-FTW

Socket.io was actually used in the next project, too. Lloyd Watkin presented his library XMPP-FTW, which he wrote to make it easier for developers to enable interaction with XMPP (Extensible Message and Presence Protocol) through a browser. XMPP is an open standard for real-time communication and mostly used in Instant Messaging services, but also in applications like Google Talk (recently replaced by Hangouts) and Facebook chat. An interesting aspect of XMPP is that you can have different 'resources' - which would normally represent different devices - and can set one as priority. Somebody sending a message to your account can either specifiy the resource they want you to receive a message on, or - if they don't specify it - it will go to the one you have set as priority. We got to try out XMPP by connecting to an XMPP system set up by Lloyd on his laptop. We each got an account on that system. Then we wrote some code to connect, and sent little messages to each other, logging them to the recipient's console. We also sent messages to a public messaging wall. Not everybody (including me) did get the code for that right so easily, but we got there in the end! You can find Lloyd's slides online, and here is XMPP-FTW and the pub-sub demo.

Refactoring (and testing)

I won't write much about the last session of the first day, which basically consisted of watching Jack Franklin expertly refactor some jQuery code and explain it as he went along, including the use of unit tests with QUnit, running through PhantomJS. Great stuff. There are posts on his blog on both refactoring and using QUnit.

And after that it was off to "Pub.js" as the agenda stated, but not for me. I think it was better that way, my brain was at that point already quite frazzled without any drinks!

Coffeescript

On Sunday morning, we all turned up again at the boathouse and enjoyed the view onto the Floating Harbour. And then we did Coffeescript. It is a programming language that compiles into Javascript and is much more concise to write. It can be installed as a node package. I quite enjoyed this session, although it will probably be a while before I use Coffeescript, just because I want to get to know Javascript better first. Coffeescript has a lot going for it though, as you can read on this document by Adam Butler who led the session. Adam talked us through the syntax, and the benefits of Coffeescript over JS. We then got some time to try writing something ourselves. Coffeescript works seamlessly with any Javascript libraries, and I tried a little example ivolving jQuery. One of the best ways to learn Coffescript is "backwards" it seems, by using the js2coffee tool. All in all, it was quite rewarding getting some things written in Coffeescript to work, though I did not finish the whole thing. Indepent of Coffeescript, the Dash docsets mentioned by Adam (which you can use with zeal on Linux) were a great discovery.

Angular

There was also one session about a Javascript MVC framework, Angular, presented by Maff Rigby. There is a vast number of frameworks around to build single-page apps, and one conclusion at the end of the session was that the choice you make depends on what specific needs you have for a certain app, but also personal preference. There is not one that is best - they all have different things that they are particularly good at.

Also, there are "opinionated" frameworks that are quite prescriptive in the way you have to structure an app, and those that leave you more freedom. As I understood it, Angular is not very prescriptive. Maff has created a website monitoring app called getTestr with Angular and was showing us how to get started with building an app. At least some of the approach seemed familiar from PHP-based MVC frameworks. I had some stupid difficulties getting things to work though. I say stupid, because they were so obvious in hindsight, and I feel a bit sorry that I bothered both my neighbour and Maff with it. - There was a lot of typing things off the screen in this workshop, and I fell behind with this quite a few times. But I do think it is good practice typing the code yourself. Still I was glad that the speakers also provided the finished examples. (Here you can download Matt's code and presentation).

Leap Motion

 

In the last session (read a great explanation of what we did on Dave's own website) we got to play with a Leap Motion device. Similar to the Xbox Kinect, it detects shapes and motion through optical sensors. Dave Taylor, who presented this session, had brought a number of these devices and people could work with them in groups of two or three. You can see a schematic and artful representation of your hand on the screen, and the software can also recognize a hand and fingers as well as certain gestures like swipe, circle or a keytap. (It can not always track individual fingers, and they seem to appear and disappear a lot of the time.) One interesting thing is that it also calculates the centre of a sphere that would fit in the palm of your hand.

We could see all the data that the Leap generated in real-time by accessing a file in the browser that displayed the data as JSON. It was quite interesting to see when a gesture was recognized, or seeing the number of hands and fingers change, also finding out the range where the Leap was able to "see". We then got to play a game of Space Invaders where you could move the ship by moving your arm and use your finger to trigger shots. (I love Space Invaders - I really do think it was the first ever computer game I played, on my cousin's Atari.. yes, I'm that old..). We also got to play a multiplayer version (Web Sockets, again!). We then looked at a JavaScript wrapper with the functionality for controlling the ship through movements. We started manipulating the code by making it stop on a certain condition (like a certain gesture). In the process, I learned a useful trick: You can introduce a breakpoint by putting the word "debugger" into a function call. The plan had been to write a better controller class, but it seemed everybody was more keen to play around, and I think we were at that point also lacking a bit in concentration! It was anyway a great session.

So, that was it. It was an intense and enjoyable two days, and going through the sessions again (I actually looked at the code of all of them where I had it!), I find it has been really useful to me. I wonder what will actually come out of it. I have in any case at least one project where I want to try things out, but I am sure it will benefit my work in general.

Thanks to everyone who made this event possible, especially Andrew McGregor and the speakers!

Thoughts that come at night

Journalists can give you the creeps (think "phone-hacking"), corporate data-hunger can give you the creeps, but governments (not only one, but a string of them!) starting to behave in the same and possibly worse ways… I can't even find a word for that. It becomes all the more perplexing, because we are all just so comfortable. What do I have to complain about? Maybe nothing yet, personally, but it does already affect others personally, and by the looks of it, will affect more and more people until there might be hardly anybody left who isn't affected.

I say "by the looks of it". Is it the media exaggerating, manipulating? One's own mind painting things more bleakly than they actually are? Do we know all the relevant facts? If there are things that resonate with what you know about the Stasi, Fascism, Nazism, is that a red herring? At least here the press can still report, right? What about all the despotic regimes, the atrocities you hear about. Are they not worthier of your outrage? But this is no excuse, and the reporting is already not totally free anymore.

And then, in some ways I do actually feel personally affected, because a government that orders the "symbolic" destruction of hard-drives to flex there muscle has for me lost every credibility and trustworthiness and I don't feel at all they represent the people they are meant to serve. I feel outrage about how it will affect many people on a subconscious level and that again most likely includes me. And quite a few journalists. You can say what you want, this is an intimidating act, it has zero to do with assuring security, but all with creating a shock effect.

Can we do anything to stop a gradual erosion of our freedom? Can I do anything? I have to say I don't know. I have never felt a very political person. But a lot of people will say that of themselves, and that is exactly why it is difficult. We have just been so comfortable and we are conditioned to worry so much more about status, about the things we have and we think we need. Maybe it is just what humans are like anyway. And we, in the Western world, just happen to have come to this point in our history where things start to go awry. Or maybe they have for a long time already. That's the thing, where do you draw the line? What does freedom actually mean?

Man Machines

Here is something I really wanted to write about. Two books I have read recently, quite different books, but both, in a wider sense, about how the mind works. Both, in my view, with some implications for individuals and society. I wonder whether I will be able to write much about the first one, as I finished reading it a few weeks ago.

It is called "The Emotion Machine", written by Marvin Minsky in 2006. It is kind of a sequel to "Society of mind" from 1986, about which I have written in another blog post. And like last time, I stumbled across it in my parents' house. So, let me see what I can retrieve.. Ha, this is actually a topic in the book! How do we retrieve memories. Anyway, these are a few things that bubble up. Some of this might be a bit inaccurate, but it is about ideas (that is how the mind works…):

• The mind is organised in layers, each of which employs different "resources" (in the 1986 book those where called "agents"). High-level resources draw on subsets of other resources which themselves draw on others. There can be conflicts between different resources. If one system uses different subsets from another, we can do things in parallel (like walking and talking at the same time). But most things we have do to serially to do them well.
• The self as a constant unchangeable agent is an illusion. There is no such thing as a self that makes decisions. It is always several parts of our mind working together.
• Moreover, we cannot directly command the mind at our will. We cannot tell it to ignore certain needs. That would be detrimental in fact, for if we could decide to put off eating or sleeping forever that would do us harm. But not only that, things might demand our attention even if we would like to ignore them, and depending on what state of mind we are in different resources get precedence.
• To decide what behaviour wil eventually be deployed, there are different layers of our mind exerting their influence. "Censors" are at work that stem from previous experiences, and they can stop things even reaching our consciousness. Minsky references Freud here. What is sometimes experienced in meditation as state of total peace (enlightenment?) is possibly the temporary absence of censors.
• In our language we have a lot of "suitcase" words, that can mean slightly different things in different contexts. For example "to give" can mean physically giving something to somebody else, transfer ownership, lend… This can also make it difficult to give accurate definitions of things. How do you define "consciousness"? But far from this being a weakness of our language, it is actually a strength. You can make more connections between things if there isn't one exclusive definition.
• When you see a familiar object, there is massive input from regions of your brain that store memories, not just from the visual cortex. So what you have learned in the past about that type of object probably contributes more to the picture than what you actually see.

This is a random list. There is much more to the book. And it gives a fascinating insight into how the brain might work. It is humbling and awe-inspiring at the same time. We are such intricate, ingenious machines! We are just not able to command them very well (or not at all?). Especially not always to our own benefit. Perhaps this is a result of my age, but I feel more and more that we are really a product, of our genetics plus all our experiences plus society plus the people we are close to plus individual circumstances and so on, rather than these largely unchangeable beings that have a personality. But of course you still move and live "as if", it is what we have learned to do, and it is our frame of reference. So while it is fascinating to follow Minsky along, in the end you cannot keep looking at things this way. Unless you worked at a "Thinking machines" lab I guess, then you would probably switch into this mode for several hours each day! In any case, we need to use the "I" as a model in our everyday lives.

One thing I took from this book for myself is that really, if we want to make any changes to our habits or ways of thinking, we have to do it in a very indirect way. This probably varies for different people, but my mind pretty much has "a mind of its own", I find it nearly impossible to order it to do anything. Any plan I make seems doomed to fail, unless there is an outside pressure, like I have an appointment with somebody. I also was reminded how powerful meditation can be, and I would so much like to do more of it again. But ironically, this is one of the things I find impossible to tell my mind to do. As is writing for that matter, and I cannot tell you what a massive relief it is to find myself writing now. Massive, massive, massive.

As I said, I feel there are implications for society, too. It might be difficult to put this into words. Basically, I guess at the level of society you find the same patterns repeated as in our mind. And in fact, Minsky's 1986 book was called "Society of Mind", it works in the other direction as well. Our mind is a society of resources that work together. Likewise, our society generates an Übermind which goes in the direction that the most powerful resources (or agents, I think that might be a better term actually) determine it to go. And sadly, you have a mixture of "bully-in-the-playground" and "old boys club" phenomena here, in our current society. The ones who shout the loudest and punch the hardest, get the attention. And decisions get made by the ruling classes, and a shocking number of times in secret it seems. It is an interesting question now, how we can make the more thoughtful and sensible parts of that Übermind be heard more. Giving them a voice should be engrained in the structure of our societies, and that is what constitutions and the law are meant to do. Yet it looks like the power of those agents that keep things in check, aber being eroded, and that is scary, I can't help saying that again.

Also, those in power employ certain tactics to manipulate the public. I just hope - and believe - that they, too, often get things wrong in that respect. Whatever psychological knowledge they might have, they will not be able to steer the collective of our minds, as much as they would like to.

Are you ready to be Wholehearted?

On to the second book. I actually stumbled over that, too! In a motorway service station, in the over-priced WHSmith shop, of all places. The book is called "Daring Greatly", subtitle "How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead". Quite a mouthful, and I have to confess that I normally have an aversion to titles like that and the books they normally adorn. But there are exceptions. And the exception here is that it is written by Brené Brown who has given one of my all-time favourite TED talks, and that upon brief inspection of the contents, I just really wanted to have this book.

I read the book in a single day. My most concise description of it would be: It is telling the truth. The truth that lies at the heart of our experience of being human. This is the other side of Minsky, this is the "illusion" that the mind creates, which is, for us, the truth we live in. It is telling this truth in very pragmatic terms, with only passing references to such things as mindfulness (her therapist tells her: "Less thinking. More feeling." Something I can fully subscribe to). Based on qualitative research. Not quantitative, thankfully! One of my pet peaves in TED talks, is the total straightness of curves and absence of standard deviations in the "statistics" they show there. So, what is this truth. In short: To be able to live life to the full, we need to allow ourselves to be vulnerable, to be seen. We also need to be prepared for some (sometimes immense) discomfort and pain. And we need to build up something Brené Brown calls "shame resilience". As a good summary of her conclusions, just watch the TED talk.

It is not at all an easy feat. In fact, BB herself says that she has created a roadmap with her research, but is not necessarily a good traveller along that map. At the start of her journey, she states, she was "2 for 10" and is still not always able to embrace the hallmarks of "Wholeheartedness", a term she has coined for the ability to live life to the full and with authenticity.

In any case, the themes of this book are really important to me. Shame is something I have felt a lot, especially in my earlier life. And it has this tendency to self-perpetuate, and to operate in silent. So, kudos to Brené Brown for dragging it out in the open like that and give it a good "beating". I say, it is important to me, but it should be to everybody really, including a lot of people who are not even aware of how shame, fear of failure, illusions of scarcity, shape their lives. I wish this idea does in fact spread and enter the collective unconscious, without ever becoming too dogmatic, that is always the danger.

To conclude, one quote from the section on parenting. That chapter had a bit of an eye-opening effect with some thoughts I had not previously come across or forgotten. One thing worth noting is that your actions and the way you present yourself to the world, has a much greater influence than anything you say to your child. This is again something I believe to be absolutely true. And this. It seems an important message in our safety-obsessed times of helicopter-parenting:

"I no longer see rescuing and intervening as unhelpful, I now think about it as dangerous. Don't get me wrong — I still struggle and I still step in when I shouldn't, but I now think twice before I let my discomfort dictate my behaviours. Here's why: Hope is a function of struggle. If we want our children to develop high levels of hopefulness, we have to let them struggle. And let me tell you, next to love and belonging, I'm not sure I want anything more for my kids than a deep sense of hopefulness."