I’m listening to “All There Is” by Anderson Cooper and there is an episode with Whoopi Goldberg. She is talking about when her mom died and how she started to feel like she was withdrawing to an unhealthy level and she said that she knew she was in trouble because: Nobody wants this for you.…
It’s an interesting thought/feeling to have… In order to be safe, I need my dad to be safe, and in order for him to be safe, I need to be unsafe. It sounds non-sensical, doesn’t it? How can this be logically true? Well, in pure logic terms, it doesn’t work. Ah, it’s funny because dad…
I’ve been thinking about truth and reality a lot recently. I grew up understanding a particular version of truth, and the version of reality that my brain was prepared to comprehend. (Also, the version of themselves that people were prepared to share with me — I can only process the information that I receive.) One…
I’ve been thinking a lot about regret recently. I regret working so hard to keep things stable for people who didn’t reciprocate. I have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility due to my dad’s underdeveloped sense of responsibility, so I take on way more than is mine in life. And this has pushed out many of…
Today’s inspiration: the slow death of the power user. https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/the-slow-death-of-the-power-user I saw the engineering tenacity first hand at my work. A coworker and I were trying to develop some software. Neither of us was an expert in this specific area, so we painstakingly read the protocol, implemented what we thought it meant, watched network traffic…
I’ve been working through the process of living with the legacy of trauma. The overwhelming, unbearable, and unbelievable thoughts and feelings. For a long time, I tried to push them away so they wouldn’t hurt me. And it worked for a good long while. Then one day, I found that pushing those feelings away was…
This is a really interesting article from Cory Doctorow, via Daniel Miessler‘s Unsupervised Learning mailing list. It talks about how unmonetizable content is kryptonite to established social-media-type platforms, and how he tries to “woo the muse of the odd.” I don’t have a lot more to add except that I think I’m trying to cultivate…
There is a saying that people come into our lives for “a reason, a season, or a lifetime.” I think I just discovered that someone who I thought was a “lifetime” friend was really more of a “season” friend. It’s possible that I’m wrong on this and it’s just a bump in the road. At…
My favorite quote from this video is: “By making trying to make them proud, I then end up making myself proud.” I like the thought of that virtuous cycle — building something to help others, which helps me, too. The video talks about how to get yourself unstuck when you’re in the “Short, Stall, or…
…and continues to save it. It was a place to put my grief when it wasn’t shared in my family of origin. In it, I could see a whole show about people who were living difficult lives, and I could see myself in their emotional lives. In many ways, my life was so much easier…