Showing posts with label blog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blog. Show all posts
Sunday, July 1, 2012
The following post reflects one reason of why I haven’t been around as frequent as I would like to or why I haven’t been publishing more photos for a while...
This last year has been very difficult for me (emotionally speaking) causing me distress, sadness and frustration; leading me to a profound state of depression and low self-value. The cause of it I will have to keep it to myself for a bit longer as there are topics of it that I still need to work out, digest and process.
Now, I know is difficult to detect the subtle yet visible trail of my depression over the last year because I tend to use to great extent satire and sarcasm as part of a defensive mechanism to guard me from a painful reality... but at the end you got to understand where you are standing, facing the truth that you have been unable to solve situations the way you want it to be solved and accept that you need of someone else to get you out of it.
Up to just seven to ten weeks ago I couldn’t recognise that I was deep in depression that was affecting my life and that I needed desperately to do something about it, starting a recovering process to a more stable version of myself.
 |
| Is hard to get out of a dark place with your eyes are closed. Image by Brandon Rechten |
It wasn’t until I went to Canberra to visit a childhood friend of mine that I was pointed out of this issue; it took to him no time to understand something was off with me, asking a series of subtle questions about my mood, behaviour, eating and resting patterns. Puzzled about the causality of my depression (as I am strong/stable personality) he tried to point me out my problem without a direct confrontation as he thought I was unable to handle it at the moment, keeping frequently in touch the next two weeks, worried I might try something stupid.
But after a short period of time something happened, leaving me totally exposed to this situation to which he called me once more to tell me to get professional help. I couldn’t discard his pleads as he was utterly concerned about my well-being and I was starting to realise he might have been right on calling me almost every day; I had touched rock bottom.
Next thing to do was to indicate the situation at the office (to my boss) trying to appeal to his understanding as I was struggling to get things going on a positive note. He told me to talk to him in person, try to deal the situation without me being uncomfortable and provide a series of advises that I was meant to follow. I don’t think that I have acknowledged to him that I am really grateful for understanding my position and give me those comments.
There were more people critical for my recovery; one of them was my good friend and co-worker that I share desk with and a Venezuelan friend that lived though a similar situation that I was living (apart from the depression). The two of them took a big chunk of their time to be there and listen out everything that I needed to say, just like a security valve I was letting everything out, venting my problems, getting feedback about it and trying to be objective about what things I needed to take control of and what things to let go.
The next following weeks were of intense work on me, stabilising my emotions and getting into rhythm; talking my issues out with friends and therapists, understanding the origin of it all, getting priorities in which I am number one and letting things go.
 |
| It may be painful at first... but letting things go is the best approach you could assume on destructive situations. |
In any case, I am a lot better now, capable of writing this post to check against myself (and my future self) to keep in line and remind me that I need to flush stress and sadness on time before everything goes dark.
I wanted to share my story as well... to expose what I think it was useful to me and to be able to connect to some others in the same situation.
There are early symptoms which you will be able to detect if you or someone you know is suffering from depression.
Is not just being sad all the time, is an entire attitude towards your day to day that changes gradually dragging you down bits and pieces until you hit the critical zone. Depression appears because of multiple causes but one common cause is the inability to resolve a situation that causes frustration, anger or sadness for a long period of time.
In any case, you might be suffering of depression if:
- If you think there is no much point of getting out of bed or performing daily activities.
- If you struggle to focus on activities and you are easily diverted for topics of conversation.
- If your daily diet is invariant most of days, you probably don’t care and you have stopped eating properly (over or under eating).
- If you have lack of decision taking and leave everyone else to take decisions for you to prevent conflicts, or because you are unable to made your mind toward one option or the other.
- If you can’t find anything gratifying or positive about your day or the activities you have performed during the day, every single day.
Does many of these items apply to someone you know? In that case get help and talk to someone about your problems. Try to vent out the steam, get out and walk, exercise, spend time with friends.
Do you still have a hard time to get on the right foot? Then try to following:
List good things of your day: creating a daily list enumerating those things you liked about your day gives you perspective and motivation to go on. For yourself to write it with at least certain amount of items; it could contain from ‘I liked my cereal this morning... marshmallows are the best’ to ‘I have manage to deal with X situation at work, getting my boss to like the outcome at the end of the day’, from ‘the night tonight has lots of stars’ to ‘I have run 2 extra kilometres this morning’. Force yourself to positive and each day you will find a new reason to keep it up.
Get distracted: if the problem follows you anywhere you go, then try to distract yourself by meeting new people, going to galleries, museums, beaches, parks or movies... Chill out! There will be a good portion of it where your brain isn’t trying to psychoanalyse your situation, giving you a second breath of air to continue moving forward.
Stay clean: Alcohol and/or drugs aren’t good advisors and are not a good source of distraction (as you will find out sooner or later that you are losing more than what you get out of it).
Recognise the support from friends and family: is easy to fell into the trap ‘I am the one with the problem, I will work it out’ but in reality there are people willing to take a seat an listen to the things you got to say without judging; they might give you some critics but embrace it and improve out of it as they meant to help you get through the situation. Close friends will not overlook details and they won’t give a critic that you won’t be able to handle.
Be honest with yourself: ask if you are happy with the situation, if you are willing to change anything to feel better with yourself and recognise you have a problem that needs to be solved. Being in a dark place is not easy and bad ideas will pop out of the wilderness of the dark regions.
Get resolution to your issues: facing your problems will be the hardest and the last thing you will do to fully recover. You will need closure of that feeling, be ready to accept any outcome and then face the problem.
Force yourself to do things: have you ever seen ‘Yes man!’? No? Watch it! Is not a great movie but the idea is fantastic. Apply it to your life; every piece of the puzzle will start to fall into its right place.
Cheers and till next time.
Monday, April 9, 2012
One of my biggest issues writing any post is me. I’ve written already close to sixteen posts about different topics and can’t get my head around it to make it interesting or just to get the courage to publish it.
But I have to ask myself: why? Is it because is open for critic? Or is it because I am sharing with the rest of the world the way I think and possibly sharing too much of my dark passenger.
 |
| Erm... not this kind of dark passenger... (image property of wordans) |
Well... the blog is a dairy to me where translate and order my thoughts into words, trying to make sense of lessons, interactions and appreciation of my environment and life. But it shouldn’t be this difficult, right?
I’ve recorded how much time it takes me to write down a post, getting a totally shocking time (average) of three to four days...
And you may ask ‘Three to Four days??? Why? I know you have typos, reaction issues and some of your jokes are... incredibly stupid.’
The first pass my draft is nothing more than a couple of lines describing general ideas of what I want to create as an end result; must of times this process is a bunch of questions I ask myself of what I have learned or what I would like to read later on (I read my blog a lot). This takes me no more than 20 minutes.
 |
| Some drafts start like this... (Thank you John of Austin for this image) |
The second pass is a refinement of the draft, trying to expand the ideas, including parts of my silly humour and some other anecdote left behind as couldn’t fit it anywhere originally. It usually takes me two to three hours and at the end of it I don’t want to keep writing anything about the blog.
A third pass or second refinement is trying to read it with my own voice, feeling the vibrations of my throat and exercising the facial muscles. This serves me with a dual functionality: spotting sections where the reading process does not flow (shuffling paragraphs or ideas) and excluding trivial or redundant details with little or none value for the post. Depending on my mood, this process could take from two hours to an entire day.
A fourth and final pass is my creative/destructive phase, consisting on a read of the content to Kathy, modifying the post (yet again) on the fly as I read it to her or rewriting entire sections as I notice certain ideas could be exposed in a different way (sometimes pulling new ideas into its own separate post). In the end I ask her if it reads ok, repeating the pass as necessary until I get it right and dropping the entire post altogether. Is at this point where Kathy points out the rough edges of my tongue, lowering the level of acidity to my statements from car battery acid to lemon or orange juice sort of thing (one of the reasons of my moderation while writing).
But, this process is not consistent; writing down a draft for two or three posts at once, to then come back to it a week later and type down an entire post: reading, expanding, researching and linking details, to then publish it just few days later, leaving those drafts as incomplete thoughts.
So I ask... is there a better way to create content and publish it? Does anyone have a better approach for me to try? because it seems to me it takes me ages to compose and get things published...
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
This is a public announcement.
 |
| I will include this toon at the top of any post that might lead to incontinence. |
Good Lads and Ladies, please... chill out!
There is nothing to be afraid.
I know the latest news has been confusing and rumours spread fast, out of control.
But I assure you everything is and will be OK.
There is no reason for mass evacuation (or the other type of evacuation, nobody wants a shitty situation) and the police is having a hard time trying to control the chaos.
 |
| Riots in London when the blog post was published |
Please, do not compare with September 11; do not call homeland and security, eventually the crisis will be over! (Now my blog is probably being tracked by 6 agents just because I said that).
So I am going to say it again without prelude (in case you freaked out before getting to the end of the previous post)
I AM NOT CLOSING MY BLOG
I was rambling about why people decides to shut it down because one of my mates (frank) decided to close his and made me reflexive, pondering about the reasons and motives.
I know my posts aren’t short and most of the time confuse people with bladder control problems... but read to the end before cursing my mom.
 |
| Yes, my head is twisted and I need a translator for human. But I meant good |
By the way, to the anonymous (who sent me an email this morning signing as Anonymous but his email address has his last and first name... yeah, clever!) my mom said 'Thanks!', and she is fine. You probably won’t understand the sarcasm, but it doesn’t matter... you probably won’t read this either and jumped of the balcony screaming ‘this is the end of the world!!!!!!!!!’
I repeat,
I AM NOT CLOSING MY BLOG
Cheers.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
In the next few words (or paragraphs) I will try to explain in my point of view why some blogs die and why you should not be upset about it. I understand the feeling and that is why I am writing down some of my digested thoughts.
Ever since I started reading blogs (mostly from people whom I have not met until later) I wondered what kind of motives they would have to write it down and then publish it?
Why these people share their thoughts in such a personal way in an open media such as the Internet?
 |
| That is the question. Image taken from creativeeducation.co.uk |
When I started Uni (at the end of the 90s) I was the kind of guy who was totally comfortable being anonymous; my facebook was closed to everyone except those very few close friends (although facebook as much much later) as well as my IM or any other type of contact. In other words, I was the most asocial person you could probably meet. But that never stopped me of being curious, frequently checking the Internet for interesting and appealing stuff with my rampant 128kbps modem (translation for the new generation that was the fastest broadband you could get at that moment, at least in Venezuela).
One of the first blog I started reading frequently (by adding it to my bookmarks) was in 2003 and those posts were written from Florida, by a photographer on his mid fifties who decided it was about time to retire and take lovely pictures of kids buying ice cream, eating lollies or running around in playgrounds, which at the time was a big deal with lots of paedophiles on the loose and people complaining about strangers taking pictures on public places. I guess he was trying to protest or argue with control freaks, more than fighting with angry and concern parents...
He used to post every Friday or Saturday about his life and how society had changed on the last 30 years in Florida, but after a while the blog posts stopped; very few people were following him (or understood the concept of virtually follow someone) and 16 months later, his blog was shut down by his son with a final and explanatory paragraph indicating a fatal blow to his father’s heart; it was just out of the blue. Not long after, the blog was deleted from wordpress and with it, the incredible tales of his author. The content of the blog and the blog itself died with his author.
 |
| Image taken from andrewcaldwell.org |
At that time I was reading more and more blogs, each of them with different topics; from silly poetry to music, videogames and software development.
There was one in particular I remember the most; it was themed on cakes and desserts, called Caroline’s Cakes blog... but in reality the blog talked about anything but cakes and it was a way to vent different situations in her life (business decisions, life, friends, etc), and the reason of why I remember this blog in particular was because I always felt ashamed of reading it in public with its bright pink and yellow pastel colours and corky midi music in the background, which by the way made its way to the internal speakers of the computer, at loud in the laboratory; it happened once and I said it was one of those frigging pop-ups and I was trying to kill it... yet no one believed me.
But somehow I felt connected to her; connected as if I was her close friend like if I knew her, her thoughts, her way of writing and her silly jokes.
That is one of the many reasons why I felt offended when she decided it was about time to move onto different things, closing down her site and erasing her blog without warning, excuse or the expected ‘that is all folks’ sort of thing; she just closed her blog. To me it was a ‘facebook un-friend’ sort of deal, where someone just decides to take you out of their lives. But who the bloody hell was I? She knew nothing about me! Not even a single peep; never left her a comment or let her know I was reading her gobbledygook. There was no reason for me to be upset, and yet I felt she killed it.
Why would she dare to share feelings and mood to total strangers?
How did she realise that is better to keep her life to herself after almost two years of constant bickering
When did that happen?
And why did she remain silent when she had followers and cyber friends?
There was a missing piece in my puzzle, why would someone take the effort of opening their world, putting it into words and writing it down then close that chapter in their life and pretend it never happened?
Radicalised on not spending more time reading someone else useless mumbling I decided to stick to just tech blogs. It was the safest approach as very few IT people, writing down code and ‘best practices’ decides to shutdown their blog to do more entertaining things.
Let’s face it, we communicate better with a keyword than with our mouth.
But my radical solution started to fall apart as I took the decision of leave Venezuela behind to move somewhere else, making our mind to choose our destination and familiarise with the culture of our soon-to-be home; reason enough to invoke the-daemons-who-find-it-all and browsed for hours any related story about Australia, filling up my head with more stuff than I could possibly remember, keeping me busy and distracted from many problems and situations of Venezuela.
It was amazing how much people have had shared when it comes to migrating to Australia. Is at that moment when you realise it does not matter the differences of culture as long as you find something in common to start a conversation, which later on leads you to friendship.
Sadly enough, very few of all those blogs were active; in fact, half the blogs were already dead! And the cause of death seemed to be Australia (arriving to it or settling in it), causing the flow on entries to dwindle for several months until total stop or the expected ‘we are going to close/end/finish blogging, it was a lovely experience but... [insert-excuse-here]’ blog post.
Could not understand why it happens. I could not possibly understand it because I was not living in Australia and the blog was an escape pod from the atrocious reality of Venezuela.
But you know, eventually I got my visa, moved here and started my life all over again and after a year of adaptation I begun to understand the motives behind the desertion of those moving to Australia.
It was like meeting with an old acquaintance whom you have not seen for a very long time: Greetings, profuse conversation about family, parents, exes (strangely enough someone will ask you about that someone who everyone knows but him/her should not be named), business or bad decisions in life and that is. End of the conversation, both parties look awkwardly to the sides and cheers goodbye.
You just ran out of conversation topics.
Of course, you could mention any funny anecdote of sometime ago but you don’t want to delay the inevitable... So you stay quiet, tapping your glass to make the other one a bit more uncomfortable to then say ‘hey, there is Mary! Has been so long since we talked! Let me check her out!’ Ending the conversation without the nasty and impolite ‘I think we don’t have anything else to talk about... off you go!’
Yes, we know... Mary was part of the plan all along. She was your escape pod from that dangerous situation of uncomfortable silence. You told her to stay there and call you out or wave hello in case you started looking to your right and left. Or even better, you just had enough beer and have to go to the loo.
Finally I was getting it, why blogs were dying! I was not because the authors decided to regain privacy of their lives... It was because they got to the point where they would have to share the private details of their mind and lives, the little details they were hiding all the time and all of the sudden, without any new source of events will be forced to share their precious intimate moments!
So the best tactic to apply is run for Mary or escape to the loo, killing the already dying blog.
To those who gets angry at the authors (like I did) whom leave their blogs in a painful state of abandonment, this post is for you. Learn to forgive and move on.
To those who decided to abandon their blogs. Respect your readers and send them one final post. Dolphins would say ‘so long and thanks for all the fish’ although the mundane crowd won’t understand it. Eventually it will be appreciated.
As you might notice by now... my blog is not dying given the amount of gibberish I just wrote.
If makes sense, good onya!
If it doesn't, eventually you will get there.
Until the next time.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
