Disclaimer: It is important to note that STABILISE is a work in progress operated by an educated woman with lived experience with bipolar disorder and computer scientists interested in improving access to practical knowledge, medical professionals, and crisis responders. We are building a mobile application that is designed to track moods and analyse text so help can be provided sooner. For medical advice, please consult your family doctor or a trusted health care practitioner. If you believe you are in need of immediate medical assistance and live in North America, call 911. Otherwise, please reach out to the Lifeline at 988 (by phone or text).
The way we begin a sentence matters, specifically in relation to how we speak about ourselves.
Consider this:
“I know I’m awkward but this is x, y, or z,”
as opposed to,
“This is x, y, or z.”
It’s the preface that builds the cage. Not impermeable or unbreakable, but edifying all the same for the one who is listening.
Consider this too:
“I know I’m insecure but this is how I feel,”
as opposed to,
“This is how I feel.”
There is an assertion in both of the latter sentences that is not certain to land to the same degree in the former.
Language is a construct-building system, a web of words that defines points of relations between the two who are in communication.
It’s a mode of defining the self and when we are self-deprecating, it is often because we want to prove to the other we are aware of our own shortcomings. It’s sort of noble, mostly destructive because we are defining ourselves through a self-imposed constraint. It could also be an illusion, one that we repeat enough times that it gives the impression of a right to speak negatively about ourselves. Enough times and we offer others a right to inaccurate perceptions.
Skipping past the insecurity is also about ownership and control, maintaining our inherent right to be flawed as a natural precept of being human while just saying the part we feel or mean.
If I were to ask you to imagine yourself as a landscape, what image would come to mind?
In the past few days, I have been a stretch of cold similar to the Tundra. I have also been as volatile as the earth’s core.
One minute, snow and ice. The next, molten iron and a variety of other elements.
There is tremendous beauty in that versatility. My inner self can appear barren, void of everything but cold and wind. One blink and I become magma. The shift between the two is hopeful because it signals the potential for change. It also hints at how multifaceted human beings truly are.
We are never just one thing, one idea, one side of the coin. And chances are, each of us has got a piece of us that appears to be missing.
The beauty of reading children’s books as a woman in her 30s is that I can grasp subtleties while also activating my inner child. For the past few years, I have been obsessed with exploring my shadow self. It seems so mature to face the dark side, so elegant and sexy and deep.
For a time, shadow work was an illuminating and essential process.
I don’t know if I’m alone in saying this, but lately, I’ve been looking at my reflection and seeing the little girl I used to be. It helps that I have been navigating my fear of being on camera by taking selfie reels of me talking about some of the things I am thinking about.
It also helps to read children’s books, like those written by Shel Silverstein and James & Kimberly Dean, because complex ideas are expressed with simple language.
It’s that quest for simplicity that I crave, reminiscent of Richard Feynman who said that if it couldn’t be explained to a child, the person didn’t understand the concept well enough.
The beauty of approaching inner child work is how it’s teaching me to approach my reflection with care and curiousity.
I came across Carol Dweck’s work today. Her book is called Mindset and she writes about the importance of having a growth mindset, as opposed to fixed, when it comes to learning and life.
I have also been testing STABILISE. This is a snapshot of our conversation earlier this morning:
Interesting, right?
Dweck writes, “as you begin to understand the fixed and growth mindsets, you will see exactly how one thing leads to another— how a belief that your qualities are carved in stone leads to a host of thoughts and actions, and how a belief that your qualities can be cultivated leads to a host of different thoughts and actions, taking you down an entirely different road.“
It becomes disingenuous to speak about past rejections as personal failures. It also says a lot about the perilous consequences of attributing value to a specific outcome, as opposed to experiencing the expansive journey that life is.
A desire is a catalyst for action. It takes integrity to commit to a choice.
It helps to strive towards a goal. It’s a form of meaning-making. Rejections are perceived setbacks. A poet could call them forks in the road. It does help to have a growth mindset — to develop the capacity to look at a situation and ask, What am I capable of learning here? What part of this can I bring with me?
It becomes important to learn how to adapt, to face the residual discomfort in certain thoughts, and reframe. It is useful to get rejected. It’s a form of weeding out and making sure.
The brain is a beautiful instrument that is capable of cognitive restructuring. One path doesn’t work? Try another, climb a different summit, learn what pleases you, what you tend to do anyway, not when you’re getting paid for it, but when you’re alone and nobody’s watching you take that secret breath of delight.
That’s how STABILISE started for me: the kernel of an idea late at night. What if I built my own version of an AI chatbot, only this one is skilled in providing rational frameworks and recognizing patterns in the user’s language?
It seemed helpful and idealistic. It was also hopeful.
I kept asking myself, what could prevent someone from entering mania or psychosis? What could provide a legitimate warning beforehand?
A good number of us are addicted to our phones. Psychosis shows up as a collection of symptoms, including social isolation, paranoia, and difficulty distinguishing between fact and reality. Mania is characterized by flights of fancy, high energy levels, impulsive spending or other impulsive acts, and increased verbosity.
It makes sense to wonder if the manner in which we use our phones indicates our personality types and mood states. Does our typing get faster while manic? What about our reading rate? What happens to our consumption of information? Are there clear markers of poor mental health?
These questions are provocative and intriguing, especially when considering that psychosis tends to revolve around falsifiable thoughts and reward-seeking behaviour based on the content of these thoughts.
What if it’s possible to design an AI chatbot that is capable of recognizing delusional thoughts for what they are? What would that type of virtual interaction look like? Is there room for AI when it comes to cognitive restructuring?
I was able to move on from Chapter 6 of Randolph Nesse’s book, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings. Near the end of Chapter 7, he writes,
“Patients with depression feel like they are sinking on a small tuft, fearful, often for good reason, of taking that first step into the muck. Leaving a job or marriage with no place else to go can make things worse. Much of the work of therapy is to help people get up the courage to make changes and to help them see other little tufts of grass on the way to higher ground” (135).
It may be the shifting of the seasons, but I can sense that some part of me is sinking on a small tuft.
For me, depression is not an anvil on the chest or a cloud of darkness. It is the paralysis of inaction. It is participating in a team-building exercise directed towards acknowledging strengths and not being able to name a single one of mine.
Nesse goes on to write,
“Depression is caused by the situation, the view of the situation, and the brain. Treatment can change the situation, the view of the situation, and the brain. However, all three interact in tangled webs of causes, so addressing only one of them will miss many treatment possibilities” (136).
While sinking on one tuft, it can be simple to narrow focus on the muck. How cold, drab, and gross! A significant part of cognitive restructuring involves being able to perceive a situation from different angles. Sure, this tuft here is sinking, but there is another tuft of grass there. One tuft to another forms rungs on a ladder until there’s stable ground.
Sometimes the next tuft is gratitude. I mean, sometimes it’s the ability to look at the sky or breathe. Maybe that’s why breathwork is often cited as a useful tool. When there is nothing else, there is the capacity to fill one’s lungs.
Release before expansion, expansion after release.
One of my own personal obstacles is wanting to climb an entire mountain in a single swoop. While building STABILISE, our virtual journal and mood tracker, I have been encouraged to learn that small steps lead the way.
Sure, there may be nicks and tears, but we are closer than we have ever been.
A fascinating component of Nesse’s work is how often he stresses the depression that accompanies pursuing an “unreachable goal.” Writing the sample paper for grad school and building an application are not unreachable goals. What may be unreachable is thinking either could be done without faltering.
Sometimes it really is about the moments where you’re stuck, where you’re convinced that you couldn’t possibly know what to do next. So, you read another page or two, you let your ideas simmer, and you make the decision to try again tomorrow.
I am still reading Randolph Nesse’s, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings. I got stuck on Chapter 6, “Low Mood and the Art of Giving Up.”
He talks about the Marginal Value Theorem, which is mathematical behavioral ecologist Eric Charnov’s solution presented to a question best imagined by you foraging for berries. At first, the berries are easy and delicious to grab. The more time you spend at a particular bush however, the less accessible the berries become.
At what point do you leave the bush in favour of finding another one?
The question may really be:
When do you give up on a goal, dream, or activity?
Activity could be extended to include a mode of being.
At what point do you let go?
I have worked in a haunted house for the last four October’s. I am a flannel-over-a-creepy-dress person. I wear the warmest sweats I’ve got. I pull my socks right up to my knees. When my haunt is empty, I press my left sole into the wall. I stare at the bricks, how some of the markings make them appear to have faces.
I look at them. I take a deep breath. I check my phone for the thirtieth time that minute. I slip it into my right pocket. I stare at the wall and I ask myself, “Will I come back here next year?”
The answer presented by Nesse is this:
“…all the action is at that spot “on the margin” where the rate of getting berries at the current bush dips below the number of berries you can get per hour by moving to a new bush.”
When debating whether or not I should come back to haunt next year, I count the factors I can measure. There is the fatigue, the exertion that accompanies having three jobs, my desire to be somewhere else next year. I keep joking I’ll be on an island. But I probably will be lying on an island with sand on my knees and the sun shining brightly.
Walking away from anything you love is hard. Easier to weigh the future, that place that doesn’t exist yet. The value in looking ahead is that it allows us to form conceptions of what we want more. Are your hands tired of being bruised when reaching further and further into the bush?
A very dear friend of mine and I went to Muskoka, Ontario for the weekend. We walked into the Walmart and there was a photo development center through the entrance on our left. It brought to mind memories; namely, how many disposable cameras I used to bring in to photo labs when I was young.
When I was young, I loved quite fiercely. I loved the skies, trains, mountains, forests, billboards, tracks, getting on a plane and heading somewhere for an indeterminate amount of time.
Time has become a dark room.
I am thinking about the clouds we saw on our trip and the clouds I saw at a haunted house later. They were moving quickly, shapeshifting in grey sky before drifting into a dark night.
I am drenched in memories, both near and far.
I returned home. I swept the floor before mopping. I rearranged the furniture. There is a new leaf on the ficus. I hung the pothos on thumbtacks along the wall.
New patterns, new modes of being.
I got up to clean the toilet, sprayed bleach on the dark brown stain in the sink from the hair dye I applied two weeks ago. I thought about a person I knew who reached out in the thick of spontaneity and ended us by saying, “You haven’t changed.”
I thought of the tailspin of loss — how we can want what isn’t good for us, how we can want what makes us sick. Head spinning, ghastly shadows, and still we want until we train our minds in the shape of our bodies.
This here, that there — wooden picks delineating space.
I get up. I sit down. I look at the watermelon quartz pendant I attached to a black chain. I look at the paint on the canvas, the dollar store sponges that are waiting to be rinsed.
I look at the evidence of a life and I notice that it’s mine.
In his book, A History of My Brief Body, Billy-Ray Belcourt writes,
“Let’s start with the body, for so much is won and lost and lost and lost there.
I was lonely once and that was all it took. A thick haze, a smothering opacity, this was the loneliness of feeling estranged from one’s body and, by extension, the world.”
It astounds me how certain books arrive at the right time.
It can be easy to think that one is alone with their thoughts, but a distinctive part of becoming an integrated human being is realizing that the majority of us share the experience of loneliness.
It is a profound feeling, one that reverberates through the body. It is a sacred calling for an honest answer, one that sets the brain ablaze in search of the questions that are being asked.
Am I enough? Am I enough as I am? What does being enough mean?
– Samples
It is sacred work to attempt to discover the questions and answers for one’s self. I don’t believe there is a single response. Rather, I believe the answers fluctuate depending on the times in which the questions are being asked. The objective may be to recognize that truths echo through one’s frame in an intuitive form of knowing.
The confusion is the desire that stems from loneliness or an equivocal feeling. Hence, the persistent emphasis on meditation and the powerful effects of grounding. To return to the earth is to return to the body. It is to gain the capacity to name loneliness without trying to eradicate it.
Let the world be what it is. Let yourself be in the world as you are. Loneliness only seems to carry a stench when it leads you to sacrifice your morals and principles. Hence, the persistent emphasis on forming intentions and setting a schedule and learning the power of self-discipline.
Control thyself — or learn how to pause before acting on an impulse.Act on the impulse anyway to learn the difference between doing and not doing.
Reading Belcourt’s memoir reminds me how veracious we can be when we offer ourselves the time to examine why we do the things we do. You, dear reader, must be familiar with the sort of doing I am mentioning: the unmentionable acts, the times we contort our physical bodies into shapes beyond our comprehension and recognition, the willful negligence of self in the name of self-expansion. When the self is lonely, it is hard to see clearly.
Loneliness, in and of itself, is not negative. It carves a space, one in which it is possible to interrogate what to do with the absence and the excess. Self-expansion can often look like self-destruction in the before.
Today, I had the opportunity to get to know my supervisor better. His name is Imran Somji and he is the founder of Appanzee Inc., the app development company responsible for building STABILISE, among various others.
We were talking about professional goals and he shared a post he had written about his own layoff story in 2022. It was an inspiring read, though slightly harrowing in the sense that being laid off is rarely conducive for producing a good feeling the moment it happens. It was Nietzsche however, who wrote, “One must have chaos to give birth to a dancing star” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra).
Depth is often borne from hardship. There are a number of striking features about Imran’s story, which can be read here. Multiple aspects touched me, including this piece of advice:
“…every now and then I do a deep-dive well outside of my comfort zone.”
An integral part of being let go is the space it carves for personal growth. Being laid off, no matter how much one may have expected it, is a nudge towards the unknown.
I remember standing at the foot of a diving board when I was young. I stood at the bottom near the ladder for quite some time. My heart was in a race against my mind. I crept up the rungs eventually, terrified when my bare feet touched the edge of the board. I walked to the front, took many deep breaths, and didn’t jump for a few minutes.
As Imran writes,
“Inertia and the feeling of security can hamper your creativity and potential.”
One of the perils of remaining in a stagnant state for the sake of security is that it eliminates potential and creativity bit by bit.
Not jumping into the water would have meant that I would never experience how it feels to dive into a pool: the breathless descent before my skin feels the crush of the pool against my skin, the scent of chlorine, the sensation of my feet hitting the bottom, the rise up.
I would have remained suspended between pensiveness and action. A safe space, but novelty makes room for understanding that newness may be the strongest precursor for learning helpful skills and developing adaptability.
I am reading a book written by Monika Carless called, Transforming the Mother Wound. Near the beginning, she writes that “self-healing or assisted healing consists of several steps,” one of which is “creating safe space to explore the trauma” (Carless, 10).
I have been thinking about grief and the desire to disappear from people’s lives. When I was growing up, there were instances when my mother and I would get into disagreements and she would ask me if I wanted her to disappear.
It is an intense and impactful question that is augmented by the fact that her physical frame has indeed disappeared through death.
I appreciate John Locke’s popularized notion of tabula rasa, a Latin phrase for blank slate. Locke himself was one of the three great empiricists, a philosophical framework that posits sensory experience as our primary mode of acquiring information and knowledge about the world.
When I was young, I learned that disappearing is an option. I learned how to ghost and leave people’s lives without a second glance. And yet, it is only now that I feel a strong urge to reprogram my way of thinking.
The neuroplasticity of our brains means that this is possible. It is one thing to form a habit, another to pay attention to the moment when you are presented with the opportunity to choose a different action. It requires self-awareness, discipline, focus, and a willingness to change.
Hard emotions demand brevity. I am learning how to stand still in the face of them. I am learning how to trust myself enough to know that even if the ground may shift beneath my feet, I will be okay. I am developing inner fortitude and the realization of control that I have over my own character.
In this place here, I am learning how to take Carless’ advice and carve a space where I can explore what moves me. I have also started writing by hand in a beautiful journal that was gifted to me.
I have lived with crippling self-doubt for too long and I would like it to end.
As this idea simmers in my mind, I am reminded of Kristin Neff’s work on self-compassion. Reading her work has been a pivotal part of my journey because she teaches her readers how to counter negative thoughts with compassion that is directed inwards.
I am an extremely self-critical person. Not just sometimes, but practically everyday at regular intervals. It helps to say that out loud. I am critical. I am mean. I am mean to the point where I self-sabotage relationships and experiences.
I want to be at peace in my head. I want to be a confident and intelligent woman. I want to get my Masters in Philosophy. I eventually want to get my PhD. I want to learn how to love people well and wisely. I want to be kind and thoughtful and considerate. I want to stop wanting to disappear from people’s lives whenever my emotions grow large.
God, it feels so good to admit all of that, and that’s barely scraping the surface of my wants. But in reference to what she wrote, there are moments when I will not be what or who I want. I will be unkind and inconsiderate and pretentious. I will say stupid things and not read an article carefully enough. My research will be misguided and I will make false assumptions. I will tell someone I care about, “I want to disappear from your life.” I may not get into grad school.
And I will survive.
I will survive because I am not a static entity. I am a consistently evolving human being who is capable of tremendous growth and genuine progress. When I wanted to go to college at 35, I doubted my intellectual capacity. I went anyway. I thrived. I met people who will be my friends for the rest of my life. I moved provinces. I shifted my entire life in the direction of a single dream: get educated and strive towards a better life.
If that is not a signal fire for hope, I am not sure what is.
I deserve to offer myself compassion because imperfection is a human condition. A constant preoccupation with efficiency is the enemy of magic. I am allowed to love myself fiercely in the face of my misgivings and shortcomings because I am also wonderful.
Here’s to dipping out of work early to enjoy the October sun and hear the pleasant crunch of leaves underneath my sneakered feet.
STABILISE 