STABILISE

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).

Tag: life

  • On Pursuing the Whole Picture

    On Pursuing the Whole Picture

    Shel Silverstein, The Missing Piece

    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.

  • On Embodiment of Self

    On Embodiment of Self

    When I use the term embodiment, I am referring to the process in which an individual returns to and inhabits their body. It could be interpreted as grounding in the sense that it symbolizes the process in which a person recognizes their physical presence in the world.

    It is a vivid internal awareness of one’s body inhabiting time and space.

    I go for periods at a time feeling disconnected from my earthly body. It’s often caused by slipping away from a routine, overstimulation through consumption of information, and allowing myself to be paralyzed by various insecurities.

    I’m going to be honest:

    The digital world, at least social media, does not come easy for me.

    I often live inside my head. Philosophy is quite cerebral, as is reading, psychology, mental health, and so on and so forth. It takes a lot for me to venture out of the safety net of my brain’s capacity to store information.

    It takes a lot for me to approach my body.

    I don’t mean physical exercise in the form of cardio and lifting weights. I mean, mirror work. I’ve struggled with my reflection for as long as I can remember. I used to turn away from every mirror I could, electing to memorize the curves of my body and face so I didn’t have to look at them.

    I still do that sometimes, but this week, something different happened. I was recording a video with my supervisor for a business venture. Given the serious nature of our work, I took the time to observe myself speak and move and look directly into the camera.

    As it turns out, I am not a mutant spaceship alien, and if I am, I give the impression of appearing human very well.

    I went home. I cooked. I stepped into my studio office space, set up my phone, and took one video after another of myself talking. I watched the way my eyes move, floating from here to there as I located the words that fit the meaning of what I was trying to say.

    It was humbling and beautiful to see my imperfect self growing more comfortable as time went on. I noticed the curve of my neck, the place where my glasses settle, how I tend to smile from one corner of my mouth.

    It was a powerful experience and a lesson on what it means to seek embodiment.

  • On Finishing a Sample Paper

    On Finishing a Sample Paper

    Finishing a sample paper to apply for grad school is a bit of a cosmic joke.

    Write 5000-6000 words on a subject that interests you within this field on the off-chance that you will be accepted.

    This is the second year in a row I have applied to grad school. Last year, I applied for an MSW and an MFA in Creative Writing. I got on the waitlist for the MFA that was eventually rejected.

    This year, it’s philosophy. I wrote my paper on the philosophy of mental illness. I included the work of people I didn’t necessarily think I would include, mostly because they present problems.

    Problems are good though. Problems help you get better at adopting new approaches and finding different solutions, sometimes for problems you didn’t even realize you wanted a solution for.

    Plus, a paper, or a philosophical essay, is meant to contain arguments and counterarguments. The point is not necessarily to be right, but to learn how to approach a problem from different angles with fairness and integrity.

    The question I’m ruminating over:

    Why do you even want to go to grad school?

    Luckily, I have the Statement of Interest to write next.

    I want to go to grad school because it proves there is a space for my interests in an academic field. I am interested in research, primarily case studies relating to people who struggle or have struggled with symptoms of psychosis. I am intrigued by the nature of delusions and how lived experience affects the symptoms expressed by a mental illness.

    Primarily though, I am interested in the question: What does an ethical and beneficial therapeutic relationship look like?

    It has been an interesting process. I sent my first draft to a professor for review. I will be sending it to somebody else. I read an article by someone on Substack who wrote that it may be a good idea to adopt a beneficial habit for thirty days and see how our lives are affected.

    Writing this paper made me suspend good self-care by taking over my brain. For the next thirty days, I am committed to performing one daily act of love and gratitude for myself.

  • On Self-Development

    On Self-Development

    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.

    This here, this is self-development.

  • On Loneliness

    On Loneliness

    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.

  • On Pursuing Stability

    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.

    Source: My Layoff Story by Imran Somji

  • On the Mother Wound

    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.

    My journey is the process of becoming.

  • On Progress

    A significant part of recovering from a traumatic event is learning how to step outside the framework of pain. It sounds simple, but I am not sure that it is. If it was, then it wouldn’t have taken me from 2019 until now to heal from my first experience with psychosis. To hear voices in your head that do not exist is a tremendous experience. The hardest part of my journey has been learning how to trust my own mind again.

    John F. Nash Jr., the Nobel Prize winner in Economics, suffered from schizophrenia for years before eventually finding his own way to live a stable life. He was institutionalized, offered antipsychotic medication, and insulin shock therapy. In his own words, he found his way when he “began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation. This began, most recognizably, with the rejection of politically-oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort.”

    I find writing about my experiences with psychosis painful because I feel as though it makes me appear weak. When I read about people like John Nash or Mark Vonnegut however, I begin to find my footing. Real people suffer from real mental health concerns. In 1959, John Nash got up to make a lecture at Columbia University for the American Mathematical Society and it was incomprehensible. That is how the public began to understand that something was deeply wrong. Imagine that: a mathematical genius getting up to prove a mathematical hypothesis and inadvertently disclosing that he thought he was a part of a government conspiracy.

    What I have learned from his experience is to cease self-judgment. There is no sense in crucifying myself for trusting voices that came from the same place as my rational ideas. It is okay to get it wrong sometimes, to make mistakes, to flounder. As Maya Angelou wrote, “But still, like dust, I’ll rise.”

  • On Building Stabilise

    In her book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou writes,

    “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

    Years ago, I began to think about what I wanted my life to mean. By mean, I was searching for a purpose, a grand narrative that was ethical and forward-thinking. I was working at a flower shop at the time. Although it was soothing to be around beauty on a daily basis, I felt an internal lurch to alter the course of my life.

    At first, I wanted to build a physical safe space, a real place where people could feel free to be themselves. For that, I considered returning to school for an MA in Social Work or Psychology. I ended up studying Social Service Work at Seneca Polytechnic, an institution that was instrumental in teaching me how to approach myself and others better.

    I was mentally ill when I began my studies. There were clear symptoms of psychosis – voices in my mind and the belief that I was being tracked and monitored by governmental forces. Once, I threw out every identification document I had: birth certificate, passport, drivers license, and bank card. I was trying to prove to the voices in my mind that I was not going to run away from Canada, that I was strong enough to stay.

    It was startling for my mother, agonizing for me. It was only when I reached out to a highly esteemed university professor that I realized something was deeply wrong. He advised me to seek medical attention for the delusions and hallucinations I was experiencing. By calling them what they were, I was able to seek help. Attending Seneca was beneficial because they offered immediate access to a psychiatrist and social worker. I spoke with a female psychiatrist who diagnosed me with bipolar disorder and prescribed an antipsychotic medication. With time, the voices stopped and I was able to live a relatively normal life.

    While recovering, it occurred to me that I could build a digital safe space instead, an application where people are offered access to a mood tracking feature and interactive virtual journal. The reason why it is beneficial to include AI is because it can be designed to look out for warning signs (disorganized thinking, delusions, hallucinations, suicidal ideation, etc.). It also offers users a chance to speak openly and not be afraid of judgment in a private space. It is not meant to be a replacement for a medical professional, but a guide on when a user may benefit from seeking real professional resources.

    Stabilise is a passion project led by real individuals – experienced computer scientists and a woman who graduated with a BA Honours in Philosophy and a diploma with Honours in Social Service Work. We are not medical professionals, but we are people who care deeply about improving mental health and access to knowledge. I look forward to continuing my education, both academically and professionally. I also look forward to sharing my learning experience with all of you.

  • On Vulnerability

    In an interview Junot Diaz had with Identity Theory, he said:

    “You can’t find intimacy—you can’t find home—when you’re always hiding behind masks. Intimacy requires a certain level of vulnerability. It requires a certain level of you exposing your fragmented, contradictory self to someone else. You run the risk of having your core self rejected and hurt and misunderstood.”

    Beginning anything new is an exercise in vulnerability. The creative process is ripe with possibility and intrigue and fear. It requires one to accept the risk that Junot describes of “being rejected, hurt, or misunderstood.” While Junot is referencing two of his characters from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, what he has to say is reflective and thoughtful about what it is like to exist as a creative person in the world.

    Most of my creative decisions tend to be deliberate and careful. This may be what Junot means when he refers to “hiding behind masks.” While it is beneficial to care deeply about the research behind one’s work, there does come a point when one must attempt to create without the intellect. It was actually Anne Sexton who wrote, “Watch out for intellect, because it knows so much it knows nothing…”

    When I reflect on what she and Junot mean, I trace it back to vulnerability. The power of the intellect is forming a strong foundation with factual information. Information can construct a mask that prevents a person from saying or accessing the underlying truth behind what they are doing. Information can obstruct our desire to connect meaningfully with another person.

    For instance, there is a certain feeling that accompanies being truthful with a person about an experience. There is the fear of being misunderstood, the terror of not expressing one’s self correctly, and the pain of needing to confide. It is easier to speak in quotations or rely on what has already been done because it transfers the burden to another.

    In saying that, I reckon that a significant aspect of being a human in the world is accepting our “fragmented, contradictory self.” It is okay to make mistakes, to get it wrong, to bite our tongues, and to concede a point. Vulnerability requests this type of honesty. Isn’t it true we grow more when we are challenged?

    Intimacy is one of my challenges. I find that I am always seeking an external source to validate my emotional experiences. I am learning there is value in being able to define such an experience for one’s self. For me, intimacy is a sense of returning to one’s self, acknowledging internal truth values while respecting the narrations made by others. Vulnerability seems to be an acceptance of our imperfect natures and a willingness to express these imperfections without over-editing. The mask must come off sometime. Perhaps art is the chipping away.

    Sources:

    Interview with Pulitzer Prize winner, Junot Diaz

    Admonitions to a Special Person, Anne Sexton