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: Self-Help

  • 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 Self-Compassion

    Today, I would like to perform an excavation.

    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.

    Neff writes,

    “We can’t always get what we want. We can’t always be who we want to be. When this reality is denied or resisted, suffering arises in the form of stress, frustration, and self-criticism. When this reality is accepted with benevolence, however, we generate positive emotions of kindness and care that can help us cope.”

    She raises two important questions:

    1.) What do you want?

    2.) Who do you want to be?

    They give me pause.

    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.

  • On Nausea

    Years ago, I stumbled across a memorable quote from Jean-Paul Sartre’s book, Nausea:

    “It’s quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don’t do it”.

    It is interesting to consider the initial moment when you recognize there is the potential to love somebody. I am not strictly talking about romantic love, but platonic love as well.

    Vulnerability can feel scary. To put yourself out there, to drop your guard, to show up with an open heart – these are tremendous tasks.

    It calls to mind Kierkegaard’s conception of the leap of faith in his book, Fear and Trembling. This is a logical comparison given that both Sartre and Kierkegaard were continental thinkers.

    In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard talks about the leap of faith, a decision that separates the knight of infinite resignation from the knight of faith. Basically, the knight of infinite resignation is the one who doesn’t jump. He approaches the precipice and is paralyzed by its depth and the potential for danger. In comparison, the knight of faith is the one who knowingly makes the leap.

    What I am learning is how to practice awareness while appreciating love’s capacity to inspire joy, peace, and gentleness. There is value in letting somebody in long enough to get to know them. Some people are beacons of light and arbiters of hope. They walk with you on life’s journey.

    It is not a perfect venture. Love is messy. It makes demands. It asks questions, hard questions, the sort that encourage you to take a good, long look at yourself in the mirror. There are conflicts, crises of conscience, and requests for compromise.

    All is well though when you choose to make the leap for those who allow you to feel safe and heard. Love is a communion between two beings who are committed to showing up for each other with respect, integrity, and dignity.

  • 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 Embracing the Quiet

    There is something to be said about being able to exist in the quiet revolutions of change.

    It is possible to slow down, to take a minute to breathe.

    This morning, I was walking to work and I could feel exhaustion creeping its way through my entire body. I asked myself, Do you want to go home and rest or do you want to power through?

    For the first time in years, I called in sick, grabbed a coffee, and returned home.

    I have been considering how only a week or two ago, I was frantic with worry.

    Reading and writing have offered me an opportunity to digest other people’s views while expanding my own.

    I have made the decision to apply for my Masters in Philosophy. I intend on writing about psychosis, mental illness, and the role that cultural frameworks plays in both.

    There is a profound liberation in releasing old paradigms. Not everything that you believe is true, is.

    I have missed this part of my personality deeply, the girl who wanted to follow her dreams wherever they might take her.

  • On Shifting Paradigms

    Yesterday, I came across Thomas Szasz’s 1960 essay, The Myth of Mental Illness, which struck me as one of the most profound papers I have ever had the good fortune to read.

    In his essay, Szasz asks a profound question:

    Do you have a mental illness or do you have a problem with living?

    At the risk of sounding foolish, I had not considered that line of inquiry until I read his work.

    As I sift through Threads, I notice how many users are struggling with mental health concerns. One user went so far as to say that being diagnosed with a mental illness felt like the end of the world.

    I can relate.

    When I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, it felt as though I had been negated by its symptoms. Suddenly, my passion became mania and my sadness became depression. I felt labeled, misunderstood, and also a perverse sense of satisfaction that I could finally name what was happening in my mind.

    Reading Szasz’s essay reminds me that I have the freedom to shift my emotional and mental paradigms. He encourages me to think about how being diagnosed with a mental illness can cause the one who has received the diagnosis to form a mental and emotional construct defined by the DSM-V.

    This construct alone is reductive and simplistic.

    When he writes there are “stresses and strains inherent in the social intercourse of complex human personalities,” Szasz is elucidating on the concept that living among other human beings is hard. Maybe not is, but can be understood as such.

    Szasz goes on to write, “the concept of illness, whether bodily or mental, implies deviation from some clearly defined norm.” The question that follows: Who defines the norm?

    I don’t have any answers at the moment. I just appreciate how he presents fascinating questions that encourage continued thought and research.

  • On the Long Road

    Michel de Montaigne, a French philosopher from the Renaissance, said,

    “To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.”

    I chose Michel’s words and the picture because death has been weighing heavy on my mind. Pampas grass grew outside the townhouse I lived in with my mother right up until she passed away. There are moments when I feel her presence near, when I think communicating with her would be as simple as picking up the phone.

    I remember her daily.

    I hear her voice in my head, not as a symptom, but a painful sense of missing someone I love who is no longer here. A professor I write to every once in a while told me that it is a strangeness to lose the person who brought us into this world.

    Strange is right, hollow too.

    At root, what I’d like to tell her is about my day. At heart, I want to hear about hers. The afterlife of loss is profound. There are instances when my soul lurches and pivots and does cartwheels.

    I think about what Michel is saying, how he emphasizes the importance of accepting one’s mortality. It isn’t strictly acceptance, but a relinquishing of the fear that can help us avoid becoming subservient.

    I know that I feel subservient to my own fear of death. The unknown is terrifying with its unseen variables. However, I have noticed that my fear of death is in proportion to the excitement I feel learning how to engage with the world again.

    Everyday, I grow more confident, a skill that I have been trying to manifest since I was a kid.

  • 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.