[Length: around 1400 words. Content: an intensely vulnerable story - my “grown-ass adult” origin story, if you will. Features my emotional experiences and growth over the past few years, starting from depression to where I am today, and expressing my hope that you might find the same positivity in your life]
Friends! As I approach my 28th birthday, I wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on my past few years of adulthood. This a story to say: I’ve taken a journey towards emotional wholeness, and I’m still weird and you’re welcome. This is a story to say: if you're at your edge, I feel you, I've been there. This is a story to say: there are causes worth giving to and pitching into, please find yours, and consider GiveWell. This is a story to say: I’ve tried to find loving communities, I think I’ve found some, and I hope you find some that fit you. This is a story to say: I'm really excited for the next decade, there are always difficulties, but opportunity exists where change exists.
Emotional Wholeness
Let's start with emotional wholeness. I'll be honest, emotional wholeness is still a hard concept for me to pin down. Perhaps, as Kristen Neff describes, this is the ability to hold our hands to our hearts and say “It’s hard, sometimes, feeling [lonely/anxious/embarrassed/what have you]. But everyone feels this way sometimes. Yes, may I be gentle and understanding with myself. Yes, may I be as compassionate as possible in this moment.” Or it’s about having a rich vocabulary of emotional words to describe our internal experience - https://www.cnvc.org/sites/default/files/feelings_inventory_0.pdf . Yet again, it might be as simple as the ability to cry when we feel sad, to laugh when we learn something new.
I don’t know for sure, but I do know I'll always remember one of the low points in my life. It was December 2015; I was still playing a lot of video games. In particular - and this remains embarrassing for me to say - I was consumed by a hentai game, a game where my characters were saving the world and having plenty of sex along the way. My best friend, Chris, texted me to see if I wanted to go climbing. This weekend was the first time, to my recollection, that I didn’t want to answer him, that I didn’t even respond with a simple “no”. For the first and only time in my life, I considered suicide. I was hooked. I was ashamed. I hid.
The depths I felt then remain the deepest I’ve experienced depression. I got better, and this took time. Healing absolutely took the help of friends and therapists - thank you for your timely suggestions and a quick emergency turnaround back in 2015, Dr. L. Thank you for your constant understanding over our year of work together and your encouraging me to get out to 1st UU, M. Thank you for a countless number of friendly walks, Scott. Thank you for your love, mom and dad and S. To all of my readers, if you’ve made it this way into the piece and feel those depths, I encourage you to consider if therapy is right for you - one of my goals in writing this personal piece is to help normalize therapy. It’s OK to ask for help. It’s OK to need help.
I say all this because I’ve been complimented, now and then - stuff like “you live a really interesting life” or “you’ve got a lot of willpower”. While the former might be true, and the latter less so, I think it’s important that we all recognize our shared experience. I feel anxiety, sometimes. I feel tired, sometimes. I also feel joy and excitement and focus. I’m human, and I hope no one ever tries to make me an idol. My life now is a product of years of work, of experimentation; this process is never complete because I’m still human, and being human in any world is hard. From my own experience, I can shout it to the rooftops: change is hard, and it takes time. Please be patient with yourself.
Causes
One belief carried me through my darkest hours in 2015: the belief that I’m at least doing some good in this world. I still remember a time that I actually stopped for a solicitor on the street; it was after work in 2013, the solicitor was cute, and I felt like talking to someone. She was with Save the Children and wanted me to sponsor a child, to support one child’s education in Africa.
I didn’t sign up.
Instead, I did my research. I’m something of a rationalist - friends know that I’ll sometimes give odds about an outcome, like my giving “60% odds that David comes out to dance this week” (he joined! Props, dude). Much of self-labeling as a rationalist means trying to have accurate models of reality. (This could mean, say, having powerfully predictive models like https://www.fs.blog/mental-models/ or rigorously updating beliefs based on new information like https://arbital.com/p/bayes_rule/?l=1zq )
In the midst of this research into how much good my donation might do, I was reminded of the effective altruist movement, and in particular GiveWell’s work. GiveWell’s research is detailed, impressive, and clearly articulates one view about how the world works and how to best contribute charitable dollars for good. I also recalled Peter Singer’s basic idea, that most well-off folks can donate 10% of their income to charity without significant changes to their lifestyle. Reams of paper could be written about how charities work. Reams could be written about how different charities are, or are not, effective.
To keep this simple: I agree that GiveWell’s recommendations are a worthwhile investment.
So, ever since 2013, I’ve donated 10% of my pre-tax income to causes identified by GiveWell. Recently, I’ve also allocated 1% of my income going to carbon offset projects, and $500 to 1st UU here in Philadelphia. These donations are fairly impersonal and small, yes, but they still benefit the world. They’ve still helped me retain a belief that I have much to give to the world, even when I found myself in my darkest hours.
Loving Community
For years, I've tried out new activities - if you met me on the dance floor, at choir, at a SMART group, improv, or up in Boston, or at Curalate, or Inspire, then you've already seen evidence of this. What I hope to see in everyone’s life is a sense that they’re tied to a loving community. Humans are a pro-social species. One particularly strong demonstration of this was found by Emile Durkheim - the more socially integrated a person is in society, the less likely they are to commit suicide.
In this vein, I’ve found no community as personally satisfying to me as dance. Consider my background - a tech worker, staring at a screen all day, hooked on video games for years. And then consider dance - all genders joyously participating, shared movement, and a common love of music. Dance meets emotional needs that, years ago, I hardly even knew I had. I feel alive when I dance; I feel interesting and fun when I dance; I have a low-pressure environment where I can meet new friends. For all this and more, I love dance.
Still, I’ve mentioned it before and I’ll repeat it again: change takes time. What communities might you find in your life, I wonder? Perhaps you might find yourself in a language-learning group, excited by the possibility of learning a new way of interacting and practicing that skill in a foreign country. Perhaps you might find yourself, as I did, joining the MKP for an intensely vulnerable weekend retreat. Perhaps you’ll find yourself at a “Women in X” event, engaging in all that feminism has to offer the world. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. I hope you find yours.
Closing
It’s amazing to me that I can write all of this and realize there’s a whole other half to me, and that one of these days I’ll have to establish my creed as an engineer. Now, I like working to ensure that the technologies and processes underlying everyone's life are as clean, practical, reliable, invisible as possible (should out to CCL and Inspire here).
Those are stories for another time.
By this point, I’m sure I’ve made myself “that strange guy” on the internet among everyone I know. That’s cool with me - if I can help even one person by talking through my own shame and history, I say it’s worth it. As long as you’ll consider reaching out to a friend to offer or receive help in this crazy modern world, it’s worth it.