Non-violent Apps

 I have a vision for an app I want to build that allows a user to reflect mindfully on what they are scrolling through using nonviolent communication. It has turned out to be a tough product vision to articulate, especially with a small budget. My main idea was to allow a user (myself to start) to read the news and then be prompted to reflect. The problem I've run into is that most news apis are currently paid. There seem to be fewer general news RSS feeds available now. (If you're reading this and know of one, let me know!)

As part of researching this today, I found two apps that are based on Nonviolent Communication and tried them both. I thought I'd share my experience.

Nonviolent Communication App by Ilia Kovalenko

Ilia Kovenko calls himself a "future therapist" and has developed a few other mental health based apps.

This one felt close to what I had envisioned. It walks you through observing, picking feelings, then selecting unmet needs, then it asks what you can request of someone.

Enjoyed: 

• Picking feelings and needs.
• Seeing the final entry.

Challenges:

• It's a long list of feelings with no way to search. You have to go through all the "Unpleasant" feelings to get to the "Pleasant" feelings.
• Observations being so free-form can be daunting. I had no idea at all what to put for what to request from someone.

There's a paid portion of this app I haven't subscribed to as well.

Inner Giraffe: NVC Empathy by Edwin Liu

I can't find any additional information about Edwin Liu. This is his only app listed on the app store. 

Enjoyed:

• The interactive NVC walkthrough around difficult emotions.
• The journal entries.
• Feelings were broken out into pleasant and unpleasant through emojis. There was also a section of "faux" feelings which I didn't explore more.

Challenges:

• I did not understand the journal entries until after a bit of trial and error.
• The interactive walkthroughs are very clearly not based on your input. It's helpful but there's no change regardless of what you answer the prompts. It feels like it should given the conversational nature of the input.

This app is completely free.

Step One

I am a failure.

Ouch. These words hurt. And yet, I'm the one saying them. I've been saying them a lot recently. Mostly to my husband and inside my own head. Of course, he says, "you're not a failure," which I greatly appreciate. The problem is I'm saying something vague to express a real feeling. 

Why do I feel like a failure? Because I feel like I'm back at step one in a number of areas in my life. Next fall, both my children will start a new school. I recently changed jobs and the skills required aren't the skills I have been using. People I relied on have moved away, or relationships changed, and I'm realizing I don't have the same community I used to. I do not want to be here. I regret the decisions that led me here.

A few years ago I texted a dear friend during a difficult time about the feelings I was having. She's a friend through Al-Anon so she replied "You're back at step one." I'm reminded of that. In the 12 steps, step one is "Admitted I was powerless over ____--that my life had become unmanageable." And people go back there many times. I'm there. I'm powerless of my feelings of success. My life is feeling unmanageable.

Step two is "Came to believe a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity." The problem for me is that I'm struggling with a power greater than myself right now. I wonder what greater power would allow the wars in the world, the casual cruelty, the abuses of power. The answers are not clear. I just know I can't do this alone. 

Loneliness and Codedependence

I first started this blog eight years ago. Then, I was so excited about the possibilities of working in tech after time spent burning out as a social worker. I named it Codedependence as a joke, a clever word play. I googled the word today and found this definition: ”The anger and frustration that grows out of an unsatisfying, unfulfilling or unpredictable relationship one has with an electronic device, especially a computer.” Perhaps ironically, this has come to mirror my own experience. I am forever grateful for the opportunities working in tech has created for me. It’s hard to regret the transition I made, between the people I’ve met, the amount my salary increased, the flexibility I got, and all that I’ve learned. However, I’m much less enchanted, and after six years of working 100% remotely, many days I wanted to throw my computer out the window. 

Part of the problem came because I moved cities right before accepting my first fully remote job, with LaborVoices, where I’d be tackling labor abuses in supply chains. I had only moved an hour away from DC, but it was far enough that casual hangouts with my old friends happened much less frequently. Some friendships didn’t survive. A few have, and I treasure them. Then, two months into the job, I realized I was pregnant with my son. This first presented as exhaustion that led me to cancel most of the social events that had previously provided me outlets and was helping me build new relationships here in Baltimore. Meanwhile, my startup dream job started running out of money. I tried going to coworking spaces, but with no connection to the people there, I didn’t know how to make friends. The stress wore me down. Six months into my son’s job, between our funding crisis and my loneliness, I started looking for new jobs. I found one, a temporary, in person Salesforce consulting job that could only pay a fraction of my current salary. I convinced them to hire me three days a week while remaining at LaborVoices two days a week. I look back on that time as one of my most joyful and creative. However, having very little paid time off became challenging when my son got a weeklong stomach bug. And I still needed more security. 

On a whim, I applied to a job with the Wikimedia Foundation, thinking Wikipedia would never hire me. I was wrong. After two months of interviews, I got the offer. It was more money than I’d even known to ask for and most importantly, offered very generous paid time off. The catch was I was returning to fully remote work. Okay, I said to myself, I’ll just try harder to find social opportunities. I’d made friends with some other mothers in my neighborhood, and I stayed connected with the nonprofit I’d been working with. I organized a writing group, joined a group of community organizers working on climate change as often as I could, went to a community garden, found people to go to coffee shops with, and at one point joined a group of women running at 6am. It worked okay for a while, but really, just okay. I didn’t have a lot of resiliency when friends couldn’t make it at the last minute, and when my daughter was born, the free time I had shrank. Then, in March 2020, the pandemic hit...the same week my mother died. A few months later, my dad, who had been living somewhat nearby, moved across the country. Some of my close friends moved away for new jobs.

So, now, I find myself struggling. I’ve started wondering if I should look for an in person job in tech (those are getting rarer) or return to social work. I realize I’m probably not alone. I also realize there are people who thrive working remotely. I work with many of them. In many ways, I’ve been one of them. For months, I thought if I just waited out the pandemic, it would get better. For a little while last year, we were podding with another family who’s daughter was in care with our kids. We’d have dinner every week or two weeks and it was always lovely and refreshing. But we had to change our caregiving situation, in large part because we realized our son was lonely, spending his days with two younger children. Now that we’re in this strange half-space where some people have resumed “normal” life, some people remain pretty locked down, and information about what we need to do changes daily, I’m not sure how to meet these needs anymore. I’m writing this after a gathering I organized last night had four out of the six other people attending cancel at the last minute. I was very grateful for the two who did make it, but it just underscored the vulnerability of my ability to meet my social needs. 

The truth is that only part of this comes from working remotely. In the last few years, I’ve realized that I tend towards a more avoidant attachment style, and that I’ve long struggled with social anxiety. Being around people consistently used to pull me out of this, but it was an issue long before I worked remotely. I tend now to feel that I’m alone in this. Reddit and Al-anon meetings are the only places that remind me that’s not true. I’m writing and posting this blog post in case I’m not actually alone. I don’t have any 12 step process to follow to get out of it, or answers of any kind, just my experience and an attempt at self-awareness.

Lil Wiki

I want to share a project that took me over a year to complete, if it could be called complete now. Lil Wiki is a tool I built after my now four year old kept asking me to look things up for him. Once I had done so, he'd ask "What's this?" about every picture about five times until I was tired of reading the captions out loud. Somehow, mid-pandemic last year, I managed to build the first prototype of a web app that would look up articles on Wikipedia, get the images, then read the captions out loud. It did exactly the trick and I could give it to my son and feel like he was getting reasonably educational screen time. This week was "inspiration week" in the Wikimedia product department, where I'm now an engineering manager for a new team that will support our Trust and Safety department. I used that time to fix up some blemishes in the user experience, and make it ready for sharing. Specifically, I improved the app by opening a new modal each time a user clicks on a search result, rather than loading the images at the bottom like I'd done before. The tricky part had been getting the close button working, but it went quickly this time. Unfortunately, I can't remember why I was struggling with this feature six months ago. I also added a title to the new page/modal. This turned out to be slightly trickier than I first thought, because I had to pass the result name to the state through an attribute on the DOM element. I got it working after some trial and error.

While I wanted this post to detail all my trials, tribulations, and learnings while building this, it turns out this blurb is what I have the energy for. I felt very accomplished after working on this. Next up will be url parameters for image pages. Wish me luck!

Written in the five minutes before I see my kids

I just wanted to write a quick post because I did not have a great day at work. The only good thing was that I was more aware than I used to be of some of my more negative coping mechanisms. Basically, my debugging tools are no longer working locally and I'm trying everything that worked for everyone else to get them working and as of now, they STILL don't work. It made me feel pretty useless. I'm currently transitioning from management back to an individual contributor/software engineer role, and it feels really vulnerable. I'm afraid of not being productive or supporting my team adequately in this role. Today triggered all of my "not good enough" shame and I can't say I fully pulled myself out, which triggered another round of shame. What's funny about shame narratives is how quickly they wipe out everything I've ever achieved. It's so tempting to find someone to blame for how I feel (which I guess could be JetBrains) but trying to stay away from that also feels scary.
Anyways, time for lots of self-compassion and baby laughs tonight. I wish I had a nice, twee ending to this story, but hopefully I learned something about both debugging and myself today.

Sundown

Over the weekend, amidst everything shifting with coronavirus in the US, my mom died at her nursing home after struggling with dementia for years. It broke my heart, especially since I couldn't be there with her. In her memory, I wanted to share a link to the free pdf of Yellow Arrow Journal in which you can read "Sundown", my non-linear account of losing her to alcoholism and dementia. The theme of the journal is Time, which seems increasingly relevant right now.
My mother, Specie Love, wrote One Blood: The Death and Resurrection of Charles Drew. You can read about Charles Drew on Wikipedia, but the story she wrote is actually about the history of the incredibly unequal treament black people have received at the hands of the medical system in this country and the indelible impact that has left
If you are reading this, I hope you are safe and healthy.

Self-compassion in the time of the coronavirus

Let's start with how silly my title is. There are probably going to be a lot of these "in the time of..." references. But it came to me today so I'm writing it. This blog is really just for me these days anyways (and you, lucky reader, if you stumbled across this).
I keep coming back to my need for self-compassion. The need is not just, in fact, for me to feel good, but I'm realizing that not being compassionate with myself has prevented me from most of the meaningful accomplishments I've longed for.
As a side note, I gave a lightning talk a few weeks back at Wikimedia All Hands on Self-Compassion and it may be one of the highlights of my professional career (aside from the Solarpunk talk I gave the year before).
I realize not everyone has heard of self-compassion. Kristin Neff has written extensively about it and has good examples on her website. To me, what's important is that it's about recognizing pain and giving myself kindness instead of criticism.
Right now, people in the US are starting to panic about coronavirus (at least, according to my social medias). I am trying not to panic too. I am enormously privileged and the truth is that the impact on me is likely to be much, much less than for a lot of other people. However, I still see the future shrinking up and disappearing in front of me. I imagine all my dreams to be suddenly out of reach. Of course, this is happening not because of COVID-19, but because this is my default reaction to stress.
When I step back and try to use self-compassion though, I see how I'm talking to myself, and how it is my own view that I am unable to cope with these stressors that is hurting not only me, but the other people I do not even think about in my panic. And because I am panicking, I want to hoard my own resources, money, time, health, and can't see how I could help anyone else.
I don't know what I have to offer to others in all this. Money is a good first step, and if my skills can be useful in another way, I hope to be able to provide that. Accepting myself and the situation with kindness will be a necessary first step towards any contribution though.