Death to Santa V: New Hope

Another year finished above ground! Yaay!  This year’s note is going to be different; can't manage humour this time since there was little to smile about.

It has been a year with loads of tragedy and a little but significant good fortune.

Lost two people, I’d known all my life, within a few months of each other which sucked donkey. I feel regret because I never showed them that they meant a lot to me; I let apathy run my relationship with most people which I’m starting to realize leads to a lower quality of life. The ode I wrote to them at different times still lies in my drafts to forever remain unfinished (I pray not).

Got off the bipolar medication and stopped seeing the psychologist completely; mostly because the sessions had become monotonous, repetitive and predictable. Going off the meds was necessary because I’d developed memory lapses, emotional disconnection and my creativity professionally and personally had reached an all-time low and kept going down! It was the hardest thing physically, getting off them, because I realized, soon enough, that there are medicines you don’t just get off cold turkey. So it took about 4-5 months to be completely off them. As expected the episodes began to show up again, but later, but they aren’t as crippling as before and I do my best to handle them and keep them from ruining/ending my life. Had a close call, a really really close call, but I survived and it didn’t make me  better person or improve my ability to handle it, but bottom line is, I’m still alive and loving it!

Still on that, 2012 is the year I can say I almost completely overcame the damage that 2010 had put in my life, my emotions are almost stable and my interpersonal skills are slowly coming back as I overcome the paranoia that I had developed towards everyone. Slowly breaking down that wall that keeps me emotionally indifferent towards new people, which is a big win!

Personal life wise, my emotions are still stabilizing and maturing, this is taking note that strong emotions like love for people who aren’t my immediate family, are recent to me; this taking into consideration that before 2009 I never could have definitively said I’d ever been in love with or loved anyone. Sucks, right? For the longest time I thought there was something wrong with me, but time teaches you that everything has its own time. While I like to assert that I have control of most facets of my life, there are those that I have to leave to fate. Besides how fun would life have been had we been able to predict everything? Anyway, I’m no longer a newbie to love and my (romantic) relationships seem to last longer now. Which I believe is good because I am happy. To be frank, I’d never date somebody who isn’t my friend first, that’ll segue me to the next section…

When it comes to good friends, I seem to have many of those. Plus my friends from my previous life have come back! Guess it’s a sign that I’m practically fixed! Or that I’m slowly reverting back to what I was *shivers*, but I doubt, the cynicism is practically all gone and I have recovered most things I lost or gave away. My new friends make me happy and are loyal to a fault which I automatically return in kind. By ‘new’ I mean people I’ve developed friendships with in the last year or so.

Career and financially I’m still not where I was but it’s ok, there are encouraging signs of that happening. Guess it’s the only aspect I haven’t fixed completely. But the one thing I’ve realized is that even in programming there are backstabbing bastards. The one thing I wonder is why people don’t stick to their lanes. The moment I realize intentional (yet unnecessary) aggression towards me, just because you feel threatened or insecure, you leave me no choice but to make you realize that I can do your work better than you while you can’t get even close to what I can do. By trying to jeopardize me, you are in fact setting yourself up for a world of hurt and regret. Why would you try to mess me up professionally yet you have no leverage or clout to protect yourself?

2012 is also the year I did something shameful. I got into a fight. The reason I’m sensitive about such things is because I have always known that while my capacity for good is wide, there is the alter ego side which I never want to encourage. And I like to believe I control my instincts and reflexes. I’m not the textbook definition of a nerd or geek, neither am I a fighter. I’m trained for fighting for the very same reason I am adept with various other skills like programming, swimming, cycling etc., in that I just want to push my brain’s capacity to learn and pick up new things/skills/concepts, and master them, to their limits, simple! I never learned it to use it to beat up people.

 I find fighting unnecessary where diplomacy would suffice, but there are those idiots who are the exception. I can’t say their problem is age because even when I was younger I still thought fighting as unnecessary, because we aren’t animals. I believe to be human is to be able to suppress primal instincts. There are those people that manifest their insecurities through unnecessary aggression and bullying. I don’t know whether it stems from having a small dick, having an overshadowing/controlling father figure, low IQ, not being able to sexually satisfy their partner or just plain stupidity. They live among us and I really don’t get it, violence will never solve any problem, it just makes it worse, that’s what most people don’t get. Why do you even need to assert dominance over another person? I find trying to achieve inner peace and harmony with nature more satisfying. But if you are going to pick an unnecessary fight, at least make sure you‘re all in. Don’t hit somebody then run to daddy the moment they defend themselves. Your daddy never told you to go around hitting strangers that are, at most, neutral and indifferent to you, whereby, you may as well be that insignificant pile of dirt next to a murram road. Even from a legal standpoint you as the aggressor are in the wrong. So thanks to some a-hole I almost ruined my pals birthday party and almost screwed up the total inner harmony I’m trying to achieve to find my bliss. Will finish that chapter with a little gem...

"I promised you, dad, not to do the things you've done.I walk away from trouble when I can.Now please don't think I'm weak, I didn't turn the other cheek,And papa, I sure hope you understand:Sometimes you gotta fight when you're a man"

As i look forward to 2013, i'll try to change a few things. Will try to be a better person and i'll do my best to prevent life from corrupting that which i struggle to keep clean. It's the year my bi annual professional cycle comes around and i have to assess whether i'm happy with what i've gained in the last two years and decide if sticking to this career is good for me. Yes! i've been a programmer/developer for less than 2 years and i get to decide if i want to retain that title in 2013.
I also plan to going back to writing as a regular habit and need to put my emotions back into it. I have to admit i became too detached from writing in 2012 and never had the follow through needed to finish articles/entries i'd started. My draft section is enough reminder of that. That changes in 2013.
While i don't want to revert personality-wise to what i was pre 09, it is important i return to the path my life had taken then/was taking, in that i need to be more assertive about what i want. Somehow i'd lost that.

My general plan for 2013 is simple, since we all know that saying about the best laid plans of men and mice, to stay true to myself and what i believe in. That has been my mantra for years now and it gives me anchoring through times of torment and mental terror when my mind becomes a hazardous environment. And to lose the flab, since it's a remainder/after-effect of my dark days.

Happy 2013 people! Regular posts this year. Personal for this blog, and kinda techie ones for yulemsee.com

The year that was: twitter

Oh no, not another blog entry about twitter. Yup, it is. I know right? I’m also ashamed to be writing about twitter when so many blogs, albeit useless(most of them), have done it; but I have about 20 drafts on other topics that I have to get about to finishing before I can post them, and this topic was the easiest to start and finish without any research needed.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written on the topic but it’s most probably the last. Really wish I could provide a link to the other entry but I did it last year and don’t have the bandwidth to go through my past posts. I’ll update here with the link when I finally get the time. The first entry had been a general overview on how to use twitter, a newbie handbook so to speak. This one is more of a recap.

Twitter like any other social network is a dynamic entity and much as I have nostalgia about the days when twitter was still very new (to Kenya) I have to accept the reality that is the twitter of today. So much negativity that before refreshing the page I have to brace myself for the filth and hatred that sometimes spews from it. I’m not the most saintly of people, but damn, people really outdo themselves, there’s really no limit to how low you can go.

When it comes to content I generally enjoy Tuesdays although most of the stuff on there isn’t that much different from what I have on my hard drive, but it is refreshing to see I’m not the only connoisseur for some things. But on a side note my hard drive tops the timeline in the HD, variety and that it’s motion area. In my books, porn is ok, the whole women being objectified angle is just propaganda from some feminist that was pissed her imaginary boyfriend refused to keep her photo in his wallet.

Bullshit and porn aside, when did twitter become the haven for attention seekers? It used to be an open forum where we’d say whatever was in mind and social interaction was peaking positively. We’d attract each other through our minds where like-mindedness and mutual interests brought people together. Reasons to follow would arise from coming across interesting things from a person then going over their content and liking it then following. Nowadays a person just joins twitter does not so random follows then tweets “@fucker #nf”! Which is just a prompt asking you to return in kind.

I have done several avi induced follows but with time you come to realize you get eye candy material but most of the time little else. Which is why I rarely put up my photo, I may neither be ugly nor that good looking but I prefer to be followed through the content of my tweets rather than the image on my avi. When it comes to followers, I treat it the same way I would my resume, I’d rather have a callback based on qualifications rather than face the bias that comes with showing the…umm…face. Who even puts a photo on their resume (modelling/tv exempted)? Anyway as long as the majority of my tweets are my thoughts and opinions with little to no attention seeking, I can sleep easy with the printouts of the retweets I get, under my pillow. When they are enough I shall shred and use them for padding in the pillow.

The worst trait, for me, about the anonymity that comes with social media would be the cowardly settling of vendettas. I have used the collective “social media” because this includes blogs. When you start a blog with the intention of tarnishing somebody’s reputation while hiding behind the veil of anonymity, you are just being cowardly. The prose in some of those blogs is sometimes so fucked up it actually counts as mind rape too (and I wish the PC crew would also add mind rape to that list where according to them saying “Merry Christmas” is offensive to people from other religions…and atheists), reason I stopped automatically checking out some links. But here’s a rule of thumb to assist you when using social media to settle scores, if (theoretically?) you can’t say it to your target’s face, even with a glass wall or chain-link separating you so that at least they know who said it, don’t bother saying it; because then you’ll just be a little whiny bitch and you’d have done the world a huge favour by having waited that one out and come out in a wet dream.

Nowadays I avoid tweeting where I am because events on the timeline have made me wary of meeting new people through twitter, which wasn’t the case little over a year ago. This is sadder considering how many of my good pals I met through twitter and facebook. Haven’t used foursquare or activated specific location in my tweets in a while too!

Basic etiquette dictates that should a photo of me be taken using a device belonging to a third party and the said third party isn’t in the frame then the third party isn’t allowed to publish the photo onto any social/public platform where it’s available to many people, without first asking for my authorisation. Simple! Furthermore, since you are not in the photo, what right do you have to publish that photo on a public platform, regardless of the fact that it was your capture device that was used!  Hell, even if the third party is in the frame, the fact that I’m also in it means that for the photo to be used in any public forum its publishing should be authorised by all parties clearly visible in it. This isn’t about being politically correct it’s about privacy! While I may have willingly posed for the photo, the act didn’t carry implicit authorisation for publishing!

Sadly privacy is really a thing of the past as it seems more than a considerable number of people have taken tweetups as an opportunity to dig dirt on strangers they met online. I don’t really understand why you would want dirt on me yet you barely know me and we barely ever interact both professionally and personally. If you sincerely just wanted to meet to confirm whether the personality projected in my tweets matches the live me that’s cool since I’d assume you want to know me better, but you have no right to try use things I told you in confidence against me online. Here I’m referencing the numerous tweefs. We should really respect each other in this area. You are allowed to use anything I published in a public forum against or for me but anything I chose to keep off, you aren’t allowed to post on my behalf…it isn’t really that complicated, is it?

Anyway here’s a list of the top tweeps in different categories I came up with:

Do I look that bored?

And finally, there’s this new breed of “social media experts” who have ambition. This section is specifically for you. Please join me in camera 3. (Blame Jon Stewart for the previous sentence)

So, you have a few thousand followers, a somewhat well-known (kinda biased/one sided/ screams “SNOB”) blog and have a vision of heading a motivated department into the future and beyond… Where the head drives a Veyron, has an Olympic size swimming pool filled with Courvoisier circulated and replaced every few hours to keep it from going stale, the poolside padded with a mat woven from the pubes of ten thousand virgins, and you rejected Phelp’s application to be your lifeguard and hired James Cameron and his sub to stay submerged and pull you up if you stayed underwater too long…because you don’t know how to swim….ok, this metaphor has dragged for too long…

 Ambition is great and is vital in an increasingly crowded, competitive yet highly rewarding sector namely digital; but before you delve into that world please leave your ego at the door. In professions like medicine and law you can afford ego because they’re time tested (the professions, dumbass) and have well setup guidelines that if you excel in you pretty much earn the right to brag.

For digital you’re dealing with dynamics like people’s preferences in usage of social networks and other digital architecture, and fads. Something may be relevant today then obsolete the next day with no defined timeline or prediction [read MySpace]. Remember the internet as we know it i.e. the www with hyperlinks and all that is relatively new, and blogs and micro-blogs are even younger!  You can’t really claim the information on their behaviour/reason to be time-tested.

You as the person making a pitch on use of digital media to investors are equivalent to the weatherman, you will make many confident predictions but few will actually pan out. More so on profitability. Your role at most should be ceremonial but in the same way everybody still needs an idea on what tomorrow’s weather will be like, the investors may decide to stick with you; so you just make those educated guesses and just cross your fingers. Remember humble pie tastes better if you were modest to begin with, especially when much of the interpretation of existing data came out of your ass.  You really don’t set yourself apart by making a presentation to digital professionals and repeatedly stating “content is king”…really? The fuck do you think they get paid for? Chiselling models of computers in soapstone then selling for profit?

And the most important thing in digital, you have to make your services available to as many people as is technologically possible! This can never be stressed enough! The minute you make it a class thing…well…you’ll barely make it through the door.

Take this advice from a not so savvy person exposed to a lot of social media ish but-can’t-refer-to-himself-as-an-expert-yet

Finally,

Overall, I’m thankful for the few people I meet through social media (read twitter) that make it worth staying on for a little bit longer. It’s the few gems hidden in the dirt that are so valuable that you don’t mind digging a little bit more if only to find more like those.

A pal is getting married in a few hours so I gotta dress up and get going.

Peace mes amies.

Mental health

That’s a big issue. So yesterday a minister’s kid killed himself, which raised the ugly topic about suicide on twitter. It really was more of a one sided affair with people castigating those who contemplate or commit suicide. At first I was angry but later I guess I felt sorry, sorry for the level of ignorance and sorry for the number of people who will continue to suffer and/or die because mental health is not highlighted enough.

I’ll use myself as a living example. I’m not ashamed to admit I have been to that level where I contemplated suicide; to the point I knew the how, among other horrible things. Though I guess there’s nothing more horrible than taking your own life. And I am among the lucky few.

I’m not really that sure where to begin or how to go about this. I won’t be that comprehensive, I’m not a mental health pro but I guess I expect after reading this, you might have an idea what goes through the mind of a mentally ill person, and you go out and learn more about mental health. I’ll cover only what I know well, and/or have experienced and get you on the journey that will hopefully result in more awareness and will get somebody in need the help they require.

There are several types of mental illnesses out there. I’ve experienced two; bipolar disorder and depression. These are the ones I’ll cover because they’re the most common and I have some semblance of experience with them.

I’ll start with bipolar disorder. For the most part this blog has been about my day to day experience with bipolar, since I started it(coincidentally though) right about the time I was informed that I might have the condition. As regular readers already know, that was confirmed last year i.e. stopped being a “might have”. Will make it as short as I can. Basically bipolar is a mood disorder characterized by elevated moods, the highs referred to as mania, and the downs just known as lows. It’s not a constant thing and may occur once, twice or several times a year. Untreated, this is incremental, meaning once you get the first episode, there will only be more. The mood cycle mostly begins with a feeling like euphoria or awesomeness that may last from a few hours to a day or two, followed by the low which basically feels like a period of reduced self-esteem and low confidence.

The reason it took me so long to get treatment was because I loved the highs and the occurrence of lows was negligible. Plus I used to get stoned and drunk a lot and therefore couldn’t recognize whether it was the drugs talking or the sick me. Some of the things I did, I don’t write about because my colleagues read this blog and even though I try to live my life as openly as possible, there’re facets of me I’d rather keep for my inner circle. I was lucky in my old job because my boss valued my input (and was my friend) so had tolerance for some of the stunts I pulled in the middle of such episodes, but more of that later.

With time I started to accept the whole ben-might-be-bipolar thing so I was able to observe my moods and have reasonable control over myself. Writing helped too, because I could compare the mood in the text with what I know as my normal self. I can’t tell at what exact point the lows turned to full blown depression and incidentally I didn’t know that till I met my current shrink.

 The mechanism behind depression is really really complicated. I remember in primary school we skimmed over depression, most probably because we were too young to comprehend this extreme form of sadness that just sucks the joy out of life. According to my shrink, depression is really more common than we think, it’s just that in most people it’s recognized too late to help them effectively. Depression is many times triggered by stress.  Be it from work, relationship and other external factors. Simple as it may seem, getting out of depression doesn’t simply involve “sucking it up” or shrugging it away.

In the brain there is a chemical called serotonin. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter. Fluctuations of this chemical affects moods. In bipolar disorder the brain is not able to regulate the amounts of this chemical so sometimes it’s in excess resulting in  mania and when it’s a little resulting in the lows. Mine is mild bipolar so my body pretty much got things under wrap most of the time. For depression, the body is producing very little serotonin. I know, right? How can such a stupid little chemical do so much damage!? Anyway that is basically it! Genetic predisposition means some people are more vulnerable to depression than others.

Umm…so what do I talk about now… Oh yes, how depression affects a person’s life. You have to remember this article is just about sating the curiosity about what the fuck goes through a depressed person’s mind, it’s not an article you can quote because the experience might be different for somebody else, but there are professional journals about all this.

When you are depressed you are in a dark dark room in the most remote recesses of your mind. You may have things going for you but you can’t notice it. My self-esteem was low, although I tried to fake it. When I got home after work all I wanted to do was be by myself and I’d beat myself up about why I couldn’t hold a relationship, why I’d become poor, why at my age I was still living with my parents while many of my age-mates were having families. i would cry to sleep many times and I’d hate myself more for doing that because I’m a man. Generally I knew my life sucked.

I would have trouble sleeping and when it was morning I didn’t want to wake up, I just wanted to go back to my sleep to the sweet peace that is unconsciousness. This way the brain is conditioned the Pavlov way to associate the darkness with good and consciousness with bad. I always thought about death a lot all that time, but I was like “noo, what about my mom and sister. What will they think?” Mental reasoning is all screwed up (but you don’t realize that), sane reasoning is eroded over time because I started to think, look at the way they’re always sad because of me. Wouldn’t they be so much better off without me, at least they’ll be able to focus on more important things, their lives. See where I’m leading?

Eventually you come to the conclusion the world is better off without you. I am catholic so I also thought about hell, but realized I was living in one. I would drag myself out of bed, and go to work but I would wonder why the heck I was bothering with that shit. I spent over one year in that routine till I forgot what happiness was. Mind you I wasn’t depressed all the time, I had happy days, but when I got depressed, it would catch up from where it left off the last time so each time I would be lower. I’m seriously considering publishing some of the extreme things I wrote during those periods, if only for the sake of awareness, many of them were mostly goodbyes and a conclusion of a life “well lived”. Oddly enough my dependence on alcohol reduced and I stopped taking weed completely, to this day I never understood why because in many cases of depression the opposite is the rule. My shrink can’t tell me why either. I guess I wanted to enjoy my last moment as myself. Oh, here’s something to note, when a depressed person seems to suddenly come out of it and seems happy again; that is the most dangerous point because it is indicative they’ve come to a decision.

No, not the decision to seek treatment and suck it up “because life is hard for everyone anyway”. It means they’re at peace with themselves and their decision. It is that final moment when that voice/instinct of self-preservation finally dies out and there’s no inner conflict. I would know; I was almost at that point, right at the cusp. Oh I wanted to die alright but that voice in me hadn’t given up yet, I had to try one last thing before coming to my final decision(morbid huh?)…I wanted to see a psychiatrist. He is good people, wanted me hospitalized immediately because he thought he wouldn’t see me again. Yeah, hospitalization is just my nice way of saying Mathare mental hospital. Nah, I kid, they have private mental institutions. He didn’t charge for that session and I think he wanted to pay for my hospitalization, I kid you not. I didn’t have any money when I went there. I hate being confined so obviously there was no way I was going to let anybody hospitalize me. But I used all the money I had and bought the medicine I’d been prescribed and…here we are; more than a year later. I’m no longer depressed and have full control of my life. I know I stopped taking the medicine without consulting the doctor, but it came out he was going to take me off them anyway. I’m only being treated for the bipolar which is a breeze compared to depression.

Anyway, getting out of depression isn’t as easy as it seems, but my family and girlfriend were a big help. The girlfriend because she is the only other person who can really understand the shit-storm that was my mind, having gone through it herself (not bipolar). We broke up several times but eventually it was all good as I healed and had more control over my mental faculties. It had to end though. Pathetic, huh? You go through years of hell and when things are finally good…but that has been covered, I guess. But long story short, I love my family and they have always been there for me and really helped me especially in making me realize I was loved regardless of who I am; but Shae was the one who made me realize I could get out of it and be happy for once. She was my rock and for that I’ll forever be grateful.

My point is depressed people can’t do it alone. Most of the time you have to reach out to them to make them realize they are sick. Believe me, they don’t know that that is something that can be treated through therapy and medication. The worst thing you can do is judge them because you make it worse. I used to think being suicidal was cowardice too (the times before I was depressed, obviously). The only reason I got out of it so fast was because I knew I had a problem. As far as my doctor is concerned, I’m not out of the woods yet…fyi. I was depressed for a whole year before I got treatment, most people have gone longer without knowing and in them the damage is much worse and you need more patience.

It takes a lot to convince a person they’re ill. Depression is a disease no less like AIDS or cancer and the most important step is to make the depressed person come to accept it as such. It’s not shameful. Being taken to Mathare is not shameful, I know we make fun of that place a lot but I think it’s about time we stopped stigmatizing mental health treatment. Taking antidepressants isn’t shameful, seeing a psychiatrist isn’t something to feel shy about; when you need a doctor, you need a doctor.

Most importantly, even if they don’t want to talk about their feelings with you, don’t feel bad, they’ll get there, just make them feel your world is a much happier place because they’re there, whether they appear “damaged” or not.

One last thing, treatment of bipolar and/or depression is freaking expensive. If you know a friend is having difficulty paying for it, help them or find a way to help them. The treatment is really important. I’m lucky insurance started paying for my treatment; I had actually stopped for a couple of weeks because of financial reasons! Went to a pharmacist and the cost of the medicine was 18k! Really fucked up, huh?

I guess now it’s time to give the list of symptoms to look out for:

·         People become withdrawn no psyche in life

·         Decreased productivity at work, decreased energy

·         Hopelessness/pessimism

·         Sadness

·         Suicidal thoughts

·         Jfgi

 For bipolar I’ll just let you google it. But I don’t think bipolar is that serious especially in its milder form. Regardless, I’m having it treated and doing my best to stick to the medical regime assigned. But I really hate popping pills every day and I long for the time all I’ll need is the psychiatric help alone. Bipolar is really cool though when you think about it, right? It’s like FREE BOOZE, no hangover, no liver damage. Anyhoo, I’ve digressed. I tend to contradict myself a lot when it comes to bipolar. It is rather a double edged sword sadly.  You get this really awesome designer drug for free but dangling on it is a disclaimer “side effects may include: loss of job, loss of savings, loss of relationship, STI, death from the God-syndrome, depression etc…”

And those who make it a habit of judging people for thinking about suicide, nobody appreciates life more than the person that almost ended their own because only they know how close they came to going off the edge and how helpless that feeling is! I know you say those things out ignorance and mean the best, but fuck you. You don’t know!

Anyway I have done my part in showing you what it feels like to be depressed. Your part now is to find out more about it. I’ve only scratched the surface. On Wikipedia there’re over a hundred mental illnesses listed; chances are, somebody you know is suffering from one of them and doesn’t even know it. Do your part. Nobody ever died from knowing too much…unless you’re working for the mafia or a drug baron, in which case, good luck.

As a footnote, I know there are group sessions for people with mental illnesses which may be helpful if you think you are suffering from a mental illness or know somebody suffering from it. It really helps to talk about it with somebody you know has gone or is going through the same. If you need the contacts hit me up on twitter(@iz_ben). I’ll confess I’ve never gone to any because I don’t need to talk about it; I write almost all my experiences which is therapy enough (and remember I had a girlfriend that had gone through the same who helped a lot), plus i have a professional psychiatrist, which as far as I'm concerned is enough. Sorry, stubborn is in my nature.

Keep safe and look out for your physical, emotional and mental well-being, and of course those of the people close to you. Cheers.