Remake The Map

Hey folks! I have a completely speculative idea.

I think maybe I can explain why so many of us with nerd qualities[1] have trouble pushing ourselves to work hard, to stay fit, to get a lot of things done.

I think it’s because quite a few of us rejected toughness. We grew up in contexts which made toughness an attribute of the enemy, and more or less decided that it’s a bad thing.

Those people who finish their marathon runs, who stay up late doing extra work, who can stop themselves from just falling into a squishy, comfortable evening of reading wikipedia and watching Veronica Mars? What they’re doing is pushing themselves, psyching themselves up, toughing it out. When we try to do that, it feels like a cousin of bullying, a meathead thing.

I came to this idea via Adventure Time. It’s a cartoon show tailor made for a nerd audience, but look how tough this kid Finn is:

I like Finn, and sometimes think of him as a role model in some ways. After I saw this particular episode of the show, I found myself biking harder, running longer, working just a bit more, because the little Finn in my head was psyching me up. But this is an attitude that I didn’t find accessible in very many other fictional characters before now, I think because they all seemed like the opposite of role models, like people to avoid being.

Do you struggle to push yourself? Examine your life and your influences a bit. Did you start rejecting toughness at some point you can recognize? Let me know, I want to expand on this!

[1]  Nerd qualities? Geek qualities? Whatever your nomenclature, I mean people who love mathematics as well as people who love Star Trek.

Sometimes hard days are eased by dreaming of the future.

Someday I’m going to take the love of my life on a road trip up the West Coast. A proper road trip, finally do it right.

We’ll start somewhere far away. I’ll start the trip by planting a seed in her mind. “Do you ever want to visit the West Coast of America? See all the places you’ve only seen in movies? These are the places I lived and loved… the part of the country that’s worth loving.”

Maybe we’ll start the actual trip in Texas. See my family, whoever’s still living there. See my old friends, eat some barbecue. She’ll experience that most truly American thing: to look at the sunset, to dream of going west, to dream of what’s over the western horizon.

We’ll drive through the desert to Los Angeles. We won’t stop for a damned thing but the gas to keep us going.

We’ll start with LA because it’s big enough to see twice. The first time we’ll just take in the bigness of it all, the endlessness, the traffic. We’ll drive right up to the ocean and watch the sunset, first of many.

In a pinch we’ll take a detour to San Diego. I’ve still never been. We’ll see Legoland, and split right afterwards.

We’ll give LA more attention the second time. If my friends still live there, we’ll eat with them in Koreatown. Walk with them on the beach. Hang out with them in shabby bowling alleys in Gardena. Play like we’re living the Big Lebowski, before a quick tour of Hollywood and a long drive north. As we drive away, she’ll tell me those are good friends, that I’m lucky to have them.

In Silicon Valley I’ll show her all the little places I used to care about so much. My marshland, outside the NASA buildings. The little cliffside in Santa Cruz. The hill above 280 near Cupertino. Maybe I’ll still have some friends at Google; we can play on the statues of dead Androids and take pictures. Play a little piano near where I used to work. Sit on the hill looking down at all the offices, marveling that these buildings damn near run the world (if they still do).

We’ll spend a day or two touring San Francisco. Have dinner with an old friend or two. See the Bay Model, see Muir Woods. We’ll climb to the top of Mission Peak and howl at the moon. I’ll show her where I accidentally threw a tennis ball down the mountain.

Of course we’ll stop at the tennis courts and juggle. She’ll tell my old friends she’s heard so much about them.

From here we won’t head north, but east. We’ll go to Yosemite, and she’ll see what a holy place this sad country can be. How good it looks in the right light. I’ll still have never conquered El Capitan. She’ll tell me we need to do it, tell me it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity. She’ll help me to climb the mountain.

We’ll think about driving east to Mono Lake, to Nevada. But we won’t go there. Fuck Nevada.

Instead we’ll drive north to Tahoe. I’ll tell her about the time my father saved me from despair, how we found the snow. We’ll look for the snow. Maybe we’ll find it, maybe not.

We’ll drive back west, then north into Oregon. We’ll finally take the time to see Crater Lake, after I tell her I’ve skipped it on every drive I’ve ever made through there. Maybe she’ll say it’s prettier than Tahoe, maybe not.

We’ll stop in Sisters. I hope my cousins still live there. We’ll hug my uncle. I’ll show her where my aunt’s ashes are scattered on Whychus Creek. We’ll have a picnic in the field under the soft sun in view of the snow capped Three Sisters. We’ll see Three Creeks, hike up Broken Top with my uncle. It’ll be a quiet, thoughtful hike.

We’ll head north, and again she’ll tell me I’m lucky to have such good people in my life. If it’s sunny in Portland, we’ll stop at the waterfront park. If not, we’ll drive right on through.

We’ll spend the longest in Seattle. Before we even get there, I’ll stop in Tacoma to show her where I grew up. I’ll show her what Mount Rainier looked like to a child, and why it has never, ever left my mind. I don’t care if it takes a week for the damned thing to pop out from behind clouds. We’ll wait. We’ll see it. Then we’ll drive to it, then hike right halfway up the side of it. I’ll tell her about the old time, the last time I did that. It will be hard, but I’ll tell it.

I can’t begin to tell you all the things we’ll see in Seattle. I guarantee it will be sunny, because I’ll time it right, and the city loves me when I come to visit. I’ll show her where my life was going, how it broke, where it went instead. She’ll remind me where it is, that very day, and where it’s going thereafter. We’ll talk on ferries, in parks, on little winding roads, in little restaurants and coffee houses, in friends’ apartments, in kayaks, on red swings, on benches looking at the setting sun over the Olympics. We’ll play foosball and take bike rides with very old friends, and as we leave, for the third time she will tell me I’m lucky to have the friends I have. Three is a good number.

Finally, only and finally we will reach the heart of the trip. We will drive north to Vancouver. I will show her how a city can be perfect. We will walk its every path and perimeter. We will get lost in the park. We will thrill to see the whole city beneath us as we snowboard down great mountain slopes. We will ache as we look north at the mountains, filled with the same longing we had when we looked west in the beginning. Only now we will know that our time here is drawing to a close, that we cannot go farther north. The great country to the north is a mystery and will remain so, for now. To know this feeling is to know America, to know the West Coast. She will know the West Coast, and I will remember it.

With melancholy hearts and strong spirits, we will return to the place we live, to Far Away, and dream of the future.

Someday…

Paralysis. You want to do something right, because you think you’ve only got one chance to do it.

I love writing letters. Real, stamped and posted letters appeal to me on many levels. They’re important to me, to send and to receive. I have one I’ve been meaning to write, but it’s been longer since I wrote a letter than it has since I wrote blog posts. If getting back to blogging has been hard, and I take letter writing more seriously, and it’s been this long… paralysis.

The letter was supposed to accompany food. Eventually I ate the food, because I had avoided writing the letter for so long.

If this letter isn’t good, will I ever get a chance to write another letter? For some reason, my brain lies to me and says, no, you will not get another chance to write a letter.

We all do this, in many different parts of our lives. We think the next thing we do is the last and most critical thing, and we paralyze ourselves trying to make it good.

Most of us don’t draw, because what if that next drawing sucks? It’s gonna suuuuuck for sure! And then we’ll never get to draw again.

We go to job interviews, and we stress about them going to go poorly, as if there aren’t going to be any more interviews ever again.

I know grown-ass men who are still afraid to tell a girl/boy that they like that girl/boy. As if they only get one chance to say it. As if there wouldn’t be another girl/boy in the future.

But there’s always going to be another! In fact, as you age, you will find that people bounce in and out of your life repeatedly, and that you re-evaluate people, and they re-evaluate you. You meet new people and you always will. You lose old friends and sometimes regain them.

There’s another job interview in the next few weeks, and there will be interview after interview after interview after interview until one goes well and you get hired. Everyone who is good at drawing got there by drawing another and another and another…

Everything is a sketch, and you already know you do some of your best, most inspired work when you stop taking things so seriously and just sketch the next moment.

I know you know what I’m trying to say. I’m not saying it well. I’ve got to find a way to break down this wall of understanding.

Or do I? No, I don’t! Day seven of blog posting is just the seventh out of hundreds I’ll write in the next decade. So, I’ll get another crack at making this argument.

Seven out of seven. Keep trying.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a letter to sketch.

 

This one is for Rose Thomas.

Also, this one is gonna be a very rough sketch. It’s too important a topic for me to leave in such bad shape, so I’m going to try a new experiment: what you’re reading is a draft, and I’m going to come back and revisit this essay, hopefully several times, hopefully with more refined thoughts in the future. If you folks want to help refine my thoughts through discussion, I would love to discuss this stuff.

You probably spend some time waiting at red lights. You probably don’t enjoy it.

Here are two strategies for passing time at red lights. They work for me; maybe they’ll work for you.

– Count the people passing through the light in the other direction. Each one that passes is having a better, faster day because you’re making the sacrifice of waiting for a moment. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen… that’s seventeen people who are having a better day because you gave up a little of your time.

– If you have a car, get yourself some cheap drum sticks. Seriously, they’re on Amazon for cheap. Put them in the car, and use them to drum on the steering wheel at red lights. Play loud music and just wail on the steering wheel. I’ve found you can do this for years without damaging the wheel. It’s fun, so much fun that you may find yourself hoping the green lights turn yellow.

/me is listening to Fever Ray – Seven.

A friend recently told me he doesn’t remember a lot of his college experience, because the breakup which followed it made a lot of memories unpleasant to process or revisit. I’ve been determined not to have a similar thing happen for my recent relationship experience. I’ve made sure to allow some time to remember what I had, especially the good parts, and to mention bits of it in relevant conversations.

What I think I’ll lose anyway is identification with those memories. When I was in the relationship, I was very strongly favoring a particular part of my personality, letting it run dominant over the other parts. Now that I’m alone again, I’ve eased back into a balance, but it makes the grieving process seem very strange to me.

A lot of the time, when the other parts of me are active, my grief seems external, and is alien to me. It’s not unpleasant. In fact, it’s very manageable. Just alien. My memories feel a little bit like the memories of another person.

Other times, when the part of me that was so strong in the relationship is active, my grief is immediate and total. I feel very strongly like it all happened yesterday. I have to survive these periods, but I always survive by accepting that it’s done. So even in this part of me, I’m more or less actively rejecting identification with my past self.

I know there are lots of other people who experience duality in their personalities. I have often wondered how (or if) they integrate things like these.

Any ideas? Similar experience?

Today at lunch, I found myself wondering: do I work in a friendly environment, or a hostile environment?

This is a question which has occupied a lot of my time for the last few years.

Where I work, there are lots of strong primary colors and bright tones, like a preschool. The food is very nice, and everything about the environment appears to be set up to make me happy to be there. The stuff they have me work on is interesting and the people are really engaged. This seems pretty friendly.

On the other hand, it’s a corporation, everything I get is payed for by icky nasty advertising, there are a distressing number of business people and other money-first people, a lot of plainly unpleasant corporate politics. This seems pretty hostile.

But… I’m starting to realize I’ve been exaggerating in both directions.

Nobody at my workplace is my friend, or would care all that much if I went away. This isn’t friendly at all.

At the same time, I’m in no danger whatsoever. There are no tigers, there’s no punching, there’s no heroin.

The bright colors, tasty food, business people, unpleasant politics… these are false markers. I’m reading them as extremes when they all fall in a pretty narrow band.

Where I work (indeed every¹ place I’ve worked) is just an environment. A decent one, safe and relatively full of opportunities.

How do you feel about your place of work?

(1) I have actually worked at one truly friendly place. The people there cared about each other and about me, and I about them. Many were friends before working together, and most remained friends after the place was torn apart. This… might have set the standard for me wondering about friendly and hostile places. I saw Shangri-La too early 🙂

Here’s a blog post by a talented math teacher, about a time in his life when he was bad at math, and how hard that was, and always is, and why.

This blog post has resonated in a raw, painful sort of way for me. So, for my third daily writing session, I’m going to write about it.

Please understand that this is a painful topic for me; what I’ve written about it could easily be described as whiny, or emo. I have lived a life of relative privilege, and I’ve gotten to do some things that many of my friends would give their eye teeth to do. What I’ve written could easily sound like I’m not aware of that privilege, and of course, sometimes that’s the case.

Also, fair warning: this post is long.

I’m writing it, though, to convey what my life felt like, to me as I was living it. I mean to communicate that even someone who is good at something can still feel wracked by insecurity about it, can feel bad at it.

So, in one way or another, I’ve been struggling with math anxiety for most of my life.

I was a smart twelve year old kid who didn’t know I had any talents, lying to my mom that I’d read the algebra textbook in my useless homeschooling time. I just read novels. I was sure I was an idiot at math.

I was a thirteen year old who had literally guessed my way through the state math test, sitting in a community college classroom waiting for the first day of “college algebra” (remedial upper high school stuff), pretty sure I was going to fail it. It took the best teacher I ever had to erase that fear, and he erased it in a matter of days.

I was fifteen, with an ego, having aced a bunch of calculus and diff-eq classes, but I was struggling with a Number Theory book given to me by a UT professor. I was worried that because my parents wouldn’t let me go to Princeton, I was already the end of my math career. I was failing to understand the book on the first try, and having overdramatic “maybe this would all be solved if i was dead” type thoughts, as fifteen year olds are wont to do. I gave up on the book and became afraid of the subject.

I was sixteen, dropping my first class at UT, that same Number Theory. I dropped it because I was afraid of it, because I hadn’t understood the book on the first try. I remember feeling such shame in the counselor’s office, as if she had any reason in the world to judge me for it. I remember being worried that the department was going to kick me out of school for being a fraud, worried my parents were going to give up and pull me back home.

I was seventeen, and I had aced number theory and four or five other undergrad math classes, and I was taking my first grad class, Complex Analysis. Nobody told me there was an undergrad version I was supposed to take first. I tried, I tried hard, and then I gave up. I failed like the blog author failed: catatonically, silently, for months. It was a bad time for me. I stopped talking so much to my friends and family. I lost all my confidence. In some ways I never recovered from this one. All the mathy or academic things I’ve ever done since then give me a faint hint of anxiety, a faint hint of possible failure that I try very hard to ignore.

I was eighteen, having aced another ten math classes (they were all I took), including two more grad classes, and preparing to apply to grad schools, but struggling to do any work, pushing myself to do any work, because I still wasn’t over the C in the first grad class. I worked hard, did eight hour homework sets on saturdays, but did it in a stressed out way, shouting at my family and friends on a regular basis, panicked that letting go would mean giving up. I was afraid of getting another C. Grownup me can’t even imagine being afraid of that anymore.

I was nineteen, with wind back in my sails, even more grad classes aced, a research paper in pre-publication, newly arrived at Cambridge, starting to do work on an eighty year old unsolved problem (Artin’s Little Conjecture), running up against it as hard as I could, still feeling so anxious about my talents, investing so much of myself in it. I told myself, regularly, that solving this problem was the litmus test of whether I could do great things in my field, whether I deserved to be there at all.

I remember asking the favorite prof about it in his office, and getting a careful “you’re going to risk your doctorate” (he was right) and a dismissive “and anyway you’re just a Part III student, I don’t have time for you” (he was a jerk)… and that wrecked me. It’s pathetic to admit, right in keeping with the blog post, but I don’t think I’ve had a day of true mathematics ambition since that day.

This is the kind of thing that happens when you care very much about something and you are deathly afraid to fail it. Little things are greatly magnified, and you handle them poorly and derail yourself.

I’m not even done.

I was twenty, putting off preparing for my Part III exams, entirely, until the last three or four weeks, because I was sure I was going to fail. I was headed back to UT, having not gotten into MIT’s grad math program, having chosen Texas from homesickness, and I was already sure I was a failure as a mathematician, just for the little reasons described above. I passed my tests and got my degree, but I would quit mathematics altogether within a year.

I was twenty one, a math grad student at UT, but completely unwilling to work. I didn’t sleep well, I didn’t leave the house often enough. I never ever showed up in my shared office. I stopped talking to my friends in the department (sorry, Todd, Shel, etc. It was a hard time in my life). In one of my class finals, I became so convinced I couldn’t do the work, so unwilling to even try, that I angrily drew a comic (“Signs you shouldn’t be a mathematician”), turned it in, and stormed out.

The department chair told me, in a kind and gentle way, that I was risking probation, and asked if I was okay. I had nothing to say; a month later I went back and asked him if I could quit, said I wanted to transfer to being an undeclared undergrad. He was kind about this. I felt so much shame. So much completely unnecessary shame.

I’d like to make an aside to point out how little any of this had to matter in my life. None of this needed to be important. None of matters as much as the first time I kissed my wife, the first time I juggled fire, the best day I’ve spent with my brother. None of this will matter on that future day where I first see my child. But we choose what matters, and we have to choose it again every day. Sometimes we choose wrong.

I’m still not even done.

I was twenty two, in the middle of a second undergrad in either chemistry or computer science (I tried two things, because I was worried I wouldn’t even be able to do at least one of them), having dropped numerous classes in both, struggling to get out of bed and do my work, struggling to feel like I could do any useful work at all. Feeling old, feeling like a public failure, like the blog post says. Feeling old and failed, at twenty two.

I was twenty four, twisting and drifting in an internship at Amazon, feeling too old to be an intern anyway, in a team where the manager had left after three weeks and we were unmanaged. I was struggling with real professional code, convinced I couldn’t make sense of it, that I was finally going to be run out of comp sci for not being an engineer.

It was a twelve week internship and I got stuck on some small stumbling blocks… and I sat doing nothing for the middle five weeks of that internship. I was just plain afraid of the anxiety that came with being stuck. It took a coworker taking me for a walk around the block and pointing out that I was in trouble of not getting anything done, and asking where I was specifically stuck and pushing to help me, took all of that, to get me to finish. I did finish with some good stuff.

Twenty five was a good year for confidence 🙂

I was twenty six, at Microsoft in the wrong group, feeling (or imagining) the daily contempt of the engineers around me for not being able to operate in the Hotmail environment, struggling to make myself show up at all. At night I was listening to my friends Dan and Avi talk about Stanford grad life, looking through my mental window like an urchin outside a banquet, wanting that experience back but feeling like I had closed it off to myself forever, because at this point I couldn’t even remember most of what I had worked on, and because… how could I go back and fail that again? I couldn’t even follow a lot of Avi’s conversation without a lot of refresher and explanation and stumbling.

And then I committed to a plan to turn this around. I would go to Seattle, do a different kind of work, use the University of Washington to get back into academic life. For a while it was great! I had the promise of mathematical work (eventually) at Amazon, even turned down that same promise at Swype, and was taking a grad quantum chemistry class, something totally outside my expertise, but also totally outside my old social groups and history. I had no fear, so I did well, got the highest or maybe second highest scores in the class.

Then I failed. I couldn’t handle Amazon and a grad class at the same time. I wrecked up my health by giving up exercise and eating all kinds of bad food, got heavier again, started getting exhausted at random times, as one does when one gains a lot of weight quickly, and finally I just had a really bad morning for thinking, and I completely failed my grad chemistry final. Like, bottom fourth of the class, after being the top.

The professor still really liked me, and I could have recovered for sure, taken the hit and continued the plan… but I felt that old failure anxiety, that old “I am really, secretly bad at this” anxiety. I bailed on my plan completely and utterly. Some of my friends ask whether I am considering going back to grad school… and I talk about my maturity level and whether I’ve aged out of math, but behind that talk I’m just frankly really damned uneasy about trying again and failing again. This math/academic/science anxiety hasn’t really ever left me.

I was twenty eight, finally starting the aforementioned mathy part of my Amazon job… sitting sullenly in my corner playing Tiny Wings, or looking out the window. Unwilling, more or less completely unwilling to believe in myself again after such a bitter failure.

I was thirty, this afternoon, at Google with an awesome machine learning project, now five or six months overdue for a variety of life and personal and team and company and whatever reasons… with good, clear and reasonable steps to take to move the project forward… unwilling to do so because I think maybe I will be fired, and because I don’t actually know machine learning well enough, and because I am still afraid of trying and failing.

These are some of the moments where I held myself to the most unreasonable standards, afraid that because I wasn’t the prodigy I set out to be, I wasn’t going to amount to anything. I still struggle not to feel that, right up to today. I’m still comparing to an imaginary ideal.

But why? The world is an amazing place, whether I am here to enjoy it or not, built on millions of beautiful incremental advances, the kind I could aspire to. There are always going to be people with talents totally beyond mine, whether I admit it or not, and ultimately it’s my choice how to feel about all this, so I can’t really justify feeling so bad.

I’m going to try not to feel so bad.