2014: The Year In Review
Oh 2014, I am ambivalent about you.
I started the year at a hacker party in Berlin. My friend had just killed himself back in ess eff and I could not get a moment alone in which to be sad. I traveled to Amman and trained bloggers. Then we crossed into Palestine and trained activists in Ramallah. Then I spent a couple of days with my family in Tel Aviv and I did not tell them what I was doing in the Middle East. I experienced my first panic attack. I did not have time to exercise. I slept too little. I worked too much. I gained weight, about twenty pounds in three or four months, until my clothes didn't fit and I felt like I was wallowing around in someone else's meat suit.
I got a therapist in 2014. I went back to the gym and to aerials. I took vitamins and subjected myself to blood tests. My cat got sick and had surgery and slowly, expensively died. J cashed out and quit his job working for his Corporate Overlords. I cut off my dreadlocks. My hair spent months recovering. I dyed my hair many different shades of purple. I put muscle back on my shoulders. I lost weight. I traveled and launched projects and gave talks. I saw Montreal for the first time and Moscow. I returned to Berlin and Stockholm and London. I stood up for myself at the Mysterious Workplace and did not travel for work for four months straight. J and I bought a fancy new car. I picked up my cat's ashes and got the last of my eye surgeries.
2014 is the year I grappled with stress, with working too much and spending all of my time thinking about government surveillance. There is no one I know who does this for a living who has not gone a little bit crazy. And I'm not done. I don't think I've really gotten all of myself back. 2014 is not a story of linear progress or unencumbered triumph. There have been setbacks. Mistakes were made. But overall, I think that I may have lurched and heaved a bit, but I turned myself around in 2014.
And there is so much left to do.
I started the year at a hacker party in Berlin. My friend had just killed himself back in ess eff and I could not get a moment alone in which to be sad. I traveled to Amman and trained bloggers. Then we crossed into Palestine and trained activists in Ramallah. Then I spent a couple of days with my family in Tel Aviv and I did not tell them what I was doing in the Middle East. I experienced my first panic attack. I did not have time to exercise. I slept too little. I worked too much. I gained weight, about twenty pounds in three or four months, until my clothes didn't fit and I felt like I was wallowing around in someone else's meat suit.
I got a therapist in 2014. I went back to the gym and to aerials. I took vitamins and subjected myself to blood tests. My cat got sick and had surgery and slowly, expensively died. J cashed out and quit his job working for his Corporate Overlords. I cut off my dreadlocks. My hair spent months recovering. I dyed my hair many different shades of purple. I put muscle back on my shoulders. I lost weight. I traveled and launched projects and gave talks. I saw Montreal for the first time and Moscow. I returned to Berlin and Stockholm and London. I stood up for myself at the Mysterious Workplace and did not travel for work for four months straight. J and I bought a fancy new car. I picked up my cat's ashes and got the last of my eye surgeries.
2014 is the year I grappled with stress, with working too much and spending all of my time thinking about government surveillance. There is no one I know who does this for a living who has not gone a little bit crazy. And I'm not done. I don't think I've really gotten all of myself back. 2014 is not a story of linear progress or unencumbered triumph. There have been setbacks. Mistakes were made. But overall, I think that I may have lurched and heaved a bit, but I turned myself around in 2014.
And there is so much left to do.