When I complained to my life coach, at the end of July, that I was finding it hard to follow the weekly structured schedule I had set up in June, even though I had felt engaged and motivated by it at the beginning, he pointed out that I had been putting enormous pressure on myself to “perform” in various ways, for many months already, and that I probably deserved a break.

There are three overlapping narratives here.

One narrative is that I worked myself into a frenzy of projects and study topics as a form of escapism. There are at least two candidate situations for me to “run forward away from”: my mom’s poor health (see below), and my lack of confidence to invest into things that truly matter to me (also see below). There may be more. However, I also worked on the skills to deal with what I was escaping from, so I do not feel the urge to push myself forward in that way anymore.

One other narrative is that my house project was very large, that I wanted to distance myself from it to avoid it becoming a huge part of my identity (something that hurt my mom twenty years ago, and which I aim to avoid), and so I spread my attention across many other topics simultaneously as a way to balance things out. Now that the one big project is completed, the need to “distract” myself is reduced too.

The last narrative is that all these projects really required a lot of work. I was also tired, in a way that needed a longer break than just one weekend away here or there.

In any case, I lifted my foot from the metaphorical gas pedal in August, and it served me well.

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This is not to say that August was fully idle either.

I started with a four day stay in Florence, Italy, as a way to extract myself from my intense routine and adopt a more creative mindset. I had wanted to see the Renaissance galleries in person for a few years already. This was a last minute trip, and I only realized when disembarking that I had chosen the hottest part of the year to travel: 38°C throughout!

I enjoyed:

• the aesthetics of the Ponte Vecchio, how one can still feel the echoes of how it was originally used when standing on it.
• the magnificence of Michelangelo’s David. Pictures do not do it justice.
• the extremely dry climate, which made the high temperature bearable.
• my train ride and short visit of Pisa (two hours away). I think I like Pisa more than Florence. The leaning tower is breathtaking (underrated), but did you know it is merely the bell tower to a giant cathedral next to it? That cathedral is far more impressive, and it is just as beautiful as the one in Florence.

I disliked:

• the other Renaissance art. 99% of it is about the Catholic church’s cultural misery (dead people, martyrs and other people feeling miserable all around) and I am totally not part of the target audience.
• Florence’s tap water, which smells like rotten eggs.
• The permeating sewage smell in the streets.
• The generally poor and degrading infrastructure.
• The unnerving and excessive number of leather good stores (thousands throughout the city), all eerily devoid of customers.

Everything and everyone is there to look at and agitate dead things from the past. I posted about my experience on Instagram: “Florence is like a rotting corpse and the tourists are like flies that keep it moving.” Pisa, in comparison, has beautiful old stuff to see and also a buzzing, modern dynamic energy to it. I hope to see more of the rest of Tuscany next time.

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Four other days were spent traveling to visit and stay with my mom. The stroke she experienced in June/July was indeed minor, and I saw her recovering well.

However, she is also still in the process of recovering from her heart failure back in January, and is confronted with a catch-22: she needs to regain muscle mass via exercise, which is difficult because her hip and knee joints hurt, which she cannot get fixed yet because she needs to regain muscle mass before she can undergo further surgery. Still, regaining muscle mass is not optional: without that exercise her bones would become weaker and she would then be more likely to break a femur or hip, and then her chances to survive that would be minuscule.

She is powering through it (with all the joint pain) and it is not pleasant.

What is next? On a positive note, she is lucid about her circumstances. She described how she is planning to rearrange one of her guest rooms at the ground level into a small apartment to rent out (additional income), and another one to live in (so she won’t need to climb up and down the stairs every day, which is becoming more risky as she ages further). One of her friends is helping her regularly (social support); she talks to her brother and another friend every day (monitoring); and she is likely to have yet another friend come live with her more permanently, in the aforementioned small apartment.

How will things look one or two years further? Truly, I do not fully know yet. There are some more medical exams coming up this month. I will try to go and visit again in October or November.

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Four other days were also spent visiting friends in Bonn, Germany. The stay was foremost pleasant; spending quality time with friends and family has this tendency to warm my soul and calm my nerves.

Ostensibly, we tried to attend FrOSCon, a conference about free and open source software. This felt nostalgic: it reminded me of FOSDEM, also organized inside a university, which I last attended around 2010.

What I liked from FrOSCon:

• foremost, sharing that experience with a friend and the corresponding quality time together;
• the nostalgia of seeing student volunteers running around, and older nerds with gray beards walking around barefoot;
• the talk by Vicențiu Ciorbaru on the new vector search algorithm he implemented in MariaDB. I liked his energy as a person quite a bit, and I liked learning about the Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) algorithm from him.

I disliked:

• The lack of food options around the premises. Especially on Sunday, when all stores in Germany close simultaneously for the day.
• The generally low quality of the delivery for the talks. Presenters were usually inexperienced, or perhaps too experienced in delivering to audiences with low expectations and little feedback. The topics covered felt pretty valuable and interesting, and the delivery was detracting from that. It made me wonder how much wisdom and innovation are locked into cultural niches because their bearers are so little capable of reaching out to wider audiences.

I also went to visit Bonn’s History Museum. Its specific achievement is to show the parallel history of Eastern and Western Germany as two literally parallel display tracks throughout the galleries. For every period, the visitor can move from one side of the room to another to experience the cultural boundary that existed at a time. This is an engaging place which I hope to visit again, next time with an audioguide.

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In the interest of further embracing calm in August, I took care of simpler homemaking projects. The purpose was to strengthen my self-confidence and generate a feeling of flow with things not computer-related.

For example, I hung curtains on my own (three sets!), and felt very proud about that. I was also able to quickly and effectively compare, then order, suitable dressings for my other windows; completion of this task without anxiety and overthinking felt like a major achievement. I set up my DDR training corner, which involved negotiating online for some cheap second hand equipment and driving a car to fetch it. I still remember the day I was driving back with a large screen on the back seat: I then wondered if the pride I was experiencing was like the one experienced by hunters carrying their prey back home thousands of years ago. I also McGuyvered a ceiling mount for my projector, and the way I approached this was probably my first original thought ever regarding construction work.

There were many other such projects here and there. I approached every one of them using the SMART framework: specific (one specific location); measurable (look finished); achievable (clear plan ahead of time); relevant (all related to increased degree of satisfaction); and time-bound (complete at end of day or weekend).

It worked! I do generally feel more authentically confident.

Back in February/March, I had started to suspend my disbelief (about my ability to complete my projects at the time) and made a leap of faith by choosing to believe that I would be resourceful enough to deal with unforeseen obstacles if any happened. This faith more or less lifted my anxiety completely, however at the time, it still felt like I was faking the confidence. Today I feel different: I just feel calm and stronger, confident that I will likely overcome unforeseen obstacles and otherwise reach out to friends and family for help when needed. This is not coming from faith anymore, but from experience. I had not planned for this change and I welcome it.

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Another positive thing that happened in August is that I have started healing my shoulder injury. I barely run into painful situations in my right arm anymore, and when I do with the left arm the pain is not as debilitating as it once was. Still, many movements are still out of reach and I am seeing some serious regressions to my previous gym work in that area. The doctor said four months of recovery, and this is just month two.

Sadly, my tennis elbow situation is not getting better at all. Reading a book for more than an half hour at a time has become nearly impossible. Many gym exercises are just painful even when they are designed to not worsen the situation. I am also not helping my body recover as well as it could, because I still use that arm to hold and screw into things quite regularly (see home projects above).

One silver lining is that I also cannot hold my phone or a computer mouse for more than a few minutes at a time. Just that has changed my patterns of activity in minor but positive and noticeable ways. I now put podcasts or lectures to play in the background while I keep my body/hands busy with other projects. This led to psychological reconditioning: now whenever I feel lazy and want to watch something passively, I start searching for some routine maintenance task or other manual project to accompany the “passive” dopamine hit. The result is that many more things get done, I move quite a bit more, and this pushes me to feel generally happier.

I wish I could make this sound like a giant positive change. I truly do! The pain however is dull and ever present, and it puts downward pressure on my mood. Combined together, my mood has been stable instead of improving. I wish for just one day where I could wake up without a dull ache somewhere.

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Another thing that happened in August was that I gave some more thoughts to my concerns around representation, last discussed in June. This is the other topic that may have caused some escapism recently. At the time, I lamented that my ambient culture does not offer male role models that look and behave like me. Under-representation results in bad psychological outcomes, known to social scientists under terms like “minority stress” or “symbolic annihilation”.

This month, I developed a thesis: that my unformed/malformed notions on the topic of masculinity had influenced how I formed relationships in the past, that I may have unconsciously surrounded myself with a majority of folk to whom gender norms are not too important, and that as a result I created a social cocoon that prevents me from learning more about core masculine traits and behaviors. With no disrespect to my friends whom I love deeply, I feel I now also have a real concern to address which requires me to step out and meet a different type of people with crisper experiences of masculinity.

What I started to figure out last month is that “the Internet” will not help me. The majority of masculinity-adjacent content is either outright toxic or also lamenting the lack of healthy resources, which does not help me.

It slowly dawned on me that core traits and behaviors associated by masculinity, by large, are incompatible with active participation in the Internet discourse. Things like “bias towards action”, “protecting others”, “competing”, “rationally dealing with crises”, “modesty”, “ambition for growth without pride”, etc., do not result in a person sitting down and writing about (or recording themselves talking about) how they reflect on their experience of masculinity. The men are out there and do things, and they do not talk/write about what they do online, and so I would actually need to meet them out there if I wanted to learn anything.

Reflexively, it simultaneously dawned on me that the reason why I was so inept in this topic is exactly because I have mostly been raised by the internet, leading me to absorb quite a bit of all it has to offer and mistakenly starting to believe that nothing existed outside of it. It is a bit awe inspiring to realize so late in life that there are so many more layers to the world onion. Or physical shapes causing the shadows. Oh well.

(Topically, this strengthens my appreciation for Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, which covers some of this topic spectacularly well. I did not realize this fully at the time I read it. One of my favorite stories.)

What happens next? I put some feelers out to meet new folk to go and do things together outdoors. I am surprised by how positive this is received. We are still in the process of forging these experiences (more to report later), but this is something that 12-month younger me would never have even imagined.

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There is much more I would like to share but it is now eleven in the evening and I am waking up at seven tomorrow morning. I found a gardener (last month’s challenge) whom I expect to arrive at around eight. I am already giddy with anticipation regarding the results. Hopefully there will be a picture forthcoming!

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References:

• Wikipedia, Ponte Vecchio
• Wikipedia, FrOSCon
• Wikipedia, FOSDEM
• MariaDB’s vector search extension
• Wikipedia, HNSW algorithm
• Wikipedia, Bonn’s History Museum
• Wikipedia, Flow
• BBC, How McGuyver became a verb
• Wikipedia, S.M.A.R.T. Criteria
• Wikipedia, Suspension of disbelief
• Wikipedia, Allegory of the Cave
• Wikipedia, Neal Stephenson’s Anathem