Tag: mentalhealth

(CW: mental health, death)

Today I received the news that someone I didn’t know well but have known for a long time passed away by her own hand. Over 20 years ago she was a community steward and editor on a work related platform I spent a lot of time at. She was creative, intelligent, and our conversations were inspiring. Not all our conversations though, because at times we talked about our mental health. Me having resurfaced from a deep long depression shortly before that time.
After that professional community, over the years she would every now and then pop up in my inbox, my feedreader or messages. We chatted about tech, Fablabs, tinkering and 3d printing. Until about 9 years ago, although as E remarked today I kept mentioning her on occasion.

We never met. She lived in New Zealand, right at the center of Middle Earth she used to joke. We only ever connected over the open web, both about the same age, both from a generation privileged to see our world suddenly meaningfully widened by internet, through which we could channel our many interests and find likeminded people. Before the slop and silo’s.

E alerted me to a post from our mutual friend J sharing the news of her death, and J shared the backstory. A change in medications tipped her into the darkness of deep depression.

I’m sad. I cried. Not because we were close, we just shared affinity over a long enough period of time to make it mean something. But because I know how among people I know, their spark of brightness, intelligence and creativity is too often tied to the abyss of depression. Because she is not the first from the inspiring connections we made in the early 00s. Because I know into which place she was thrust. I’ve been in that place, and not once. That raging place of darkness, groping around in the ashes of everything, where nothing else exists or penetrates but that fatal way out. By coincidence and circumstance I found other ways to leave that place. It could have just as easily have been me who didn’t come back out again. Like others didn’t. Like she didn’t. It is so deeply sad.

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Wayfinding, The Art and Science of How We Find and Lose Our Way. This is a fascinating book. It is fun to read but also highly relevant to me in multiple ways.

Wayfinding, orienting ourselves, is an old skill providing an evolutionary advantage. Our brains are evolved for it with cells that fire in distinct places, to mark boundaries, for head directions, in recognition of landmarks or in grids at different levels of resolution. They allow us to build cognitive maps of our world. How we navigate and what happens when we get lost and fear grips us impacting quality of decisions is however just the beginning.

The book brings together recent research on the connection between our navigational skills, cognition of abstract concepts and mental decline due to aging. Reading it renewed my urgency to do more with Systems Convening in our work, helped me think about my mental health, and about physical fitness w.r.t. aging and dementia, something that runs in the family.

I picked this book up last May in an independent book store in Utrecht, Steven Sterk. Burn-out and depression are akin to being lost, and it’s why this book jumped out at me browsing the book store.

Read it over summer, and have now finished transcribing my annotations from the many post-its I added to the book’s pages. Some 6000 words in total.


The book Wayfinding next to a large pile of post-its with annotations that I removed from the book after transcribing them into my notes.

Bookmarked Home-worker… care-work… self-care. by Maren Deepwell

Maren Deepwell in a blogpost explores a question E and I have been discussing as well. Now the days are getting shorter, and begin outside a lot is less of an option, how are we going to deal with likely lock-down periods? In the spring the lockdown was easier to carry: the weather was generally beautiful and we enjoyed our garden as much as possible. Now life is taking place inside more for the next few months. As usual around early October, I started taking high doses of vitamin D, which for years has been helpful to me. We’ve already made a few improvements in the house to make it more comfortable. Maren Deepwell points to how the Nordics deal with the dark half of the year, and that is a good pointer. One thing we learned from visiting the north of Sweden, as well as Denmark, in the winter months, is the use of lighting and candles. But there’s likely more.

And that got me thinking about what the equivalent of a fresh snowfall will be for me as a home-worker this winter, as I continue to work through this crisis in the colder, darker months and return to localised lock downs here in Wales, which will restrict all aspects of my life. …

Maren Deepwell