Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

January bookmarks

Oh Hello Ana

The longest month of the year is finally over! The days are getting longer and plans are starting to look aligned.

Bookmarks from January

Web development/tech related content

Not exactly web development related

Miscellaneous

Funny or cute or happy or uplifting content etc.

Made me think

Content warning: This section might include tweets that aren't uplifting and happy but rather thoughts that stayed with me.

Bookmarks of the rest of 2019

Oh Hello Ana

My last bookmark post was in July 2019 and that is quite telling of how things didn't go so well last year for me. At the time, I told myself that I would try to do a bookmark post every month and it all came crashing down around that time. It was in September that I think that I officially burned out. So actually, this will not be a very long collection: I wasn't browsing or reading much and I spent a lot of time offline.

Bookmarks from August to December 2019

Web development/tech related content

Not exactly web development related

Miscellaneous

Funny or cute or happy or uplifting content etc.

Made me think

Content warning: This section might include tweets that aren't uplifting and happy but rather thoughts that stayed with me.

Goodbye 2019

Oh Hello Ana

This year sucked with the exception of one moment of it. It was a long and draining year. The year number switch doesn’t magically create a brand new blank year where everything bad goes away. In fact, I’ve been dreading the end of 2019 exactly because the end of the year forces me to reflect on it. And when it is a bad year, it is painful to do it.

I looked back to the blog post that I did one year ago and I’m heartbroken and I feel disappointed in myself. My goals for 2019 were vague but I still feel like I didn’t accomplish anything.

This year I lost and found my cat and the whole experience absolutely destroyed me. One of the reasons why I have a lot of anxiety, it is because I have the need to feel safe. When my cat got lost, as I explain in the blog post, I felt exposed, vulnerable and unsafe. These feelings didn’t disappear once we found the cat and it took me weeks to recover. I was on edge all the time and very sensitive to “potential threats”.

I resumed therapy and with it I lost friendships and had some rude awakenings on some people’s character. Realising you’re a people pleaser all your life and sometimes a doormat is a disappointing realisation. And in my case, start asserting boundaries or stop accepting some behaviours towards me backfired. Some people don’t even know they lost me. I was so heartbroken with how I was treated that I just decided to accept that confrontation would not only not change them but it would cause me even more distress.

Therapy was incredibly painful this year and I also experienced re-traumatisation. I addressed a lot of painful memories that I tried to bury and I thought that talking about them would make me feel better. But the actual result was opening intense wounds that bleed for months.

The majority of my year was spent crying and feeling anger and sadness. The bitterness was overwhelming and all I could think was: “where could I have been if this and that hadn’t happened to me?”. This year I finally understood why people talk a lot about the power of forgiveness. I always saw forgiveness in a light level. I thought it was accepting someone’s apology when they messed up but it isn’t. And my problem is that I haven’t been able to forgive the past and it consumed me all year. This has taken a big physical and mental toll on me and changed a lot of relationships.

Because I am not a robot, I can’t fully separate things: my talks didn’t go that well, I stopped applying to give talks, I stopped writing, I lost count the amount of times I cried at work. I burned out because I wanted to compensate for every bad day I had this year and I was never satisfied.

And then I entered the forbidden loop: the one where I start comparing myself to the other’s perceived success on social media and resent myself for having current personal issues.

In a scenario where I am a bank account, all the things that happened this year where withdrawals from me and very little was being transferred back. And good things did happen to but I felt like I was living in an overdraft.

Speaking of good things:

And finally, the highlight of the year:

I married the most understanding, patient, kind, compassionate and beautiful human. My resilience is what made me survive this year but it would have been much much harder without him by my side supporting me.

Even in the past when things didn’t go well either he was the only person that fully accepted me and gave me room to feel and grow without holding anything against me. Thank you.

I would be lying if I said I don’t have goals for 2020. I do have some but all I want is for my whole self to feel better.

I suppose that making lists with a lot of goals that are for productivity and efficiency instead of happiness are the killers of my creativity and passion. So I will try but I will need to practise a lot of self forgiveness.

To anyone else who may read this: have a healthy 2020.

Starring Jessie

Oh Hello Ana

Needless to say, I am my cat's biggest fan. Literally her number one fan. She is a star in my eyes. Everything she does is cute so obviously she is the star of our Christmas cards ever since we adopted her.

This will be her 3rd Christmas with us although we nearly had a disaster earlier this year.

Earlier this year, in February, on a Saturday, I let Jessie out via the catflap as I would do every single day. She usually stays in our garden - at most she would jump next door but she would rarely stray more than one house away.

That day she didn't come home. I thought that maybe she went into someone's house and they took a liking and fed her and let her stay and she would come back in the morning. But I was really worried so I slept in the living room. All I wanted was to hear the catflap noise. But she didn't come home.

Sunday morning we decided to knock on neighbours' houses as we began to be afraid that she may have entered a high fenced garden and not be able to jump back. We also printed flyers with my phone number and put them up on trees.

She didn't come home that day. In fact, she didn't come home for 8 days and those were the most horrible 8 days I've lived this year (and in recent years). I wish I could say that in those 8 days the only thing that happened was missing her but it isn't true. The search for a loved pet makes you vulnerable. During that week, here is a list of things that happened:

  • A woman was walking her dog in our street and I asked her if she happened to see my cat. Her response was to abuse me. Besides the name calling she said that I deserved to have my pet missing because if I loved my pet I wouldn't have lost it.
  • A man got so angry we put a flyer through his letter box that he left his house to not only be abusive but also to make physical threats. He said we had no business in putting our flyer in his letterbox because, to him, it was rubbish.
  • I received threatening phone calls from a man claiming to have looked for my cat and demanding money for it.

I don't handle threats well, especially if made by men. And in that week I realised that I was vulnerable. Those men knew more or less where we lived, my phone number and that we were desperate to have our cat back. One of the tips to look for a cat is to look for it in the middle of the night. If a cat is scared, they are most likely to come when there are less car noises. So I was doing midnight, 3am and 6am walks around my block calling for her. So I began to be afraid of doing that.

We both became physically unwell and our mental health took a big hit. I got very paranoid and I began to be afraid to answer the phone. I needed to answer the phone if it was someone telling me they found Jessie, but all I could think about was the man on the phone being threatening because I wasn't giving him money.

But good things also happened. I received so many text messages from strangers saying that they were hoping that I would find her and that they were looking out for her too. My NextDoor post got very popular and I got to meet lovely neighbours who really cared. And from NextDoor I had two people who volunteered to come with us one night to call for her. I have tears in my eyes every time I think about how selfless those people were.

We also had so many people sending us photos of cats that did look like her and asking us if it was her. There was one poor cat in one particular street that was caught three times on the same day by different people. I'm sure that cat is still very confused about that weird day they had!

Eight days later, on a Sunday, I had officially given up hope. All I was hoping was that she didn't suffer, in whatever happened. At that point we did everything we could and we needed to get back to work. On that Sunday evening we received a phone call. Up until that point, most phone calls were about similar cats (all very well intentioned obviously) so I thought it was another one like that. I was afraid to answer the phone so I gave it to my partner and he answers it and just gets up and runs through the door.

Jessie was stuck a couple of numbers down in a neighbours cellar. Those neighbours have been away all week and had only just come back and saw our flyers and since something similar had happened to them, they decided to call for her in their cellar. And there was she was. Stuck underneath their floorboards and meowing through a hole in their cellar from which she couldn't get out.

I couldn't believe my own eyes and I couldn't stop crying. Jessie was a bit thinner but she was in good health.

There were other details from this bad experience. I remember when I went to a shop to print her missing flyers, my pen drive stopped working. And because I did those flyers in google docs I thought I could just forward them to the shop's email. Turns out, I couldn't open them without having an app installed. This whole situation happened while I was in tears and my 4G wasn't being fast enough.

I also learned that without social media, it is really hard to reach your local community. I had to join local Facebook groups and create a NextDoor account. I managed to buy a temporary number redirect but I couldn't help but still feeling exposed. I still needed my real phone number in flyers because most people use iMessage and WhatsApp.

Sometimes my husband had work commitments that didn't allow him to stay at home. I questioned my safety a few times when following tips from people.

But we had a happy ending, many people don't. This changed me so much. Before, I would take a photo of a missing pet and keep my eyes open, but now I am actually active in replying to people and hoping to give them the comfort and empathy that I once received. I volunteered to help search when my neighbour's cat went missing (another happy ending story!) and I keep an eye/am active on the groups I once joined when I needed help.

It is free to have empathy.

We would both like to thank everyone at Hactar who gave me all the time I needed to look for her and to look after her after she was found.

But now back to happy Jessie. She has put the weight back on! And more important than John Lewis Christmas ad: here is Jessie's 2019 Christmas card.

Jessie posing in front of a Christmas tree wearing a Christmas outfit with the message: Merry Christmas

P.S.: You might wanna read my Developurrs interview with Jessie!

Oh Hello Ana