It should be International Celebration Day ... EVERYDAY

So this week was International Women's Day - look it up here, it's a thing.  And yes, there's an International Men's Day too if you're worried.  Although to me, International Talk Like A Pirate Day sounds much more fun (I need to remember next year).

What I thought was quite nice, there were some folk on Twitter thanking and celebrating women they'd felt had been influential.  The problem is - if you missed it, then I guess you need to wait 365 days til next year to celebrate someone you thought was influential.  Heck, less if that person is male!

Or maybe you can tell them right now?  Or let the world know right now?  What's stopping you?  Do you REALLY need a special day to do it?

Celebrating people in our life is something I think we can be really crap about.  It's "not cool", and certainly something as a teen-uncomfortable-with-emotion brought me out in a sweat.  It's unfortunate, but it took something sad to snap me out of it.

I've talked before about my grandmother who died in 2014.  She was very dear to me, but I couldn't always say it.  Sadly she was diagnosed with early Alzheimer's the week before I got married - it was an absolute bombshell for me - I realised she wouldn't be around forever.  But as sad as that realisation was, it led to something good.  It made me realised that saying "I love you", holding her hand, hugging her as long as I could - it was all important, and it made her day.  And as hard as losing her in 2014 was, there are no major regrets - and those memories you have are all the "warm fuzzy kind".  You only regret there wasn't room for an extra one or two.

I guess I must have got into the habit - when my friend Violet died unexpectedly in 2010, I was obviously sad, and continue to be.  But I know I told her how important she was, and said all those important things that need to be said between best friends.

Make celebrating people and being thankful for them something you don't wait to be prompted for "a special day" to do.

Mental Health 109 - The long grief. Five years on ...

Today was an emotional day.  It's Violet's 40th birthday - but those who've read for a while will know my good friend Violet died 5 years ago.  I've written a lot about my early grief when she died, but with a lot of people around me going through their own journey, I want to move the story forward into the present day a little.

Violet's death at 35 is probably the hardest bombshell I've ever had to deal with.  It was death of someone I loved so very much at an age which to be honest was unfair.

That first week, it was like there was this extreme emotion trapped within me - it felt too big to be kept inside, and like I'd burst at the seems from it.  And yet I remember being so much more angry than sad.  So very angry.

Although no-one was to blame, it just felt she died too soon, and it wasn't fair or right or just.

Not being able to attend the funeral made things that much harder.  I held a brief ceremony myself, but it was difficult.  I didn't have many mutual friends, but I was really lucky to have a lady named Jenny Day who I could talk about her so much with.  And I did talk a lot.  But in a lot of ways I felt like I was going through this myself.

But most of all the grief lingered.  Every night, just going to sleep was a struggle, because your mind always drifted to her.  It felt like all the joy had been sucked out from life.

It was the common bonds of our friendship which were harder to go on alone.  I deleted all my Regina Spektor from my MP3 players, and I stopped watching Doctor Who.  Because these were things I'd shared with her, and now they just brought me such inconsolable pain.

Over Christmas, my son and I listened to the autobiography of Donald Malarkey, one of the famous Easy Company Parachutists.  The thing I most identified with was his tale of grief over losing his best friend, Skip Monk, and how that grief followed him around, never really leaving.

Looking back 5 years on, I'm often surprised how the grief is still there.  It's still very powerful and emotional, and yet it's a gentler grief.  Like feelings of melancholy over anguish.  I'm not a great believer in the afterlife or ghosts, but often it feels like she's just next to me, only slightly out of sight and out of reach.

They say "as long as you remember them, they're not really dead" - but I hate that cliche, although at the same time seeing some truth in it.  If you live your life like Violet lived, you are someone who is nurturing of others, someone who is passionate and makes a difference.  Though Violet has been long gone now, those changes in me that her love and her friendship brought about remain.  That's probably why she always feels so very close, especially when I'm most alone, because I do carry the best bit of her within my heart.

In on odd way, the hardest part of dealing with it is moving on.  You love your departed friend, but you don't want to turn your life into a devotion to her memory that you forget that you're still alive.  When you've lost such a close friend, you're afraid of making new friends, in part because you're worried you're just looking to replace them.  But also, because having lost one friend, you sometimes want to just withdraw into isolation so you never feel that pain again.

Life has been good though, and in my own way I've managed to move on - somehow I've picked up new friends, including best friends which fill some of the hole she left behind.  I still have grief - maybe I'll always have it, but somehow it's a less scary grief - one which seems to be capable of having great beauty concurrently with a gentle sadness.  And I think there will always be a place in my heart for the girl who will always be 35, and where she left her mark ...

She loved the watercolours of John William Waterhouse, and somehow in the haunting story of The Lady Of Shallot, there is something which powerfully resonates with the tale of my Violet.

Mental Health 105 - "I regret to inform you". The suicide bombshell.

It’s the worst email you can get in the morning, “I regret to inform you that our colleague and friend Nicholas passed away in the night”.

I've received this kind of email twice, and at the time you have no idea what has happened.  But sadly a few months later the rumours go around that Nicholas did no “pass away” peacefully.  I myself was temping in IT support at the time of one of those emails, and had to reclaim the machine of the deceased, going through files in his account and hard disk, deciding any work related ones.  Unfortunately for a number of files that meant opening, quickly visually scanning the contents, and moving anything that could be important to a shared drive.

I found it unnerving to go through his things, and really didn't want to delve into his private life.  But all the same, it became apparent even from my quick visual scanning of documents that he'd written a lot of letters to lawyers, going through divorce and custody hell.  Nicholas (not his real name) had been going through a difficult time, and few of us at work would have guessed.

Even now, it feels unfair, even under the shield anonymity to reveal this about him.  However these details did eventually come out during the inquest into his death many months later.

This isn't my only brush with suicide.  I've written previously about my friend Violet, and the effect her life and her death had on me.  There I wanted to celebrate her life, and to talk about how I dealt with mourning her loss.

There were some details I omitted though – I’d mentioned that Violet had issues with mental health which had seen her committed for a period of time, as well as a previous failed suicide attempts.  Ironically she was the first peer mental health sufferer who I formed an open friendship with, and she was severely influential in my life.  I learned that fellow sufferers can get a great deal of support by sharing their troubles with someone else who “gets it”.  This picture, like no other reflect my friendship with her,

Those conversations over the years of our friendship really turned my life around – because I could talk through things with her that it was difficult to talk to anyone else about, without judgement.

Sadly though in 2010 her life started to spiral – she was on a new medication system which she was finding difficult to find balance on.  Unfortunately people have to occasionally change their meds, and as Violet was on a combination of pills for various difficulties she had, there could be complex side effects that could cause whole weeks wiped out in a “zombie” state as she adjusted.  She’d also spent years waiting for a free slot with a specialist therapist to try and deal with some of the issues and reduce her medication dependence.

In hindsight we’d talked about her stints in mental institutions, and she’d ominously said that she’d never go back there.  Her landlord started motions to (illegally) evict her, something which is a difficult trial for someone with her level of anxiety, for which your flat is your only “safe” area.

One day she went quiet.  People phoned, but there was no reply.  The next day, the Police battered down the door, and found her dead on her bed surrounded by empty packets of medication.  It took months to get information – I was told her blood toxicology results were inconclusive.  She had alcohol and elevated levels of medication.  Coroner eventually erred on the side of accidental over deliberate overdose, but given the circumstances, I've always been in doubt.

Whether Violet was or wasn't a statistic, suicide is unfortunately something that does go on.  In New Zealand, suicide kills more people than road traffic accidents (almost twice the number) – and almost 75% of those who die are male.  That is an alarming number – it’s the single preventable cause of death in men 16-40.  It’s a chilling statistic.

Last year I was lucky enough to attend the Whirlwind Workshop on men’s mental health on Kapiti.  Whirlwind is an initiative to promote men’s mental health, and provide a network to both support and discuss issues frankly.  I'm pleased to say that Qual IT, one of New Zealand's premier IT test consultancies are amongst their sponsors – it’s nice to see an IT company involved in this, as going around the support groups in Wellington, I've seen an alarming number of our industry as end users of these kinds of services, and their tale is often all too the same.  Project managers and programmers who pushed themselves, until something broke, with the some finally seeing a doctor for help, or eventually ending up in care for a limited time.

Yet they are still the lucky ones – for some, their problems, and the dark places they inhabit just feel too overwhelming.  Martin Sloman of Whirlwind sums it up when he says it’s a difficult thing for many men to admit they need help, “men are very bad at coming forward and embracing this kind of challenge … it’s unblokey”, and yet this attitude of shame is leading people to feel it’s easier to end their life than to live with the shame of a badge like “depression”.

Problems in life can feel daunting – but in life as in IT, we know that breaking complexity down, you can work on it a piece at a time.  Problems can be dealt with, support can be got, but death is so huge and permanent and "unfixable".

Nicholas’s suicide ended the custody battle with his wife – but it left a gaping hole in the life of his children.  Something could have been settled and negotiated.  But instead his children are left trying to understand why he did this, and why they’ll never see their father again.

As I said about Violet, before the inquest  I would spend alternate days so upset she was dead, or feeling so incredibly peeved she did this.

If you are feeling depressed or suicidal, I really encourage you to talk to someone – pick up the phone.  A good place to start is the Samaritans – most countries have a branch somewhere.  If that doesn’t help, just type the words “suicide hotline” into Google, and see what your local options are.

Don’t think you’re too weak, and don’t think it’s just you!

A powerful video - and worth watching ...

Mental Health 101 – The ultimate taboo

Back when I was closing in on my 100th post, I put on Twitter a list of potential future topics for blog posts.  The one I was surprised to see the appetite for was on the subject of mental health.

You see, I was pitching that topic thinking “maybe it’s just me”.

Mental health is a difficult subject to do, and do well.  It is in many ways the ultimate taboo.  By admitting that in the past I have ever had any problem in this area, I potentially run the risk of a future employer coming over this piece and viewing hiring me “as a risk”.  But I really hope we’re coming out of the dark ages here when we talk about attitudes to mental health.

Over this series of articles, I will be frank about my own experiences, and will also discuss those of friends that I've worked with, or know outside of work through various channels.  For these people, I’ll be using their experiences but under assumed names.  The only person I break this for is for my friend Violet, who died, and who was such a crusader for mental health, I know this'd have her blessing.

Make no mistake, these posts that follow are going to be a dark and explicit because of the nature of what’s being explored.  It will probably unsettle some people – but I'm putting this together for those people who need to know “it’s not just me”.  I have had too many people within the IT industry who thought it was.

Remembering Violet

This weekend has been an emotional one for me. It marks the two year anniversary of the death of my close friend Violet, which felt as painful as last year. I spoke briefly about Violet and my reaction to her death earlier in the year in TheProblems We Can't Fix.

However despite talking about the passing of world luminaries like Steve Jobs or Dennis Ritchie, I've never really spoken about Violet despite her huge personal influence on me (partly as her death came 6 months before I started this blog).

So to mark her extraordinary life, I'd like to share with you who she was and how she continues to challenge and influence me …

Violet was many things – when she died at 35 she had in some ways lived out more than many of us.  She was primarily an artist, this was her passion. But she was a knowledgeable genius in many fields – psychology, photography, politics, ethics, obscure science fiction and engineering. Like my own family, she'd grown up in an engineering family, and she was passionate at tinkering and understanding technology – despite having worked in computers for over 10 years I was always asking her “how to” do things.

But her true legacy is the relationships she nurtured. She was a big believer and champion of people above all.

She was an easy person for others to dismiss – she was transexual, she had a number of mental problems suffering from crippling levels of manic depression (bipolar) and well as suffering from acute levels of anxiety. She'd even been committed over her mental health issues for periods of time.

And yet she used her own demons to battle the demons of others. She understood the mental health system, symptoms of certain conditions and medication as only an experienced end-user. There are countless stories of the people who she helped get diagnosed and find real help to deal with their issues. When she died in 2010, the phrase most on peoples lips was “you understood me when no-one else did, you championed me when others judged, you saved my life”. I too consider myself within that number of people who faced my inner demons with her, and came out stronger. This is why I consider her a friend and a mentor.

That ethos of “we're stronger together” ran through her whole life. She was a big believer in co-operation and trying to get to a better place as a community.

She loved OpenSource, and was always experimenting with Linux, especially Ubuntu. She believed the internet had great potential to aiding all to access information fairly, and be able to be informed and a global community. She feared technology and the internet becoming a divisive line in the world, where only the “haves” who could afford Microsoft or Apple devices would benefit. As such she often helped people to build their own Linux machines often from spare/junk parts.

She was a committed vegetarian and passionate peace and political activitist. She wanted a fairer world where the line between the privileged and the non-privileged would not become the line between life and death or opportunity and enslavement.

Meanwhile, I was someone who I worked previously for nuclear energy (at University) and on countless military applications. I never thought we'd be able to be friends. But she only ever saw the good and the potential in me – encouraging me in my work, and in my writing. We actually became the best of friends, and it's the reason my book The Software Minefield is dedicated to her.

At work I'm always striving to build a team around me who are committed to each other on a work level and a personal level, and seek wherever possible to work for companies with a strong ethics and behaviour, who will seek to say no when a situation is wrong. All these things are the legacy of her mentorship and example. I know in my heart she would have excelled in an Agile environment.

And yet amongst all the serious stuff, she had a wicked sense of humour. One of the things which makes her memory so bittersweet is it's hard to think about her too much without wanting to laugh remembering some quip of hers. She had a true talent for saying the right (humorous) thing to turn around my most monstrous of problems. She kept me sane like that.

I must be honest. My first reaction to this strange transsexual with so mental challenges was of being unnerved. Not an easy thing for me to say, but I say it because if I had chosen to judge and follow that prejudice, I would have missed out on one of the most positive and influential friendships of my life.

The problems we can't fix ...

Testers are often the ones who are deeply involved in finding problems in software.  But they are more than this.  They are a core part of how problems are solved.

It has an unfortunate mental affect on many of us, which I think we're not aware of.  We get used to the idea that we can fix any problem.  It’s what makes us positive people around projects - our managers can be panicking about the latest showstopper defect, but to us it’s something we’re used to dealing with.

We get very good at feeling there’s not a problem that we can’t work with.  Sadly there are limits.  Away from our test labs, not every problem or issue can be so easily solved.

It’s an unfortunate fact that life can be unfair, and sometimes quite brutal.  We tend to invent things like religion, karma or ‘what goes around comes around’ to make it feel fairer.

I’ve just sent a friend a copy of a book “The Road Less Travelled” by M. Scott Peck, which kind of touches on some of this.  Its theme is very much that life is complex, and we often expect it to be simple and fixable, but we have to learn to accept that it’s complex, and accept those limits of what we can do.

Back in 2010 I lost my close friend Violet.  She was someone very special in my life, in some ways I’d want to say best friend, but she was also a mentor.  In your life you will meet only a handful of people who will champion you and see qualities within you especially when you can’t see them in yourself.  This was what Violet was to me.

Her death came as a bombshell.  It was upsetting, and I was so angry.  For about a fortnight my mind kept going over and over how unfair it was, how could it have happened.  Part of me really wanted to make it not so.  Much later I realised how much we really feel if we protest about something enough it’s like a soccer match where footballers feel if they protest enough to a referee, they can get him to reverse a decision.  But unfortunately God’s not a referee.

It was an awful feeling – my best friend was dead, and there was nothing I could do to “fix”it.  There would be all these moments and achievements in my life I’d now never get to share with her.  There’s an enormity in realising this friend is gone forever, that you never seem to be able to come to terms with.

It’s something we’d really not like to think about, but during our working life there are going to be moments of extreme upset in our personal life, and also times of tragedy.  There’s an awful Superman myth in some organisations that professionals should leave their personal life at home and give their all at work.

To an extent yes, we can’t turn into work and be snappy and irritable with our customers and co-workers because we’re going through a bad patch.  But we're not machines.  Sometimes we have to realise that if we are going through a bad time, maybe work isn’t the place we should be headed.

2011 was a terrible year for my team, my co-workers were put through the wringer in various ways – family bereavement, divorce, long term injury, house washed away.  What shone out was the way everyone tried to be supportive and sensitive within our team.  And this was echoed by my company really stood out as one where people's wellbeing was vital.

I know for myself I was aware that the company provided a limited number of counselling sessions.  And a year on from Violet’s death, I’d still not really got closure over it.  You get to a point where you feel inside just how much impact this person had in your life, but you're also aware that just as their life is over, yours needs in some ways to move on.  

I took the courage to book an appointment with the company's counsellor.  I say courage because taking such an appointment can feel like an act of weakness, and it’s a hard thing so admit “I can’t deal with this myself”.

But the session helped a lot.  Overall I was told my thought processes to Violet’s death were pretty much spot on, the problem was I was trying to go through the grief process to a timetable (typical tester on a Waterfall project there).  I just needed to accept this was going to take time.  I needed to hear that, and it was a huge weight from my shoulders.

This is in many ways a follow on to my post that we need to let go of our need to feel like Superman.  When bad things happen to us, we need to be wary of just soldiering on.  There’s no shame in being upset about it – just because we’re a professional doesn’t make us emotionally neutered.  Sometimes we need to stop, and take time to deal with it, and not feel ashamed for doing that (although obviously we should always be wary of overly lingering and dwelling on any event to the point that we never move on).

Sometimes the thing that most needs to be fixed is ourselves …