Category Archives: dealing with life

More on shame

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A friend posted on Facebook,

Dear advisors of graduate students,

Please read, comment on, and edit your student’s paper before it is submitted to a journal.

Sincerely,
A cranky reviewer

She’s right and criticizing the correct person, but I can’t help but feel for the student.

You see, I was that student.

I hope my friend writes something like, “To the senior authors/advisor of the student on this paper: seriously, you couldn’t put the time in to comment on, edit, and help put this paper together? You do know that is your job, right?” and, “To the junior author on this paper: Your senior authors/advisors let you down. This isn’t your fault. You are probably doing all the right things. You can’t control them. So don’t take my comments as a reflection on your ability or worth; they aren’t. And keep trying. You are doing work that has merit, and everyone benefits from professional critique before a paper is submitted. Even senior faculty.”

I know that even if my friend correctly calls out the advisor, it might be the student first reading those reviews. She’s right to call out the advisor. But oh, do I ever feel for the student.

I hope the student is stronger than I was.

Even 13 years later, I still have tears in my eyes thinking of that night and how I felt. I was so ashamed of myself, for not doing a better job. For not being more. For not knowing how to write that paper correctly. For being an ignorant student, instead of the expert professional I thought I was supposed to be.

Shame thrives in darkness and isolation. Talking doesn’t make it go away, but it makes it a little bit better. A little less frightening. A little more like adversity that I have overcome, rather than a sign that I am a failure as a person.

The one thing I have been able to do with all the pain is to use it to offer my students something better. I don’t ever want them to feel like that.

Past, present and future

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I had a Thanksgiving visit to a faculty colleague’s house. We got to talking about graduate school after dinner and the feelings of inadequacy it seems to bring out in everyone. These feelings relate back to my earlier post on shame. He described the dogged persistence by which he finished up, and he is glad to not have research responsibilities anymore in a teaching-focused faculty position.

As for me … I am glad I am not in a research position, and as I wrote earlier, I feel like a failed researcher. Graduate school sure kicked the stuffing out of my ego. But there’s a part of me that isn’t convinced that I couldn’t be a good researcher now (although exactly at what is still an open question) or couldn’t have been a good one then. The one thing I am sure of is that you can put a perfectly motivated, intelligent, creative person in the wrong circumstance with the wrong people, and you can tear her down so badly that she is almost unable to function. So that she starts to hate things that were enjoyed activities to begin with.

Yes, a good part of that was my own damn fault, and I know it. No one teaches you when to quit; that sometimes the only way to make something better is to run away from it. I should have found other people and another direction, but when things didn’t work, I was far too busy blaming myself, feeling like a failure. That does not help give you strength to pick yourself up, walk away, and start over.

I got on Project Euler this summer; discovering that I do really like programming was a revelation. After leaving my last software job, I thought I had made a huge mistake going into the field. Must’ve been guilt or pressure, being one of the few women who could to go on and pursue math and software. But that’s not right either. Over the past years of teaching, I keep discovering that I do love problem-solving, math, and programming, and not just when I am working with students. I enjoy them in their own right. And what does that mean?

I am always going to be a teacher first; give me students and they will take priority in my life. I want more than that out of life too. I want to write articles and books; I really want to write things that people read and care about. I don’t want to just write musty math articles.

I know I approach problems differently now than back then; now I’m all about finding the low hanging fruit and plucking it down. Way back when I was in graduate school, I wanted to understand the things that most confused me. Which is, for the record, not the best way to pick a thesis topic.

One thing for certain is that we cannot go back and fix the past. The only thing we can do is learn from it, and use our lessons to help ourselves and others. I don’t know where my journey will take me; maybe into more research and maybe not. One thing I am always telling my students is that they are capable. They are worthy. They are strong. They will find a way, even though it may not be what they currently imagine. And that is the message I need to bring to myself. I am capable. I am worthy. I am strong. I will find a way, even if it is nothing that I currently imagine.

Shame

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A friend and I had dinner last night, and one of the topics we talked about was shame. Something else in our conversation made me think that he would like to watch Brené Brown’s TED talk on The Power of Vulnerability (one of the most-watched TED videos)

I hadn’t quite processed at that time, that she had a second video about shame, but when I watched it again, I knew I’d seen it before.

Shame is one of the hardest things for people to talk about. It is painful to live through, and just as painful to hear, and so we try to hide it. But shame thrives on secrecy and isolation.

Dr. Brown defines shame this way:

Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance or belonging.

The last time I had an intense bout of shame was during my first semester when I started working at a university after a long sojourn as a software developer. I gave a talk to the Numerical Analysis seminar, about a paper I had recently gotten published. The talk was too short, and I didn’t have to do anything beyond some fairly basic mathematics to get my result. It felt like everyone filed past me, not speaking to me, and I had days of crisis, tears, trying to get help from my therapist, not knowing where to go or what to do. But definitely not talking about the incident with anyone who was there; I wanted to avoid all of them. I think I told a friend who advised me to ask someone there how it went, and one thing I knew for sure was that I couldn’t do that. I was completely terrified of what the response would be. I am still not sure I could ask someone who was there that day about it, and that was 5 or more years ago now.

This stirs up all the memories of my graduate school experience, where, no matter what I did, I felt like I had disappointed my advisors and hadn’t met the standard. I remember going home from an oral exam that I passed and crying for hours, feeling like a failure. I remember words, “Maybe you are like a retarded third grader who can’t learn how to read.” I remember many days where my one success was not starting to cry until I got out of the building. And the sense that my Ph.D. represented my ultimate failure as a human being to be what I wanted to be.

Clearly one of my shame triggers is being unworthy as a mathematician. Of being unable to do anything but second rate or easy work.

Today I was videotaping a lecture. A student asked how I knew a certain equation was the equation of a plane, and on tape, I couldn’t figure out what to say. I was stumped, although I know I know this answer. I said it was because a linear constraint in 3 dimensions solves to a 2 dimensional space. Because I just do. You’ll learn more about this in the next section on the cross product, and more yet in linear algebra.

In office hours I struggled with a few questions (some were hard) and eventually managed to put together the neat answer to the plane equation for my student, after several tries to write the notation properly. It’s not like I don’t know the notation. I was feeling queasy and uncertain and anxious and uncomfortable. That was enough to keep the notation from coming out properly.

I kept thinking, I caught that on videotape. I can’t show that videotape to anyone, They will think I am stupid, or that I don’t know my subject matter, that I am incompetent.

And that is shame. Not as bad as those other, earlier, times. But shame. I am writing here, so that maybe these things can see the light of day. So that they can be exposed to empathy. Because openness and empathy are the two antidotes to shame.

And I wonder, dear readers, what stories you might be brave enough to tell me about shame. Maybe not publicly. Maybe not here. Maybe in person, sometime, or by private message. I hope that if you honor me with your confidence, that I can provide the empathy that helps ease the experience of unworthiness and isolation.

Anxiety Medication

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Hello. My name is Dr. Jinx and I have an anxiety problem. Generalized Anxiety Disorder, as far as I can tell, not that I’ve ever had anyone other than a general practitioner take a crack at it. It’s one of those things I have to figure out how to live with and deal with.

About a week and a half ago, I went on a different medication. It was one I had used successfully before, but there was a good reason to go off it. My then-significant other and I hoped that, despite my advanced age, we might get pregnant, and this medication is not recommended with pregnancy. So I weaned my way off of it, doing sometimes okay, and sometimes worse, while we tried and hoped. I had another medication I could take for immediate crisis. It was okay, but not great.

That part of my life ended rather suddenly, but I never returned to the old medication that had worked relatively well for me. I toughed some things out I shouldn’t have, and finally began relying on my back-up medication more. And more and more. It was time for a change.

It is working like a charm. I feel normal most of the time, which means, I’m not feeling on edge all the time, waiting for the axe to fall or the other shoe to drop. I know that it is a matter of days or weeks before “normal” stops feeling like the wonder it is right now. I better write about it, so that I can remember it later.

In my handwritten journal, I’ve written over and over again, “Please make the anxiety go away. Please find a solution to my anxiety problem. Please make it better, this is so hard.” For a little while I am here, and it is better. I wish I could give this to everyone who is suffering; a respite.

When I’m suffering, on edge, I think I should be strong, hold off taking anything, breathe through it. It’s a personal failing, is it not, to have this condition in the first place. So many bad situations that I stayed in far too long, thinking quitters never win and winners never quit. But there are problems that you just have to run away from. In this case, in my case, medication that I just need to take.

A wise friend has said to me, there is something about emotions that just needs to be witnessed. Yes. I need the pain to be seen, and the relief to be seen. Maybe in someone seeing, we can begin, between us, to make sense of it.

Gratitude Exercise

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Another long day today. I am home, I am tired, I need to do more. But not tonight. Tonight I am finished with work. If I opened it up, I would just inch through whatever it was, hardly making progress, slowly getting frustrated.

One thing might make a difference before bed. A gratitude exercise.

What is a gratitude exercise? You just have to make a list of things, little things, big things, whatever, that you are grateful for. Things that make you happy. Things that make your life better.

Don’t expect a gratitude exercise to fix your bad mood completely, but it helps a little bit in the moment. In general, it helps me to keep a positive attitude, and to keep me happier. We have to see the good things in our lives to be glad to be ourselves and to live this life. And in the end, it is very trite, but also very true that happiness is wanting what you have, not getting what you want.

With that:

  1. I am grateful for a colleague who agreed to write a letter of recommendation for me, and who has been a constant supporter of mine since the day we met.
  2. I am grateful to have a supervisor who understands my values, and agrees with them.
  3. I am grateful for another supervisor (one I don’t like as much) who stood up for me today.
  4. I am grateful I made progress on one of my “missions” for the semester, to get some faculty Wiki space, password protected and away from students, so that we can more easily share course materials.
  5. I am grateful for a visit from a student that I am concerned about.
  6. I am grateful for students who are becoming/have become colleagues and friends.
  7. I am grateful for green beans, grown in my garden.
  8. I am grateful that I managed to run a successful Undergraduate Seminar series this semester.
  9. I am grateful for anxiety medication, a different one, that is actually working. Feeling normal most of the time is so much nicer than feeling like something awful is about to happen most of the time.
  10. I am grateful that I only have to write my Honors exam this time, and not also write a make-up for the common exam.
  11. I am grateful for funky clouds this morning, even though I didn’t get to take a picture of them.
  12. I am grateful that gratitude exercises so often make me feel better.

It is done

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I posted about stress and burnout, resolved to take some time off, and then reality started laughing in my face. I’ve squeezed out a few hours here and there, but not a 24 hour block of time. There’s some statement out there about a battle plan not lasting any longer than the first engagement with the enemy, and that’s exactly what I’m thinking about.

Back in May, I submitted an article on the writing we do in my mathematical modeling class to PRIMUS. In September, it came back from peer review. Since that time, I’ve been slammed with work, problems at work, stressors at work, moving my office at work, a major flood at work, and, well, I hope that is enough to explain why finding time for these revisions has been difficult at best. That my job has no time allocated to scholarly work or research sure didn’t help.

And the revisions weren’t easy. I realized back in May I’d picked a huge topic. That came home to roost; my biggest mandates was to cut my article down and focus. I’d work on the article for an hour or two and get stuck. Then I’d think about it for a week or more and come back to it again. Thus has been my effort all semester long.

I got a boost a week or two ago when one of the graduate students heaped some praise on my Epsilon > 0 Exercise Plan. That helped me realize I should apply the Epsilon Is Greater Than Zero Principle to my efforts on the paper. Sit down with the idea of spending 15 quality minutes on it. Just 15 minutes. You can quit after 15 minutes. Get yourself to do that much, and it is amazing how quickly progress is made.

Today’s long hours had a nice reward. The article is finished and resubmitted. I am grateful for friends and mentors who took their time to help me with the final edits. I am grateful for those who encouraged me to just keep going every step of the way. Those who reminded me: just keep trying. Just keep trying. Just keep trying. I did.

Now I suspect I have another 2 month wait to see if I need to do further revisions or if it is accepted. I doubt it will make the special issue on Writing in Mathematics, because I had too many delays. But then again, I may be just in the nick of time before the final resubmission deadline; there may be some hope. I will see.

Today, if just for a few minutes, I celebrate.

Stress, burnout and advice

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Sometimes I think I give too much advice. I like to give advice. I like to give good advice! But not everyone needs advice, sometimes people need empathy more than anything else. So I hope that my predilection isn’t a big negative on my listening skills. I hope it isn’t affecting them much at all, but I guess if I’m honest, I have to admit that it probably does, and I should be careful.

But there is one definite upside of giving advice, which is that if I find myself saying it to someone else, then I have to listen to it. Sometimes, the first time you can really hear something is when you find yourself saying it.

And most recently I found myself saying, “You have to take time for yourself. Study after study shows that a 40 hour work week maximizes productivity, especially for knowledge workers.”

I’ve been working some ungodly hours for most of the semester. More than 40? Sometimes more than 60 a week. I haven’t liked it, but I’ve felt like this is what I need to do to get everything done.

And maybe I slipped into that grossly unproductive zone where you are working and working at things and not really getting anything done. And making mistakes. I know I’ve made a lot of mistakes. The first exam proofreading was embarrassingly bad.

So. Stop. Stop it now. I am stressed. And I am feeling a lot of burnout. And you know what? I do not need to be a hero here. I’m afraid of not doing enough, but maybe that is stupid. If I did less, maybe I could do more.

And so, I need to try to take all or most of this next weekend off.

Don’t believe me? This web article is not perfect, but it discusses the relevant research.

It comes down to productivity. Workers can maintain productivity more or less indefinitely at 40 hours per five-day workweek. When working longer hours, productivity begins to decline. Somewhere between four days and two months, the gains from additional hours of work are negated by the decline in hourly productivity. In extreme cases (within a day or two, as soon as workers stop getting at least 7-8 hours of sleep per night), the degradation can be abrupt.

Many of the studies quoted above come out of industrial environments, and it may be argued that the more creative mental work of programmers, artists, and testers is fundamentally different. In fact, it is different , and Colonel Belenky explicitly addresses that:

In contrast to complex mental performance, simple psychomotor performance, physical strength and endurance are unaffected by sleep deprivation.

The ability to do complex mental tasks degrades faster than physical performance does. Among knowledge workers, the productivity loss due to excessive hours may begin sooner and be greater than it is among soldiers, because our work is more affected by mental fatigue.

Why You Should Ask Stupid Questions: How to Look and Act Like the Smartest Person in the Room

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I’ve got a little story for you, so sit right down and make yourself comfortable.

A while back, I worked as a software developer for a fairly small but very profitable company. The owner of the company is one of those geniuses. He was interested in computers back when desktop computers first became available. He started playing with the idea that they could be used to do statistics and mathematics. Eventually the program he wrote to do that was paying his bills. In the present, that software package has since likely made him many millions of dollars. At a guess? Tens of millions of dollars.

I remember one day, we were sitting in a meeting discussing the future of documentation for this product. Our documentation was (at the time) printed in the dead tree edition: a set of about 12 books or manuals. Online documentation, it was becoming clear, was the way things would be in the future. And the standard way to do documents like that is PDFs.

At some point in the conversation, my boss, the genius, the owner of the company, the man who had been in computing since desktop computers first became available, spit out the question, “What does PDF stand for?”

PDF, very simply, stands for Portable Document Format.

It might not strike you, Dear Reader, that this is a stupid question, but at that time in that context, PDFs had been around for a decade or so. Surely, anyone who was anyone in commercial software development would know what this is. Especially someone who had seen these evolve over the past decade. For goodness sake, he had been into computers when the first PCs came out! How could he not know what PDFs are?

Apparently he didn’t know what PDF meant.

I sat there in my chair thinking, very rudely, to myself, “That is the stupidest damn question I have ever heard in my entire life.”

You know what happened next?

Someone, maybe even me, answered him. I don’t remember who.

The conversation continued as if nothing unusual had happened.

No one ever mentioned it to him again. I certainly didn’t let loose with my opinion.

But I was keen to observe and think about the dynamic of what I had just seen.

I came to a few conclusions.

  1. If you are the smartest person in the room, you can ask whatever stupid question you want, and someone will give you an answer.
  2. So rather than worrying about whether or not a question is stupid, maybe you should act like you are the smartest person in the room, and just ask it.

I’ve put this into practice. If I have a question, even if I have that little nagging doubt in my mind about whether it is a stupid question, I ask it. What have I found out from this?

  1. Almost always, others have the same questions that I do.
  2. I get more respect from asking questions than I do from keeping silent.
  3. People tend to think I’m smarter when I ask questions than when I don’t.

Dear Reader, I conclude with my advice to you. Act like the smartest person in the room. Have courage, and ask your stupid questions.

Success and Luck

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I have had several conversations about success and luck today.

The truth is that if someone is successful at anything meaningful, s/he had to work hard, but s/he also got lucky. The right opportunities appeared at the right time, and the right place for that person to take advantage of them. This isn’t to say that hard work wasn’t involved. It certainly was. It is to say that luck is involved too. Sometimes a lot of it.

Now, most people, especially most successful people, think it is all about hard work. I don’t want to deny hard work, but realize that some people who are less successful worked just as hard, but didn’t get the same opportunities.

What really grates is the implication that if you aren’t in whatever successful group it is, it is surely because you just don’t work that hard.

This is explained by the Just World Hypothesis, a known cognitive bias in psychology. We all want to believe in a just world. And in a just world, the deserving, the hard-working, will succeed, and, well, we know who it is that fails.

News bulletin: the world isn’t just.

This goes along with all the talk about the relationship between power and empathy. They don’t go together. Here’s a link to the research paper and scientific results.

I hope you didn’t miss the video with evidence that wealth and economic success go along with poor behavior: cheating, taking advantage, lack of empathy.

What got to me today was a conversation about online dating. I tried that several years ago. My experiences were mostly pretty awesomely awful. And hilariously funny. But not so much while I was going through them.

A friend met her husband on one of these sites. I don’t think she realized that she immediately began offering advice on how to succeed, how to play the game right. I know she wasn’t criticizing me, but all I could hear was the message, “if I just tried harder, put together the right profile, screened the other users of the site more carefully, then success would be mine too.”

It grated several weeks ago when someone else commented, “Well, I didn’t meet my special someone until I was 50.”

As if … as if we can just play the game right and find the relationship we are looking for. Or anything else. Yes, it requires hard work. But it requires more than hard work.

And hey, I also know I’ve done this to other people too, in a variety of contexts. I’m not innocent of this, and it is hardly a crime. We all say things that strike others the wrong way sometimes. No sense in getting angry, No sense in getting upset.

So yes, it is kind of stupid to get so upset, I know, but after the awful experience this spring, it all hits home that I’m 44 years old, and I honestly don’t believe I am going to find that special person. And even if I do, at this point it is too late to have a family.

And yes, I do know how negative and unfair that line of thinking is. The Just World Hypothesis. If I’ve been doing things right, I shouldn’t have to go through this. And what is it I did wrong? Can I fix it? Make it up to the universe and somehow get back on track? Of course not. Ah, but the world isn’t fair. And yes, yes I do have to go through this. And the other things that are bothering me right now.

I have to just let this and all the rest go. I have to find a way to be happy with the life I have, not with the life I thought I’d have, not wanting something that isn’t mine. Focus on the things that I am grateful for. Surely students are the next best thing to having children. Even when they walk out of class right after quizzes.

But another truth is, as true as all that might be? It isn’t comforting much of the time. It all tastes like ashes. These days it takes a hell of a lot of effort to put on that happy face and keep moving forward. Not that I’m about to stop, but just saying.

And yes, yes, I do know first world problems. Yes indeed.

I also know that this is a sign that my world has been disrupted, and I haven’t resolved the disruption yet. I think it is harder when you are older. But maybe I’m wrong; when you are older you at least have more experience and maturity to realize what is happening and what you need to do to get through it. I am surely an expert at grief by now.

If you are single you establish a pattern (eventually) that at least mostly works for you. Then you start a relationship, which disrupts the pattern. Then if the relationship ends, you don’t have a pattern any more, and you go through a time as I am now, where I spend a lot of what little free time I have alone. Which is hard on a person. Solitary confinement is punishment everywhere for a reason.

And the other part, too much work, too little free time, just wears me down day after day after day. I haven’t had 24 hours off since the beginning of the semester. Not even when I was sick. And some real nasty issues have come up at work, making me uncomfortable and unhappy there. So nothing in my life aside from teaching the honors class is working well right now. And that is working well at the price of a hell of a lot of time to make it happen, and once again without much hope that I will get to re-use the work I put into the class this semester. No wonder I am emotionally and physically tired.

But there we come back to it again. Put on as happy a face as you can and keep moving forward. Keep moving forward. One step at a time. But that sure doesn’t make it easy, and it sure doesn’t make it better quickly. But yes, it is, indeed, all I can do.

Walking out of class

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Friday is quiz day. I give a quiz. I try not to make it an easy quiz. This week inspiration came in the form of an online homework problem everyone said was difficult. I didn’t think it was that bad, but I took time to write up a solution and post it for them. Then I recycled it for the quiz question, figuring that after they had tried to do it, and after I had posted a solution, it was fair game. And if we still didn’t know how to do it, it was time to learn.

I could tell that many were unprepared for the question, and they were too flustered to come up with a coherent strategy for dealing with it.

And that’s fine. That’s why I solve quiz questions immediately after giving a quiz. If you don’t know how to do it and you should, well, now I’ll show you again and hope that this will impress the method on your brain.

Five students stood up and walked out before I started doing the quiz solution.

That kind of blatant display of disrespect for me and their own learning annoys the daylights out of me. I know that we are a learning environment, not a forced learning environment. You can lead a horse to water, blah blah blah.

But. Wow.

I’ve seen this happen in other people’s classes, including one I was sitting in on for fun. I know this has nothing to do with the quality of the instructor, and everything to do with the quality of the student. Still … it can be hard to sit/stand there and take it.

I pointed out to the ones who stayed that they were at a competitive advantage in the class.

Before we went home, I reminded them that I would love to see them in office hours. “Maybe I am weird, but I love to watch you do math,” I said, “I guess that’s why I am a math teacher. So if you are wondering if you would be `bothering’ me in my office hours, don’t. Working with students is the best part of my day. So come.”

Three new ones did. Maybe the day was not without its successes.