Life can quickly get overwhelming, and if you allow yourself to be paralyzed by waiting for perfection, you will miss out on many opportunities.

As I have finished my OCD treatment and returned back to normal everyday living, I have found myself writing less and less. Part of the issue is the natural hustle and bustle of life. But as I step back for some introspection, the brutal truth is that I have been avoiding it. I have been waiting to have something truly meaningful to say.

I need to stop waiting and start writing.

While I was in the middle of intensive treatment, it was clear to me that I was writing to benefit my mental health. But after graduating from treatment, I was taking less time to think about myself—how I was doing and how to improve. In many ways, that is a good thing. I am going to be happiest as I seek to make other people happy. But as in all things, a balance must be achieved.

Deep down, I know that part of what has held me back from writing more is the feeling of shouting into the void. There is not a large reader base waiting for me to publish again, and so the pressure is less than in other areas of my life. However, throughout the course of this year, I have learned that writing is a helpful exercise for me and my mind. I do not need an audience. I am my audience. The act of processing my thoughts sufficiently to express them is healthy and productive, and requires no other validation to be worthwhile. Hopefully I can remember that.

🎥 Toy Story 4

With the five older kids

🎥 Men in Black International

Alone

Wow. Two nights. Two championships by first-time teams. Congrats to the St. Louis Blues and Toronto Raptors! 🏒 🏀

🎥 X-Men: Dark Phoenix

My impressions and reactions from the announcements this morning.

This was an exciting morning. I have the opportunity this week to be in San Jose with my team from work. Along with two other guys, I did not get WWDC tickets, so we are enjoying AltConf and Layers instead.

The thing that struck me most was the inclusion of SwiftUI in the keynote. I am thrilled that it exists, and I love that it got so much stage time. It felt like a portion of the State of the Union got picked up and plopped in a few hours earlier.

Announcing SwiftUI made this keynote feel like the most developer-focused event in years.

As a customer, I am even more thrilled with the iPadOS announcement. When I am not in Xcode, I prefer to be on my iPad Pro, and this will solidify that even more. When the SwiftUI demo was being shown, my first thought was that it looked very similar to Swift Playgrounds, and I have a not-so-secret hope to get Xcode on the iPad this year.

This will be an interesting week. There are so many positive changes I can tell are coming to impact our daily developer life, and I can’t wait to learn more about them.

I’m feeling lucky I work for a great company and could bring my team to San Jose for WWDC week. Looking forward to enjoying Alt Conf, Layers, and meeting up with people. I’ll be posting sketchnotes at @sketchnotable if you want to follow along.

Excited to be flying out for WWDC. Looking forward to spending the week with my team and meeting up with a few friends I rarely get to see.

📖 🎧 No Happy Endings: A Memoir

By Nora McInerny

A special episode recorded as part of my OCD treatment. Thoughts on my experience doing exposure treatment and how success is not the absence of failure, but rather progress.

Note: This episode contains strong language

Links

The OCD and Anxiety Treatment Center

Who is Fernando

Tried my hand at stand-up comedy for the first time today as part of my OCD treatment. The results were not nearly as terrible as I feared.

📖 🎧 It’s Okay to Laugh (Crying Is Cool Too)

By Nora McInerny Purmort

My thoughts and feelings for my new one-way friend, Nora McInerny, after listening to every episode of Terrible, Thanks For Asking.

Dear Nora,

This is an odd letter to write. I feel like I’m writing to a close friend who doesn’t yet know that we are friends. Maybe I will start by explaining how our friendship began.

I had a mental breakdown that started last summer and culminated in a night at the hospital in January and nine weeks off work through March. It turns out that I have OCD, and I found a treatment center which has made a huge difference. During that journey, I found The Hilarious World of Depression which was a lifeline. From their website, I browsed other podcasts by APM and discovered yours. I first listened to Episode 65: Sad and Lucky, and was hooked. I downloaded all past episodes and made my way through them over the past couple months.

One interesting effect of listening to you so much over a short time is being gifted a new relationship. You and I are close in age, which has always been a bit sensitive for me. I have always felt too old for my age, and with six kids and one on the way, when people ask how old I am, I have to math it. It was helpful and freeing for me to hear you own your age so matter-of-factly. I recognize that I only see what you have chosen to share publicly, but it seems that you have been authentic and vulnerable in sharing your true self. You are the kind of funny that I always wished I could be—seemingly effortless and natural.

Thank you for normalizing and harboring strong emotions. It would have been easy to focus only on grief, but you have welcomed all sorts of experiences into the show and given permission for all sorts of people to feel their feelings. This has helped me in my own journey toward self-compassion and mindfulness. I added your podcast to my “Funny” playlist in Overcast along with THWoD, but there were some days when I wondered if it was healthy for me to be listening to TTFA. It wasn’t always funny—it was often extremely heavy. But I found that as I opened my heart to feel some of the terrible things other people have felt, it was more open to feel what I was feeling.

I imagine there are days when you question whether being so open and vulnerable and honest is worth it. You have taken parts of yourself that we typically hold in reserve and put them out for all to see. I want you to know what a difference that has made in my life. I see how you have taken a defining, transformative experience and turned it into a catalyst to touch other people. The more I heal and the further I progress in my own mental health journey, the more I feel a burning desire to help other people who have suffered like I have. I don’t know what my future holds, but I draw strength and inspiration from your example and I am filled with hope and excitement.

Hopefully one day I can meet you, give you a hug, and thank you in person for how you have affected me. Until then, I will continue to participate in our one-way friendship.

Your new (but unknown) friend,

Glitter and sparkle,
Spin and shine,
Throw rainbows on the wall.

Ridges and divots,
Towers and gashes
Comprise identifiable topography.

Infinitely unique,
Utterly alike,
Common in our individuality.

Awash in a sea of special souls,
Kicking and fighting to stay afloat.
Wishing to be noticed,
Hoping to stay hidden.

Lifted up on to the shore,
Left alone to contemplate:
All my quirks and gifts and flaws
Make me just like everybody else.

What a game! St Louis Blues win game 7 in double overtime to head to the conference finals. Well earned win! 🏒

I loved this article from the Art of Manliness: Sunday Firesides: Marriage Isn’t a Game of Russian Roulette

But rather than being the kind of unmanageable risk found in Russian roulette, the risk of marriage is more like that of driving a car. While you can’t 100% eliminate the chance of a crash, nobody lets that stop them from getting behind the wheel every day. Because despite the risk, that mechanical vehicle, like the vehicle of marriage, will take you places you couldn’t otherwise go.

We can allow risk to inhibit us, or we can allow it to help us. When we notice that something feels risky, instead of shutting down, we should recognize that this is something that is more important to us. We need to step up and engage fully and make sure that we meet the risk head on.

Acknowledging and welcoming emotions, even painful ones, makes it possible to process and digest them in a healthy way.

I continue to have experiences that illustrate principles I am learning in my OCD treatment. I suppose that is due to the Baader–Meinhof effect. A skill we recently discussed is emotion regulation, which is essentially the ability to identify and process your emotions healthily. In the middle of learning about this, I had a situation that felt straight out of a textbook.

We had a meeting at work in which some news was shared that was difficult for me to handle. I asked a question, and was frustrated that the answers seemed to not align with what I really wanted to know. Later in the day, I was discussing the experience, and realized what was happening: I was angry. It struck me like a thunderclap. As soon as I realized that, a wave of anger and relief washed over me simultaneously. When I allowed myself to be angry, and validated that the experience was hard for me, I was relieved.

I had not realized that I was repressing my emotions until I stopped. I had been “shoulding” all over myself and invalidating my experience. I felt fear at making someone defensive, and so when they responded in a defensive way, I felt frustrated that they misunderstood me. In reality, it made sense that they were defensive, because I was upset at them for the situation. I was just denying that, even to myself.

Since that moment, I have continued to find that allowing myself to honestly acknowledge my emotions has permitted me to fully feel them, and then quickly move forward. I recognize that I will not always be able to do this successfully, but at least I know it is possible. It is a skill that I can improve with attention and practice. And so can you.

🔖 How to Be a Better Dad When You Travel for Business - The Art of Manliness

I loved this article from the Art of Manliness: Your Life Explained Through Dopamine.

The key is to toggle between these two sets of chemicals, as appropriate — allowing yourself to be satisfied, but never wholly so; content, and yet eager for continuous growth. You have to be able to enjoy the excitement of the conquest, and be able to hold onto what you secure.

Understanding the function of brain chemistry has been a huge part of the last few months for me. This precarious balance is crucial to master in order to find true happiness in life. One thing that I especially appreciate is the normalization of the ebb and flow. When we understand that force, we can work with it instead of fighting against it.

I announced that I was going to take a shower. Micah (age 6) got a glint in his eye and started running for the bathroom. I said, “Micah, I have a favor to ask of you.”

“Oh, come on!”

As I started getting ready, he said, “Dad, why don’t you want me to?” At this point, it is clear that he is understanding I don’t want him to dump cold water on me like every other day that I shower.

I answered, “Well, sometimes it’s kind of hard, you know?”

His solution was simple. “You could know I’m coming, and so you could turn your back. That way it doesn’t get on you-know-what.”

The Calm app impressed me this weekend when I broke my streak.

I posted recently about my 90 day meditation streak. Last weekend, I missed my meditation on Saturday, which I realized Sunday. Part of my OCD is an obsession for streaks, so when I found that I blew my 90+ day streak, I felt my stomach drop out of my body.

Part of me wanted to not even meditate on Sunday. “What was the point? I already blew it,” my mind tried to convince me. My wife pointed out that I still had the advantage of everything I learned in those 94 days—I did not lose that by breaking the streak.

Almost out of necessity, I took a few minutes out to meditate. When I finished, I expected the app to say something that would feel shaming because I had failed. I was pleasantly surprised to find positive encouragement instead.

Rather than seeing that I now had a streak of one day, I saw that I had 95 mindful days.

That simple choice by a product manager or designer on the Calm app team made a significant difference for me. It was a needed emotional boost on a difficult day. Whereas I had been nearly despondent at losing my streak, I became encouraged. I was reminded how much I had accomplished and not allowed to wallow in my disappointment.

This is a lesson I hope to remember. Whether for myself or others, I want to emphasize what truly matters.

🎥 Avengers: Endgame

Excitement is mounting in the Norris household 🏰🎡🎢

Wow. Probably the most exciting game of hockey I’ve seen. What a comeback by the San Jose Sharks to win the series in overtime. 🏒