Let’s talk about social anxiety

It took me a long time to publish my last post. I spent months trying to start it until I finally felt brave enough. I must confess that for a few hours after it was published I felt my anxiety levels rising. No-one responded. Nothing on Twitter or Facebook. Was everyone horrified at what I’d said?  What had I done?

I’m glad to say that those feelings soon subsided as friends and colleagues chimed in their support both public and private. A few mentioned that seeing me talk about these things helped them too. Knowing that you’re not alone is a powerful thing. That can be hard with mental health because we don’t talk about it. When it strikes you feel alone and isolated which makes everything worse.

So I thought I might try to talk more. Many people don’t know what it is like to have a mental health problem and I didn’t go into many details. Reading up on conditions doesn’t help much. Often it is just jargon but even then most things listed as specific conditions are really just buckets of symptoms that you get slotted into. What I call social anxiety should resonate with others but the specifics can and will differ.

I think that there is a lot of crossover between introversion and social anxiety. In fact I’m not really sure where the line is technically. I see the difference being how you feel when you’re around other people. For me it is often terror that you’re judging me for what I’m doing. Here’s an example.

Two months ago all of Mozilla gathered at Disneyworld. My trip there pretty much blew. Due to delays it took nearly 24 hours to cross the U.S. and after I arrived it took another 6 hours or so for the hotel to have a room for me. So I wasn’t exactly in my best possible state. The second night there was a big party. Aside from some near panic attacks walking to the venue (I don’t do well in slow-moving queues, despite being British) I managed to have a good time. Mainly I stuck with people who I knew really well. But after I got back to the hotel I was exhausted so I resolved to have a quiet night the next day and regain my energy for the final party.

So the next night I went out to find a quick bite in the middle of working on stuff in my hotel room. But I couldn’t. Everywhere I went there were Mozilla people. All of them staring at me, wondering why I was out by myself, why I wasn’t hanging out with others like normal people. I had to make it look like I had a reason. I was going to the gift shop to look for gifts for family. I surely wasn’t going to eat by myself because what sort of recluse does that?! Everytime I thought I had found somewhere without people I knew, someone showed up and I had to escape.

It was futile. I went back to the hotel and looked over the rather poor room service menu. But then I thought, no, this is rubbish. They aren’t really staring at you, they aren’t judging you, no-one is going to bat an eyelid if you choose to eat by yourself. I knew this logically and so I just had to act on it. So I went out again. And again I failed to find food. I just couldn’t do it. It was too much. There were people everywhere. What if they asked if I wanted to join them? I’d have to come up with some excuse for why I didn’t want to without offending them. My lizard brain was telling me that I had to run away. I went back to my room and felt awful. How much of a failure was I that I couldn’t even find food by myself?

It sounds ridiculous writing about it now from the safety of my home. Why would anyone care that I’m eating alone? There are surely enough people in Mozilla that need some time to themselves here and there that it would hardly be surprising. And as much as I can tell myself that now, I couldn’t when I was out there physically walking amongst people I knew and feeling like I couldn’t do the things I wanted.

This is one of the ways social anxiety affects me, the inability to do seemingly simple and benign things when in public because I’m terrified of how others will view me.

More to come.

Me and my dumb brain

Today those polite folk from up north have been talking about mental health and how it affects them and those around them. Mental health is one of those issues that we too rarely talk about. I think it’s partly because you can’t see the problem and unless you have experienced it yourself it can be very difficult to understand. There has always been a stigma attached as if for some reason having something wrong with your mind is much worse than having any other kind of medical issue.

Whether you know it or not you’ve known people with mental health problems. Maybe chronic conditions that they will have to learn to live with for the rest of their lives, maybe just short term problems that time and therapy can help with. I’ve always been very impressed at how brave some of my friends have been to come out, as it were, to me or their community about the difficulties they face. Today it felt like it should be my turn.

For most of my adult life I’ve suffered from social anxiety. It’s never been too much of a problem but being in public spaces and interacting with people I don’t know well has been hard. In particular this affects me with phone calls and video conferences which I try to avoid wherever possible. Mostly I can push myself past this, particularly if there are a few drinks to be had to calm my nerves, but it still affects the things I will consider doing meaning I just stay at home a lot.

Some years ago though things got a little harder. Since then I’ve been suffering from IBS, a simple name for a condition that isn’t really understood and is mostly the diagnosis you get if you have chronic stomach problems and no-one can identify why. As you might expect from that there isn’t really a cure or anything that will help symptoms for everyone. For some people one thing works, for others something else will work. For some it only lasts a while, for others it lasts a lifetime. One thing that is true for many people with IBS is that it causes anxiety and depression and that has been true for me for about four years now.

Going to places I’m not familiar with, long journeys, anything where I’m expecting to be stuck somewhere and unable to go to a bathroom at short notice all trigger my anxiety. Add in the social anxiety which makes me feel pressured to not act out of the ordinary when I’m around other people when this is going on and you’ve got a great combination for me never wanting to leave the house. Add in other normally manageable life stresses and you’ve got the perfect recipe for panic attacks when I do. Oh and did I mention that stress and anxiety make IBS worse?

Thankfully I’m in the position that no one of my problems are debilitating, it is just the combination of them and other normal sources of stress and how they feed each other that makes me go through periods of extreme anxiety often with short periods of depression. Alleviating one of them helps to alleviate the others automatically. Shortly before Chloë was born my IBS was largely gone. The anxiety remained but I went into therapy and for a time things were mostly normal. Unfortunately things have taken a downturn lately.

One thing’s for sure, adding a baby to your family sure increases your stress levels and along with some medical issues with family members I’ve got caught back in the viscous cycle. And so now I’m taking anti-depressants to help stop the panic attacks and get my anxiety under control again. Medication is not something I take lightly, but it is necessary right now while I get back into therapy.I’m very proud of the family I have who have supported me since opening up about this. It’s made the difference between feeling like someone who has to hide themselves and someone who can actually be themselves, which is very important for someone with social anxiety. If someone opens up to you about something like this, please accept and support them. You may not be able to understand exactly what they’re going through but taking the pressure off by letting them know that you’ll help in any way you can means a lot.

The bizarre world of the expectant father

I don’t often blog about non-work related stuff. Actually scratch that, I don’t often blog. But I can’t help but talk about how life becomes very strange when you’re expecting. None of this is new but it is new to me so therefore you must read it again and in some cases relive it.

Random strangers are suddenly your closest friend

I don’t know how my wife copes with it at least I don’t have to wear a stamp on my forehead proclaiming me to be an expectant father. Even so the fact does occasionally slip out while I’m talking to people I don’t know. All of a sudden I’m expected to offer up details on how far along we are, how my wife is feeling, if we know the sex, what names have we picked and damnit I just want to order some new checks please I don’t need to hear about how great the schools are around here.

They’re also all experts

So far I’ve been told in no uncertain terms that the city I live in is great for kids and terrible for kids. Natural birth is way better but epidurals are the way to go. Working from home is going to be great when the baby is here but also terrible. I don’t know what it is but when it comes to raising a child people suddenly start talking like they’re an authority rather than giving you suggestions like for other subjects.

They all think that you must be excited

Of course we must. I mean we’re only a few weeks from a large change in the status quo that by all accounts nothing can prepare you for so excitement is the natural reaction right? Generally I tell people that I’m actually petrified and everyone laughs like they think I am joking.

Which is strange because they apparently also think that your life is about to become terrible

  • What’s that? You’re feeling a little tired? Haha just wait until your baby is here!
  • You went to the cinema? Better do as much of that while you still can!
  • Laundry day? When your baby is here it will be laundry hour, amirite!

Need I go on?

But naturally we’ll want a second

Without a doubt the most bizarre thing to me is how common it is for everyone from friends and family to the supermarket trolley boy to ask when we’re planning to have our second. Hold your horses there buddy the first one isn’t even cooked yet, plenty of time to be thinking about dessert later.

How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age

A friend recently made me a deal where he would buy me this book if I’d read it and tell him something that I learnt from it. I think this is all a cunning plan of his to get all his friends to do the same and save him having to read it himself but I’m never one to turn down a free book, especially when it is one that a former manager recommended I read. Well ok so he recommended I read the original which was written in the 1930’s. Since then there have been a number of books based on the same ideas for different audiences, even one in pink for teen girls (I am not kidding). This version attempts to bring the concepts into the modern age by using more recent examples and explaining how you can apply them to the internet age.

The title of this book always put me off. It made it sound like a textbook on manipulative practices to make people like you. That isn’t really what it’s about though. It’s more about changing your own attitudes and behaviours than it is trying to get others to change theirs. The claim is that others will react to your attitude towards them and often respond in kind so if you can change yourself for the better then you’ll see others respond to you in better ways.

The principles in this book are well worth anyone taking the time to read over and try to follow. This is particularly true of those in corporate environments and they are all vital for those who manage people. It should come as no surprise then that all of them are also covered to one degree or other in other management books that I’ve read. This means that nothing in this book was completely new to me. Some of the chapters did put some of the ideas into different contexts and had me thinking of ideas that might help me manage my teams though.

What I liked about the style of the book was its simplicity. It’s short and doesn’t mess around. You can see what all the techniques are from the table of contents. For many you don’t even need to read into the chapters to understand why they are important but the chapters provide useful examples of how they can be applied in certain situations. I’m planning on making a list of the chapter headings to stick up by my desk somewhere for quick reference. A couple of the chapters seem to go off the rails a little, particularly towards the end and some of the examples meant for the digital age felt a little contrived and jammed in for the sake of it. I do wonder if it might be as good to read the original and rely on yourself to figure out how to apply it to the modern world.

I think the thing I immediately drew from the book is that I am consistently too negative. I was at first going to make this post a scathing review of the book because for sure it does have some problems. But that would be ignoring all of the benefits you can get from reading it. And what would be the point? Maybe it makes me feel big and clever but it doesn’t make me look big and clever. So hopefully this is a more positive review that should convince you to take a flick through, it is certainly worthwhile if you haven’t read much like it in the past.

And now I feel big and clever for seeing that being negative only makes me feel big and clever. Ah well, can’t win them all.

Afterburner steak rub

This is a recipe for a steak rub that I made up last night. It came out pretty well and everyone enjoyed it. It slightly caramelises the surface of the steak infusing it with herby goodness and after you enjoy that flavour a nice kick of heat comes in the after taste.

  • 1/4 handful fresh sage, finely chopped
  • 1/2 handful fresh thyme, finely chopped
  • 1 handful fresh parsley, finely chopped
  • 2 tsp salt
  • 1 tbsp brown sugar
  • 2 tsp black pepper
  • 1 tsp cayenne pepper

Mix it all together in a bowl, rinse off your steaks and apply liberally to each side about half an hour before you plan to start cooking. These quantities should make enough for 4 small steaks.

Six hour chilli

I’ve enjoyed making and eating chilli ever since I was in university. It has a lot of appeal for your average student:

  • You can make it in bulk and live off it for a few weeks
  • You can make it spicy enough that you start bleeding out of your nose (and thus totally impress all your friends)
  • It’s dead simple and really hard to screw up

The great part is that really once you have the basic ingredients you can just go nuts, vary up the ratios, add extra bits and pieces, whatever you fancy. Eventually though I discovered that I was getting a bit too wild and really wanted to nail down a basic “good” recipe to work from. It took a couple of tries but here it is. It’ll take around six hours to cook, an extra hour for prep depending on how lazy/drunk you are.

Ingredients

  • 2 cups chopped onions
  • 2.5 lb lean ground beef

 

  • 56 oz diced tomatoes (canned works just fine)
  • 2 tsp chilli powder
  • 2 tsp chilli pepper flakes
  • 1 tsp ground cumin
  • 1 tsp cayenne pepper
  • 1/8 cup cilantro leaves (I use dried but fresh is probably good too)
  • 1/2 tsp chipotle chilli pepper powder
  • 1/2 pint stout or other dark beer
  • 2 cups red wine (I tend to use merlot)
  • 2 cups beef broth
  • 1/8 cup tomato puree or 1/4 cup tomato ketchup
  • ~3-4 tsp coarsely ground black pepper

 

  • 3×12 oz cans of mixed beans
  • 2-3 large bell peppers (red and/or green), chopped

Instructions

  • Fry the onions in some olive oil until they start to turn translucent, then throw in the beef and stir until it browns all over.
  • Add into a large pot with the tomatoes, spices, wine, beer and broth
  • Cover and simmer for 2 hours, stirring periodically (use the remains of the stout to help you get through this)
  • Drain and add the beans
  • Cover and simmer for 2 hours, stirring periodically (it’s possible you’ll need more stout)
  • Add the chopped peppers
  • Cover and simmer for 1-2 hours, stirring periodically
  • Serve with cornbread and the rest of the bottle of wine

Tips

  • This makes a lot of chilli, make sure you have a large enough frying pan and pot. You can try scaling it down but I find it works best when making it in large quantities.
  • After adding the peppers you’re basically simmering till it is about the right consistency, uncovering and/or adding some corn starch can help thicken it up at this stage.
  • This recipe comes out pretty spicy, you might want to drop the chipotle chilli pepper power if that isn’t your thing.
  • Unless you are feeding an army make sure you have tupperware to hold the leftovers. It reheats very well, if using a microwave throwing a little extra water in helps.

Another 7 things…

Thanks to robcee you get to learn a little more about me. Much like him I’ve done this once before (perhaps it’s a sign of our age?) but it was over two years ago so let’s see if I can manage to rustle up a whole other seven things. I believe that the original meme said the facts had to be surprising things that most people didn’t know but I think I’ve used up all the surprising stuff about me already so most of this is probably common knowledge to those that follow my twitter stream.

Here are the rules:

  1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
  2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
  3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
  4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

My new things:

  1. I like creating fractals. I guess this says that I have an artistic side but fractals are kind of cheating, you can create beautiful images mostly by tinkering with numbers in equations. I haven’t had chance to do it much lately mostly because the better software is Windows only and rebooting my laptop into Windows is tedious.[flickr size=”small”]4715418159[/flickr]
  2. Another part of my artistic side which has grown in the past couple of years is photography. I’ve liked taking photographs for some time but for a lot of that I was really just playing with simple point and shoots. Since moving onto the excellent Canon Powershot S90 and now the Nikon D7000 I like to think I’ve been able to get some really great shots. Of course I throw away more than I take. During a recent weekend trip to a lake I think I took around 1000 shots, kept about 90 of those and uploaded just 35 to flickr.[flickr size=”small”]5766449103[/flickr]
  3. I am engaged to the gorgeous Tiffney. We’re going to be married at the start of September, just five months after I proposed. We took the easy route of paying for a mostly pre-packaged wedding. I think some of our friends who are also getting married at the same time are a little jealous of how easy it’s been for us.[flickr size=”small”]5777718954[/flickr]
  4. We own a cat, Loki. He is curled up next to me as I write this. We named him before we knew just how appropriate it was. We had to buy sheets of plastic to lay by the sides of the bed to stop him scratching the mattress in the middle of the night. We used to also have a second cat, Ripley, but sadly she passed away at the start of the year from cancer.[flickr size=”small”]5870075150[/flickr]
  5. I have just bought a condo with my fiancée, the first place I’ve owned. It feels nice to no longer be answerable to a landlord though I guess we still have to answer to the homeowner’s association. Since we only just moved in we don’t know where any of our stuff is including the TV remote which is quite irritating.[flickr size=”small”]6015887571[/flickr]
  6. For a few years while I was at university I answered to the name Andy. This started because in my scuba diving class there was a large number of Andys and our instructor decided to just start calling us all Andy. I was one of the few from that year’s novices who got more involved in the club afterwards and so the name stuck. In fact I got so used to it that one evening in a noisy pub someone was trying to get my attention by calling “Dave” and when that didn’t work they called “Andy” which I heard right away.
  7. My IRC nickname (Mossop) originated in college. There was a childrens TV show on at the time featuring extremely badly modelled puppets. Someone in my physics class claimed that I looked like one of them, the nickname stuck and I’ve been using it online ever since. One bonus is the name is so unusual that I mostly get away with using it wherever I go.

Now for the tags, hopefully many of these are new to the game:

  1. Myk Melez who always has something interesting to say and hasn’t blogged enough lately.
  2. Dave Mason who needs to get his blog syndicated on planet.
  3. Jeff Griffiths who has only recently started at Mozilla and needs to get his new blog syndicated on planet before he follows through on this.
  4. Blair McBride, my chief partner in coding for the grand Add-ons Manager redesign for Firefox 4.
  5. Daniel Holbert, his blog title makes me laugh and the second coming of this meme needs to branch out into other teams.
  6. John Ford, so he can get the build and release teams in on this.
  7. Philipp von Weitershausen, I can’t pronounce his last name and I’m sure he’ll tag lots of the new services guys.

 

Sad news today

As I blogged yesterday, today Ripley got a CT scan and biopsy of the mass that is growing in her left shoulder. The biopsy results won’t be back for a few days but the CT results were really all that were needed to confirm our worst fears. Ripley has cancer and it’s large and aggressive.

We got to look at the CT scan and it was frankly terrifying how large this thing is. In certain cross sections it looked to be taking up a full third of her body and it curves all down her left side and up over the top of her spine. It was taking up the contrast solution they inject which means blood is running through it. This both increases the odds of it spreading and makes it much more difficult to remove. In short, there is basically nothing we can do at this point.

In one respect the diagnosis left me a little relieved. I had pretty much prepared myself for the bad news and at least we don’t have to make a horrible decision between paying lots of money for treatment which would could itself cause her a lot of suffering with an unknown chance of success.

Thankfully, at least right now, it doesn’t bother her at all aside from a slight limp. She is in no pain and is still active and playing. The doctors said though that we probably have a couple of weeks before it starts to effect her quality of life. All we can do is try to enjoy the time we have left with her and watch out for when she starts to be in too much discomfort. To that end we let her sleep off the drugs this afternoon and then curled up on the couch to watch a movie this evening, with a few drinks to help soften the reality.

[flickr]5329339616[/flickr]

Kontemplating Kitteh Katastrophe

Well that’s certainly a nicer way of saying that you’re trying to work out just how to decide how much money and trauma it is worth putting your cat through to keep her alive.

Just before we flew home for Christmas (yes, that flight) we spotted a small lump on Ripley’s left shoulder. We rushed her to the vet’s fearing the worst but they allayed our fears, finding it was just a blood filled space, likely the result of a trauma (though what we couldn’t fathom) and blood tests showed no irregularities. They said it should shrink over the course of a few weeks. We had to put her up at the boarders while we were travelling of course but we managed to put it out of our minds and have a good trip with family.

After we got back the lump was clearly larger than it had been before we left and so we rushed back to the vet to get a second look. They were very concerned, the lump was now feeling mostly solid and spread over a large area under her shoulder blade. Although tumors in cats this young are rare they can still happen for a number of reasons and though they weren’t sure they weren’t suggesting any other options really. They couldn’t do any further diagnosis there, we had to get a surgical consult. The surgeon had basically the same opinion but wanted to do some more tests before suggesting a treatment.

Tomorrow Ripley is booked to go in for a CT scan and a biopsy to try to give a final diagnosis. This will cost us around $2k and I have to admit to feeling very conflicted. I hate to say it but a part of me is questioning how much money I’d be willing to spend on getting her healthy. If $2k is just the diagnosis then I dread to think how much the treatment could be. To complicate matters we were considering giving Ripley away to a new family as she does not get along with our first cat and they are both basically stressed out while they are living under the same roof. How much money is it worth spending on a cat that you’re thinking of giving away anyway?

I love her very much and don’t want to lose her for any reason so it feels very callous of me to be thinking like this. I guess tomorrow we’ll get some answers and have some hard decisions to make.

British Airways ruined my Christmas

To be clear I don’t blame BA for having to cancel flights into Heathrow when the airport cannot run at full capacity. That is certainly not their fault, you can’t change the weather (though you could buy more snowploughs!). What annoys me is their incompetent response to the situation and then their attempts at being nice with fakey emails from the CEO.

I wanted to go and see my family for Christmas this year. We were booked on a direct flight from San Francisco to Heathrow that was due to leave about 4 hours from now but due to the snowstorms in the UK it has been cancelled. The first we heard about it was an email from my dad at 9:30am yesterday morning, he had been keeping track of the flight status better than us. I don’t understand this. They have my contact details so why wasn’t I the first to hear about the cancellation the moment it went up onto the website. In fact I finally got an email from BA about it at 3pm, at least five and a half hours after it went onto the website. The email contained this boldfaced lie:

We have sent you this information as quickly as possible by automated email and hope it reaches you in time to allow alternative arrangements to be made.

Who knows what our chances were of re-booking onto something sensible had we waited for that to arrive. Thankfully we had been working hard, talking to Egencia who we had booked through and looking up what options were open to us. The good news was that Heathrow wasn’t totally closed, just running slow so only a few flights were actually getting cancelled so there was still the possibility of getting home in time. Egencia were saying they couldn’t see any economy seats to book us onto before Christmas but there were some business class seats and maybe if we spoke to BA directly and made use of some of our miles for an upgrade we could get those. The problem is that we couldn’t get through to BA by phone. This afternoon I received a laughable email supposedly from BA’s CEO which had this to say:

Throughout this period of disruption we have extended our call centre opening times and added extra phone lines to deal with the 150,000 calls we’ve received

There is even a nice video of him saying how they have kept their call centres open 24 hours a day. That would be nice if true except every time we rang them yesterday we received a recorded message saying they were too busy and to try again later and then hanging up on us. Yes, they cancelled a bunch of people’s flights, told them they’d need to rebook, then shut down their phone lines and then released statements proudly announcing how they’d managed to keep their call centres open.

So we were running out of options but then we spotted that BA’s main site was still showing availability on a number of alternate flights albeit indirect ones. In particular a flight via LA was available and didn’t make much change to our flight times. We spoke to Egencia and they said they would try to get us on it (why they hadn’t seen it before I don’t know) but because it included one leg that wasn’t BA (SFO to LAX was run by one of their partners, American Airlines) they had to speak to BA to get approval to change our booking. BA being the kind-hearted souls eager to embody the true meaning of Christmas and help out their disrupted passengers denied the request. We couldn’t even just swap the SFO-LHR flight to the LAX-LHR flight. Apparently when Willie Walsh says “we have not been able to help all of our customers in the way that they, or we, would have liked” he means “we couldn’t be bothered to help customers take alternate routes home for Christmas because we were all outside having snowball fights”.

Eventually we got a new flight booked. We get to spend our Christmas evening in the air. We’ll finally get to my family on Boxing day evening, jetlagged and probably not feeling fantastically Christmassy. I guess it’s an exaggeration that Christmas is ruined, but this will be the first year that I haven’t been with my family on Christmas day, if it was just because of the snow then that’d be ok but BA had the opportunity to get us there with minimal disruption and they chose to refuse us that option.