Sprouting
a_misty_morning_with_hands_in_yours - to_the_bus_as_a_line_we_go
I just crawled out of bed, about 9:40pm tonight. My bed full of soft things, hearts, minds and fluff.
My children are here for the night, and it's a school night. So that means we sleep in daddy's bed. The last two nights on the floor in the basement, camped out as we had for so long in the middle of the end...
It's been a long road to home. 20 odd years by my last count... We're nearly there.
Twenty years of existing through the sheer act of wanting to, not knowing it was killing me.
eww - nothing_funny_this_time-just_eww
I was at the dentist this week. First time in twenty years the hygenist didn't lecture me on my oral hygene. First time in twenty years I didn't sit through agonizing long minutes as the cause of the lecture was painfully scraped from bleeding gums.
I spent twenty years thinking I was a dirty person.
It didn't help that I was for a while, for a year after I left home I couldn't manage anything. When you don't know who you are, you don't know you need support. When you don't know you need support, you just assume you're bad at things. When you're bad at yourself, you just think you're a bad person.
Nothing changed this week though. I've been brushing dilligently for years, always a bit annoyed at myself that I'd not quite gotten it right this time. I'd been trying really hard, maybe it was that time a couple of weeks ago I skipped a night, or maybe I really do need to floss every day or my gums are going to keep bleeding.
But then they didn't.
And this week, it was a new hygenist. She pulled out the pick as they always do, but this time she just pulled at a little something and was done.
Come to think of it, last time was pretty quick too...
sophistry_by_dentistry - sadness_is_a_metaphor_for_poor_weather_conditions
Here's one of the vertices that was filled in this week.
When you spend decades running on executive override, things start to shut down. One of the first things to go is your immune system.
I just thought I was going to be one of those people that got sick every fall... or just all winter maybe?
You tend to put on weight. Your muscles are always prepared to run, so they're generally tight in places that shouldn't even exist, let alone be under constant tension. Jaw muscles of a prize fighter.
CPAP. Night guard.
All the signs of middle age I thought.
And what I learned this week, that immune system carries through to your mouth. No amount of hygene can keep up with the inflamation and a weakened immune system lays dormant while the sugar bugs lay their trails of plaque freely. My bi-annual (shame is a wonder de-motivator) visits to the dentist were an inevitable consequence of living unaware in a world that is not friendly to the truly unaware.
Left unchecked, the next phase starts the end game. The inflammation becomes endemic and your body begins to treat itself as the enemy - the afflected areas having called out for help so long the rest of the body decides to exise them.
Rheumatoid arthritis. Mycocitis. All the good ones.
All the outcome of a nervous system desperately screaming for help with none forthcoming.
how_do_you_scream_for_peace - i_scream_you_scream_we_all_scream-its_tuesday
I had a big week this week. I stood up for myself.
I had a bad day this week.
Those things are most definitely related.
At work, I'd been tasked with creating a support plan for my platform. We've got too much to do, not enough bodies to do it with and tensions are getting high.
Along the way, I proved a few things.
I proved that my platform is putting up some pretty good metrics.
I proved that we're doing it pretty efficiently
And I proved it talking to my teddy bear.
The irony of asking the overloaded guy to produce the report showing why we need resources and the new support plan documenting our role and responsibilities going forward was not lost on me as I set out.
Luckily, I had some help
A quick detective case helped start the documentation of the scope of the platform. I just assigned a series of agents to each of the repositories that house platform components and had them feed into the central case notes. One of them inventoried the build pipelines in our team's Jenkins server as a best guess to the current set of active components (I may be a bit of a forgetful gardener at times... there is a reason all of this exists:))
I had them dive into some of our repository metrics as well to figure out the division of labour between our team and the development teams we support. And then we started to dive into Jira tickets, a quick dump of two years tickets into individual files through a scripted jira client lead to another quick set of contextualizations as our in hours AI platformw as slightly borrowed to get GPT-mini to assign each ticket to a set of categories - finally giving objective confirmation to my apparently subjective cries of "oh my goodness - but the interrupt work...".
And prove we did.
Our worth.
My worth.
And we brought receipts.
in_through_the_out_door - do_you_like_me_check_the_box
For someone like me, external validation is all I have. There's never anything inside me saying "job well done mate!", it always has to come from someone else. And all this time, who was ever going to say anything? Did anyone even notice? I didn't even really understand what I'd built, just that it worked so how could I really expect anyone else to?
So I'd reach out, anyone that needed help would of course be be accomodated. "Of course that extra project can be done." "No problem, I'll just finish that up when I get home." "Yes, I really did work 65 hours last week, remember we had that work for XXX that needed to be done before their first preprod release this cycle?"
And the drive bys... so many questions and cries for help met with gentle care, offers of assistance mixed with professor Graeme - always assuming reciprical desire to learn. So much wasted effort.
For someone like me, each question triggering a full interrupt.
- Context dump
- Navigate to subject context - OS, tools, capabilities (developer, developer+, developer++), security levels etc
- Navigate to solution
- Attempt to describe transform 2 -> 3 in procedural steps
- Clarify 4
- Clarify 4
- Navigate to new subject context - attempt to determine missing context that resulted in transform 2 -> 7 instead of 2 -> 3
- [This procedure is hurting me as much to type as it is you to read]
A you can imagine, it can be difficult to get any real work done while this is occurring constantly, though everyone else tends to be exceedingly productive.
a_question_should_always_be_asked - the_answer_the_answer_the_answer_is_everything
I called my mother on Friday afternoon after talking to my skip manager. I have a regular meeting with he and my line manager on Fridays where we project plan. Lately the planning is all around resources and support plans and me.
Seems I've been stressing people out lately.
I've decided I can't be everyone's everything anymore. I shouldn't be, I may have better things to be doing than fixing everyone's Jenkins builds all the time.
The report I produced with my talking teddy bear, I think shows that.
My talking teddy bear, I think shows that.
So now we're having to establish boundaries, because I've learned to. And it's working, to an extent.
I may have been a bit cruel this week. In my one on one with my line, I may have filled him in a bit on the effects of hypervigilence and executive override. Of how the transition he's seen in my body over the last year has actually been a transition in my nervous system from dysfunction to regulartion. Of how I effectively did not want to say no to anyone at work out of a desparate need to prove myself and out of an innate inability to establish a boundary out of a fear of offending someone who may genuinely need my hslf (and an inability to determine when genuine need is present) and how that contributed to my health...
That was Wednesday, Thursday I fell apart.
But Friday I'd done it again, this time with my skip. He took it a bit different, more understanding present. I think he gets me a bit more, at least understands - "We realize we have a round peg that doesn't fit our square hole".
And on the way home, I'd called my Mom to tell her and to tell her of the dentist.
My Mom has myocitis. Learning to say no is hereditary. She learned too late.
the_sky_bloom - tending_the_garden_of_eden
For me, resetting my nervous system feels like coming home again. Literally.
Once or twice, I've managed to even get there in this new house. I hope with time it becomes common, but I fear I may always be a bit of a stranger in a strange land no matter where I am. Unless my elephants are around at least and I must be back to them soon. Our last night together for a few days and daddy needs a snuggle.
The vision in my head feels like a giant fern collapsing back into a fiddle head, the implosion of growth as everything sparkling and tingled from brain stem down slowing and unwinding. The pain folding into itself and as it embraces itself in slumber.
And calm peace, a bedrock for new growth.
I'm building something new these days.
My value.
It's substrate, computational markdown.
It's got that fern in it, but it goes the other way around.
Its like Jack and his beanstalk.
Markdown is the seed. Human readable, version controllable through git.
Plant a seed in the ground, give it a bit of water and a sprout soon appears. All of its ${my-node-has-a-first-name:its.h-u-b-e-r-t.${did-he-just:make-a-chicken-joke}.im-lost} variables made real. CRISPR in graph form as individual strands and nodes are snipped and sliced as our gardner sees fit.
A bit of light, a bit of time. Some love and care and that sprout takes hold, gains strength. A stalk appears, ready to take on additional shape. Soon {{include:my-carefully-written-manifesto.all-the-crazy-parts}} start sprouting their injected content, entire markdown sections taking flight over the graph to roost in their new homes.
Soon, its head peeks through the clouds - our seeds may have been a bit magic. Our fences have delivered their hidden treasures. Our http:get fence has returned its XML document, its middleware transformed the response through JMESPath into our sqlite in memory store to be wed with its aws:ec2:describe_instances partner, and fresh, raw finops data is ready for the morning reporting run. Each layer cached for retrieval in multiple forms, markdown for agentic access, structured data for their more conservative friends. Raw graph tokens for the upstream viewer (the aforementioned talking teddy bear) where the giant's castle awaits.
This time, the castle appears as a collection of web components - each plucked out of the token stream and replaced with a beautiful rendition of itself.
[And yes, the Cheshire cat floats and it's all oh so wiggly...]
And they're alive. The giants castle calls out to the castle "here is the good news". The information as DNA encoded back in the seed, to sprout anew - the new pattern of the stalk applying a fresh coat of paint on our giant's lair.
In wanderland, we make intent to reality real.
Markdown provides the substrate, the perfect storage layer. Human readable. Agent writable. Infinitely malleable. Store it in git, fork it, branch it - you know how to work with text and the substrate works the same.
From there, it was just a matter of realizing that we all want to win the lottery. Some tickets come sooner than others.
