How to be Okay with Being Alone, or Metrics for Emotional Wellness

I've heard a few different but similar assertions about what I should be doing with my life right now.  I'm sure I'll misquote the ones that I don't forget to mention.  Here are some of them:

(1) "Before you can be happy with someone, you have to learn to be happy alone."

(2) "You need to take the time to focus on and learn about you before you get involved in a serious relationship."

(3) "What you need right now is connection to other people."

(4) "You should start dating - it will really help  you move on to the next phase."

There have been plenty of other suggestions, all good, all sincere.  I think these four cover most of the sentiments that have been expressed though.  Even the casual reader will notice the contradiction between these.  If the advice had come from just plain old people, I wouldn't be too worried.  Plain-old-people (a.k.a. not my people) say a lot of things.  This advice comes from my people.  Well, my people, I have some concerns.

"...to be happy alone."

A nerd, an introvert, a tinkerer, a person who likes being in his own head, I've spent a lifetime fighting the impulse to be alone.  If there was a battle to win, I would say I had won it.  I might even say I've won it so hard that I don't even like being alone any more.  Of course I'm still an introvert, and as such I will always need my recharging time, but it's no longer the goal.

One of the obvious apparent contradictions in the statements above is that I need to be happy alone, and that I need connection to other people.  Maybe it's implied in the (1) that I need to be happy romantically alone.  Lets say that's the case.  For my own benefit, lets rewite:

(1) "Before you can be happy with someone, you have to learn to be happy romantically alone."

It follows that I need to establish connections to people, but that these should not be romantic connections.

Before I get too far down that road, I'm still struggling a bit with (1).  I've been separated from my ex-wife since January 18.  As of October 4th, that's 261 days of being alone physically.  It would not be hard to make the case that I had been romantically alone for quite some time before that, but I don't suspect it matters.  Lets say that I had figured out how to be happy without a romantic partner/interest.  How would I know?  Would I know because I no longer felt a desire for romance?  I have a hard time accepting that because I would consider the lack of desire a failure on a whole other level.  If we assume the desire for romantic connection is healthy, I don't know how to measure when I have learned to be "happy alone".

"... learn about you ..."

Is believing that you're fairly self-aware a sign of a lack of self-awareness?  I feel like there's an implication in (2) that I failed at my marriage because I didn't know me well enough.  I'm confident that no one would state that outright, perhaps they wouldn't even believe it to be the case.  If I challenge the statement, though, I can't see any other justification.  Does this statement mean that I'm not ready for a serious relationship because I'm broken beyond some threshold, and focusing on and learning about myself with fix that?  I've been an introvert my whole life, so I've spent a lot of time and energy learning about and focusing on myself.  This didn't change with the divorce.  I want to understand how this applies to me.

"...connection to other people..."

Well I'm working on this one.  Are there implicit qualifications about what a "connection" is?  Here are some examples of connections.  Which ones count?

• I ordered dinner at a drive-through.  When I picked it up at the window, I looked a person in the eyes and said thank you.
• I wrote this blog and you read it.
• I worked from home and chatted on slack with quite a few people - maybe 15?
• I worked from  home and was in video conferences with about 6 different people.
• I went swimming and a person was swimming next to me.  We made eye contact.
• I played my piano and streamed it live to the internet.  5 or 6 people watched.
• I played my piano and recorded it.  A lot more people watched.
• I played my piano and thought about if I was keeping my neighbor awake.
• I chatted with friends online.
• I commented on and made posts on facebook.
• I played a game with some people I don't know.
• I played some games with people I know.
• I froze with my kids while we watched Annie in the amphitheater at SLCC
• I had dinner with my parents, sisters and kids.

The list is longer than this, but how do I know when it's enough?  

I don't mean to come off argumentative.  I strongly suspect that of the assertions made to me somewhere between 0 and 4 of them are at least a little bit true and relevant.  I want a dashboard where I can see the things I should be working on and what my current status is.  

That reminds me of another piece of advice I keep hearing:

(5) Don't over-analyze everything to death.  Wing it!

On that note, I'm out.

Yin and yang

In my previous post, I described some of my feelings regarding my marriage and recent divorce.  As anyone who's been through a divorce can attest, the positive feelings expressed in that post are an incomplete picture.

The reaction to that post was very supportive and appreciative.  It meant a lot to me.  I couldn't help feeling, though, like I had lied to everyone.  While what I expressed there is true, it is a very manicured, selective view of my feelings.  It was only the yang.

Every ounce of emotion expressed in that post is matched by at least as much negativity, doubt, anger and fear.  Yet for some reason, I'm far less inclined to share those feelings.  I'm so much less inclined, in fact, that I barely know how to put them into words.  However difficult, I feel strongly that for me to be able to move past these feelings, I have to figure out how to express them.  Forgive me if this post is a little less eloquent than others.

A trusted friend of mine (ok, it's my therapist) tells me that I can talk about my feelings perfectly fine without talking about Lynnae, so that is my intent here.

Fear

On one hand I'm told that I shouldn't repress emotions, but at the same time I'm told I shouldn't submit to my fears.  What gives?

What if I've already had the best of my life, and for the rest of it I'm doomed to miss the best part?
What if people that claim things will get better actually have no idea what they're talking about?  What if by "better" they simply mean I will numb to the pain I feel now?
What if anyone that comes to know me as Lynnae did decides that they're better off without me?
What if every relationship going forward is doomed to pail in comparison to what we had?
What if the negative things others may believe about me are true?

Remorse

I claim that no marriage fails by the efforts of just one.  There are thousands of things I can only and will always wonder about.  I'm told that I shouldn't play the "what if" game.  Should I repress all those questions, then?  If, playing the game or not, I fail to identify the critical "what if"(s) that might've saved our marriage, how can I expect a better outcome in a future marriage?

Anger

I don't wonder if God loves me, or if He knows me.  I know that He knows me and loves me.  Given those truths, how can my current circumstances be?  Of course there's something for me to learn here, but how can He ask me and my family to endure such pain for a lesson?
Did He create me, an imperfect being, just to watch me suffer the consequences of my failures?  How much trying is enough?  If He is omnipotent, why would he allow me to suffer so?

Note that I don't ask these questions because I want someone to answer.  They are simply the voice of my anger.  I know there are answers.

I also feel anger at every trite piece of advice about how to have a good marriage.  "Be sure to say I love you every day." "Never go to bed angry." and so on.  Of course I hold my tongue when I hear them, as I've been trained.  Skepticism at marriage isn't something one would be encouraged to embrace.  (Is sarcasm okay here?)

Loneliness

There isn't a single soul whose head hits her pillow every night and she thinks to herself, "I wish I could spend time with Bob right now".  As I play my piano alone, there's no one who listens and says "I sure appreciate how it makes me feel when Bob plays the piano".  When I come home from a hard day at work, there's no one who's been missing me and wants to talk about what went on during our days, or find something fun and distracting to do now that I'm home.

There are lots of people who care about me and want me to be well.  They even go out of their way to help me be well, and I appreciate it and love them for it.  As much as I appreciate them and enjoy the time I spend with them, I'm an afterthought for them.  There is no one for whom I am a forethought.



When we share these types of feelings, it comes across as whining, and we're judged negatively for expressing these negative emotions.  But when we express positive emotions, we're judged positively.  Now, it's entirely possible that this is all in my head, but my perception is my reality.

Not long after my previous, positively-charged post, I went into a pretty uncomfortable depression, feeling many of the things I mention above, but feeling like the love and support I was enjoying was only for the yang, but that it wasn't okay to also have the yin.

So there it is.  If my yin makes you uncomfortable, I hope you'll forgive me.

Some good things must come to an end

As my marriage comes to an end, I feel that it is only appropriate to summarize my feelings about it and about how lucky I am to have been a part of it.

On September 11th, 1998, I was privileged to begin a 17-year journey with my best friend, Lynnae. As anyone who knew us will attest, this engagement was the stuff dreams are made of. I'd be very surprised to learn that anyone has ever been more in love than we were.

When we met, sparks didn't fly. Somehow Lynnae thought that I was a nerd. I know what you're thinking. It's hard for me to imagine as well. Meanwhile, I saw past her smooth, confident facade to a real person inside who wondered about herself much like I wondered about myself.

Despite the lack of sparks, we quickly became good friends.  We commiserated with each other about dating and life in general until I jokingly suggested we date each other.  Of course this was a ridiculous idea - we were friends, after all.  Who dates their friends?? It was about at this time that I told Lynnae that my feelings were well summarized by Howard Jones' song Dreamin' On (sorry for the cheesy background):

She wondered if I knew what the lyrics meant when he says "be my lover, be my friend". I did :) Well, after being turned down on the dating idea, To my surprise, the next day I suggested that we get married. To my even greater surprise, Lynnae agreed!! This seemed too good to be true. We prayed about it together and the response felt like the Lord doing a face-palm. "Of course you should get married. Why do you think I'm doing all this?!" He seemed to say.

Our wedding was like a fairy tale for me. For the entirety of our engagement I couldn't believe that I was lucky enough to be marrying Lynnae. When the day finally came, it was perfect.

After we got married, we felt like it was important to have children soon.  So Robert joined us pretty quickly, and the fun had only just begun.

One of the things that made our marriage so great is how well Lynnae and I contrast each other. For instance, while I am logical to a fault, Lynnae is very aware of and in touch with her emotions, and the emotions of those around her. While I am quite introverted (not that I don't like people), Lynnae loves to be around lots of people.

I learned a lot of great lessons from her during our marriage. She taught me that you don't necessarily need a reason to serve people - a hunch is more than enough. I learned that sometimes it's okay to treat the symptom of someone else's problem with a plate of cookies, or brownies or a loaf of bread or some other treat that doesn't fix the underlying problem, but can help clear a person's view so they can see the underlying problem.

We had four great children together and lots of fantastic adventures. I am eternally grateful for the journey we shared.

I'm sad to say that we've gotten to a point where what we had is simply gone. After months and months of trying to make things work for us, we've come to the conclusion that our only path forward isn't together. "We have created a suffering circle, that threatens to tighten and destroy you and me". "This tug-of-war has weakened our purpose and pulled us apart from beginning to end."

I'm writing this to commemorate the good times we had together. In divorce, it is too easy to focus on the negatives, on the faults, on the reasons it never could have worked anyway, etc. I beg of those that care for us or our children to please refrain. I believe that the best way to move forward into the next phases of our separate lives is through gratitude for what we had.

I hope you enjoy these memories as I enjoyed making them.

Who in their right mind would leave Pluralsight??!

This question has been running through my mind quite a lot over the past two weeks - since I resigned from Pluralsight (yes that Pluralsight).

Today is my last day, and, of course, everyone wants to know what's going on.  So here goes...

On Tuesday (after Martin Luther King Day) I'll be starting at LiveAuctioneers.com, working for Jason Finger (with whom I worked at SeamlessWeb back in the day) and friends on bringing a monolithic PHP/MySQL app up to date.  They are a small company with a loyal customer base.  I'll be joining as their Principal Software Engineer, and building a team here in Utah.

"Ok that all sounds great, but srsly bro, leaving Pluralsight??"  I know, I know.  I've been with Pluralsight now for around a year and a half, and we've been doing amazing things.  Before I get into that though, let me give some even earlier history.

I've been doing software in one way or another for about 15 years.  I didn't get a degree in CS, and the degree I did get (in mathematics) took me quite a long time to get.  I started my career in QA and taught myself to program from there.  My career growth felt very slow and was often frustrating.

While working at 1-800-Contacts, I realized that I could help other programmers to avoid this frustration by working hard to serve as a mentor to them.  The culmination of this realization happened when I was coerced into being a team lead over a QA development team there.  I was reluctant, but ended up absolutely loving it, and I loved watching young programmers grow professionally.  I learned that while I'm a perfectly adequate programmer, I have some instinct about building and growing teams.

In the meantime, an opportunity to work for Pluralsight came to me and I hesitantly accepted it.  If any of the readers of this blog aren't already aware, their mission is to "Democratize professional technical learning".  Of course I was excited about it because it's a business whose mission matches my own professional ambition.  Besides that, they are the best example of developing a good culture that I've ever seen.

In my 18-or-so months here at Pluralsight, I've participated in some amazing things from both organizational and engineering perspectives.  The engineering team here has undergone incredibly fast growth.  Being part of a self-organizing group during this process has been awesome.

Through my last position at 1-800-Contacts and my experience at Pluralsight, I've learned a lot about myself.  I believe that for me to make a distinctly Bob contribution to a company I need to be in some type of leadership position.  Pluralsight already has fantastic leadership, so there isn't much of a need there.  LiveAuctioneers, on the other hand, is in the process of building their engineering team leadership, and that's what they asked me to help them do.  As the Principle Software Engineer, I'll have opportunities to build teams that fit well together and complement each other.  I'll also have a lot of input into their technical direction.  My experience at Pluralsight and other companies makes me a uniquely qualified candidate for these responsibilities.

So there you have it.  I'm leaving Pluralsight for LiveAuctioneers because there is a need for my distinct talents at LiveAuctioneers that doesn't exist at Pluralsight.

Thanks for listening to my rant. It helped me to understand the reasons behind all the feelings.

For the record, I only have the "who on earth would willingly leave Pluralsight" panic attacks about once every couple or three hours now.

Big thanks to everyone I worked with there.  It has been an honor and a pleasure.

Why do we celebrate Cinco de Mayo?

Once upon a time, there was a small island whose inhabitants spoke Spanglish and liked sandwiches. Unfortunately, they had a difficult time getting sandwich supplies to their island. Of particular difficulty was mayonnaise, because it needed to be refrigerated in transport, and with their technology, its shelf-life ended up significantly shorter than other sandwich necessities. To solve this problem, the islanders would watch for cruise ships from which they could purchase extra mayonnaise, but this was usually in small quantities, because the ships needed to hold on to most of their supplies for vacationers.

In 1912, they noticed an enormous cruise ship on the horizon, and were excited to be able to get a little more mayonnaise than usual. As the ship approached, it collided with an enormous ice burgh, and slowly began to sink. While saddened by all the death on their shores, this day was significant for them because they could get ALL they mayonnaise off the sunken ship. In celebration, the island children would run up and down the beach shouting "Cinco de mayo!!"

Happy Cinco de Mayo!!

Things I know, things I believe

Over the past several days I've had occasion to discuss what, why and how I believe and know the things I believe and know. This caused me to reconsider careful what things I know and what I believe, and why. So I thought I would try to express these things more clearly than I have managed to do yet.

Logic: I know that there are certain rules in logic that are true. For instance, if A is true and B is true, then the argument C, which is A and B is true. I know that the set of basic logical rules is true. I believe these rules to be perfect, though I also believe no human has the capacity to practise them perfectly all the time. I mention logic first, because it is an important tool in discovering other things I know to be true.

Mathematics: All the math that I've learned I know to be true, because it can be logically derived from things that are self evidently true. This includes things like the quadratic formula, the Pythagorean theorem, Euler's formula and so forth. These are some of my favorite truths because they are simple and absolute. If you doubt one of these truths, it can be proven absolutely based on simpler truths. Being abstract, mathematics gives me a comfortable set of rules I can know absolutely to be true.

Physics: I know that the laws of Newtonian physics approximate the world around me closely enough for all practical purposes. I know this through my own experimentation and by turning my results into mathematics. I believe the theories of relativistic and quantum physics to be very good approximations for the world around me that I cannot see quite so easily. I believe the claims of others who have done experiments and observed these parts of the world. Unlike mathematics, however, physics does not give me any basis for what is or isn't absolutely true. The best it can do is good approximations.

Life sciences: I believe that what I've seen in microscopes is well-described by the cell model from biology. I believe that virii and bacteria are the cause of many illnesses I've experienced. Here, too, however, there are no absolutes. As a society, we understand a little bit on the surface of what makes life work. There are no absolute truths to be had here.

God: I know that God is real and that he loves me. I know this because I asked him and he answered me. The logical implications of this knowledge are vast. It means that I am responsible to someone for my behavior. It means that the people around me are also loved by God, and it seems clear that they should be loved by me.

Christ: I know that Christ is God's son, and that he, too, loves me, and has paid for my sins though his Atonement. I learned this by asking as well. A result of this is that I can make mistakes and still be worthy of being loved by God. The implications of the truthfulness of the Atonement are beyond my capacity for reason. Perhaps this is why it is often referred to as an infinite atonement.

The Book of Mormon: I know that the Book of Mormon is true, again, because I asked. When I learned the answer to this question, I also learned that Joseph Smith is a true Prophet of God. I can deduce from this that President Thomas S Monson is also a Prophet of God. I know this because it has been revealed that no Prophet will ever lead the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints astray. The Lord would remove such a prophet from office before this were allowed to happen.

The question has come up: What if the Prophet reveals something you find unacceptable? If this happens, I assume that the problem is mine. Then I pray for help in bringing my will in line with what the Prophet has revealed to be the will of the Lord.

The next question was what if you receive an answer from the Lord that is different than what the Prophet has indicated. Well, first of all, this seems an impossibility, because of what I already know. However, if after very careful soul-searching and sufficient prayer, I found my answer still to be different, I would have to deduce that the Prophet in reference was not revealing the will of the Lord. Believing as I do in logical connections, I would then have to trace this conclusion back through all the modern-day prophets, leading me to conclude that Joseph Smith also was not a prophet.

In one of these discussions, we talked about the various groups that have broken off from the LDS Church. Reference was made to one group in particular, but I speak of them collectively. Any time the Prophet receives revelation that might be a little bit controversial, there are those that disagree. At Joseph Smith's death this happened the first time (to my knowledge). Other times it has happened were when the Church stopped practising polygamy and when blacks were given the priesthood. These groups generally have some story about how the President of the Church had a secret meeting with someone and said "Please lead those that are true in heart. I can't do it, but I have to keep pretending." This is not how God operates. This is how a secret combination operates.

It was my goal in writing this post to gain a little bit better understanding of what things I know and what I believe. I believe it's clear that if my faith in the leadership of the LDS Church were shaken to the point of loss, I would also be forced to give up my belief in the Book of Mormon and in Joseph Smith. Logic does not allow for any other conclusion.

PS I hope that mixing the spiritual and temporal types of knowledge isn't a huge cause of discomfort for anyone. I always try to think about truth in whole, rather than treating spiritual truth and temporal truth differently.

New style

Just a quick note to mention that I've changed the style up on the blog. I've been playing with generated colors for a while, and while I still think they're fun, they seemed to make this blog much less readable, or at least drew attention away from the content.

I'll probably be changing my blog template every so often, just because I'm like that, but now it won't be every single time you load the page.