I am making lots of behind-the-scenes progress on setting up this site. I am working on setting the styles, and adding some plug-ins that I think will be fun and enhance the community atmosphere. I’m hoping to get a lot of this done today, and then try to publicize this site so that things get into swing…
Well, doingfine.org is officially launched. I decided to set up this blog to give a name to the shadow that’s always lurking around the edges of my life, and to help myself (and hopefully others) talk about it in a constructive way. The Disease
I have been being treated for depression for about three years now, and I have probably had it for around ten. It is a physical disease that is prevalent among the women in my family. Untreated, it can have devastating consequences, as it did for my grandmother who committed suicide in 1968, four years before I was born. Mine is easliy managed through medication. The Stigma
What bothers me most about the situation is the stigma of having to take medication that is misunderstood by the general public and frequently mde the butt of jokes. You’ve probably heard something along the lines of “the new soccer-mom Barbie comes with an SUV and a supply of Prozac,” or one of the seeming infinite variations of jokes about medications that are seen as “happy pills” for yuppies. Becuse of the stigma, people with depression don’t talk about having it. The Goals
One of my good friends has diabetes, and takes insulin every day. She doesn’t have to be worried about how she is perceived at work because of her dependence on medication, and people don’t expect her to “just get over it”. My husband is battling Hodgkin’s Lymphoma right now, and he doesn’t have to be embarrassed about being on chemotherapy. One of the goals of this blog is to help educate people about depression— my problems are just as physical as cancer and just as responsive to medical treatment as diabetes. That being said, depression is something that’s always there in my life, even when it’s being managed with medication. The pills don’t change my personality, make me happy all the time, or give me a high. They work in very subtle ways, making me less frustrated with life in general and more willing to enjoy it. Some days are better than others. But most days are good. Another, and probably the main, goal for this blog is to provide a voice for me and any other interested people who are living with depression, managing it well, and having fun. I think realizing that most people with depression are productive, fully-functioning members of society is the first step to overcoming preconceptions about the disease. Which will in turn lead to more accurate diagnoses and less stigma. Which will allow those of us with the disease to not feel pressured to keep an important part of our lives hidden from everyone but those closest to us. What do you think?
Please give me some feedback on what you’d like to see here. I envision this as a place to house some facts about depression and treatment, but more importantly as a place for people with depression to show off their talents, express themselves creatively, and learn from each other. In other words, a way for us to show each other the ways in which we’re “doing fine”.
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I’ve finally gotten time to get this project of mine off the ground. After about a year of helping my husband get through cancer, I have decided that I need to do this for myself. Getting him to the point where he’s OK has made me realize the ways in which I am not. And the ways in which I am. I have had depression for at least 15 years, and it’s something I deal with every day. However, only two people in my life know about it outside of my immediate family. I have come to realize that hiding something that’s such a major part of myself has taken its toll on my sanity. I am now coming clean about it here, where it somehow seems a little easier to do. For me, it’s a medical problem that I, along with most of the women in my family, inherited. My grandmother committed suicide in 1969 because of it, 3 years before my birth. It’s something that literally has been affecting me since before I was born. There is a huge stigma attached to it, mostly because it’s poorly understood. Also because it mainly affects women. It’s easy to laugh at and/or doubt those who have to take medicine for problems we can’t really detect. Those who need chemotherapy or insulin aren’t assumed to be faking it, but those who take antidepressants are thought to be using it as a crutch, or a “mood enhancer”. Not so. But I’m not going to go off on a tanget about this. Suffice it to say that it’s a genetic, physical problem that can be overcome by helping my body out with some processes it can’t do very well by itself. I am finally to the point where I’m at peace with the decisions I’ve made regarding my health, and I’m ready to own them and make them publicly part of me. After deciding this, I realized that I had a lot that I want to do in my life, and one is to contribute to a community that has unknowingly helped me through some hard times lately— the CSS and web standards community. I have taken to doing a lot of reading about and experimenting with CSS while Brian has been sick, and I have teaching web standards to the student assistants I co-manage at work. I think I have some points to add to the dialog from a different angle: education, both of the educators in our institutions and of our future web designers. So, this blog is not about depression, it’s about being a creative, productive member of society that happens to have depression.
This is officially my last post about the designing and redesigning of this blog. It is starting to become a blog about a blog. I am finally happy enough with it to call it Version 1.0. There are still some tweaks to be made here and there, and some content to fill in (namely the About and Portfolio pages), but it’s pretty much done. There are a few major things going on that I want to point out.
Molly is hosting a panel discussion at SXSW which I will be attending. It is one of the many things I’m looking forward to in Austin; right up there with spending time with Jess. There seems to be some controversy over the fact that she has invited a man to speak on the panel. This to me seems silly. I’m much more interested to know where the men think we are than the women. We women know exactly where we are. But in all seriousness, the fighting over who got invited to speak — which women and which men — seems to me symptomatic of the very problem. Web design is clubby. This is because these days web designers communicate by blogging, and blogging is clubby by nature. You link to your friends, and they link to you. Blogging also happens to be public, so I can follow the musings of a web designer I admire, and after a while I can see his social network becoming evident in his posts. And I realize that A) I am not a part of his social network; even though his thoughts are important to me, mine are not important to him, and B) he is friends with a lot of other men. It just so happens that there is a big group of friends that are famous and write books. And they write good books that have helped me, and I get value out of reading their blogs. They don’t read my blog or link to me because I am not a part of their social network, and they have lives outside of their work. They barely have time to keep up with their friends. That doesn’t bother me. I’m confident in my work and I have no real desire to write books. I have to force myself to write this. Maybe the reason why the men of the “A list” are friends with more men than women is the same reason why I am friends with more women than men. Or maybe it’s because they’re ubergeeks that can’t relate to girls. Not likely, since I think there are women among that group, Molly being one of them. OK— that was all a little facetious, but I think the “problem” may partially be that simple. I’m not saying that “A-listers” don’t go out of their way to point out those who are doing good work that they don’t know, because I think most of them do. I just think that it’s human nature to form a social group and maintain it. So I don’t think women being less visible in the web design world is any kind of conspiracy. I think once you mix together that facts that girls are not encouraged to go into math or science when they’re young, that it is a little harder for women to gain respect in almost any workplace than it is for men (read Malcolm Gladwell’s book if you think you don’t make unconscious snap decisions based on gender no matter how many X chromosomes you have) and the fact that our main communication mechanism fosters a somewhat inbred network, and you get a scenario with more visible men. Maybe a better panel would be Meet the Women of Web Design, where we all could show our work. I’m sure it can stand on it’s own merits, and one you get to know us I’m sure you’ll love us.
In the past month, on my drive home from work, I have watched 3 small mammals get consumed by great egrets. I’m fairly certain 2 were field mice (Peromyscus spp.) and one was a vole (Microtus spp.). It amazes me that I can be zipping by at 55 mph and see this little drama play out. It is intense: a cute fuzzy thing with flailing limbs, wriggling for its life in the bright yellow beak of an elegant, serene bird. I never get to see how it ends, but I have a good idea. I’ve had my hand in the beak of a similar bird a few times, and it always ended with several layers of skin neatly removed from said hand, and much profanity on my part. I’ve got the scars to prove it. I have a feeling the little guys aren’t getting away with just scars.