A Long Overdue Reality Check (@wundarous)

For the last month or so, I've been in a largely dark and unhappy mood. There's been a confluence of events and factors which have led to this depressive fugue, including (but not limited to):

• Self-image; I now weigh more than I ever have in my life, and am precariously close to a big, round, psychologically-significant number of pounds


• Money; my credit score is at a precariously low point for someone employed by a credit-card processor, and the interest rate on a huge and maxed-out unsecured line-of-credit was recently hiked to usurious levels


• Living arrangements; I recently went through a stressful apartment move, though I honestly can't point my finger at the stress points


• Loneliness; being recently divorced, I had physical custody of my daughter for most of the summer. The act of returning her to her mother, 800+ miles away, knowing I won't spend time with her again for the better part of a year, left a surprisingly huge yawning void in my life.

These and other things conspired to make me quite depressed, and left me quite discontented with my lot in life, and lately I've been prone to a lot of really unhelpful "poor me" thinking.

But then, reality decided to rear up on its hind legs and smack me across the face with itself, like this. It served to remind me that no matter how good of a person you may think that you are, and how much you may think your life is unfair or crappy, there's always another good person out there whose situation is suddenly, devastatingly, life-threateningly orders of magnitude worse-off than yours.

When I first read Wendy's blog entry that's linked to above, on the day she wrote it nearly a month ago, I felt like I had been gut-punched. I've never even corresponded with her, much less met her, but I've got a great deal of respect for her. I'll be the first to admit that the only reason I even know her name is due to a very intriguing Google Images result for the query "pair programming", but even though I first came to her blog because of the photo (seriously, how often does one encounter really talented female software developers who are that hot?), I definitely stayed for the articles. And when she gave in and finally started a Twitter account, I was one of her first followers.

So, between the constant noise of dealing with my own life (not to mention my "poor me" depressive state) and the serious shock of her announcement leaving me without knowledge of what to say, it's taken me almost a month to write this. But I suppose the moral of the story (for me, at least) is that Wendy's awful this-should-never-happen-to-anybody ordeal has started something positive in the life of a total stranger half a continent away by giving me a serious kick in my "poor me" complacency. Most, if not all, of the problems in my life are under my control to one degree or another and for the most part all I need to do to improve my situation is to choose to do so, and to persist and persevere. Complacency and a "woe is me" attitude are my worst enemies; get past them, and I've got a real shot at making my life better.

Finally, here's a story from my life of which I'm suddenly reminded. Wendy, if you ever end up reading this, this is for you.

I believe the year was 1977; I don't really remember for sure, since I was between 6 and 18 months old at the time and I only know the story second-hand. My mom had been having strange symptoms and been feeling unwell for some time when her doctor ran some tests and one day gave her a diagnosis of a disease mom had only barely heard of, and he didn't want to give her a prognosis without some more work and research. Mom came home and went next door to talk to a friend who was an RN, and asked her "What do you know about Lupus?" Her friend's tactless response was "Not a lot, other than it's always fatal. Why?"

Mom was always a fighter, and refused to let this thing beat her. Meanwhile, the state of the art changed radically and rapidly, and nobody would ever say that Lupus is "always fatal" anymore. She did eventually die - on August 12, 2003, when I was 27 years old, from complications from type II diabetes. I have decades of happy memories of her, and the best ones are the looks of incomparable joy on her face as she played with her granddaughter.

Fight, Wendy. Give your daughter her own decades of happy memories, and play with your grandchildren.