Dopp Juice Archive

John T. Unger just put up a post called, It’s only life or death. It’s always only life or death. It starts out:

“The best thing that ever happened to me was the night an angry, messed up cab driver pulled me into the back room of a 24 hour diner and held a huge handgun to my head for over ten minutes, all the while describing in intricately fetishistic detail exactly what would happen when he pulled the trigger.

“Why? Because it changes you, staring down a nutjob holding a gun. After that, the small stuff just doesn’t get sweated. You either break, or break through to a mandatory satori of keeping things in proportion that most people never get to walk away from. It’s an ice calm I wouldn’t trade for anything.”

This sounds like something straight out of Fight Club, but he’s exactly right. There’s this line between life and death where the crap that doesn’t really matter falls away.

Last month marked the ten-year anniversary of my failed suicide attempt. Ten years. It’s a good number. I’ve also been building website for ten years, and performing poetry at microphones for ten years. Guess what I started doing when I realized my life wasn’t going to live itself?

A brief backstory: I had a challenging adolescence. Combine growing up queer in a straight-or-gay world with watching my father slowly die of a terminal illness, and you have the perfect formula for depression and self-loathing. I hit a breaking point, devoured a bottle of sleeping pills, woke up the next day (surprise!), spent a week in a mental health ward, and then decided it was time to get a grip on things. I was fourteen years old.

I subscribe to the philosophy of “No Regrets.” We live, we learn, we move on. I reached a point where I was willing, ready, and determined to end my life, and then I lived beyond it. I’m not going to stand here and advocate suicide attempts, but I will say it was the most dramatic positive turning point in my life to date. I discovered that I’m not trapped in a meaningless and oppressive system. I found out that when life and death are on the line, all of the clutter falls away and we finally see the point: that we matter, that there is love all around us, and that all of those rules are really just suggestions. We get to do whatever we want.

As a sidenote… For anyone struggling with suicidal thoughts, I highly recommend the book Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws by Kate Bornstein. The premise is pretty simple: if you feel like you need to choose between doing [blank] and killing yourself, do [blank]. (And she has some great suggestions for “[blank]” if you’re getting bored with your own ideas.) If you want the book but you can’t bring yourself to purchase it, please email me.

Today my friend Nelz came out today on his professional tech programming blog as a tattooed and pierced, silly-flash-mob-organizing, sex-positive Burning Man fanatic. He invoked my favorite web comic and ended by cheering, “Hooray for transparency!”

I’ll add, Hooray for not taking suggestions that don’t work for us!

Nic Askew put together a video interview of Seth Godin speaking on curiosity. It’s so great to see Seth‘s animated face and voice speaking on the topics that I usually get only from him via text.

Here’s my quote mashup of the interview, for those who don’t have five minutes to watch:”What’s a fundamentalist? A fundamentalist is a person who considers whether a fact is acceptable to their faith before they explore it. As opposed to a curious person, who explores first and then considers whether or not they want to accept the ramifications.”

“What we’re seeing is that fundamentalism has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with an outlook, regardless of what your religion is.”

“These are the people who still have a 12 flashing on their VCR. They are fearful, they are stuck, they’re not interested.”

“What we’re seeing is about a 5 or 10 or 15-year period where people start finding their voice, and they start realizing that the safest thing they can do feels risky, and the riskiest thing they can do is play it safe.”

“These people are the curious. Curious is the key word. It has nothing to do with income, nothing to do with education. It has to do with a desire to understand, a desire to try, a desire to push whatever envelope you’re interested in. Here’s the reason these people count: not because there’s a lot of them, but because these are the ones who talk to the people who are in stupor. They’re the ones who talk to the masses in the middle, who are stuck. The masses in the middle have brainwashed themselves into thinking it’s safe to do nothing.”

I got a ride home from the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) from a VP at a Fortune 500 company, and we talked about the complicated natures of our love lives. It felt a little bit like driving home after summer camp, especially since I was on Day 2 with my jeans and underwear. Fortunately, though, I was sporting a nice clean IIW schwag t-shirt, which was neatly ironed for me by the astrophysicist who let me crash on his fold-out hotel suite couch the night before. This, of course, happened after I sang and danced to Abba’s “Dancing Queen” with the conference organizer during karaoke.

The last session I attended at IIW was called “Newbies4Newbies.” Five of us conference first-timers sat around a table with one of the community’s longtime members and talked about our experience. We were all pretty much on the same page with observations:

• The sparse conference website and jargon-heavy materials provided beforehand gave us the impression that this was a self-contained community. We felt like we were crashing someone else’s party.
• We ended up in some conversations that were way over our heads, and felt a moment of panic that were very, very much in the wrong place.
• We took some initiative to figure out what was going on, and started to notice how passionate and productive this community was.
• We began to feel like we were being heartily welcomed by everyone we talked to, and saw people going out of their way to make sure we were able to engaged in the conversations.
• We connected with great thinkers and leaders who made themselves available for our questions and ideas, and who took the time to explain complex ideas to us in language we could understand.
• People recognized that we, as newcomers, had a valuable perspective to offer on what they were doing, and they asked us to share it.
• We felt like we had become an integral part of the community, and we were sad to see the conference end.

“Workshop” is a fitting term for the event. It really was about getting stuff done. Before I realized what was happening, I found myself helping to spearhead two new working groups which now have clear missions for ongoing roles in the community. The first is called Inclusive Initiatives, and its plan is to coordinate events and identify research studies that will help bring to light a wide range of perspectives on what the public needs from identity solutions. Somehow, I became the Stewards Council Representative for this group (go figure).

The second group sprung out of the “Newbies4Newbies” conversation. We’re rallying together to help bridge the gap between this brilliant community and the people who could join it but don’t know how. Our hope is that by making the website more accessible, developing clear introduction materials, and identifying people who can serve as mentors within the community, Identity Commons will broaden its reach, its influence, and its pool of resources for being effective.

This community is pulling the Internet into an arena where our information is safe and manageable by us, the users. Its projects include things that will take our passwords out of the hands of people we don’t trust, and take our consumer experiences out of the hands of marketers. It’s “the good fight” for our rights on the web.

Listen to me. I’m on a soapbox already. These people got under my skin.

tag: iiw2007b, iiw