At age 17 on Easter Sunday, I attempted suicide. I had been trying to self advocate for a while, in spite of having no legal right to do so as a minor.
I had slept too little and eaten too little and my blood sugar was in the toilet when I got up that day. Having not really had much breakfast because I probably got up at noon, I found myself at a restaurant with family for Easter dinner early that afternoon.
One of the relatives sitting at the table with me had raped me when I was twelve. By then, they all knew. I had told someone who told someone else etc. I was in therapy trying to sort my crap. Relatives were trying to pretend everything was okay.
That day, they were particularly desperate to pretend that everything was okay and they wanted me to play along with the charade. Presumably because it was Easter, it was critical to them that I make nice to my rapist while he acted like an asshole to the max on that occasion.
Rather than put up with this shit, I got up before my meal arrived and I left. I walked home a mile or two, having still not really eaten. My blood sugar fell from the toilet to the sewer system.
My family came home, still desperate to pretend everything was fine. I refused to deal with their BS, so I locked myself in my room and continued to fail to eat. I wasn't willing to go to the kitchen to get food. It would just be a chance for them to harangue me.
I eventually began looking for a means to kill myself. I ultimately found a sharp tool in my art box. I no longer remember the name of it.
It was some kind of painter's knife which I used to carefully carve on my left wrist for the next hour, without really drawing much blood but resulting in stitches. I no longer paint.
One of my favorite role models, Maya Angelou, learned the power of her words early. At the age of eight, she was raped and she told her brother, who told the rest of their family. A few days later, the man who raped her was murdered, probably by Angelou's uncles. Angelou became mute for almost five years because:
I had reason to believe he sanded his fingerprints off because he mouthed off in public to a woman who had gotten under his skin because I was that woman. It was his means to walk it back without publicly commenting on his feelings about me.
There was no affair or otherwise inappropriate anything, but I believe that the potential consequences for simply having a crush on a woman in his social circle had him so concerned that he took a belt sander to his fingerprints as his solution to his PR problem. This incident has strongly shaped my relationship to Hacker News and caused me to swallow a LOT of jagged little pills while trying to figure out public relations crap under challenging circumstances (while very sick, homeless for years, etc).
When I first joined HN, jacquesm talked to me a LOT and I was baffled. He's Dutch. I'm American. Something was lost in translation and then one day he quit speaking to me and my participation on Hacker News got a LOT rougher.
I had no idea at all that I was de facto "under his protection" or in some sense being vouched for merely because he spoke to me regularly until he stopped speaking to me. I have been behind the eight ball on Hacker News ever since, though my only crime is that some influential man finds me attractive and his only crime is he doesn't want anyone to know that.
Because of my history of having attempted suicide, I am well versed on the subject and prone to reading articles about suicide. It is for this reason that I know that I'm not the only person on Hacker News behind the eight ball.
Ed Weissman is also behind the eight ball, so this isn't simply something "done to women" on this overwhelmingly male forum full of movers and shakers.
A man named Aaron Swartz was in prison and the courts had locked up his money. He was forbidden from mentioning that fact, so he could not tell people the real reason he was asking for money when he asked for funds to pay for his defense.
Ed Weissman, not knowing what Aaron could not say because the courts forbade it, said Aaron needed to man up and pay for it himself. He had enough money.
With failing to get the help he needed, Aaron hanged himself.
HN still does memorials to Aaron and wrestles with its guilt over its role in the debacle. Ed Weissman participates less than he used to and has lost a lot of respect.
People talk trash about him over it as if Aaron's suicide was entirely Ed's fault. He doesn't bother to defend himself. Unlike some people on the leaderboard, Ed appears to care more about what is right than about covering his own ass.
He took a break from the forum for some weeks after the suicide. When he finally commented again, someone said something shitty to him about him being back. He quietly said he had never left and he didn't let it become a shitshow.
I was very impressed with his consistent focus on not making it about him, no matter how hard other people tried. But Ed will probably never live down the fact that he said what everyone there was thinking, even though he wasn't the only one saying that type thing.
He has worn it surprisingly well. I can't imagine how hard that would be to live with.
I wasn't there when Aaron committed suicide. I was likely on hiatus from HN for eighteen months, in part to calm jacquesm down and assure him I was no threat to him and would not knowingly and willingly hurt him without cause.
I was present for a different incident some years later. I think my participation at that time likely did prevent someone else from ending up behind the eight ball.
On January 23, 2018, among other things I said:
I am finding the comments here about how Linus needs to behave properly, like they do at Google, amusing given how often Google and other for profit companies are portrayed as evil empires and FOSS is portrayed as the only moral antidote to the evils of capitalism.
Let Linus swear a little and suddenly those roles are entirely reversed? Really?
The following day I happened to post a related piece: The new microcode from Intel and AMD adds three new features. I apparently left only one comment in the discussion of the piece.
A few months later on September 16, 2018, we have the following rather surprising headline on Hacker News: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off. My recollection is his team had done an intervention and he took their criticisms to heart and decided to do better.
I'm far from the only person who talked about Linus Torvalds on January 23, 2018. There are 680 comments in that one discussion alone that day on Hacker News and there were no doubt many other discussions of the incident in question in various places around the internet.
But the intervention intended to help him course correct instead of just ruin his career is incredibly unusual stuff and incredibly unusual and positive social stuff tends to not "just happen" like lightning out of a blue sky. My suspicion is the seeds of this event were most likely planted by me with some of my comments on Hacker News several months earlier.
But an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Although I seem to have helped the career of Linus Torvalds, I don't know how to get myself out from behind the eight ball and I don't know how to get Ed Weissman out from behind the eight ball.
I had slept too little and eaten too little and my blood sugar was in the toilet when I got up that day. Having not really had much breakfast because I probably got up at noon, I found myself at a restaurant with family for Easter dinner early that afternoon.
One of the relatives sitting at the table with me had raped me when I was twelve. By then, they all knew. I had told someone who told someone else etc. I was in therapy trying to sort my crap. Relatives were trying to pretend everything was okay.
That day, they were particularly desperate to pretend that everything was okay and they wanted me to play along with the charade. Presumably because it was Easter, it was critical to them that I make nice to my rapist while he acted like an asshole to the max on that occasion.
Rather than put up with this shit, I got up before my meal arrived and I left. I walked home a mile or two, having still not really eaten. My blood sugar fell from the toilet to the sewer system.
My family came home, still desperate to pretend everything was fine. I refused to deal with their BS, so I locked myself in my room and continued to fail to eat. I wasn't willing to go to the kitchen to get food. It would just be a chance for them to harangue me.
I eventually began looking for a means to kill myself. I ultimately found a sharp tool in my art box. I no longer remember the name of it.
It was some kind of painter's knife which I used to carefully carve on my left wrist for the next hour, without really drawing much blood but resulting in stitches. I no longer paint.
One of my favorite role models, Maya Angelou, learned the power of her words early. At the age of eight, she was raped and she told her brother, who told the rest of their family. A few days later, the man who raped her was murdered, probably by Angelou's uncles. Angelou became mute for almost five years because:
"I thought, my voice killed him; I killed that man, because I told his name. And then I thought I would never speak again, because my voice would kill anyone."Not nearly so dramatic, but I learned to tread lightly on Hacker News in March 2011, less than two years after joining the forum, when jacquesm -- one of the more prominent people there, at least in terms of being high on the leaderboard -- posted this blog post: The belt sander and the battle for privacy. A body hack.
I had reason to believe he sanded his fingerprints off because he mouthed off in public to a woman who had gotten under his skin because I was that woman. It was his means to walk it back without publicly commenting on his feelings about me.
There was no affair or otherwise inappropriate anything, but I believe that the potential consequences for simply having a crush on a woman in his social circle had him so concerned that he took a belt sander to his fingerprints as his solution to his PR problem. This incident has strongly shaped my relationship to Hacker News and caused me to swallow a LOT of jagged little pills while trying to figure out public relations crap under challenging circumstances (while very sick, homeless for years, etc).
When I first joined HN, jacquesm talked to me a LOT and I was baffled. He's Dutch. I'm American. Something was lost in translation and then one day he quit speaking to me and my participation on Hacker News got a LOT rougher.
I had no idea at all that I was de facto "under his protection" or in some sense being vouched for merely because he spoke to me regularly until he stopped speaking to me. I have been behind the eight ball on Hacker News ever since, though my only crime is that some influential man finds me attractive and his only crime is he doesn't want anyone to know that.
Because of my history of having attempted suicide, I am well versed on the subject and prone to reading articles about suicide. It is for this reason that I know that I'm not the only person on Hacker News behind the eight ball.
Ed Weissman is also behind the eight ball, so this isn't simply something "done to women" on this overwhelmingly male forum full of movers and shakers.
A man named Aaron Swartz was in prison and the courts had locked up his money. He was forbidden from mentioning that fact, so he could not tell people the real reason he was asking for money when he asked for funds to pay for his defense.
Ed Weissman, not knowing what Aaron could not say because the courts forbade it, said Aaron needed to man up and pay for it himself. He had enough money.
With failing to get the help he needed, Aaron hanged himself.
HN still does memorials to Aaron and wrestles with its guilt over its role in the debacle. Ed Weissman participates less than he used to and has lost a lot of respect.
People talk trash about him over it as if Aaron's suicide was entirely Ed's fault. He doesn't bother to defend himself. Unlike some people on the leaderboard, Ed appears to care more about what is right than about covering his own ass.
He took a break from the forum for some weeks after the suicide. When he finally commented again, someone said something shitty to him about him being back. He quietly said he had never left and he didn't let it become a shitshow.
I was very impressed with his consistent focus on not making it about him, no matter how hard other people tried. But Ed will probably never live down the fact that he said what everyone there was thinking, even though he wasn't the only one saying that type thing.
He has worn it surprisingly well. I can't imagine how hard that would be to live with.
I wasn't there when Aaron committed suicide. I was likely on hiatus from HN for eighteen months, in part to calm jacquesm down and assure him I was no threat to him and would not knowingly and willingly hurt him without cause.
I was present for a different incident some years later. I think my participation at that time likely did prevent someone else from ending up behind the eight ball.
On January 23, 2018, among other things I said:
I am finding the comments here about how Linus needs to behave properly, like they do at Google, amusing given how often Google and other for profit companies are portrayed as evil empires and FOSS is portrayed as the only moral antidote to the evils of capitalism.
Let Linus swear a little and suddenly those roles are entirely reversed? Really?
The following day I happened to post a related piece: The new microcode from Intel and AMD adds three new features. I apparently left only one comment in the discussion of the piece.
A few months later on September 16, 2018, we have the following rather surprising headline on Hacker News: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off. My recollection is his team had done an intervention and he took their criticisms to heart and decided to do better.
I'm far from the only person who talked about Linus Torvalds on January 23, 2018. There are 680 comments in that one discussion alone that day on Hacker News and there were no doubt many other discussions of the incident in question in various places around the internet.
But the intervention intended to help him course correct instead of just ruin his career is incredibly unusual stuff and incredibly unusual and positive social stuff tends to not "just happen" like lightning out of a blue sky. My suspicion is the seeds of this event were most likely planted by me with some of my comments on Hacker News several months earlier.
But an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Although I seem to have helped the career of Linus Torvalds, I don't know how to get myself out from behind the eight ball and I don't know how to get Ed Weissman out from behind the eight ball.