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Category: Personal

Difficulties of Being a Woman in Tech

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I’ve been lucky enough to have Microsoft pay for me to go to the virtual Grace Hopper Celebration this week. It’s been largely inspiring and rejuvenating, but at times has been tiring and frustrating.

I got into a funk today after an encounter that was sort of like a microcosm of the tech industry. I was in a networking session for the LGBT+ community, hosted on Zoom, where the session organizers put everyone into random virtual breakout rooms for 10 minutes or so at a time to get to know people more personally. It was sponsored by Discover, so they …

Pride Month Sharing

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This month I agreed to share about my own journey in the LGBT community I’m a part of at work, and thought it’d be worth sharing the same post more widely. ❤️

My name is Heather and my pronouns are she/her. I’m bisexual, having come out “fully” only a couple of years ago. When I was about 7 years old, soon after my parents divorced, my father came out as trans, and bi, and transitioned to being a woman: Paige. I’ve always been close with her, so the LGBT community has been close to my heart for nearly my whole …

Recovering a Sense of Strength

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I just started reading Tehanu by Ursula Le Guin, the 4th book in her Earthsea series. Her writing style is so beautiful to me. It fills me with a sense of longing and urgency: I want to be able to do that. I feel the same way about Tolkien’s works, or whenever I watch the Lord of the Rings movies.

It inspired me to dig out The Artist’s Way again, and continue working through it to see if I can unblock my creativity. Synchronistically, I left off on week 8 which is about “Recovering a Sense of Strength” and it …

Pepparkakor Cookies

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I used to make Swedish pepparkakor cookies with my mom for Christmas. Americans would call them gingersnaps. We’d always use my grandmother’s friend’s recipe, a very simple list of ingredients and a sentence or two on a yellowing notecard written in my grandmother’s handwriting. I never met my grandmother on my mom’s side, since she died a year before I was born. My grandfather eventually married another wonderful woman, and as I grew up, I considered her my grandma.

When my grandparents still lived in Seattle, we’d sometimes bake the pepparkakor cookies at their condo. It was in an older …

Morning Pages

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I have a lot of mixed feelings about writing. At times I get a lot of meaning and happiness from it, and at other times I feel like an untalented failure of a writer and avoid writing altogether. The latter has been winning out for the past few years, depression being one of a few factors. We talked about this in my therapy session today and given all the tools I’ve learned to deal with feelings of failure, I think I’m ready to try writing again.

The Artist’s Way came up, a book by Julia Cameron. The idea of trying …

Experiences with Anxiety and Depression

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For me, learning to handle my depression has been like fighting my base instincts. The difficult thing is, I can’t fight it, fighting it doesn’t help, I have to accept it and move through it, not around it. My analytical mind, which I pride myself on at work, works against me when it comes to emotions. Trying to figure out why I’m so anxious, or so down, leads me to trying to “fix” it, which often results in no helpful outcome, and instead sends me into a self-critical downward spiral. My biggest lesson at my therapist recently was learning to …

Reflections on Grief

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This month marks one year since my mom Maria died, and I feel like sharing.

It’s been one of the hardest years of my life, to be honest. It hasn’t been without its ups, of course (I’m engaged and making wedding plans!), but I’ve had more downs than I care to think about. Ups don’t counteract downs. They just kind of… coexist.

My grief is triggered by seemingly random things sometimes and it can be intense when it happens.

One example: last year at Sasquatch in late May, I was watching Florence & The Machine on the main stage. She …

On Trump and Social Media

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This is an article from the New Yorker, from an issue I brought along on my current trip to London, published before the election.

Now, I hate to give people like Cernovich this publicity, even if it’s bad publicity, but people need to know this stuff is going on. This article is about a man who seems to be one of the leaders of the alt-right movement in America. He started out as a lawyer, and has learned how to use social media to his advantage. The way he and others like him spread misinformation like viruses makes me …

You CAN be a Self-Confident Introvert!

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I finished Felicia Day’s book today, You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost)… it makes me sad. I want more! I want to be her friend! 🙁

For those who don’t know, Felicia Day is an actress who has been in a few popular sci-fi and fantasy TV shows. But she is most known for writing the popular web series The Guild. If you haven’t seen it and want to watch a hilarious show about a group of online gamers meeting up in real life, I highly recommend it.

Something that made me think a bit was just …

Catching My Excuses

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I’ve been on a bit of a writing hiatus. Okay, more than a bit. I haven’t written anything other than technical docs at work and the occasional small Facebook post for at least six months, and really it’s been a lot longer since I wrote regularly. I’ve been asking myself why, and for a while I felt like writing was so much of a chore and a guilt-trip that I had been mistaken in my young aspirations to write. That I’m not capable of writing anything good, and that the encouragement I got from other people had just been …