Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-05-28/Op-ed
Journey of a Wikipedian
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There’s no one moment when you go insane;
not when
you find yourself crying into a phone behind a closet door
or tapping your foot to neutralize thoughts you can’t handle
or sleeping on a bed of worn clothes on a hard floor
or when the police officer pulls you over again for driving
up and back the same stretch of highway, six times
and not when you physically crack the monitor in a dark room for no reason even though it was the only light left in a night’s center as you tap away at keys throughout the silence
But you occasionally get a glimpse of someone else realizing that, “you’ve lost it”.
It was probably fall 2010. My dad turned the knob on the attic bathroom door in the house where I had grown up, and the reaction on his face was devastated. He didn’t know that no other room in the house, or the country, felt safe to me, that the warm water soothed and wetted the dry, frigid air, that my laptop was balanced purposefully so that it would fall backwards onto the tile rather than into the hip-high water, and that I had chosen the back wall of the tub for its ergonomic watchlist-monitoring suitability.
He didn’t know that. He just saw his 27-year old son, feverishly tinkering with electronics on the edge of a full bath, completely nude, oblivious to anything else, or anything wrong. He also didn’t know that I was helping lead the Egyptian revolution.
That too sounds insane, but as the calendar flipped into January 2011, the new year brought millions to Egypt’s streets. A boy had gone missing, turned up in a morgue clearly beaten beyond breath by police. Facebook pages organized gatherings that filled immense public squares. Protests turned into uprising turned into revolution.
And I, alongside 4 exceptionally dedicated editors from 3 different continents, monitored the 2011 Egyptian Revolution Wikipedia article 24-hours-a-day with equipoise and fervor. We yearned for Mubarak to fall, but in the newsroom which the article’s talkpage had become, we were vigilantly checking multiple independent reports before inputting any new words onto the growing page, scouring the article for flourishes of revolutionary support. The world would come here to find the facts; those that would dispassionately drive understanding without embellishment or motivation, for the hundreds of thousands of people reading that page each day. And I would make sure of it. From my bathtub.
There’s also no one time when sanity returns, if there is such a defined state. But suffice to say that it builds upon moments.
Like the moment when you start chatting off-channel to a Wikipedian on irc-help, just to talk to someone again. Or when you put on a suit for the first time in 6 years, to give a talk on conflict-of-interest to a gathering of pr folks at a posh downtown bar. Or when you step into the hostel at Wikimania in 2012 in D.C. and meet Stu Geiger, your coincidental bunkmate, and instantly recognize his familiar, Wikipedian-ite, eclectic genius.
The moments gather momentum though. Soon you are calling up major media companies to ask for donations. Not as Jake, or that guy who lost a decade in his 20’s, or the model teenager who lapsed into dysfunction and veered ‘off course’. But calling rather, as a piece-of-Wikipedia… Do you know what doors that opens?
The drama of recovery shouldn’t be overly simplified into highlights. It was just as much my psychiatrist’s expert balancing — seeking of psychic neutrality — with a fine and formidable mix of anxiolytics, antidepressants, antipsychotics, and sleep aids. Not too high, not too low. Not too moody, not too flat. Every pill presented a trade-off, but we found a consensus pharmacology that worked.
My parents made sure that my rock bottom was somewhere safe.
My friends’ surprise visits reminded me that there was fun yet to be had.
The diagnoses I received were varied and all increasingly off-the mark. I was bipolar, but generally calm through even the grittiest edit wars. I was agoraphobic and socially anxious, but traveling to Hong Kong and Quebec and Berlin for meetups with strangers from myriad countries. I was depressed, but could not control an urge to improve a bit of Wikipedia, every day, most of the day.
They say that Wikipedia is NotTherapy. It’s a serious place to write an encyclopedia, not to iron out one’s mental kinks or cracks. But I think that’s wrong. No one knew me on Wikipedia, except for my words, the wisdom of my input, and the value of my contributions. They couldn’t care less if I was manic, phobic, delusional, or hysterical. It just didn’t matter. They didn’t see that part of me.
So I got to build my identity, my confidence, my vocation — with longwinded eloquent analyses, meticulous bibliographies, and copious rewrites of difficult subjects.
They also say that Wikipedia is Not a social network, but that’s wrong too. In the 8 years since I started editing, first in my car outside a Starbucks, and then throughout the dull shifts of a mountain-town Staples store where I squatted for wifi, and then still more through 3 years back at home under blankets between dusk and dawn, I met hundreds of people with whom I shared the same passion. I received, quite marvelously, 49 barnstars from peers, friends, and fans. There wasn’t a bigger or better sense of validation.
I received two incomparable partners, to build a Wikipedia Library that I created and had become the head of. I received a job offer, with wellness benefits. I also received, in the grand sense of things, an irrepressible, stunning and brilliant girlfriend and her exuberant 5-year old daughter into my life.
You see, Wikipedia brings people together. It brought me together. It just takes some time for everyone to get their heads on straight, before they can see that their lives too have a mission, and an [edit] button.
_____________________
A few thoughts to remember, for online collaborators, or any collaborator, really:
- We are a community of very real people with deep emotions and human complexities.
- We are deeply invested in our project, so much so it hurts us at times even if it is also a passion or refuge for many.
- You never know what someone has been through, or is going through.
- We all need help at some point. There is no shame in needing help, asking for help, or receiving help.
- If you are ever feeling completely hopeless: Wait. Things really can get better. Talk to someone about it.
- Mental health carries a powerful stigma. The more we are open about it, the less that weighs all of us down.
- If we listen, we can learn from each other.
- We need to be kind. This is a higher calling than civility, and entirely compatible with achieving our goals.
- Our movement depends on its people. We are our most valuable resource.
- We are not finished products. With time, space, support, and practice — people can, and do, grow and change.
The above text is licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0. It can be shared or reposted without permission under the terms of the Creative Commons license, which requires only attribution and that reusers keep the same license. It was originally published in a slightly different form on Medium.
See also "Wikipedians' fragility" in this week's "In the media" section.
Note: The National Suicide Prevention Hotline is toll-free in the US and available 24/7 at 1-800-273-8255. suicide.org has a list of international suicide hotlines, including Australia, Canada, the UK and many other countries across the world. To report any threats of harm or self-harm on Wikipedia, contact emergency
wikimedia.org.
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