My depression in Waterloo, part 7: my mother’s selfishness, re-visited
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Published by
davinci on
May 30, 2009 in
autobiography and personal.
Tags: authoritarian parenting, authoritarian parents, child abuse, depression, Henry David Thoreau, Institute for Quantum Computing, Iranians, Mahatma Gandhi, mother, Satyagraha, selfishness.
In a previous post, I wrote about how my mother had been attacking me since high school for teaching and for collaborating with others. I resisted the effects of her attacks for as long as I could manage, but a short time after I switched my Ph.D. research area to quantum computing, I finally broke.
I have already written a lot about my experiences in elementary and high school, and in particular about how, unlike most of my classmates with authoritarian parents (many of whom were of Chinese descent), I had refused to allow my parents’ wishes to dictate what I should or should not do. I saw with my own eyes that those kids who had allowed themselves to become nothing more than a mere puppet to their parents’ will, at the expense of the denial of their own individuality, were absolutely miserable… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
Miscellaneous articles about raising gifted children, from Scientific American
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I was searching/browsing through the online archives of Scientific American while writing the previous posts, and came across some articles about raising gifted children that I thought I’d comment on, especially with respect to their relevance to my personal situation.
The article “Gifted Children: How to Bring Out Their Potential” by Christian Fischer begins:
Contrary to what many people believe, highly intelligent children are not necessarily destined for academic success. In fact, so-called gifted students may fail to do well because they are unusually smart. Ensuring that a gifted child reaches his or her potential requires an understanding of what can go wrong and how to satisfy the unusual learning requirements of extremely bright young people.
I remember that the teachers and counsellors at my gifted school warned us and our parents about this… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
My depression in Waterloo, part 6: meeting people
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Published by
davinci on
May 27, 2009 in
autobiography and personal.
Tags: abusive parents, authoritarian parenting, authoritarian parents, child abuse, depression, depression triggers, meeting people, Michael Nielsen, Richard Cleve, Scott Aaronson.
As a consequence of being a graduate student in quantum computing, I met several people whose papers I had read in high school and whose writings had influenced my interests. It was very cool, for example, to sit next to Dr. Charles Bennett during a lecture at the Perimeter Institute and to watch him grill the speaker. My supervisor, Dr. Cleve, also introduced me personally to Dr. John Preskill, a meeting which I will describe in another post.
Another person I met through Dr. Cleve was Dr. Michael Nielsen, the co-author with Dr. Isaac Chuang of the standard textbook on quantum computing. Dr. Nielsen is writing a book on the future of science and is interested in the effects of modern communications technologies on scientific research and collaboration, a topic which I had been thinking and writing about since high school. But when I met him, I couldn’t bring myself to discuss it with him.
I have already written about this kind of self-sabotage, of holding myself back… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
My depression in Waterloo, part 5: feeling “unworthy”
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The main part of my strategy for overcoming my depression is to identify its triggers and confront each and every one of them by writing about them. Since switching my Ph.D. research topic to quantum computing, almost everything that I encountered every single day as a graduate student in this area has been a trigger of my depression.
The very situation itself was depressing to me, which is in some ways quite irrational. I had told my father when I was in high school that there would be a close collaboration between computer scientists and physicists to study the physics of computation, and now I was a part of this. But in many ways I felt very out of place… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
My depression in Waterloo, part 4: switching into quantum computing
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In the first term of my Ph.D., I audited the Quantum Information course taught by Dr. Ashwin Nayak, but did not take it for credit. This was partly because I was so distracted by my predicament, but also because I initially didn’t want the course to appear on my transcript, lest my parents should see it. I was originally just going to sit in on the lectures, but Dr. Nayak convinced me to audit the course, because I had been doing the assignments anyway. And so the course did, in fact, appear on my transcript after all.
During the next several terms, I took some courses to satisfy my degree requirements, while I searched for a way to do research into quantum computing without my parents’ interference. I started to become depressed, because, perhaps unsurprisingly, my parents had begun to attack me for studying bioinformatics. I suppose that the onset of my depression had always only been a matter of time… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
Thirteen Abusive Behaviours
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I recently came across this list of “Thirteen Abusive Behaviours”. While the list was about abuse between domestic partners, most of the thirteen abusive behaviours apply to abusive parent-child relationships as well.
I will list them and comment on each one in turn… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
My depression in Waterloo, part 3: my Master’s degree in computer science
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Published by
davinci on
May 24, 2009 in
autobiography and personal.
Tags: abusive parents, authoritarian parenting, authoritarian parents, bioinformatics, child abuse, depression, information retrieval, Master's degree, Master's thesis, MMath, Programming Language Group, TREC.
Beginning in my second term at the University of Waterloo, I started to work with Dr. Gord Cormack and Dr. Charles Clarke in the Programming Languages Group on some information retrieval problems. (They’re very easygoing and everyone just calls them “Gord and Charlie”, so it feels a little bit strange to refer to them so formally. But I will maintain this level of formality when referring to all of my professors for the sake of consistency.) I also took a course from Dr. Clarke on Automatic Question Answering.
It was quite fortuitous that Dr. Cormack and Dr. Clarke were members of the Programming Languages Group, to which I was thus assigned, along with other graduate students who were researching information retrieval. Programming languages was a topic to which my parents had no objection… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice
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I had discovered, by the end of my first term in Waterloo, that while my father had maintained his negative opinion of quantum computing, it no longer seemed to enrage him consistently as it did before. This was a man who had screamed at me, beat me, locked me out of the house, and threatened to disown me for studying the components that make up quantum computing while I was in high school, but his reaction to the fact that I had resumed my studies — which he had expressly forbidden me to continue, under threat of being disowned — could only be described as mild irritation.
One of the main difficulties in coping with abusive authoritarian parents is the lack of consistency in their demands… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
My depression in Waterloo, part 1: the first term
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Published by
davinci on
May 18, 2009 in
autobiography and personal.
Tags: abusive parents, authoritarian parenting, authoritarian parents, autobiography, Christianity, creationism, Golden Age of Islam, historical negationism, Institute for Quantum Computing, Jeff Shallit, Michele Mosca, quantum computing, Raymond Laflamme, Stephen Hawking, University of Waterloo, Waterloo.
The previous series of posts, called “The causes of my depression”, established the triggers that set off my depression. Since coming to Waterloo, I have been encountering these almost every single day. I am therefore beginning a new series on (the effects of) my depression in Waterloo. As before, these posts were expanded from notes I took after my sessions with UW Counselling and a private psychiatrist.
The University of Waterloo is run on a system of three terms (or semesters) of four months each per academic year. The first term actually went very well for me, right up until near the end of the term, when I made the mistake of consenting to a visit from my parents… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
The causes of my depression, part 19: the demographics of my graduate school labmates
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Published by
davinci on
May 13, 2009 in
autobiography and personal.
Tags: abusive parents, authoritarian parenting, authoritarian parents, autobiography, Chinese culture, control systems, depression, graduate school, information retrieval, Iranians, LaTeX, Persian.
As I have described in several previous posts, my academic and social lives basically did not intersect while I was an undergraduate. In graduate school, these aspects of my life became somewhat re-integrated once again, because there were so many Iranians in engineering, and especially in my area of control systems.
I should perhaps go back a little and explain why the demographics of my graduate school labmates was noteworthy. Throughout my undergraduate years in Engineering Science, my father had been harassing me about my supposed inability to compete with students from mainland China… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]