Revenge as a Motivation for Abusive Parents
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As I have alluded to in my previous post, I’m current reading Alice Miller’s For Your Own Good.
(Coincidentally, she passed away just a few days before I wrote that post, although I didn’t know about this at the time.)
I’m only about half way through the book, but one particular idea really struck me, and I wanted to write something about it. It’s so obvious in retrospect, and explains so much about the behaviour of my biological parents towards me throughout my life, that I’m shocked that I hadn’t thought of it earlier myself… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
Programming exercises and comparison of programming languages
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I started programming when I was eight years old. The first programming language I learned was Basic, followed very shortly by C and 8086 assembly language. During elementary school, I was also exposed to Pascal and Logo. I ignored Pascal because it seemed to me that anything I could do in it I could already do with C, and although I had some fun with Logo’s turtle graphics, I didn’t take it very seriously. At the time, I didn’t appreciate its connection with Lisp and other “serious” programming languages… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
My depression in Waterloo, part 13: dropping out
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My parents have always worked very hard throughout my life to cut me off from people who inspired, encouraged, or helped me to make the most of myself. They attacked me for socialising with people who motivated me to do well in school and provided me with opportunities to practise many of the skills I would later need in university while I was still in high school. They discouraged, prevented, or forbid me from associating with people who supported me. They did everything that they could to deprive me of the intellectual cultural background shared by my future colleagues, and continually criticised me for being in the company of the kind of people that my teachers and my classmates’ parents were always trying to inspire their students and children, respectively, to become. But the fact is that throughout my life there has always been a perfect correlation between my productivity and my sociability, and my parents’ eradication of my enjoyment of the company of others led inevitably to the collapse of my ability to do any work whatsoever.
The only way for me to return to work was to complete my Research Proposal. I couldn’t write it, because every time I sat down to write all I could think about was how my father had beat me, locked me out of the house, and threatened to disown me for writing about essentially the same thing back in high school… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
My depression in Waterloo, part 12: the aftermath
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I scrapped my plans for the seminar, and in fact, I essentially did not go to school for several months. Anything that was related to quantum computing became very depressing to me. A series of events related to research into quantum foundations and information, collectively called “Taming the Quantum World”, was scheduled to take place that summer at IQC and PI. But I couldn’t stomach the idea of being surrounded by people who would have told me what a moron my father was, if they had known about his opinions on their research, even though I had wanted to be there. I also had to avoid the other graduate students at IQC because I didn’t want to hear any discussions about QIP and their plans for going to India.
One of the activities that I undertook to cheer myself up was a hiking trip to the Bruce Peninsula with several people, including Mina, who became my girlfriend over that summer. My parents had thoroughly destroyed my ability even just to be in the presence of my academic colleagues by continually attacking them and their research throughout my life, but despite their persistent efforts they had not managed to eradicate my social life entirely, and I still had friends who supported me.
In the meantime, I applied to have my surname legally changed… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
My depression in Waterloo, part 11: the biggest regret of my life
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I suppose that I should explain why, even though my parents had caused me so much pain and were actively opposed to everything that I did, I did not break off contact with them much earlier. In retrospect, I wish that I had run away from home in high school. Not having done so is the biggest regret of my life.
I had actually discussed in high school with some friends my intention to run away from home, but I was talked out of it. It wasn’t that they had given me reasons not to run away; they were the reasons not to run away… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
My depression in Waterloo, part 10: disowned
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The locations of some of the upcoming conferences and events at the time were also a source of depression for me. I wrote in a previous post that none of the people my supervisor worked with were Iranians, but one of his co-authors, whose papers I was studying, did have a connection to Iran. Dr. Barry Sanders of the University of Calgary, who shared my belief that it was very important for scientists from Iran and the West to interact with each other, was instrumental in playing a part in organising the International Iran Conference on Quantum Information, which was to take place in September 2007 on Kish Island in Iran. And the QIP workshop 2008, which was actually in December of 2007, was held in New Delhi, India.
Now these were countries that I had wanted to visit for personal reasons… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
My depression in Waterloo, part 9: exposed
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One of the main difficulties in coping with abusive parents is that it is often impossible to explain your motivations to others. I expressed to Dr. Cleve that I wanted to look for a research topic connected with engineering, and he was glad to assist me with this. But I never fully explained to him all of the restrictions that I was under, and I guess he must have been frustrated that I wasn’t as enthusiastic about many of his suggestions as I would have been if I didn’t have my parents’ reaction to them to consider.
Because I couldn’t find a way to disguise my research or to connect it to a topic that was acceptable to my parents, I was under a lot of stress while I carried it out. It’s very difficult to conduct scientific research unless one is excited about a topic, and it’s very difficult to be excited about a topic that causes one to experience physical and psychological pain. (I think even a masochist enjoys physical pain only because it gives him psychological pleasure.) My life in the Ph.D. program as a quantum computing researcher consisted of exactly the activities that my father had punished me so severely for in high school: … » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
My depression in Waterloo, part 8: disguising my research
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The next several posts were especially difficult for me to write, but they are also the most important in my autobiographical series. Every post in the series up to now had been written for the purpose of setting up these ones.
In the previous posts, I have described the damage caused by my parents’ anti-intellectualism and their hatred of science to my scientific career. They have been persecuting me for my interest in science, and more broadly for my intellectual interests in general, ever since they came to Canada. They kept up their attacks on my scientific research throughout high school, right through university, and even into graduate school. By the time I entered the Ph.D. program in computer science and switched into quantum computing as my research area — which my parents had forbidden me to study under pain of being disowned — the regular day-to-day activities of a scientific researcher, such as reading papers or having discussions with colleagues, would cause me to experience physical pain.
Obviously, this prevented me from focusing on my work or making any progress in my research. A question that naturally arises is, “Why would you put so much effort into doing something that is so painful to you?” Or, equivalently, “Why not be doing something else?”… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
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]
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]