Tag Archive for 'child abuse'

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My depression in Waterloo, part 7: my mother’s selfishness, re-visited

Published by davinci on May 30, 2009 in autobiography and personal. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

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] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. My depression in Waterloo, part 5: feeling “unworthy”
  2. The causes of my depression, part 7: my mother’s selfishness
  3. My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice
  4. My depression in Waterloo, part 11: the biggest regret of my life
  5. My depression in Waterloo, part 13: dropping out
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My depression in Waterloo, part 6: meeting people

Published by davinci on May 27, 2009 in autobiography and personal. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

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] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. My depression in Waterloo, part 5: feeling “unworthy”
  2. My depression in Waterloo, part 10: disowned
  3. My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice
  4. My depression in Waterloo, part 8: disguising my research
  5. My depression in Waterloo, part 12: the aftermath
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My depression in Waterloo, part 5: feeling “unworthy”

Published by davinci on May 26, 2009 in autobiography and personal. 6 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

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] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. My depression in Waterloo, part 6: meeting people
  2. My depression in Waterloo, part 7: my mother’s selfishness, re-visited
  3. My depression in Waterloo, part 8: disguising my research
  4. My depression in Waterloo, part 3: my Master’s degree in computer science
  5. My depression in Waterloo, part 12: the aftermath
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My depression in Waterloo, part 4: switching into quantum computing

Published by davinci on May 25, 2009 in autobiography and personal. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

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] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. My depression in Waterloo, part 3: my Master’s degree in computer science
  2. My depression in Waterloo, part 6: meeting people
  3. My depression in Waterloo, part 5: feeling “unworthy”
  4. My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice
  5. My depression in Waterloo, part 11: the biggest regret of my life
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Thirteen Abusive Behaviours

Published by davinci on May 24, 2009 in personal and social issues. 3 Comments Tags: , , , .

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] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. Most advice given to people with abusive parents is wrong
  2. Revenge as a Motivation for Abusive Parents
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My depression in Waterloo, part 3: my Master’s degree in computer science

Published by davinci on May 24, 2009 in autobiography and personal. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , .

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] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice
  2. My depression in Waterloo, part 10: disowned
  3. My depression in Waterloo, part 12: the aftermath
  4. My depression in Waterloo, part 13: dropping out
  5. My depression in Waterloo, part 6: meeting people
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My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice

Published by davinci on May 23, 2009 in autobiography and personal. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

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] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. My depression in Waterloo, part 3: my Master’s degree in computer science
  2. My depression in Waterloo, part 10: disowned
  3. My depression in Waterloo, part 11: the biggest regret of my life
  4. My depression in Waterloo, part 13: dropping out
  5. My depression in Waterloo, part 8: disguising my research
2 Comments

The causes of my depression, part 18: my parents blamed me for 9/11

Published by davinci on May 8, 2009 in autobiography and personal. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

My parents had been attacking me for years for observing that religion would once again become important in global affairs, that the post-Cold War division of the world would be into blocs defined by religion and culture, and that in particular the resurgence of Islam would have a large part to play in this. Their reaction to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the way they began to treat me thereafter, perfectly illustrate the enormous gulf between traditional Chinese culture and the culture of science.

In science, progress is made through the elimination of faulty hypotheses which are discarded whenever they are shown not to agree with observations of reality. Science therefore demands certain traits of its practitioners: the readiness to alter one’s opinions, no matter how deeply held, when they are contradicted by incoming evidence; and the willingness to admit one’s errors. An individual scientist may be unwilling to abandon a pet theory, but for the most part, science celebrates the desertion of wrong ideas; when one studies the history of science, the really major discoveries have been hailed as such precisely because they overturned previously cherished beliefs. These traits are not only lacking in traditional Chinese culture — which values obedience, harmony, reverence for authority, and the concept of “face” — but are actually antithetical to it… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice
  2. My depression in Waterloo, part 3: my Master’s degree in computer science
  3. My depression in Waterloo, part 5: feeling “unworthy”
  4. My depression in Waterloo, part 10: disowned
  5. My depression in Waterloo, part 11: the biggest regret of my life
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The causes of my depression, part 17: my “frivolous” web site and how I learned Persian

Published by davinci on May 7, 2009 in autobiography and personal. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

When I entered graduate school to study discrete-event control systems, I once again put up a web site with my interests and my writings. As a part of that, I experimented with automatic translation, but the state of the technology was pretty poor at the time, and so it didn’t work out. What I ended up with was a web site with sections in four languages — English, Chinese, Klingon, and Hindi — and different content in each.

I featured a number of projects on the web site which had nothing to do with school… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. The causes of my depression, part 19: the demographics of my graduate school labmates
  2. My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice
  3. The causes of my depression, part 4: the Mentorship Program
  4. The causes of my depression, part 10: “the Machine”
  5. The causes of my depression, part 15: the most important thing I did in undergrad
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The causes of my depression, part 13: leading a double life

Published by davinci on May 4, 2009 in autobiography and personal. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

I mentioned earlier that I lived essentially two separate lives in my undergraduate years. My life outside of the classroom was an attempt to continue to do the things that my parents had tried to prevent me from doing. Because I could not focus on studying theoretical computer science or physics, for the reasons explained previously, I turned my attention to what I believed would be happening in the near future in the Muslim world. I sat in on classes in history, religion, and languages, though I did not take them officially because I did not want my parents to see these courses on my transcript. There were a few people who knew that I was doing all of these things in additional to being in Engineering Science, and they always expressed amazement that I was able to pull it off. But I don’t think that this was actually all that impressive… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. My depression in Waterloo, part 11: the biggest regret of my life
  2. The causes of my depression, part 8: a “prestigious” degree
  3. The causes of my depression, part 10: “the Machine”
  4. The causes of my depression, part 11: nothing in common with classmates
  5. The causes of my depression, part 3: “stop wasting money on worthless books”
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