The Tweet that Saved My Life
180 degree shift with #codetochange
Since the Philippine presidential elections 2016, I had sworn off Facebook. It had become a toxic environment in which my family and friends were being torn apart due to political differences and misinformation. My feed had increasingly become a long advertisement, a funnel of polarizing news, and status anxiety. I retreated back into Twitter finding relevant, varied, interest groups. I was weaned off of it in 2009 when China banned Twitter, Google, and Facebook and little did I know in 2018, a random referral to #codetochange would be the final push I needed for personal change.
I don't remember when I lost that inner zing, you know, the fearless verve you had in your early 20’s and the uncompromising tenacity you had in your 30’s. Oh yes, academia happened. By the time, I emerged out of it, I was not unscathed.
In one phone conversation I had with Debra Payne of the Academic Writing Club in 2009, she called it, the post-scholar traumatic stress syndrome. This was her label from the post-traumatic stress syndrome that she was seeing among graduate students and young researchers in her practice. She explained that I was suffering from trauma rooted in the nature of the institutional hierarchy in the academic system. This was preventing me from writing. It wasn't me. That was a lightbulb moment. I had a name, and labels are incredibly powerful.
Institutionalized bullying takes a toll. I managed to overcome a highly dysfunctional system at a state university and graduated with barely the skin on my back. The college dean did not extend help when in-fighting broke out between my supervisors. By the time I arrived in the UK, academia was beginning its neoliberal turn and I saw how the system merely used the degree program to make money receiving little adequate supervision for the thesis. I was shocked. In Australia, I experienced ghosting by my daily supervisor. I barely received any response from him in all the years I was assigned to him. I was fortunate that in the Netherlands, one kind word from my daily supervisor made a difference on my road to completion. Still, my experience is merely a drop in the bucket confronting academia and anthropology as a discipline today.
However, it is not just the academic environment that contributed to it. There were major upheavals in other areas of my life. It was a tremendous betrayal when I experienced friend ghosting. It was truly heartbreaking when friends you thought you grew up with, for one reason or the other, refused to acknowledge you, or the problem. It was the sad realization that perhaps they were never really your friends in the first place. I won't detail the narcissistic relationship that destroyed the last filaments of my identity but I was truly spent and rubbed raw in 2011-2012.
I woke up with all the layers removed, the last ounce of my identity I had created all these decades. It was who I was. Without it, who am I today? I was born and bred in academia and after two decades, I realized that I was in the process of grieving. It took time to extricate its hold on my inner being and voice. You cannot finish a dissertation without finding your voice. One important lesson I learned on my way to the finish was that, what I do (the dissertation) is not who I am. I still am the same person without it and it was this liberating understanding that led to the long road of identity separation and letting go.
If I was in the project of becoming new and blank slate, what could I fill it in? I thought I would swore off research but I discovered social blockchains and was energized into investigating its myriad social applications. However, my analogue social science background served as a fertile ground for ethics in tech but I needed to bridge my knowledge for a post-doctoral research application. I was in the liminal stage— saying goodbye to academia but also welcoming the strange, exciting world of technology, of algorithms, and code.
Where to next? I was feeling (un)stuck, middle-aged, and happily isolated/nestled in my writing bubble. It was not a coincidence that I saw a tweet on my feed about #codetochange for women in Amsterdam. Finally, a group that recognizes a need — a community of women role models seeking to help middle-aged women transition into tech! I felt a tingle and applied! I was happily accepted into the program about two weeks before it started.
Code To Change (C2C) is an NGO run by Iffat Rose Gil who was facing a new life in the Netherlands without a network and wanting to help. Along with early co-founder, Mine Ogura, they saw that females were sorely absent in the IT industry, even in the Netherlands. Statistics continue to be grim. The most recent Women in Tech Index in 2018 show that Dutch women occupy only 15.56% of the workforce (65,000) of the 422,500 personnel in the tech workforce. C2C was a way to give back to the community. This was a way to belong, to be relevant, and most of all, to be a woman fighting for another.
In part two, I discuss what a Code to Change bootcamp looks like.
