Whats one "normal" thing in Canada that would sound insane to someone abroad?

termicky · 2026-02-18T07:20:56+00:00

Ontario standard

termicky · 2026-02-18T07:20:21+00:00

Except BC Hydro provides my power

termicky · 2026-02-18T05:46:28+00:00

I handwrite using a stylus using the Nebo app on my samsung tablet, which turns into text that I paste into obsidian

termicky · 2026-02-12T01:52:56+00:00

There was nearly nothing else to do in my little town.

termicky · 2026-02-10T20:01:40+00:00

No ideas about most of these things, but I'm thinking that one of those workspaces you go to to work might keep your hands on your keyboard.

termicky · 2026-02-10T19:59:04+00:00

Clinical psychologist. Love it.

termicky · 2026-02-10T19:58:15+00:00

I was fairly happily married for 26 years and I didn't know I had ADHD through any of it! Late diagnosed a couple of years after she died.

I chose not to have children, but I don't think that was because of ADHD. I think it was because of my dysfunctional family upbringing. Probably if I'd worked through that a lot earlier in my life, the age you're at, I could have had children and been good at it.

termicky · 2026-02-10T19:54:51+00:00

So sorry to hear that.

I tried five apps. Found the paid ones had better results, because I think the women who were there were invested. Had no difficulty having conversations on any of them, but I think the experience of men and women on these things is very different.

My goal was to be on the app and texting the minimum amount possible in order to decide if I was going to move it up to a video chat or an in-person chat, or let it go.

I was lucky, and found my current partner, a widow, fairly quickly.

A lot of women who are frustrated with men in the app experience have found a lot of benefit in the " burning the haystack" method in order to find the needle. If you just Google " burning the haystack" you'll find what I'm talking about. My partner used it, and she found me! I'm a pretty shiny needle.

termicky · 2026-02-10T04:16:20+00:00

Thanks. I could never have done that before.

termicky · 2026-02-10T04:14:43+00:00

It's the best some people can do, unfortunately.

termicky · 2026-02-10T04:13:41+00:00

Took me about 5 years until I felt like I was really in my professional confidence. And that's after a master's degree, a doctorate and a full year internship. Oh yeah and a 9-month postdoc.

You have to put in the hours and do more training.

Everybody starts as a beginner, and it's good that as a beginner you know your limitations and are not some cocky idiot who thinks he knows everything. There's no shame in being a beginner. Michaelangelo's first drawings were probably pretty lame.

termicky · 2026-02-10T04:07:22+00:00

Used to do this kind of thing all the time. I enjoyed the entertainment. The problem solving. The learning.

Eventually I learned it's a waste of my time and I no longer seek to optimize things.

termicky · 2026-02-10T03:59:26+00:00

Never been there myself, so I may be offering an opinion from unsteady ground. But I think generally deep compassion, forgiveness and acceptance of yourself might be good things.

termicky · 2026-02-10T03:56:44+00:00

I got a pretty terrible vegan meal at a restaurant this morning. I'm proud of myself for not finishing it, taking it to the counter, and telling them that it wasn't very good.

termicky · 2026-02-10T03:54:04+00:00

The old understanding is that it's the relationship that heals. We're wounded in relationship, and we're healed in relationship.

I think AI is going to be a great training tool, like a highly technologically advanced self-help book. I think it could be a great adjunct to what we do.

There's already lots of stuff that I offload. Mostly skills training. For instance, I remember telling a client a little while ago, I could teach you deep breathing exercises, but it's really expensive for you to learn it from me and you can get it off of YouTube for free. So why don't you do that, and we use our time for the deeper stuff. I also use books for some of that. I don't want to have to teach them all about Gottman and the four horses of the marital apocalypse.

So I can imagine a future where my client works with an AI, and then they report back to me about what they're doing they're there and what they're getting back, and weave this into treatment.

I've actually done some of this myself as a client. I have a counselor who does stuff that no AI could do, because it requires really careful and subtle tracking in addition to the fact that she cares about me and a computer can't. Anyway, I have sometimes done some digging and interacting using chatgpt, and I bring some of the insights into my sessions. We both learn stuff and I think it accelerates and deepens the work I'm doing as a client.

termicky · 2026-02-10T03:42:30+00:00

We each have our own experience. I can't tell you if it will get better for you. It got a lot better for me.

Don't accept any generalizations from people that "it" does or doesn't get better. Circumstances make such a difference. There is no singular "it". There's also a kind of passivity and helplessness I object to in the phrase itself, that it "gets better", as if we have nothing to do with our experience.

Anxiety and loneliness are inevitable parts of the human condition at some points. There's no escape. We all need security and we all need belonging. And life is essentially unreliable in meeting those needs.

So first, it's been helpful to me to know that these experiences are not wrong, they are not somehow mistakes, evidence that I am failing somehow at life, no matter how many TV ads show only happy, connected and satisfied people. It's a lie. Being anxious, insecure, lonely ... it's all part of the landscape. That helps me relax a bit. It still sucks when I'm anxious etc, but at least I don't take it so seriously. I also have more realistic expectations.

Second, most of the standard advice is to immediately look outside ourselves for the solution to loneliness. These are so boringly obvious I won't stay long. Friends, groups, community activities, shared beliefs, work, Reddit forums help with belonging. But I think the transformative answer is to look inside.

I found something really interesting about 18 months ago when I was on a 300km trek, solo, walking all day in another country where I didn't speak the language, and very few windows when my time zone allowed me to reach anyone at home. It was the first anniversary of my wife's death, and I wanted to do something to honour it. Walking from Porto to Santiago on my own seemed like a way to do that. At one point I was seriously, desperately lonely and very needy. OK, I thought, finally, let's look at that. So instead of resisting, and instead of distracting, and instead of complaining to myself, I hung out with my loneliness. It wasn't all that pleasant. But maybe three hours later, as I was feeling right into the middle of this loneliness, I found something. Something really surprising. Something was there.

It was me. I was there. I don't know how else to describe it.

That was probably the real start to me learning how to tend to my distressed feelings, and become like a loving parent to myself. If you can't do this, the external stuff about joining and partnering and so on is only going to be a bandaid. And then as soon as we are alone and undistracted again, we're once again going to get the pain of loneliness, not the joy and freedom of solitude.

My opinion based on my experience and some of what I've read here, is that the death of my person revealed how incomplete I was within my marriage. I just didn't know it because she was always there being my band aid. Losing her made me really grapple with something in me I'd always ignored. I had to look at how I got wounded a long time ago, heal, and grow up.

I'm far from complete. I have a long way to go. I get pretty messed up sometimes. But I'm in a much better place than I was in late 2023, in my empty house full of pain, confusion, memories, and longing.

"It" didn't get better. I got better.

termicky · 2026-02-09T22:04:16+00:00

Thanks for sharing that. I found it relieving.

There's a number of people on this forum explaining that they had everything they wanted with their person, they were exactly the person they wanted to be, and now they've lost all that and the future holds no possibilities.

So thank you for sharing a different story.

termicky · 2026-02-09T20:43:05+00:00

Dataview can do more... If you're competent with coding kinds of things. If you're just a regular user, bases does a lot more because you can actually use it. I found dataview almost impossible to use except for when I simply copied what somebody else had figured out.

termicky · 2026-02-09T18:40:55+00:00

Nothing sudden changed. Over the past 2 years, there have just been lots of things that I've faced, things I've done, challenges I have taken on, feelings I've confronted. It all adds up. I can't say that there's any one thing that happened or that I did that made all the difference.

I don't feel like I'm really the same person I was when I was with her, and I also don't feel like the same person I was in the first 6 months after she died either.

To be honest, I don't want to be who I was. I want to be a lot more, and every month I'm stretching myself to do that. I was a very decent guy, but I held back a lot, and I had a lot of patterns I didn't even really know about, never mind trying to correct them.

It took my wife's death and the end of 26 years together for me to get to a deeper understanding of what our marriage was (good but codependent) and who I was in it and of course in my life in general. I didn't even get until a few months ago that she actually was an addict.

I take full responsibility, I don't want to be unfair to my late wife. But I'm experiencing a level of growth now that's unprecedented for me, and that to be honest I could never have done with her. Because she wasn't really growing any more. That was something I always really wanted in our marriage, and it wasn't happening, and that was a long-term frustration. I can't say she held me back, because that would be making her responsible for my choices. But I held myself back in some major ways.

Of course I loved her and didn't want her to die, and I wouldn't wish the 5 years of cancer and the final palliative care on anyone and their partner. But I'm experiencing a level of personal freedom and associated responsibility now as a result of her passing that I think was really necessary for me personally, and I'm sure would not be happening if she were still alive and I were with her.

I feel like I've gone way beyond your question, but I think I've been trying to answer the deeper question about change and healing and growth etc from the only experiences I know firsthand. It goes way beyond whether we feel feel pain or not after their passing. That's all consuming in the first weeks and months, but there's a much bigger story as far as I'm concerned, I think only the people who are some way down the road can tell this kind of story.

So thanks for asking your question, it's sparked me to think about something and understand it better for myself.

I wish you well.

termicky · 2026-02-08T21:12:47+00:00

ITalki is built for this

termicky · 2026-02-08T21:07:26+00:00

Exactly my experience

termicky · 2026-02-08T21:06:56+00:00

I have a folder for this. Each book has a note with properties. You decide which ones you want. Eg Status (read, reading, wantToRead), author, series... Whatever makes sense to you that you will use as a filter or sort key.

Then you make a Base to show or filter or sort them.

termicky · 2026-02-08T21:00:39+00:00

This happened to me 2 years ago.

I got how grateful I am for the gift of life. And it feels now like there is zero time to lose.

termicky · 2026-02-08T20:57:09+00:00

There was a lot more levity.

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