I haven't been online much over the past couple of months and wanted to update everyone that knows me personally and uses Pushshift. Many of you who know me personally know that I have been dealing with family issues related to my father's declining health. Also, my mother's
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mother recently was diagnosed with dementia and it has taken a huge toll on my own mother's mental health. The constant anxiety I've experienced along with maintaining a huge resource such as Pushshift for the research community slowly pushed my own mental state into a dark
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place. Not many people know this outside my family, but I'm currently talking to an amazing therapist that is helping me tackle these unique challenges. I often put in over 100 hours a week into just maintaining Pushshift and rarely get more than 4-6 hours of sleep per night.
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When you are younger, you can get away with chronic sleep deprivation but as you get older, you notice that your mind / body doesn't spring back quite as fast as it used to.
Anyway, I felt personally responsible for failed projects / research when I wasn't able to meet
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deadlines and then as time went on, I felt more and more behind on things and it just felt easier mentally to "retreat" from online conversations. After talking to a therapist, I started learning proper coping mechanisms and other ways to keep an even keel mentally. Pushshift...
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merged with NCRI several years ago and luckily I've had a fantastic team to help when things got more stressful. We were able to raise substantial funds to move most of the Pushshift architecture into a proper COLO and we are continuing to transition services to the new location.
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I'm starting to get back into a much better place mentally and getting more assistance with my dad's condition while also supporting my mother with her anxiety and depression dealing with her own mother. When we are born, we don't get a "life manual" to accompany our journey...
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Sometimes you will make the wrong decisions in life and sometimes you will need to reach out to others for help and that's perfectly fine. We live in a society that is woefully ill-equipped to deal with mental illness and that is very problematic for us as a society.
I wanted
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to take a moment to thank all those who have written / called to check up on me. I also want to apologize to those who felt I just dropped off the map completely over the last several months. There is no excuse I can give other than I recently faced the most intense personal
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challenges I've ever dealt with as a human being and adult and that I was lucky to have the resources and companions to help me face these challenges. I will be online much more over the next month and going through a huge backlog of comms with other researchers / friends and
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family. Thank you so much for your patience and support. I'm looking forward to an amazing 2023 and I am dedicating at least 1-2 hours each day to get back on track with previous comms, etc.
If you have any questions, please let me know. I'll try to reply as time allows.
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