On the value of small kindnesses

Sunday 11 February should have finished well for me. That afternoon, I'd been to an awesome and fun fitness event; one full of movement that made my body feel good, and attended by an upbeat crowd of friendly, positive people. And even better, as it ended, the skies over Brisbane opened up with a summer thunderstorm, which always makes me feel invigorated and refreshed.

But that evening, some other pressures and tensions in my life came to a head, and left me feeling really low. For the purposes of this post, it really doesn't matter what they were; only that the effect was by the end of the night, I felt completely worthless. It had been many, many years since I'd experienced anything like this, certainly with this level of intensity. I wanted to withdraw from everyone around me because it seemed that their lives would be better without me in them.

The next day was my birthday, and I awoke feeling like that was nothing to celebrate; I wasn't even grateful to be alive that morning. My morning ballet class helped a bit. Even though I felt on the verge of tears throughout a lot of it (especially in the slow movements), the mental focus of dance demanded attention on something other than my feelings.

A few things really helped me over the next 24 hours; most particularly the love of my incredible wife and family.

But while that's an uncontroversial observation, the purpose of this post is to acknowledge the way that social media helped as well. It's fashionable with some commentators to take a really cynical view of this part of our modern lives. Facebook and Instagram and Twitter "likes" come cheap, we're told. What happens on social media isn't "real" they tell us.

Cynics be damned: that day, when I was feeling at my lowest ebb, the sixty-something people who left me a birthday message, even if it was often only three words, helped to turn things around for me with their small kindnesses:

And then came an Instagram post from a friend that spoke to me exactly what I needed to hear that morning:

The picture of a caterpillar dangling from a stem was captioned "Hang on" and continued:

"Sometimes it’s all we can do - and we need to know what a huge and brave thing it is. Just showing up in the most difficult of times allows our inward transformation to keep ripening. We can describe this ‘hanging on’ as ‘holding the tension’ without collapsing things into right or wrong, success or failure, black or white. The truth is that we have no idea who we are about to become because it’s beyond our mind’s capacity to understand something truly new. Indeed our minds would even rather decide that “all is lost” - because of the mind’s difficulty with uncertainty. If we can be kindly courageous with ourselves and allow the unknown, healing is always possible."

On a morning when I did indeed feel like "all is lost", these words gave me the courage to show up despite my hurt and shame and to receive love and healing. 

So, thank you Emma, for your wise post that morning. And to everyone who wished me happy birthday on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and elsewhere: it was a little gesture on your part, but you made a huge difference in my day, and I'm very lucky to have you in my life.

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Emma's Instagram image and post reproduced with her kind permission. 

Why I left Miso for IMDb

When I came to social media in 2010, I quickly found Goodreads as a convenient way of tracking and sharing my reading habits, and was a little surprised that nothing quite as good existed for TV and movies. I knew and had used IMDb, but back then, its coverage of TV episodes seemed to me quite lacking, as did its social functions. Eventually, I settled on Miso as the closest fit for me.

I was pretty happy with Miso, and apathy would have prevented me from looking further afield until in late 2012 they merged their database with theTVDB.com. In the process, they trashed the episode histories of a couple of shows that I follow.

Since then, I’ve reappraised IMDb and think that it’s a better fit for me now. It’s sad to move on and drop the history that I’ve built up on Miso (1160 check ins!) and also to lose a couple of things that IMDb doesn’t have.

I hope that one day something even better comes along.

Here’s the list of features that I would want from such a site; with Goodreads, Miso, and IMDb for comparison:

	Goodreads	Miso	IMDb
Movies	✘	✔	✔
TV episodes	✘	✔	✔
Link separate titles by series	✔	✘	✘
Can rate	✔	✔	✔
Can review	✔	✔	✔
Lists	✔	✘	✔
Facebook integration	✔	✔	✔
Twitter integration	✔	✔	✔
iOS app	✔	✔	✔
Machine recommendations	✔	✘	✔
Friend recommendations	✔	✘	✘
See friends’ updates	✔	✔	✘

Of all these, making and maintaining lists is probably the feature I missed most on Miso, and I’d been keeping a list of what to watch next as a Google document instead. Of the things that IMDb currently lacks, I’d most want to see friends’ updates and be able to give recommendations to and take recommendations from them.

Seenth.at is an effort to build a movie check-in website with Goodreads-like functionality. It’s still under development and looks very promising, but its (deliberate) lack of support for TV shows makes it a non-starter for me, unfortunately.