On Oct 10th 7:15pm I was walking my dog, when suddenly her leash broke. She doesn’t know how to act in the outside environment, so she moved randomly towards the middle of the road, in just a few seconds, I watched a white car run over my dog. It all felt like the world stopped, and it happened in a millisecond. I heard her screaming the loudest she has ever screamed. Two seconds later, the car passed, she got out from the other side, and she’s perfectly fine. Nothing happened. Turns she screamed out of fear, not pain. It was a miracle, never in my life have I seen anything like it at this point.
I ran to the clinic, got her checked, X-Rays, sonar on the whole body, everything, nothing is off, no fractures, no internal bleeding, and no physical harm. Two hours later I returned home, and the visual of the car would haunt me for the rest of the night.
Because I wasn’t able but to think I’m directly responsible, I kept feeling that she could’ve died because of me. The visual of the car would continue to pop in my mind every time I’d go to sleep for the next few days.
This made me think: Up to this point, I wouldn’t say I have experienced something that I would call a “traumatic experience”, and I have seen a lot. I reflected back on everything “bad” that happened in my life, and I found it wouldn’t have been considerably “worse” than losing my dog.
This was Oct 10th, just a few days apart from what would be another life-changing event, but not just for me, for millions. The first few days after the incident with my dog, gave me clarity on some aspects that I admittedly believe I previously overlooked.
Since Jan of this year, my #1 mission is to consume research about how to boost mental health through the use of technology. I looked into the set of practices I’ve been trying to sustain for years, and then I tried to make sense out of them. I tried to make them work together, increase their frequency, and decrease their friction. There has to be some system or tool that I can depend on to keep my mental health under control, one that doesn’t feel like a burden to use, which ultimately pushed me & some close friends to start working on Hyperspaces.
Up to this point, the premise was always: If we could easily document our lives, our mental health would get much better just by doing so. (Why? The work of a journal is the work of a therapist. They both help you look back, explore your memories, get in the arena with your emotions, and make sense out of them. Lots of a good therapist’s work is embedded in how they ask questions, not how they listen. Just by talking the events out, you’re already getting better.)
During this Oct 10 week, I got new insights – Every new life event is either: Positive, Negative, or Neutral. I found out that the above worked well for Positive & Neutral events, but what about events that we identify as negative or bad? It’s not easy to think about it, because it’s not easy to track or reflect upon a negative event. For example, I may want to have the perfect memory of my trip to Southeast Asia, but when I do have a car accident, do I want my iPhone to craft a story out of that?
How do I want to document or remember a bad incident?
I kept thinking about this question for two reasons:
1. My hypothesis for Hyperspaces as a mental health app wouldn’t have been complete without it. If I ignored it, it would’ve been the equivalent of me saying “Your mental health is only important when you’re happy, when everything is working well for you, and when you have nothing to worry about”. Which is implicitly false.
2. It is extremely hard to do anything when you’re at a low point in your life. Lots of times, being in a low mental state due to a bad life event paralyzes everything else. A statement I can definitely relate to.
Naturally, I found I’m left with two answers to the question:
1. Either ignore it, as if the incident never happened – which we don’t want
2. Or reflect upon it in form of LESSONS not EVENTS – which makes more sense
So this left me with the conclusion that whatever works best (with technology) is to imitate what a healthy brain is already organically doing (without technology), which is: Retain the good moments from a good life event, and retain the lessons from a bad life event – It seems so simple, but it’s such a revelation. We are made to forget for a reason, and technology should only reflect that, not overcome it. We may not want to remember everything after all, only the helpful (healthy) pieces.
So at least now I know that next time, whenever something bad happens, I know just what I need to do to avoid overwhelm, sadness, or even guilt.
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