Dr. Taco’s Notes

The fake diversity

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

There is a topic that has been on trend over the last couple of years: Diversity at work.

I have seen numerous posts and articles on the internet, where people talk about diversity in the work environment, but mostly they focus on gender diversity. Also, when companies refer to diversity, they measure this with numbers related to how many people work there based on gender. There are always some bunch of statistics presented around this, and it seems that just counting people based on the gender they choose to define themselves is enough to talk about diversity (and most of the times, they just split men and women).

There are also cases where they present some statistics related to the nationalities of people working there, meaning if they have one Mexican in the company it will automatically add one more country to their counter.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it is a good start that more and more people and companies have the awareness that there are not only men workers. However, this seems to me, like a way for companies (or any kind of organizations) to say “yes, look how diverse we are”, but they never consider other forms of diversity.

For me, diversity should also consider different ways of working, socializing, communicating, skills, and even ways of learning. It would be so cool, that in the same way we now have pronouns, we could choose how people can address us better. For example, we could also choose labels like “writing”, “no—video call”, or “video call” for people to recognize how to better communicate with us. (Apparently, there are some efforts around, but it’s not a common practice yet.)

There are many people who get anxious about video calls, and there are others who are more in the introverted spectrum and prefer written messages instead of the confrontation of calls.

I would appreciate knowing if my colleagues prefer to work more with another person, solo, or in a group (like mob programming, for example). Maybe even if they are the kind who likes to get constant feedback or more on the side of having more space.

It would be also super useful to know what kind of skills my colleagues have and want to share with the team. Maybe you’re a lot into aesthetics and design but your job position is more related to some abstract problem-solving, so most of the people you work with, will never notice your hidden talents.

Additionally to this, it would also be great to have a tag for “things you struggle with” or “things you would like to get support with”. In this way, I could show my colleagues not just what I’m good at and can support with, but what I’d like to have help with, for example “I’m good at creating visuals for projects, and need support with organizational topics”.

And let’s not even go into the topic of neurodiversity at work because I think it’s even more hidden and less considerate in the working environment. People never consider that maybe some of their colleagues aren’t so expressive, or sometimes they are too direct, or maybe they get panic and dissociate during some meeting, and just take them as weird or rude persons, which is sometimes the reason to even get bad feedback (or fired) from a job.

Finally, another unseen aspect of diversity is the language barrier. When working in international teams, there are always some difficulties that come from speaking different languages and communicating in a language that’s not your own. There is an entire cultural aspect to it, like the differences between how people communicate with more or less gestures or higher or lower tones (this is part of the high-context & low context cultures), there is also the aspect of sounding too direct or confrontational vs too friendly because the direct translation is to the foreign language is very different. And there is also the aspect of lack of words in the language you’re speaking (it often happens that you know the word in your own language, but not how to say it in a different one, causing a series of explanations to clarify what you mean). In general, I think the diversity of languages, and speaking one that’s not your own, gives you more understanding and empathy of the difficulties others may have when communicating things (even if there is always the person, who would not be understanding), and makes you learn more about other cultures indirectly.

I think, there are many ways of looking at diversity in a broader spectrum, beyond numbers that companies present to pretend they are doing “the best they can”. But sadly, I think we are still very far from this.

Cooking means freedom

Sat, 23 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Knowing how to cook makes you free.

Maybe I have an unpopular opinion, but I think that being able to cook your own food, anytime and using ingredients you have on hand, releases you from depending on others to fulfill something so substantial as eating.

Since I moved to Germany, I’ve met many people (from different places) who don’t cook at all, in many cases they never learned how to do it, but also many of them told me that they don’t want to learn. It has given me the impression that cooking is seen as an activity marked for subjugated women, and housewives. So, for men cooking is sometimes seen as something they aren’t meant to do, and for many women it is seen with the stigma that if they cook they may not feel emancipated enough.

In Mexico it’s something very common for women to learn to cook since very young age, and in many households it’s still seen as an obligation. However, over the years whenever I visited my family, I’ve seen this has also changed. It has become more normal that men start to cook very early in life and take on household chores with the same responsibility as women — a slow change but change nonetheless.

During the pandemic of 2020, I saw how many people I knew were struggling because all restaurants were closed, and they didn't know how to cook anything. Many were totally dependent on frozen food or eating raw vegetables and fruits only (not judging people who may actually pursue this diet form). During this period of time, with all the hardness and collective trauma we all got, I felt empowered, because I realized that I had at least one good post apocalyptic skill — cooking.

I feel that regardless of the society, cooking still has a big label of a domestic chore that enslaves and represses people. I think this is very unfortunate because cooking can be very beneficial for our psyche, motor skills, and mainly to become independent.

Cooking has shown to have positive benefits for our psyche and even cognitive development — hand work improves our memory, attention capabilities, and refined movements.

Additionally, cooking might foster the qualities that allow for the mitigation of psychosocial distress and promote well-being. Research has shown, that cooking is an evolutionary trait that helps us reduce our stress levels, and fosters many areas of our brain on a very subconscious level.

With all these benefits, some people still refuse to learn how to cook, I have heard arguments like “cooking is not my thing” or “cooking is so hard”. The thing is, and I know that from experience of my close friends, everyone can learn to cook (even if the person doesn’t have fun while doing it). You don’t need to be a fancy chef and cook super complex dishes but knowing how to cook some basic things, and knowing how to use basic cooking utensils can actually be a huge difference.

Viva la Revolución en la cocina!

A note on unfitting

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

This is out of our reach and it’s grown, this is getting to be drone, I’m a negative creep. Nirvana, 1989.

The feeling of not fitting has been with me for as long as I can remember, and I don’t mean (at least in this note) about not fitting within society's standards as a woman, not fitting as an immigrant, or not fitting within preferences or likings. Today, I’m talking about the unfitting sensation I get for how I feel and say things.

From very early in my life I noticed that I had difficulties when sharing my thoughts with others, I’d often experience rejection from them, and most of the time I was told that I was wrong. As a teenager, I can remember being told that my points of view were too negative, and people tended to disregard them as if they were less valid. All these situations, made me grow up thinking that my opinions, feelings, and ways of saying things were wrong and I should basically just hide them. This has permeated my behavior up to these days. What came later in my life was understanding that my way of thinking and seeing things was part of my neurodiverse brain. So, it’s not wrong, it’s just different.

I’ll illustrate this with an example: A good and close friend of mine comes and tells me all about this new job they got, how excited they are about this new place and how the people there are so great, and how “this one is different” from the former ones. My reaction would be not as excited as they expect it (imagine a person saying “congrats” in a monotonous tone), and immediately asking them to remain conservative about this job, probably by reminding them the resuts of their pasts choices. The reaction of my friend would be something like “Why can’t you be happy about it? Why do you immediately need to point out the negative?”. It may be even, that they tell me things like “just because you have experienced this or that, doesn’t mean it’s the same for me” or “the problem with you is that you never seem to see the good”.

The context in my head, when such a situation happens, is that my friend changed thier job with arguments like “people there don’t care about others” or “I can’t believe my manager did this to me, we were like family”, and this is mainly because they are very friendly and have the tendency to get too attached and close to people they work with, which in principle is great, except they get hurt very often.

My logic behind the skepticism comes (from my point of view) from a good-intentioned heart, worried that my friend may end up hurt again. It probably also comes from my anxious brain, trying to stay alert while facing life. Also, my capabilities to display excitement are different, I’m not a yelling jumpy type that will say things so loud, but this in no way means that I’m not feeling it.

Over the years I have learned to “show more enthusiasm”, at least to fit the standard of what others expect to see. I have also learned to moderate how I say things, to think how could I tell my friend that “employers are just employers”, and that rarely they would see you as a family, and that “they should be more careful when giving themselves out there” because people are often not as nice as they seem. But all this using the words that they are more open to accept and that they don’t refuse to hear arguing I’m being too negative about life.

At this point in my life, I have no idea how many times I have been judged as negative, pessimistic or even a hater, just because I put my feelings and thoughts out there as raw as they are. In the last years, I had the luck to learn that this is a personality trait of people with a neurodiverse brain, most of the time is seen as “being too honest” for some, but in my case is something called “being too realistic”.

The difference in world views between people with autistic traits and those without them has been studied, showing a tendency of autistic folks to be more realistic and, somewhat ironically, than their non-autistic counterparts.

Apparently, this idea of people: “When believing the world is just, the future appears to be more controllable if acting according to accepted standards”, is not something that is part of my brain. This very notion of not believing that there’s some form of “automatic justice” in the world, and that it doesn’t matter how good or just one behaves as a reflection of how good you get things in life, has made me loose friends. It has also made me entering unwanted arguments and discussions, but above all it made me stay in the quiet to avoid being hurt. And apparently, it has also made me a person who can’t just say “everything will be fine” or “this is wonderful” without thinking what comes next?. I’ll always be the person who thinks of having plans A to Z for all possible scenarios.

Having the knowledge of why I say things the way I do, or why I feel this need to always think on “the negative side”, is comforting and alleviates my guilt. However, it certainly doesn’t make it better to not feel rejected (even from my very close people), and it also doesn’t change the fact that I still need to hide what I want to say, and always choose the option to stay quiet but not isolated.

My cooking story

Mon, 11 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I have a fair amount of memories of my childhood (some more blurry than others), but there’s one that I have saved especially in my black heart (also it’s probably the oldest memory of all):

My grandma standing in the kitchen stirring something in a pan and me standing next to her.

I have many flashback memories of her and me in the kitchen, teaching me how to make gorditas with masa, clean corn for pozole, tasting food for saltiness or spiciness, preparing dough to bake, eating super spicy food together (yes, it was normal for small children in Mexico to eat spicy food), or just waiting for something on the stove to be cooked. My first 10 years of life were full of memories of me and my abuelita.

I owe her probably not just all the mitochondrial DNA that came with my mom, but also the joy of cooking. She was born during the Revolutionary War in Mexico, so she had a very strict “housewive” oriented education, where learning how to run a house was the most important. In spite of that, she always had a very progressive mentality, from her I got my spirit of always wanting more. She infused me with the love for cooking, not as a way of a woman’s obligation, but as a way of showing your appreciation, of caring for someone, and even as a way of dealing with emotions.

I can still remember her patiently hearing all kinds of insane things I would be saying while stirring a pot that smelled delicious. I think that with this experience, she also showed me a way of showing and channeling my emotions. No matter how confusing my brain can be about how I feel when cooking I’ll find a way to understand it. It’ll give me the peace of mind, and compassion that I need.

She would always cook something special for me or anyone in my family when in need. If I had a difficult day, she would cook me a nice piece of bread to make me feel better. If my mom would be busy and stressed at work, she would come home to a warm and tasty plate of food from my grandma. In this way, I grew up with the — very subconscious — idea that cooking for someone is loving someone. For me, there’s no greater act of showing love, than when cooking something for someone.

Cooking is caring, Cooking is loving

This all meant, that before I even started kindergarten I already had good training with household tasks in the kitchen thanks to my abuelita (I was a model kid in the school because I had very good motor skills).

After she left this world, she left me with the most beautiful gifts: the joy of spending hours in the kitchen cooking something and the good practice of patience (you know, when pozole takes the whole day to get completely cooked, it becomes a trait). Back then, I knew only the most basic things (which apparently are a high achievement for a 10-year-old), but I wanted to learn more and I also had a palate that knew how to differentiate different kinds of chiles. My curiosity and my (already) scientific spirit also led me to keep exploring and learning new things. I approached cooking — and still do — as a lab experiment, where you measure things (though sometimes it looks more like witchcraft, and later I have absolutely no idea what I did) and try recipes or techniques, sometimes the results are great, some others are very sad, but you always get some learning from it.

In Mexico, cooking is a social activity, in a family reunion, the place to be is the kitchen. There is where all gossip and stories are told, where hugs and tears are shared, and where a warm taquito de sal would give relief to a hungry belly (or a broken heart) while the food is getting ready. ****

After coming to Berlin, one of the things I missed the most about Mexico was the food (because it’s ducking awesome there!), especially the one made by my maker — the original señora Margarita. Entering home after a long day of work, getting the smell of the warm food on the stove, and then having dinner on a table while gossiping about everything with my mom, it’s one of the greatest gifts life has given to me. Her food has a special taste — not just because it’s good, I’d dare to say that it has the taste of legacy and knowledge, which I can only aspire to achieve one day.

Cooking has become a staple family activity for me in Berlin, so, in this rushed and stressful life, whenever I'm cooking something new, I will ask my mom for her advice, or I'll tell her what I cook to get her feedback.

Every time I taste something I’m cooking, I wonder whether my grandma would feel proud of her legacy in the kitchen. Luckily, I still have my mom to double-check when she’s around.

The Ponzi-like job

Mon, 11 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

A Ponzi scheme is a form of fraud that lures people into putting money into a business or company with the promise of getting great profit with low risk, then will use the money from new investors to pay previous investors.

For a Ponzi scheme to work, there should be a person with highly convincing strategies and a very charming or at least reassuring personality in order to make others feel trust and engage with the investment idea.

Where am I going with this? Well, it’s story time!

A friend of mine, who’s very talented and whom we will call Elaine, was contacted by an acquaintance of hers a few months ago (whom we will call George). George was not her friend or someone very close, but also she had no reason to doubt him. George contacted Elaine telling her that since she was an expert in the computer intelligence field, she would be the perfect candidate to join a new company George and another person (who we will call Kramer) were starting. George told her that now they didn’t have a lot of money since it was a very new idea and a very new company, but Elaine would have the chance to join them from the beginning and have all these great benefits.

Elaine is as I said, a very smart and talented person, but also she doesn’t distrust people enough in my opinion. So, Elaine met Kramer and George together, still a bit skeptical of things, but when meeting Kramer in person, Elaine got totally hooked. Kramer turned out to be a totally reassuring and even charming person and spoke a lot about why they wanted to do this project and how this could change the lives of so many people. When I spoke to Elaine, she was totally excited, and even I felt excited about her, because it seemed she had found a project she really liked in a place with an actual mission and all.

Elaine was a full-time employee in another company when meeting George and Kramer for the project, Kramer made a great point that Elaine should not quit her job yet, since they were in the stage where they needed to get funding first. However, Elaine slowly started to take more responsibilities within the company, and brought her ideas and expertise to the project, without asking anything in return since both Kramer and George claimed there was no money to pay anyone.

You should be thinking, at this point in the story, nothing seems really wrong, but here’s where the Ponzi-like scheme starts.

Shortly after Elaine was involved in all of this, and also after Kramer had already developed a more personal exchange with her through meetings, calls or even eating dinner together; George got into a fight with Kramer and decided to leave the company (George also had a full-time job somewhere else, so she was only leaving this project that involved Kramer). From this situation, Elaine got some private messages from George, warning her that Kramer was not a good person (let’s say) and that he had abused the trust of George workwise. Elaine, after also seeing that George wasn’t the most stable person, and helped by the relationship she had already with Kramer, decided to give him the benefit of the doubt, besides, Kramer didn’t seem to be such a bad person (he was very friendly).

Apparently, a couple of weeks after that, Kramer got a letter from George’s lawyer, asking to get paid for the work he had done during the last months. He told Elaine, that this was unfair and that George was only doing this to take revenge and destroy the company, especially now that he knew there wasn’t any money, how would Kramer pay for the lawyer to help him save the company? Kramer played a very good victim in this part. Well, my good friend, with the kindness of her heart offered to loan Kramer some money to pay for the lawyer fees and save the company, after all, Kramer made it seem until now, that a part of the company belongs (or will belong) to Elaine.

During that time, whenever I spoke to Elaine, she was very convinced of the projects, and investing herself in them, she was overworking (she was working 12 hours per day combined with her full-time job), even when sick or on holidays. Yet, whenever I asked about the rights she had in the company, she wouldn’t be sure, she would tell me that Kramer was a very difficult person to talk with, and would always excuse him by saying things like “he doesn't mean to be like that, he has suffered so much” or “it’s a trauma response to his past”. Kramer would always take a confrontational and even defensive position, whenever Elaine would talk about her role in the company and even the rights she would get.

Meanwhile, my friend would be attending all sorts of meetings, writing the project’s specs, developing the actual products, and even seeking funding with investors, without having anything in writing, but solely the word of Kramer as a promise.

This went on for like 3-4 months until Elaine got too tired of this. During this time she was demanded to pay for the lawyer that Kramer used to defend himself from George’s issue stating this money would be returned to her in the form of company shares (Elaine was meant to become a co-founder of the company supposedly); she was put into pressure to deliver work when Kramer would say it, and without getting anything in return.

One day, Elaine called me and she was on the border of a breakdown, she was struggling so much with her health, she would be having constant panic attacks and feeling super stressed (and I’m an expert on these kinds of ailments). When I asked about how things with Kramer were going, she broke into tears and told me that now every time she would bring up the topic of putting things in writing, he would avoid it, and instead, he would have an aggressive attitude towards her. She said that Kramer was even refusing to recognize her contributions, and making “gymnastics” when doing the maths of the value of her work.

The result of this story: Elaine got a “termination letter” for a contract that she never had, with threatening messages, stating that she had caused insanely pricey damages to the company by withdrawing herself, and removing the work she did for free, and that she could even get sued by that, how she had broke some form of NDA, and how all the work she did for free was supposedly company’s property (because we apparently still live in slavery times). Also, she never got the money she loaned to Kramer, since he claimed that he would only pay her when the company secured something like 10 times the debt (right! because that’s how debts work, or?).

I could only recommend Elaine to consult with a lawyer and wish that at least she could recover the money she paid to him. But it all made me think, that maybe now Kramer will need to find a new person, who can give him some money in order to pay what he owes to Elaine. Hence, bringing someone to take money from and pay the former, until the new person also goes and he needs someone else to pay, creating a cycle. This sounds totally to a Ponzi-like scheme.

The moral of the story: never give money to anyone, who hasn’t put in writing the terms and conditions, and never never never work for free.

Understanding the anxious brain Vol. 1

Tue, 05 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Now I'm not looking for absolution, forgiveness for the things I do, but before you come to any conclusions, try walking in my shoes. Depeche Mode, 1998.

I decided to write something (I think it will be several posts) about how an anxious brain works and can behave, inspired by the fact that understanding my own brain helped me a lot in the past to release guilt, and actually take advantage of my “new skills”. I also hope, that someone in my friends or family circle (or in the friends or family circle from someone else with an anxious brain) could at some point read this, and help them understand a bit, that people like me don’t behave the way they do because we want to. It’s more we don’t have a choice and sometimes we feel a lot of shame and guilt because we’re not fitting within the behavioral standards of society.

Very simplified, Anxiety can be seen as a series of events that are triggered in any person when facing something unknown, a threat, or any kind of trouble. It starts in a part of the brain called the Amygdala (it belongs to something called the parasympathetic), which in turn will unchain the production of several hormones (neurotransmitters) like cortisol and adrenaline. By doing this, our body becomes capable of responding to this threat we’re facing. This process is also referred to as the fight-flight-freeze mechanism. Here our pupils dilate, our heart pumps blood faster, our senses become more alert, and our muscles tense in the expectation of the next step.

Anxiety is in itself not a negative thing to have, it actually has made us survive over the years. To illustrate this, let’s take the example of a cavewoman (better said, a prehistoric woman) who we will call Eva. Imagine Eva going on her day to collect fruits and herbs to eat in the woods, she may have with herself a stick to help with the walk and maybe even to defend herself from animals. In this scene, Eva is bending under a bush, trying to collect some berries she just found; now she hears the rustle of branches nearby. In a matter of milliseconds, she needs to proceed to run away, take the stick to defend herself, or do nothing, because this is a potential threat that could be another person, an animal, or just the wind. This is how anxiety works.

Maybe in our modern era, we are not out there in the wild with a stick collecting berries (or maybe just during holidays), but we are faced with things, that can potentially be dangerous, all the time, and our brain responds to this even without us noticing it. Our brain regulates how strong the response is by assessing how dangerous the threat can be, and automatically go back to normal once the threat is gone.

For a person with an anxious brain, this kind of response happens all the time and very strongly regardless of how big the threat is. Basically, an anxious brain has trouble regulating how much of the stress response to have, and it can’t differentiate if one is facing a lion or just losing a sock at home.

An additional component, that people with high levels of anxiety have is the emotional one. An anxious brain will get triggered by basically unexpected things and will be difficult to go out of the anxiety spiraling, but for sure the ones that have a personal or emotional side will lead to a stronger response and the inability to go out of the spiraling. Let me give another example to illustrate this: if I hear a person yelling random things in the street, this would trigger my anxiety, and I would probably have a hard time keeping it at bay, but I’d certainly feel okay after a couple of hours. However, if during a conversation with someone I know, the other person suddenly yells at me for 2 seconds, I’d have an anxiety attack, I’d not be able to respond to this person because I’d feel blocked, I’d probably have my heart beating in my ears, I’d have trouble breathing, and even after I’d go away from this person, my brain will keep spiraling thinking why that happened, or why this person said this or that. Perhaps, even if I caused it, I’ll easily spend one full day trying to recover from this situation and it would block me from doing other things.

Maybe, this already sounds like anyone would feel anxious, nervous, or jumpy if facing this situation, which is true, the difference with an anxious person would be the strength of the body response and thus the duration of the anxiety attack. This means everyone can feel anxiety at any given time, but an anxiety disorder (or an anxious brain) is when this happens all the time (yes, ALL THE TIME). It’s very different to experience anxiety when a certain thing occurs than living with anxiety all the time.

A person can get diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), some form of Phobia, Anxiety as a trauma response, or as a side symptom from other conditions (i.e. being on the spectrum). In any case, it is important to consider that a person who has lived with an anxiety condition for a long time (meaning more than a couple of weeks or months) and has a sustained state of anxiety, has no control over their responses. The chemistry of the brain is different but also the changes in the brain reach a structural level. In simpler words, people with anxious brains have differences in the brain wiring that make them behave differently.

This is especially important to remark in order to remove the guilt and shaming that comes from it. I’ll give another example to understand this: imagine you are going to the cinema, as many other times in the past, to watch some comedy movie that you have expected for a long time, and you’re going with your close group of friends. Then, when you’re finally sitting in the movie theater, the advertisements start (these ones, that come always before the actual movie starts, where the candy shop or some other movie trailers are displayed), and out of nowhere you start to have difficulties to breathe, you’re all sweaty, get all dizzy and feel as if your brain suddenly is not in your head anymore. You start to feel fear of something, but you’re not even sure of why. So, all you want to do is go out of the place before you pass out, and the worse is that you don’t even understand why. This, my friends, is a super senior anxious brain.

Could you imagine the shame a person feels, because the candy advertisement put you into full anxiety attack mode? Could you imagine, that you need to explain to your friends what happened to you? And maybe even not stay at the cinema, probably some of your friends may also want to make sure you’re okay, so they will also leave the movies to be with you, then you will feel guilty that they couldn’t enjoy the movie due to your situation. Imagine even, they’d ask you what’s wrong, and you can’t explain it. Well, this kind of situation happens regularly in the life of an anxious person (I can say it has happened to me).

For people who haven’t experienced this level of anxiety, it can be difficult to understand not just why this thing happens, but also why the anxious person can’t just chill. As an anxious person, you may hear things like “just do some breathing and you will feel better”, or “try to keep the bad thoughts away”, or “it’s all in your head” … While the advice may have the best of intentions, unfortunately, none of this may work (maybe if the response wasn’t so strong it could work). When you are experiencing anxiety like this, even if you start to think logically and try to control your breathing, your brain is already on the roll, it’s already hooked on this and will not stop until the cycle is complete. The worst is, that after the attack has passed, the person will feel a “hangover”, the amount of energy that is drained during an anxiety attack is insane, and your body will stay prone to enter the cycle again (if you have ever vomited, it’s like the feeling you have afterward that you can vomit again and again non-stop).

All I wrote here, is just very general situations of how an anxious brain may react, there is so much more to it: distraught at work, memory complications, a lack of concentration, eternal overwhelming feelings, fatigue, difficulty with relationships, loneliness, the sadness feelings — the list is too big to put it all here.

I can only conclude this post by asking for more kindness toward the people around you. We all have difficulties, but we don’t really know how bad someone can be. And if you know someone who lives with anxiety, be more patient, they are trying their best.

My immigration story

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

México lindo y querido, si muero lejos de ti, que digan que estoy dormido y que me traigan a ti. Chucho Monge, 1945.

I think the immigrant life isn’t for everyone, yet I believe everyone who experiences it mutates into someone else, into someone completely different. More than eight years ago, I decided to move out from my Guadalajara, Mexico to Berlin, Germany. It was a ducking difficult decision. I wanted to study for a Ph.D. in Germany to pursue my dreams in academia (more of that in a different post). However, I knew already, that leaving Mexico wouldn’t be just for a few years until I finish it. I knew it would be a many-years-long (possibly the rest of my life) journey.

Before leaving Guadalajara, I tried to meet everyone in my family and friends circle, I went to eat in all my favorite places and was mentally preparing for it. Yet, it didn’t really prepare me for what it was like arriving in a new country, with a totally new language and without knowing anyone.

I arrived at the, now closed, Tegel airport in Berlin on October 5th, 2015, on a cold rainy morning via a Cancún-Dusseldorf flight. I didn’t have mobile internet and contrary to what I was expecting, there was no free Wi-Fi anywhere. After a rough encounter with the German culture when trying to buy a train ticket and with missing luggage, I made it safely to the apartment I was being borrowed as a student near Wittenbergplatz. All information I had, was written in some papers I printed before departing Guadalajara. Wet, hungry, internetless, I cried most of my first night in Berlin in an empty room, with only my laptop and a couple of clothes I had in my carry-on.

Over the months and thanks to the people at the German school I was attending, I found many things that helped me to survive. The cultural shock, the lifestyle, and the weather were very difficult things to adapt to (and I’m not sure whether I even adapted or just got used to after these years), but I think the hardest impact was on my expectations. Before coming to live here, I had all these expectations of how life, people, environment, and all here would be, but they were all based either on other people's stories (who actually lived in Berlin before me) or on the knowledge of Germany on the other side of the Atlantic that is seen on TV, movies and so on.

I had so many expectations that in Germany everything would work more efficiently, the cities would be cleaner, the people would be more respectful, the healthcare would have higher quality, the cities would be safer, and the services would be better. Some things are better than in Guadalajara (and I’ll refer only to my comparison between Berlin and Guadalajara), in general it is much safer to walk the streets alone as a woman even during late hours of the night, but considering this is the capital of Germany, and not just a big city in Mexico, I have experienced quite a lot of harassment, xenophobia and dangerous situations while leaving here. Berlin is by far not a clean city, it is much greener than Guadalajara for sure, but streets and public spaces are not an example of pulchritude. Regarding the services, Germany is known for its crappy Customer Service - and it is a thing - where it is impossible sometimes to even reach a person to present your difficulty, and when you finally do it, probably they will blame everything on you, meaning you need to pay for anything you need. In Guadalajara, we have the good old American customer service, where the client is always right, and if you don’t like the service of a company, you have all the rights to get some compensation for the bad service or change without problems to another provider (it doesn’t always go as smooth as it should, but generally it works). On the last point, when talking of efficiency and healthcare, well, for the amount of taxes a contributor pays here, one would expect to get responses and appointments faster - at least - but the bureaucracy and an overload system make the exception that something works on time here.

I don't think anything actually prepared me for what I have experienced here these years, and I think is mainly because the story of each immigrant is different, we all come here for different reasons, at different stages of our lives, with different circumstances and different dreams. When speaking to friends of mine about their own journeys and experiences here, we all have so many different things and feelings about it, for some people, this has become their new home country, and they feel happy to be here all the time, while for some others being here is not what they expected and they feel unhappy about their lives here.

There are also all the painful stories about abuse, violence, and loss that I have heard or read over the years, how many emigrated for love, to start a family here, and the love of their lives became a living nightmare.

In addition to the struggle of adaptation and finding a new support circle here, I think the pain caused by the loss of what I left behind has been the hardest to overcome. While things were difficult in Guadalajara (and sadly, they still are due to crime and violence), being away from my family, my lifetime friends, the culture I know, the food I grew with, and even the year-round sunny weather, caused pain in me. I can’t avoid to miss these things.

Yet, whenever I visit Guadalajara, I get the feeling that I don’t belong there anymore. My family and friends continued with their lives (as expected) and I’m so disconnected from what is happening with them there, the culture I know, now also feels strange to me sometimes, and in general, my lifestyle and mindset don’t feel adequate for Guadalajara anymore. This has given me the feeling that I don’t belong there anymore, but I also don’t belong in Berlin either. Here, I’m too exotic, too different, and sometimes even too talkative to fit in.

All this has always made me consider if I should go back to Guadalajara, or even move somewhere else (but more on that in a different post). However, I do have one thing clear now, it doesn’t matter where I go or stay, I need to accept that being an immigrant, has changed me for good, and transformed me into someone different over these last years. Sometimes it was very painful, but in general, it’s very rewarding to be this resilient and badass, because it has shown me what I’m made of.

Henlo world

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Hola mortals!

What is love?

Sun, 27 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

“What is love? Baby don't hurt, don’t hurt me, no more”, Haddaway, 1993.

Somehow, many of us grow up with the idea that love is supposed to hurt. For people in my generation, Disney set up a quite dramatic stereotype, where women are helpless princesses incapable of defending themselves on their own and need to be always rescued by a prince charming. These stories also set a standard that along the path of falling in love there should be suffering, constant gaslighting, and rejection; and that basically men and women need to suffer when loving someone. Basically, they represented only relationships between people with anxious and avoidant attachment styles. The problem with this is that many of us grew up thinking that this is how romantic (and even non-romantic) relationships are supposed to be.

If we also analyze the lyrics of songs of the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, and beyond, many are about how love hurts, and how one of the persons in the couple should give it all to the point of losing themselves in the relationship. Let’s not even think about the movies of the same decades (even if I enjoy watching the films around the 80s because of the aesthetics), where someone in the couple (typically the man) will cheat on the partner, abuse them, be aggressive towards them, gaslight them, but after some grand gesture, everything would be forgiven and forgotten.

I also have spoken to friends and people around about how they saw the relations of their parents (I include here also one of my life-givers), apparently, no matter which country they were in, relationships were based (more or less) on the same premise: women needed to be submissive to the husbands and give it all on behalf of the partner and children. At the same time, men were meant to provide and be the decision-makers at home.

For Mexican couples (I hope not to these days still) it was very common to have a macho husband, with a wife, a side lover, many children inside and outside the marriage, and a wife who was meant to stand all that. There is even a saying that older people use for this, they would say to an unhappy wife “Es tu cruz” (translates to “He’s your cross”), making reference to the biblical scene of Christ carrying a cross on his back for the good of mankind, such a martyr way of living.

In Germany, over the last 20 years, the divorce rate has an average of approximately 40%, and it’s similar for developed countries around the world. There are many reasons to speculate why, among which could be that in developed countries the education is higher and people feel secure enough to take the step into divorce, but I’m more of the opinion that in modern society, we live under so much stress and in a rush all the time, that our relationships are a reflection of this.

In this statistic (which I take with a pinch of salt), authors claim that 70% of couples will break up within the first year of dating, this number, although, high is likely to be close to reality. Speaking only from my experience, from friends, acquaintances, and after reading posts of people on the internet, most of the couples break up just after a few months of dating, and many who stay longer struggle so much in the relationship, which often leads to break up just at a later stage.

I have only personal speculations and ideas of why this kind of phenomenon is happening. Going back to the idea of a relationship that’s Disney-like, maybe this is what has been hurting us and putting us in the place of pursuing the perfect relationship, even if it’s completely subconscious. At least, I know that for the most part of my youth, I had a very twisted idea of how relationships were supposed to be (and it was totally subconscious), it wasn’t just because of the society I grew up in, it was what TV and movies were showing, what my friends would be experiencing, the thing is that I wasn’t even aware that there was a kind of relationship I was repeating. It wasn't until my 30s that I changed my ideals, I started to go deeper on understanding myself, my values, my attachment type (strongly recommend reading the book), what I want from life, how I see life, and what is important to me, and then I started to look differently at couples. The funny thing, growing up I felt these kinds of “butterflies on the stomach” when meeting someone new, but after understanding many things, I realized that those physical feelings were actually a survival mechanism of my body to prevent me from something odd, so, a piece of advice to those who are in “anxious mode” regularly: if your gut gets nervous on the relationship, listen to it!

I can only reflect on how different I feel in my current relationship: it’s not that I never felt insecure, but it was that when I came forward to my partner about it he understood it and reassured me instead of denying it or making trouble out of it. We never avoided having difficult conversations since the beginning, instead, we always approached them with a curious ear from both sides, there was never any kind of “games” of who wrote first or more, we both reached each other as much as we wanted, respecting the limits of the other; and I think one of the most valuable things we had is our “agile” approach. We have a retro every week (no skipping) where we sit with a cup of coffee, tea, or whatever drink, ideally, we go somewhere to distract ourselves but we also do it sometimes at home, where we dedicate about an hour just to talk of how do we felt during the past week, if something upset us or made us happy, if there was something stressing us, or basically anything that is related to our inner selves and it’s not part of the daily household chores let’s say. Over time, this has proven to help us keep a space for regular communication, which in long-term relationships is given for granted but rarely respected; it has also helped us to not suppress feelings or resentments along the way since there is always some special time where we can talk about them.

Photo: Communication tube from movie ASSA

Perhaps, another thing that changed for me is how I approach and allow to be approached when having differences. I call it the “no drama, anxious llama” approach. When a conflict arises, we let it cool down, and we have a calm convo about it afterward, without thinking the other person is trying to hurt the other or doing it on purpose. But I can only say, that this has worked because my partner is also a calm and quiet kind of person, that appreciates the opportunity just to sit and talk. However, in the past, when someone started to lose it, yelling and taking the opportunity to create some drama, it became a red flag for me and a great opportunity to say goodbye.

There is something that has also been helpful over the years, when getting in the loop of the toxic behavior, nothing works better than having a second pair of eyes seeing it and giving an outside honest opinion; sometimes, it has been a good friend of mine, but oftentimes it has been my therapist. The hardest here is to learn to NEVER IGNORE THE RED FLAGS that arise when dating someone, which is a completely different area of self-development. Listening to your inner self is a thing that becomes normal when you’re healing it over time because you learn to trust yourself.

In spite of all the difficulties, we humans keep pursuing love, we put ourselves out there even after our heart has been broken, even after we felt consistent pain within a relationship (sometimes even trauma); we are nothing but social living beings that have a need to feel companionship, caring and be part of something. Science has also supported the idea of having love in our lives as part of something beneficial (I suggest looking out there for more research on the topic, there is a lot), but I can only imagine (also have experienced myself) that the benefits of an improved immune system, less stress and even better sleep come only when we are in a healthy and happy relationship. This means that seeking our soulmate, whatever form it has (couple, friend, pet, etc.) definitely worth the rocky road.

Do people hide behind clothes?

Fri, 25 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Some evenings ago, my partner and I were on the sofa watching the show “Queer Eye” (as usual after a work day), and there was this episode about a woman in Texas in her 60s, who was dressing very provocatively and what one could say very teenagy (very short skirts and shorts, deep cleavage, color and pattern explosion, and she also had the stereotypical long fake-blond hairstyle since forever). Along the show, they explore why is she dressing this way, whether it’s actually who she is now, and why she refuses to change. The result was a very low image of herself and thinking that by staying in the outfits of her 20s, she would be 20 forever.

Removing the “something more adequate for your age” line, the episode made me think about how we as humans hide behind (inside) our clothes, either for a certain event, activity or even just to avoid looks and comments. From this woman in the episode, I came to think that maybe it’s this scenario where you grow up, dress as others around you to fit in, and then forget to find yourself. Because you can get older and still have the same style as when you’re 20, but it evolves along your life. I don’t mean that the look should depend on your age, but on where you live, what you do every day, the weather, and even health conditions.

Let me give you an example: I always liked Converse shoes, but when I was a teenager, I couldn’t afford to have more than one pair every few years, so when I started to make more money, I got several pairs in different colors, and I would wear them regularly until a couple of years ago. Now, I still like them, but due to an orthopedic condition, I can’t wear them as often as I’d like (even adapted with appropriate inlays), so I had to look for alternatives that I like, that have the same conversy vibe, but are suitable for me and my circumstances. It would be a mistake on my side to keep wearing them, in spite of this, mainly because my feet and back would hate me, but above all, because I’m conscious that they aren’t for me anymore.

I have seen in people I know, these phenomena of “refusing to change”, “wearing gigantic/diminute clothing” and also “wearing all the colors of the rainbow” — it’s something that doesn’t recognize age or nationality, but I can say I have seen them more often here in Berlin (I’m not sure why, and this is just my biased view of course). I think that this is probably a reflection of hiding in clothing, like if wearing a mask to cover our identity, we cover who we are with clothes. I don’t want to look older, so I’ll wear the same kind of clothes as a teenager; I don’t like the shape of my body, so I’ll wear an oversized t-shirt to conceal the curves; I want to feel I’m going against the rules, so I’ll wear clothes in insanely bright colors that don’t match. These are all merely speculations of course.

But thinking of this, brought me to wonder if there would be a connection between our inner self, our emotions, our family and people around us, and even the community or society where we live, after all, we are very complex living beings and it’s not possible to reduce our behaviors to simple assumptions.

Some research has been made around the topic of how our emotions are altered by the clothes we wear, it is apparently a bi-directional relation, where if our clothes are “sad” we would transfer this to ourselves, in the same way if we feel “excited”, we would have a clothing choice that suits this. However, how “sad” or “excited” reflects on each of us, is as different as a snowflake.

On the other hand, there has been research also on how in the pursuit of belonging, we follow trends, styles, and looks from others (we have the Instagram generation here); and this increases the pressure when looking different or oddly while walking on the street.

I come from a culture where dressing is important, used as a means of showing status and money, as a way of showing belonging and identity, and even as a way of unity and standards. I grew up in a family of low financial resources (let’s not be so formal, poor family), yet I remember my mom would always bring our attention to look clean and neat, with matching colors, and what was her concept of “decent”. This impacted how I dressed then and even how I do it now.

I have now a lot of thoughts and not many conclusions about this, I guess this calls for more observation and reading. This means I’ll continue observing random people on the street and imagining why they decided to wear this or that, and probably making up some stories in my head.

My special recipe for a breakdown

Wed, 23 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I'm a shooting star leaping through the sky like a tiger, defying the laws of gravity, I'm a racing car passing by like Lady Godiva, I'm gonna go, go, go, there's no stopping me. Queen, 1979

Have you ever wondered what brings a person to the breaking point? I used to believe (because I heard it in the past) that to know the limits of a person you need to test them. Now I believe that’s horseshit, and you can know your limits without bringing you to the extreme of almost dying.

I always had an anxious personality, I’ve been what people know as an overthinker, a person who tends to think everything more than just twice, one who tries to find out why this or that happened, or why some other person said or did something. These characteristics have been with me for as long as I can remember. As a child in school, I was an overachiever who always had plans A, B, C, and escapes. This all was okay, and even a strength I used when going through my studies. However, it got to the point where it became unmanageable and completely broke me when I was 28. And here are some of the reasons why.

A bit of life context: I started to have a formal job (meaning one with defined hours, employer, defined salary, and all that) when I was 15 years old because life is expensive and I didn’t come from a family with financial security. It was a part-time job in a mechanical workshop, where I took care of inventory and warehousing control, and at some point, I was a mechanic apprentice due to my high school studies (I got a double high school degree with a technical career as a mechanic). Since then, I have always had a job, which means that at this point around 60% of my lifetime I have been an employee. I guess, this also comes with the feeling I got from having a job — the freedom and empowerment I got from a young age.

After high school, I jumped directly to a college to get a Bachelor’s degree, then a Master’s degree, then a PhD degree, then just work and more work. This also means, that I always had a side job to pay for my studies or at least to have some additional income to support myself and my family.

To expand on this, let me describe how the Margarita of 13 (given or taken) years ago was regarding her work. I was a fresh graduate Bachelor’s in Engineering, full of ideals, and wanted to be someone in life, I was used to having a full-time job while studying in college and being an A+ student and worker, meaning I was used to working or doing something work-related for about 12 hours per day. I already knew I wanted to keep studying and become a researcher, so making a Master’s was my next immediate step. I didn’t want to lose time between studies, because I was scared that if I didn’t continue one after the other, something would come in the middle and I’ll not be able to do it. My life became, during the Master’s, basically getting up at 5:00 in the morning, going to the University, starting working on my research project, having a short pause for lunch, then working some more, then going and teaching some lessons in the afternoon (yeah, I was also a part-time professor while studying), then coming back to my cubicle and working some more until 7 pm, leaving work, going home, eating dinner, reviewing students’ homework and exams from students until midnight, then sleeping. I repeated this pattern Monday to Friday and half a day on Saturdays; and Sundays I was too tired and destroyed, so I’d have only energy for cleaning my home, doing laundry, groceries, and sleeping some additional hours. There was never time for parties, or holidays, rarely for friends or family, and even during Christmas time, I’d be working on something. Additionally, I had the idea in my mind that if I was not working on something, then I was wasting my time, meaning I didn’t have hobbies or many distractions.

So far, this image of me sounds bad, but not the worst, at least my mother always knew where I was, and in the eyes of people around me, I was successful, I had studied and I was a responsible adult making money. This kind of life went on, and on, even when I completed my degree, I moved to teach at several Universities, and that meant I was driving all over the city all day six days per week, with classes between 7 am and 9 pm. This life rhythm continued in a similar way just with different actors and job titles until the middle of 2015 when I moved to Germany to do a PhD, at this point I was 26 years old.

If you ask my family and friends how they saw me back then, they will say “busy” or “sleepy”, but never happy or even calm. My work was my life, and I was giving all I had to it. I thought I was following my dreams, which in principle was not false and not entirely bad. But over the years, this situation made me very vulnerable, and even damaged the image I had of myself, all of my worth was “Which work was I doing”. I felt guilty about the time I’d spent with my friends or my family, I was in a trap of having an unhealthy (super toxic) love relationship, I never had holidays, and if I would, then half of the time I would be working. I got a severe sleeping disorder, my eating habits were awful, and I was a very unhappy person.

After I moved to Berlin, I continued with a similar lifestyle, where even if I was doing a language course (and I should have taken time to just explore the city, and make friends), I would be working on something part-time related to research. My routine was very similar, I’d be going to University, spending 12 hours there, and coming to my apartment to eat dinner, and continue working or doing something work-related until after midnight.

The trick here is that I think many of us are victims of this: we think “it’s not work” because we’re not doing it during working hours or precisely for something we do at the moment at work. Let me put a fictional example: Let’s say I was working on an algorithm to detect lines on the road, the problem and methods were defined, but when I would be home, I’d be reading about the history of programming languages. This looks unrelated, but what if from reading this I’d get an idea of learning a new programming language that’s better for hardware implementations, and it would help me to improve what I’m doing or probably give me a new idea. Anyway, all of this is work, you don’t allow your brain to wind down, and get enough rest. The consequences of not prioritizing and respecting wind-down time on your health can be very serious (look here and here).

Anyway, back to the story. It was around 2017 when I started to notice the first symptoms of breakage, I was super stressed and nervous all the time, I was sleeping in pauses over the night and very little, I always had stomach events, I had difficulties focusing and remembering things, I felt tired all the time. It also came with hair loss and increased appetite. Contrary to what I’d expected, I didn’t feel more sad or emotional, it was the opposite of that, I was numb to my emotions, and I didn’t even have time to think of my emotional state. I have never been a confrontational person, so I was not arguing or fighting either. Things just went worse for another three years (more or less), and I kept surviving it, mainly because I needed to complete my degree in a defined time (otherwise I’d not have the financial resources to do it), I had the pressure of a visa, the thesis. Even after I completed my degree, I immediately jumped to have a research job at a University, as I said I was used to the workload, and things just grew like a snowball without stopping.

Moved by the constant anxiety attacks, I started therapy somewhere around 2019, it slowly started to make me aware of the totality of my status. It was a long road of trying to put me out of the hole of pain where I was (especially while finishing my degree and keeping a full-time job afterward).

Along with the therapy, I read a lot of research on the effect of stress and anxiety on the brain, I also learned to remove the guilt of asking for help and stopping once in a while.

There are many things I learned from this journey; however, the most important is: to respect my own limits.

The tough journey of not being defined by my work

Wed, 23 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I owe the idea of this post to my therapist (Oh yeah! I’m far away from the therapy taboo, and I keep trying to heal my inner child and outer grownup), it has made me have some days of introspection and enlightened me on how I see myself and my work now.

For the context, I was used to an environment of working 12+ hours per day in a University/Academia setup (for the full story check my post “My special recipe for a breakdown”), with all kinds of abusive and toxic behaviors.

Many of this these behaviors were responses to the people I was working with, the environment of the Academia, the society's expectations, the pressure of my peers and my bosses, but also the pressure I’d put on myself to put all these labels on me: “Teacher”, “Researcher”, “Profesor”, “Engineer”, “Manager”, “XYZ Scientist”, “Doctor”.

At the end of 2020, being in pandemic mode, all the time home alone, and with very little contact with people outside, I went deep into depression after I got the notice that my contract at the university will be finished and my visa (and means to stay in Germany) would be gone. My dreams of being a professor or a full-time researcher in a University were also gone at that point, but I needed to find a job immediately, and of course, I started the (frenetical) search. The problem… I didn’t know what I wanted to do then. My experience and skills matched many jobs, but not entirely, I didn’t have a long list of various job titles (”Super Senior Monkey Master”, or “Staff Master Manager” to name a few) in my CV, and I was genuinely not sure what did I want to do, for so many years I was pursuing the same dream, and at that point, nothing made sense anymore. Additionally, during that time many interview processes were stopped or very slow because of the COVID restrictions and the financial situation of the companies.

Then, it was when it all started, my brain was in full fight-or-flight mode, and all I wanted was to get a job, any job. I still needed a job to pay my bills and for my visa, in spite of my emotional status. So, with every application I would send for employment, I’d start to envision myself in the role and how my responsibilities would look like. Even when positions would be different, I started to realize that, all of those images of me had something in common, they were not happy. The reason: None of those jobs felt like it was me. The problem: I wasn’t sure who I was anymore.

I know, how insane all this sounds. How does a person not know who she is? Well, thanks to the power of therapy, I embarked on the journey of finding myself. The first thing was, getting a job that at least made me feel comfortable to pay for the bills (which I did), without thinking too much (tell that to the anxious brain) about the future. The second thing was trying different hobbies to find things I like, meeting friends more often, and simply learning how to wind down. Let my brain guide what it wants. But of course, my sciency spirit was calling: learning about my brain functions, how to overcome trauma, and having a plan were also part of the following steps.

Over time, I found my skills beyond work, I found my hobbies, I found my approach to life and things. At work, I needed to wear many hats that were beyond my job title, which sometimes was tiring, but also made me see that the title at work is just a name.

So I continued the magical and painful journey of finding myself, of finding what I like and dislike, of seeing that life is too freaking short, of starting to enjoy things again, of having time to rest or sleep or even go for a walk, of having dreams of who I wanted to be. To my surprise, my dreams changed, they weren’t any more of having XYZ job, they were of having a holiday in Egypt, making a road trip in Italy, having a house with a big garden for all of my plants and crops, learning how to make sourdough bread, having a chicken coop, going on a holiday to Paris with my mom, spending hours on the phone with a friend to talk about everything, getting old with my partner together, having all night conversations with my mom to hear about her life and the life of my relatives. I was hungry for life, not for work.

And now, after a few years into this process, I’m sure of who I am, and it has nothing to do with my job title, because my job is just work I do to pay for my bills, I do it with the best of my capacities and to have a career, but I also know that if tomorrow I want to change and become a baker, a cook, a tailor, a saleswoman, a software engineer, open a business, or anything else, it’s going to be fine, because it would still be me behind, I would still be Dr. Taco, my personality, my experiences, my way of doing things, and my skills would be there, and I will use them to anything I do.

Above all, I know that the least relevant thing is what my job title is because that is not me.

I lost my best friend

Sat, 19 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

This is a very difficult thing to write, but it’s a story I need to get out of my chest. Directly and without preambles, on July 18th 2023 I lost my best friend. She was the most loving and warm dark brown with bits of black dachshund. She had an official Russian name (because originally it was the puppy of my boyfriend and his ex), but since we met I gave her a new name she recognized as her own: her name was Señora, plain and honorable for a dog of her age (she passed away with 14 years of life on her back).

Before I write about the pain and void that her loss means to me, I will tell you more about her.

The Señora Dessi Puerquita (because that became her full name in our family), aka Señora, aka Wonnie, aka Little Piggy, aka Puerquita, was born in Russia on July 3rd 2009, and moved to Berlin in July 2015. Señora was the friendliest puppy one could ever know, she would always come to greet everyone at the door and walk them inside home with a cheerful spirit. Though she was never recognized for being a super physically active puppy (she was more like an energy saver) she would bring a toy for you as a present sometimes. She was always known for being the best emotional support anyone can ask for, she would be there for the sickness, sadness, and difficult moments to offer you a hug or a lick on your palm. She was always highly motivated by food and would be ready for a snack anytime. Señora was the kind of puppy, who would make companionship in the kitchen in spite of her low interest in cooking. Her hobbies included licking the floor in search of some little snack, sleeping, cuddling, and attending virtual meetings on her bed under the desk with a cozy blanket. She was the best sleeping buddy I had, always available for a hug, warm during winter, and snoring as loud as an old motorcycle. She started to be sick around August 2022, it all went from a small lump in her mouth to a crappy vet diagnosis, two surgeries on full anesthesia, to a type of cancer that resulted in a huge tumor growing in her jaw. Until her last moment, she was a happy puppy, waiving her tail and greeting everyone around.

Her loss has had an impact I can hardly describe for myself, I had pets over my youth (mostly chickens and cats), but I don’t think I ever felt so attached and close to any until Señora. She adopted me as part of her family and made me feel welcome in the home of my boyfriend since we met (not because he didn’t but because she was the family of my boyfriend for a longer time than me, so it meant a lot to me). Over the past few years, I had some anxiety crises due to stress, and she was a warm fuzzy living being, who would give me her love unconditionally. She and I became home buddies and did everything together (except showering — she was not a fan of water or soap), countless nights I spent in front of the monitor, either working on something or on a call with my mom, and Señora was there with me on her bed or on my lap until it was time to go to bed, where she would take her place and remain to cuddle with me until the morning.

We tried to give her the best life we were able until it became too much for her little body, and in one last act of kindness, we let her go.

Every morning when I wake up, I still expect to find her under the blanket waiting for me to have some snack while I have breakfast and start our day together, it is hard to get used to.

She will always remain in my heart as my little Señora, my best friend, and the void she has left in my life will stay as an open wound that closes slowly for a long time.

Why did I become a Scientist?

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

This is a question that people ask me often when they meet me (also during job interviews), and it’s a question it took me some time to have an actual answer for. In the past, when I was still a doctoral student, I always gave answers like “Science is my passion”, or “Because I believe in Science”, or even “Because Science tries to provide answers to the questions of the world”. This all sounds like plain bullshit to me (no offending to anyone who actually has any of these among their reasons), I was avoiding giving an honest and thoughtful answer. The reality is, that I never actually reflected on why I decided to be a scientist, why did I choose the path of research, and one of the reasons to avoid it, is because it became very painful to think of the reasons (but that’s a trauma-related story for another post).

Some many months ago, I started to feel bothered by work, but that’s not new, who doesn’t feel like that, right? However, this feeling became stronger and stronger with time passing, so I decided to have some introspection on it. I realized then, that the thing bothering me was the impact of my work in AI on people’s lives and well-being. All this wave of chatGPT and Co. and the missuses of them also reached me and my daily work, and my inner self keep being triggered by the fact that the things I was doing, could also go in that direction and that I should be double or triple aware of this. All this made me remember that when I started to learn about research, when I went through the path of ethics in science and how easy it is to corrupt it, and it hit me… The reason I became a scientist in the first place is because I wanted to help people with the skills I had, as idealistic as it sounds, I wanted to contribute to solving the world’s problems (even if a super tiny little) and retribute to society.

After this, I reviewed many decisions I have made on the way of the last 15 years, the pressure that Academia (Profs, Universities, and Institutions) puts on researchers to follow a particular path, the budgetary restrictions, the industry demands, and how I have seen many fellow researchers suffering the same. But it also made me aware of what I’m doing now and where I want to go, in a way was also a career enlightenment moment.

In the end, I realized that I’m a Scientist who started many years ago with a noble and positive motivation to do research, and I want to keep this scientist very much alive in myself. I also realized that I will always be Dr. Taco the Scientist, because it goes beyond my career or job title, for me it’s a lifestyle, it’s a way of approaching all things by wanting to know more and keep a critical but open mindset, it makes me be the person that my friends and family know for having all kinds of knowledge on random topics, and the person they can ask about some weird topic and who will go in a possum hole at 2am reading on her phone some research about it (and then writing here some post).

So, maybe at some point, I may not be a researcher at work, I may not pursue research projects on behalf of a company or University, my job title will mutate into whatever life has ahead for me, and that’s just fine because I will be Dr. Taco in my heart.