 I'm going to talk about it now. So you don't have to listen to me for an hour. We can all run away and get a drink afterwards because I'm going to need one. So I'd like to start my story by telling you about a girl. This little girl, a long, long time ago in the 1980s, she had her very first year of school, finished the year, across the playground with a brown envelope in her hand and this brown envelope was her school report she gave it to her mum and asked her to read it to her there in them in this envelope it said she is a bold student who is bright and bubbly she is a pleasure to teach in the classroom she is willing to help all the other students a really great student and this girl went through school and university with the same kind of report every single year she never really had any problems with bullying she never felt alone or upset by people she was very much a social butterfly she loved going on holiday with her family and extended family and would be willing to help anyone and everyone whenever she could when she was 22 she met a boy and he promised her the world and they fell in love and he asked her to marry her to him about when she was about 23 and they moved in together so everything happened a bit quickly and it wasn't long after that when he started to take control of their finances which kind of makes sense somebody has to kind of pay the bills but then he started to take loans out in her name and then he started to tell her who she could see and what she could wear and if she should see her family or not and then it got to the stage where it was what she could eat and what she could watch on the tv and the food that she ate and he was she was beginning to feel a little bit enclosed in a poisonous bubble and the only time that she had to herself was the mile it took to walk to work every morning and in this 10 minute walk she would be her face would be full of tears she'd feel lonely she'd be upset there were times when she crossed the railway bridge that actually she considered jumping in front of the train but she was never going to she would never want to hurt another person but that was the position that he had put her in she was the bottom of the bottom and she was feeling pretty terrified and lonely and she never felt like she could hold her head high or be very very enthusiastic she definitely wasn't the girl that she grew up to be and um when she was at work she would talk to some people online and these people would make her laugh and she'd make them laugh and she was she kind of had that little bit of happiness for like a few hours just talking to these people and one day when she was around 27 they told her that she should go to this big conference and it would really help her career and it would like they could see that she had some potential and that she should go along so her reply was no he won't let me go there's men there there's this there and and all of these people turned around and said no that's not right you have to come and it took a little while because this was the beginning of the year and the conference wasn't until the end of the year but she finally kind of realised that yes she wanted to go but she still needed to figure out how she was going to do this and one day when her partner went to work she did the bravest thing that she ever did and that was that she left him and she went to the conference she got a good job and a pretty good design and a good pretty good agency she's also stood here right now talking to you um and today I would like to tell you how I kind of got myself back to get there again and how I became me again um so the first thing I did is you might have realised that the conference that I wanted to go to is Drupalcon it was Drupalcon London and the people that pushed me is actually this row of people here which is really terrifying I like to say first of all thank you to these people here for doing that they didn't really know what they were saying they didn't really know how much of an impact it was having on my life when they said that don't cry but it it it meant the world um and so these are my tribe and there's other people there in my tribe that can't be here today and there's other people that aren't even Drupal people there in my tribe but I recommend everybody to find your tribe members they are like the key people to push you into being the best version of you that you possibly can be and they'll do it even if you don't want them to um they'll do it and they'll be your cheerleaders they'll be your conscience they'll be your mind they'll they'll be there for you and um you probably don't even recognise that you've got the tribe out there because we all take people for granted really easily and it I think maybe over like the next few days actually spend some time to think about who as in your tribe doesn't have to be your parents or your wife or your husband it doesn't have to be these people it can be somebody that you don't even know um one of my tribe members is actually Gavin Strange he's um a senior developer in Ardman and the reason he's in my tribe and that I follow and admire him on every single social media thing there is is because I really love his vibe and I love the way he works and his passion and his energy and I want to take a bit of that and I think that you we've all got these people that we admire and that you can pull things from them and there's the saying that if you surround yourself with six people that you'll become elements of those six people and I think that's very true and I think that if you are acknowledging who you're spending your time with acknowledging your tribe then that will give you a massive head start into where you want to go next um when I left my ex I was probably more scared when I left than I was when I was there and that was because all of a sudden I had to use my own mind and these people they they kind of told me what to do when I didn't know what I was doing and the first thing that I asked them was what do I do now and we made a plan and actually this plan and you might see me walking around with this is um is this um and this was on my bedroom door and I need to get back down for the microphone um this was on my bedroom door for a long time and it had very menial things in like right my CV buy a car and go to Drupalcon and Drupalcon was the very first thing I managed to cross off this list actually and somewhere down here it says talk at Drupalcon so I probably should cross that off um but this list helped me put some focus back into my life it helped me do things that I maybe wasn't going to do or that I thought I couldn't do it says run a marathon I ran a marathon it says skydiving I met a guy and said oh yeah I've got skydiving on my list I'm gonna do a tandem and here is like no you do your AFF level one and you'll just pull your own cord yeah funny so I did that um and um and this is the thing like these people this come they push in they help you and there's things on here that I don't quite understand what they are but somebody told me to do it and I trust them whatever um and that really helped um there came to a stage when I stopped using this bucket list and I started feeling a bit better with myself and I got on with life um and I needed smaller lists to get on with tasks and daily things in life and what I found was um a bullet journal and this bullet journal is like the simplest kind of notebook there is so there's all these fancy trackers to do things like to do and and Trello and all these like tracky list things but the bullet journal I found was really helpful because it's basically the potato of the notebook world and what I mean by that by with me what I mean by that is that a potato is like the most versatile thing there is in the kitchen pantry you can turn it into chips you can turn it into waffles you can turn it into roast potatoes anybody else hungry yet and and it and it is very versatile and you can make it into what you want it to be and this is the same with the bullet journal it's just a plain notebook and it's just got some very simple rules of checkboxes and an index and some other simple tasks to follow but the point is is you make your own trackers I've got a tracker in here for the amount of days that I've run I'll it's just a blank page and I just it is still a blank page and and and that I just like draw a little pictures of footsteps in it for every day and then the plan was that the biggest the lowest amount of footsteps on there would be that I've run a lot yeah there's about three or four and um and then there's another one for my mood and things like that but I also use it as an actual journal and I write and write and write in there and some days I write in there and then I don't read it back and another wonderful tip I found pretty early on was that when things get really stressful just to write and write and write and let it out and that cathartic kind of letting everything out dump of stuff helps for that moment but it doesn't fix anything and the way to fix it is to go back after writing a few of these and to weed it down and to find the elements of what you've written and to go okay so a moment about work there and a moment about work there I think there might be a problem with work and then and then you can figure it out and then you can slowly go through because it's all about reflection and going back and finding the things that that maybe at the that present moment aren't a problem or they don't seem to be a problem but you just when you're automatically writing them out it just falls out um so ever since I left my ex it hasn't all been roses um it was five or six years ago um but two years ago I got diagnosed with Crohn's disease and that kind of flew everything up in the air again because I thought I was going to get my life back and I was going to do all these wonderful things and then health got in my way um so I had to kind of first look at what Crohn's was I had no idea um I I knew that it was painful because I'd suffered with it for quite some time and I knew it was something to do with my digestive system and that that was it and um so I had to start researching into it and one of the key factors that I kept on cropping up was that stress paid a massive part in um the flare-ups of what Crohn's does so I started to read about how to control stress because the nurses were saying to me we're going to give you these crazy drugs they're cancer drugs they're going to lower your immune system you can't go near anybody who's sick you can't do this you can't do that and um don't drink any alcohol it wasn't going to happen I'm not taking those drugs um so I had to learn how to manage my stress because I wanted to be able to live my life to its fullest because honestly I missed out five years of it by being with the world's worst demon so I needed to get that back and I needed to make sure that I wasn't going to suffer again so I started to read about stress and one book I very much recommend is Dr Steve Peters um The Chimp Paradox and this book I've been given other books to read but this one is written in a style that I really understood and it was really helpful it's all about monkeys weirdly and it um it's basically how you've got a small monkey in your brain and it's like the child that's naughty and it's the thing that reacts first and it's all about controlling this and it's all about sorting out how to to kind of control the naughtiness and to be you properly and I really recommend that and it really works quite well and um that kind of pushed me a little bit further into wanting to read more I haven't actually finished this book and I've given this talk quite a lot of times but um the point is you started reading it and then you go in the footnotes and then you want to read another book and then you read another book because that bit's interesting and another bit's interesting we've all done it we do the same every day when we're googling for why this problem is we end up like looking at cats because all of a sudden one thing was similar um so the other thing I recommend is Blinkist and um this really helped me get back to being able to read The Chimp book again because it's just uh there's another other services like it but Blinkist was really good because it gives you like the top 10 of something and um their facts they've read the book for you they're just going to digest it down and tell you it and I have never read so many books in my life um before I had Blinkist I think I probably read The Harry Potter books and this I now have read like 47 books in just like six months that you know that was great um and it's been really helpful you can just pick things up you can go into it if you want to buy the book you can go through and buy it in even more um so there were really helpful tools for helping me figure out what stress is um I really needed to understand the cause of the problem and fix the root of it instead of um just sticky taping it over it's the same with code you don't just stick a important somewhere you have to get in and fix the root of it or you should be doing that um so I knowing that I needed to reduce the stress in my life I decided that I was going to do some meditation and I picked Headspace the app and that has actually been really useful for me um and it kind of it's not meditation like you expect it to be I think a lot of people might know this app it seems to be getting more and more popular but um I always thought meditation was going to be imagining myself in a white dress on a horse floating through the fields and then going up to some zen land somewhere well it's not like that you don't really have to float anywhere it's just imagining maybe a warm light or something and just being mindful of your body and that became really important with Crohn's disease because I have to be very aware that at some point I could get very sick and I've learned that if my elbow starts to hurt then maybe I need some time off work because I'm about to get inflamed and puffy and get really tired and stressed and it's kind of like a trigger that I'm getting stressed and the only reason I found out that my elbow is the first place to get inflamed was because of this meditation because I'd sit there every day and I'd give myself 10 minutes and how many people sit there and pay attention to themselves for 10 minutes you don't you just carry on with everything else in your life and you never stop and think about you from head to toe and that's really important and not just for physical illnesses but mentally as well because that 10 minutes of sanding still thinking about nothing other than how you feel puts everything into perspective and can help you carry on and get further so I didn't realise actually until I did most of the sessions in this app that I was doing some of these things naturally when I was with my ex when I was walking towards the train crossing some days I'd look down at the floor because in those days I would literally walk with my head down very timid very unable to talk to lots of people and I would see a puddle on the floor some rubbish the grey pavement and it would just be a very depressing picture and I would keep walking with my head down and I'd feel worse and worse and worse but some days typically around spring or on a sunny day I'd be able to hold my head up and see that actually there were rows of blossom trees there was a bright blue sky and instantly my mood is lifted everybody feels better on a sunny day everybody feels a little bit happier when the sun's out and what the mindfulness app actually taught me is that that sunshine is always there even if it is rubbish at some part there is some sunshine somewhere I imagine quite a few people came here on a plane you all went through the clouds and came up the other side and the sunshine is there the blue sky is there and that's the thing it could be miserable I was hoping it was going to rain and be typical Dublin weather but it's not but you can't have everything but yeah the sunshine is still there it's still the other side of the clouds and that's the thing when I was in my very bad poisonous bubble I still did have that sunshine and that was my tribe of people that I spoke to on the internet in the days so there is something there and even when you do feel that you're up most worst I think taking those five ten minutes to look into yourself and to try and identify that blue sky moment makes a massive difference and I'll move the slides on in the right place when sometimes there's moments when you feel that you can't find that moment we all get there you're in a dialogue gets too big and you're kind of I hate myself I hate my life I'm rubbish at my job I can't do this I can't do that and it all takes over and you just kind of escalate all because you can't do one line of code or because you banged your head when you tied your shoelaces you know we've all been there and the thing that I like to do and I think is very powerful and pretty overrated is music I think that music is so powerful that we don't that we do take it for granted because when you're in a bad place and you listen to sad songs you get sad with it and you kind of go oh they understand how I feel they understand me and all this stuff and then you listen to happy songs and you'll dance around all over the place so when you wake up in the morning how about putting on a happy song and starting your day in the right mood and something that kind of gets you up gets you pumping around it's a good quick way to just boost your energy and you know maybe we should just do it at three o'clock in the afternoon when everyone's feeling a little bit glum I'm not sure but it just music is a very good motivator very good mood changer and that's a very good place to start if you're lost music was very important to me when I was with my ex it was very important to me going through everything the first couple of things I did will go to a lot of gigs and that definitely did help a lot but I said this was a talk short a short talk and I want to finish today with one last message and it pretty much that it's okay it doesn't matter if you feel bad it doesn't matter if you feel like you're not in control it will be okay like life will come along and it will sideswipe you and you won't know it's coming it will come and knock you for six without you even realising that it was happening you could be on the top of the world one minute and fall down to the bottom the next but you will get back up and I think even whatever kind of space you're in and however you feel you just have to keep remembering that it's okay something will help you your tribe will be there you will take five minutes to look after yourself and you will feel that little bit better and if you can't find anybody then come and talk to me and I'll have a chinwag with you for 15 minutes and we'll put the world to right or get a drink or do something because we're all here for each other and this is the wonderful thing about Drupal that it isn't just the code and yeah it's all okay there's never normally questions it's a bit weird but are there any questions pink