I spent the year getting a good look at myself.

A quiet sabbatical

My childhood was not a quiet one.

Part of it was movement and conflict. For a brief time, my parents saw building and selling homes as a way to climb out of the lower-middle class, and so my childhood was full of hammering and saws and landscaping and grout, and the certainty of brief settling period before we moved again into some unfinished, temporary home. When my parents divorced, this shifted, and my nomadic life was divided, moving my cherished objects between two constantly changing homes, living out of my backpack, mediating parental strife. By the time I was 18, I’d lived in 15 different homes, and rarely had a sense of stability or peace. It was loud, clamorous, unstable, and uncertain.

But I also mean quiet figuratively. For my mind was not a quiet place. At any moment, you might find me pondering the people around me, the lush old growth of my hilly hoods, or the peculiar beauty of mathematics, or physics, or painting. When I wasn’t fascinated by the world, I was busily suppressing every bit of myself that I could, trying to find a way to be in the world that did not require acknowledging what I wanted or needed or felt. I was everything but present and my mind was happy to keep a chatter, so I wouldn’t have to listen to what it said to me in silence.

I got very good at keeping things loud in life. My first quarter of college, free of the daily drama of parental conflict and poverty, and poured myself into student leadership, undergraduate research, 23 credit quarters crammed with intellectual challenge and busy work. I did anything I could to find stability that also ensured I didn’t have a single moment to ponder my place, my self, or my needs. I had friends to the extent that I had people around me, but none of them really knew me. How could they? I didn’t know myself. I was in hiding, and fully occupied, hiding amidst busyness.

Doctoral studies and faculty life turned out to be an excellent distraction. Unlike college, where I had to find my own ways of hiding from myself, faculty life had a way of occupying all of my attention by default. The teaching, the fundraising, the advising, the committees, the hiring, the growth, the opportunities, the service, the striving. Academia offered me exactly what my trans coping mechanisms demanded: all of my mind and none of my self. I was happy to oblige, and it was happy to reward me with that financial stability that had been so lacking in my youth.

There was just one problem with tenure. Now that I did not have to worry about money, or securing it, there was too much space to pursue my own goals and needs, and too many questions about what they might be. As much as academia had offered me security, it began to feel like the gift of academic freedom demanded me to be me, in order to sort out what I might do with the privilege. I resisted that demand by doing a startup instead, giving my freedom to venture capitalists for 3 years, and upon my return giving it to my institution in administrative roles. These were convenient ways to keep hiding, and uncomparable ways to stay busy.

The rot that had started in my early adolescence, however, began to set in. I began to see my future as one in which I would inevitably be die young, and what would remain would be an efficient, effective, reliable automaton, producing PDFs, process, PhDs. I cratered, and found myself in a hole, choosing between that inevitable death, or an embrace of life. Once I chose life, I began the hard journey of undoing a self hatred that had survived for decades, and trying to nurture a 10 year old that had been locked up and silenced for nearly 30 years. I spent much of 2019–2022 doing that nurturing, while also burning out under the weight of responsibility, civic strife, and pandemic fear.

That brings us to Summer 2022 last year, when I began my sabbatical. I remember talking to my therapist for much of last Spring about what it might mean to just be with myself, my thoughts, and my body for a whole year, without all my distractions. By that point, I’d felt like I understood myself enough to know that what I needed most was to be around me, intensely. And so I sketched a sabbatical that had two elements:

• A lot of time making art that centered my thoughts, interests, values, and visions. I desperately needed to make something that I thought was beautiful, but also an expression of me. It needed to be something that no one but me shaped, because I need to use it as a mirror: to understand who I am, but also share who I am. In the same way that a musician might make music that speaks to them, and only happens to speak to others.
• A lot of time away, from campus, from my home, from friends, from my family. I needed to be in new places, by myself, learning to be with myself and hear myself. And it couldn’t just be one place, for a long period of time — I was not ready to be so separated from my fragile community of support. What I needed was a kaleidoscope of places, to help me understand who I am, and grow into who I am, outside of the shell I’d built for myself, and inside a diversity of context that could reflect myself back at me.

The first need above turned into Wordplay. Over the past 15 months, it’s been 50–60% of my work time in any given week. I spent luxurious 4–9 hour days by myself on many days, writing code, doing design work, imagining possibilities, bringing them reality, and not having to coordinate with a single other person for any of it. As of today, this has turned into 800+ files spanning 120K lines of TypeScript, Svelte, JSON, CSS, HTML, a 20,000 word dramatic play (get it, “word play”?), and dozens of Wordplay example programs. This adds up to a new programming language, editor, debugger, documentation system, animation engine, localization platform, sharing platform, and an exciting new vision for playful programming, for functional programming, for interactive typography, for justice-centered programming. I’m proud of what I’ve designed and built, and I’m excited to share it with the world this fall, after a bit more polish and a lot more localization.

The second need above turned into 15 months of 1–2 week jaunts, into unfamiliar spaces, to see if I could catch a glimpse of myself outside my routines. Looking back, it was a lot:

• I went to Germany to co-organize a Dagstuhl workshop on theories of programming.
• I went to Denver to chart a year long project on smoother pathways into computer science research as part of my last year on the CRA-E board. (This turned into CRA SPARC, which will soon be live on the CRA website as a resource for mentors and students.)
• I went to CSTA 2022 to spend a week in Chicago, building new community with teachers and teacher advocates, and to share our book, Critically Conscious Computing.
• I went back to Germany to think about educational programming languages, and get inspiration for Wordplay, and learn from people who’ve built and maintained them for years.
• I went to Switzerland for ICER 2022, to enjoy a peaceful week in Lugano, learning, thinking, and making by its beautiful lake.
• I went to Iceland, to live a quiet week in Reykjavík with food, museums, and some bustling queer community.
• I went to Spokane for several days, for a 1-year anniversary of bottom surgery, to try to replace some of the memories of isolation, stress, pain, bleeding with ones of love and support with my partner.
• I visited San Diego, to see my wise daughter, but also be a beach bum, eating tacos with surfers, and adjusting to the ever present and sometimes threatening male gaze.
• I visited Vancouver and Simon Fraser University, to make new friends in my neighborly Pacific Northwest, and begin to comprehend the hidden diversity in our famed white enclaves.
• I visited Boulder, Colorado for a week, particularly Google, to make new community with equity advocates in computing education, and to ponder the role of industry in shaping agendas.
• I went to Boston and Cambridge for a week, to visit colleagues at Harvard, MIT, Tufts, and Northeastern, finding a home base in Cambridge where I settled into its cozy cafe culture, grimy street corners, and status building.
• I spent 10 glorious days at the Kaimana Beach Hotel and Waikiki, eating at Hawaiian owned businesses, meeting local educators, and finding cozy shade from which to integrate time travel into Wordplay.
• I visited Portland to see my brother and parents, and the chilly comforts the city offers on its darkest days, trying to share the new me I was finding with the old them.
• I visited Atlanta, to build community around CS pre-service teacher educators, and take stock of our own work on STEP CS.
• I spent a week in Toronto at SIGCSE 2023, but also talking to colleagues about systematic change, community organizing, and the viability of anti-capitalist ideas in any computing community.
• I had two weeks Pittsburgh, replacing my graduate school memories as a young parent in trans hiding with new ones of trans joy, resistance, and Spring feelings of hope and renewal.
• I went to my first AERA conference in Chicago, and found myself overwhelmed, disoriented, energized, and disappointed.
• I spent a week in Ann Arbor, visiting with faculty and students all over campus, as well as close high school friends, sorting out my feelings about sprawl, silos, and power.
• I went to San Francisco, to advocate at the ACM Publications Board, and lament the high cost of NIMBYism and capitalism that the city and region has tragically modeled for the world.
• I attended my first RESPECT conference in Atlanta for a week, feeling the chill that infighting can create in a community, and the boundaries it erects that can deter trust, progress, and ironically, respect. But outside its walls, I found a thriving community of queer and trans people of color.
• I visited San Diego for my daughter’s college graduation from UCSD, trying to make space for our many family’s irreconcilable ways of being, while celebrating my daughter’s endless resilience.
• I returned to Chicago for a week for ICER 2023, and learned how overwhelming, brutal, and beautiful the city can be.
• I spent a week thinking about rural computing at the UW/MSR Summer Institute on the U.S. side of the Canadian border, learning about the vibrant community of rural scholars and technologists who have yet to find a way to speak each other’s languages.
• I capped all of it with a joyous Janelle Monáe concert in a massive dark room, full of amazing costume changes, outpouring of love and safety, and an endless testament to the power, beauty, and creativity of trans and non-binary people.

That’s about 25 weeks of travel in 65 weeks of sabbatical, much of it on trains and buses, and most of it in now very worn Birkenstocks. The rest of the time I spent nuzzling my cat and my partner, and slowly weaving myself into the trans communities in Seattle, particularly those that support youth. About 25 of those Monday evenings, for example, were on Zoom, with 11–21 year trans youth from around the region, country, and world, sharing their humor, their interests, their fears, and their dreams. The kids are not alright, but they will be alright, if only people will stop getting in their way.

In all that time away, much of it absorbed in the heady work of trying to reimagine programming, and much of it with youth, I learned many things about myself. I learned that when left to myself, I am a visionary, creative, playful, perfectionist, who thrives in bringing things to life. I learned that I can be obsessive about things I’m making and don’t like to be interrupted when I’m lost in my ideas. I learned that despite all my skills in planning, I’m fully capable of intuiting my way into good ideas, and I should trust myself to stumble gracefully into them without turning to rationality. I learned that I am a deeply anxious person that has developed deeply effective strategies for channeling it into action. I learned that when I’ve hurt someone, even accidentally, I hold a deep shame that can’t be erased. And I learned that even though for much of my life I have been profoundly lonely, I actually like being alone, with myself, and with my thoughts, focused intensely. But I also learned that I like nothing more than a good meal with friends, family, and colleagues.

I will not return to faculty life next week the same person. I will have the same skills I had before, and some new ones. But the quiet of these past 15 months have shown me how peaceful life can be, even amidst obsessive, intense, long periods of creativity, climate chaos, and unprecedented assaults on my community’s civil rights that have shrunk my world and made me feel less safe in my own country. I expect to be far more protective of my focus time than I have ever been, and much more serious about setting boundaries around my time and attention. For too long, I have given all of myself to the work in front of me. I’ll return to this job giving part of myself to my work, in ways that channel my values. The rest of me is for me.

That brings me to this last weekend my of 2022–23 sabbatical, which also happens to be Labor Day weekend in the United States. It’s a holiday that has a peculiar mix of equity-centered labor rights activism and neoliberal capitalist ends. I often approach the day trying to remember that work, for everyone, should necessarily entail release. For a day, a week, a month, a year. I’m deeply grateful to the state of Washington for sustaining this generous gift of time, focus, and recovery to me — it has been essential and transformative. But it is a privilege that all of us should have, in the form of paid parental leave, a minimum of one month of paid vacation every year, in ample paid family leave, and a generous lifelong public investment in everyone’s need to step away from working altogether, learn something new, and become someone else. That is what will make the U.S. strong. That is what has made me strong, these past 15 months.

Bring on the noise.