Today, I posted on Mastodon about how I often do my aerial training with my Apple Watch on my ankle rather than my wrist because it’s dangerous for me to have the watch on my wrist while I work in the air. Of course, this mode of use is not officially supported by Apple, but it works well enough for my purposes. (The Apple Watch, as we all know, is full of sensors, all of which have likely been very specifically calibrated for wrist-only wear.) I was surprised to see lots of responses to my post from folks essentially saying “I do that too” or “I know people who want to do that.”

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Back when I worked at Apple, on the Accessibility Team, we’d often receive bug reports from customers. Sometimes we’d get hundreds of the same one, and sometimes just a few. However, there was a certain class of reports that this story is about. It went something like this, “Hello, I have this specific disability X. It causes these symptoms and issues for me. When I try to do Y in your product, I cannot.” This bug report always came solo. The combination of disability and use case was so specific there was almost always only one such report.

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It wouldn’t be a social media “cleanse” if I didn’t write a blog post about it, would it?

Jokes aside, a month without social media was a fascinating experience for me…both in how mundane it was and how extraordinary. I’ll start with the mundane.

I had more time to do things I liked

In news that will shock no one, not being able to doom scroll meant that when I reached for my phone, there was nothing to do. At first, I wasn’t quit sure what to do with myself, but soon enough, I started reaching for other things instead. My book. My journal. Music. Or just nothing at all. Sometimes I just let myself sit and do nothing. Overall, when I took away a default behavior, I found that I was more intentional about how I filled my down time.

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I’ve been wanting to update my website for a long time. Not for any particular reason; the old one was fine and did the job. I just felt the urge to tinker!

I’m not much of a web dev. Though my early programming years were spent dabbling in HTML and CSS, that was long forgotten after oscillating between between a chemical engineering major, a music major, and, finally, a psych major. When I stumbled back into code, I found myself drawn to lower-level programming for no reason I can explain, so I ended up studying mostly C during my masters program. After that, it was just the steady progression onto Objective-C and finally Swift with a bit of Java along the way.

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One year ago today, I quit my full-time job as a software engineer at Twitter to “run away with the circus.” The idea was that I would give myself one year to get some sort of meaningful work in the circus industry — a tour…a contract at a theme park…a cruise ship gig… It didn’t have to be my dream job, but I wanted to see if I could at least get my foot in the door somewhere. I wanted to know if I was “good enough,” whatever that may mean. The rule I made for myself was that if I didn’t get something in one year — by Feb 4, 2016 — then, it’s time to go back to tech…or school.

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On April 20, 2015 I auditioned for Le Rêve in Las Vegas as a generalist. Spoiler: I got cut.

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