I know how it feels to feel unlovable. I know how it feels when you’ve been hurt in a way that makes you think you deserved it. You didn’t. Everyone told you so. You nodded whenever a friend told you that you were not guilty of your abuse, but you found your soul so broken after everything, your soul dripping black blood from her wounds, that you thought it to be the end of all possible love for you. I know how it feels. Trust me.

There are few tools that feel like a permanent uphill battle like OpenPGP, at least to me. It is a critical specification in FOSS and even so I frequently find myself banging my head against it in use cases that one would argue are basic or should work more easily. It isn’t just GnuPG, which has become a monstruous behemoth, as I will touch below, but also the whole of OpenPGP regardless of implementation used. It’s frustrating to use, to a level I would equate to the frustration of using XMPP (to this day!), but the difference being, as I said above, that OpenPGP is a critical specification that we depend on for the integrity and security of our systems.

Rain falls outside in the darkness of the night. Fall is slowly leaving its place for winter to arrive. These are times to stay home more, have some hot tea, and look inside ourselves. It’s not December yet, but almost. Another year has passed. It feels like 2025 was filmed both in slow motion and in full speed. These last weeks I’ve felt this gnawing emptiness of having left a heavy burden behind: a nasty and painful one that I had desired for months to be freed of… Now that I have been, life at times seems like an empty forest on which snow had fallen the night before, white, pure, blindingly bright, but also silent, the trees naked without any leaves, and cold. Anxiety creeps in before the peace that I so much craved and has finally arrived.

Being a techie millennial girl means that I have been exposed to the worst of the worst algorithmic poisoning ever. It’s only now, after I’ve withdrawn from all poisonous platforms I was on, that I’m realizing the depth of how much recommendation algorithms both on social media and other platforms (e.g. GitHub) have managed to break my psyche, my thought processes, hijacked my interests and natural desire for connection, and sank me into a terrifying spiral. It’s a known story. So, instead of focusing on the past and on the darkness those platforms led me to, I want to focus this post on the future, as an important part of recovering from an addiction (which this is) is to build a new life and new habits that make the old thing lose its power.