Reboot Changed My Life

Ton reminds me that it was 20 years ago this week, in June of 2005, that we were all at reboot7 in Copenhagen. 

That conference—and those that followed in 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009—changed are changing my life, in ways that I continue to discover.

Some of that change was obvious at the time. 

In reflecting on the closing day—exactly 20 years ago— I wrote, in Shy:

And of course I’m just plain afraid. Terrified of the unknown, suddenly left frozen at the thought of freeform social contact.

Given that the interesting part of conferences happens during the “hanging out in the coffee room after the speakers” part, this fear / awkwardness / terror leaves me at something of a disadvantage.

Halfway through reboot, I decided that, fuck it, I had to just jump off. Pretend I wasn’t terrified, and see what played out.

(It worked.)

In other  ways I’m only now able to understand why reboot was so important, what role it played in my life, how it saved my life.

Reboot was my gateway to cultivating a love of Europe, an easy facility with Europe, and a network of European friends. Denmark, Sweden, Germany, The Netherlands, Portugal, Italy, and the friends thereof, have proved a wellspring of ideas, inspirations, opportunities, connection. 

What a privilege it is to have a magic place to go, long over the horizon and far away from the everyday, that serves as a kind of off-site for mind, body, and soul.

But time has shown me more.

In recent months I’ve been working with a counsellor schooled in the ways of Internal Family Systems, and through that practice I’m becoming more aware of what IFS calls my “self” and my “parts.” And through that, I’m starting to learn more about how elusive my “self” has been, for a long, long time.

IFS associates “self-leadership” with “eight Cs”:

It is also a way of understanding personal and intimate relationships and stepping into life with the 8 Cs: confidence, calm, compassion, courage, creativity, clarity, curiosity, and connectedness.

Those are all qualities that, to one degree or another, have been absent from my life, obscured behind a thicket of parts—fear, anger, loneliness, overwhelm, disconnectedness, shame, avoidance. One of the great gifts of plucking up my courage to go to that first reboot conference, and the opportunities that followed from it, is that I was gifted a glimpse of “self,” a creative, courageous, curious version of myself. 

I love that guy, and it’s no wonder that I was, and am, drawn to Europe to rekindle my relationship with him.

So, yes, reboot saved my life, let me connect to myself.

But it also delayed my life, stunted it. 

By rooting access to “self” off-shore, I remained content, or at least resigned, to allow my everyday life at home to be “parts-led.” 

Historically, I felt this most acutely on the transitions back to home from Europe, where it felt like a fog descending over me, like going through a glitchy version of the Star Trek transporter that filtered out access to some important parts of myself.

This is difficult to write about, in part because it appears that I’m throwing a huge swath of my life under the bus, a swath rooted in a partner who died, a child I’m continuing to raise, myriad work and volunteer projects and relationships. 

I don’t want to suggest that my life has sucked, with brief respites when it didn’t, because that’s both not true, and over-simplifies the ever-changing presence of “parts” and “self” in my life.

But I do find myself understanding how much I have been holding in for so long, how shallow I’ve allowed my relationships to be, how I’ve used fear as a guard against vulnerability.

Pete Livingstone—who I met in Copenhagen many years ago, another byproduct of my reboot life—wrote this, in a blow-by-blow of his 2024 cancer treatment:

On the other hand I can now concede that being pushed towards an awareness of ones own mortality – coupled with a degree of illness and physical discomfort - may have some weird and unexpected effects on ones unconscious mind. In my case it feels like that the experience I have gone through has conferred on my body and mind an ability to perform, on occasion, what I want to describe as an “action”, a kind of psychic, almost physiological muscle-flexing. This “action” feels completely novel to me, but I can feel that the potential to carry it out has always lain dormant inside me, and indeed is part of how I, and I presume all other humans, are put together. It’s as if, quite sensibly, we contain an algorithm in our unconscious which lies in wait, and is specifically for dealing with suffering and death. The tentative flexing of this previously unused psychic muscle seems to set off some emotional events which I find unfamiliar in an almost alarming way.

Perhaps you could describe what Pete experienced as a “reboot,” and perhaps I could, now that I think of it, describe my life in recent years in the same way.

Like reboot the conference gifted me a taste of “self,”  going through years of life as a carer, living through the death of my partner of 28 years, nurturing Olivia through COVID, finding new love in an audacious partner (and an audacious step-daughter), leaving paid work and reimagining myself as a printer, helping set Olivia off toward independence, all of that was a portal, its own kind of reboot, that, having emerged, somewhat intact, out the other side, allows me slightly more clarity, more access to my parts and my self and how I have lived, and will live my life.

When I reflected on that first reboot 15 years ago, on its 10th anniversary, I wrote:

On June 14, I flew back to Prince Edward Island, via Frankfurt and Montreal. Exhausted but happy and very, very changed.

That’s not a bad way of describing my current state: exhausted but happy and very, very changed.

Thank you, reboot.