The article reflects on the author's experience with Claris FileMaker Pro at age 10, during a tumultuous period in their life. This software became an avenue for the author to impose order on chaos, allowing them to catalog people and objects in their life. This obsessive behavior stemmed from a need for control and was driven by fear of losing valuable information. The article explores themes of mental health, the compulsion to collect data, and the intellectual curiosity sparked by programming capabilities within the software.
As a mentally ill pre-teen, lacking a sense of control over anything or anyone in my own life, including myself, I began building a personalized database to catalogue the various objects and people in my immediate vicinity.
I developed a categorical imperative to spend as much of my time as possible collecting and entering data about everything that I could reasonably arrange into a common schema.
A less-generous... observer might have replaced the word "systematically" with "obsessively" in the assessment above.
The right question is "was it possible" to which my answer was "yes".
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