Courage from a Zero Day Inside

besides DC would like to thank all of our sponsors and a special thank you to all of our speakers volunteers and organizers so a few things before we begin just to give you a heads up I put this here the disclaimer about laughter tears drooling anything that is all okay if you nee feel the need to do any of that go for it [Music] and even though we're discussing a serious matter I laugh and I laugh a lot I am also autistic but I don't believe that that's the oh you can leave at least one on do you want for the video with getting the house lights down that definitely helped it's very nice but can

they see it on the video okay so now we have an official start time okay so welcome thank you so much for coming and joining us here I am Mandy Logan I go by survivor tricks it's my twitter handle my hacker handle it was actually selected for me by a hacker group in Las Vegas called shadow syndicate so that is where that name comes from and

if you've read the brief description of what this talk centers on it is called courage from a node a inside and it does discuss some pretty deep physical difficulties that I've had to overcome because of the disabilities I want you to be aware that I may change in my ability to speak my vision may go out during the talk that's happened before I may need to sit down I may slow down we may go to pure slides or if I can't see it may be pure story time so I am going to ask that you just work with me whatever presence right now first aid has been informed everybody knows what to do if I actually did need

to completely lay down or something so there's no like immediate threat just know that speaking and vision are still issues for me at times [Music] so courage from a node a inside mandy Logan and this is if you want to look up on LinkedIn that is my LinkedIn these certifications come from my life prior to the strokes I worked in environmental and construction engineering and management survive at Rick's spelled with a five one seven in there and we all are all in besides DC right so okay this is a deeply personal talk why because I am a person in each of you shockingly enough is a person and as we go through this I want you to identify

with the good the strong the courage the parts of this that you can see and apply in your life so I am an expert in my experience in my choices nothing that I bring up here is medical advice legal advice any other kind of financial advice no it's my experience now this is a theory or a mandate that I have used throughout my life no matter who cuts your check or how you spend your hours you are your own expert and you work for yourself even if somebody else is cutting you a check and they pay your benefits you are all personally self-employed you are your own experts and you're your own experts in your life

even if you make no money or if you fail at your goal or you face constant setbacks you are still your own boss and you are still in charge is that showing up weird so I'm going to discuss a time of major major major setbacks how I over achieved to hack my brain and come back and have no idea why that's cut off there but how courage aided in this

so I came to information security kind of in a roundabout way I am not employed directly in information security or anything at this time I came to it following the attacks because I went through a very major stalker situation and I had to learn Oh scent and strategic maneuvers and all the things on the fly this is how I ended up getting into the cyber world the cyber stalker law enforcement and anything having to do with information security that was my initiation into this world so I came here from gurken it was a really great conference I definitely recommend going to that and there were some beautiful talks that were given one of them this was a question posed by mr.

Jeff man his talk was what are we doing here rethinking security now he has 30 plus years in information security work for the NSA he knows this industry and he posed this question several times what is security everybody's an information security professional but what is security my definition of this is is an internal feeling it's an internal knowing or state it's the solidness with which you feel equal to what comes at you that applies in your personal life that applies in information security in the business if you're looking at vulnerabilities still what how I define that is for you your company your clients what you are going after is that they have a general feeling of being equal to what is going

to come at them also at närcon investigator chick brought how to talk on a theme of fear hacking the paradigm she said rail against the idea that one thing fixes all this is very true you for your clients for your customers for the people that you interact with steer them away there is no one thing they're going to buy and it's going to fix all of their security concerns for their companies for their employees for the adversarial threats that are out there but when she brought that up it really struck me hard because I want you to rail against thinking that you don't already have the one thing you need to be secure security all comes from that

internal feeling so don't discount that you have what will take when it no matter what you're facing something at work or something in your personal life also at Garcons side dragon chris roberts said if we fail people die now I don't actually know exactly what he referred to here I don't know the example use case this but he does have 30 plus years and information security is an expert in the subject and he really pushes that InfoSec professionals do better so my thought on that is well if those are the stakes that you are facing and you are choosing to be in this industry then I think you need to know just how resilient and capable people capable

people naturally are okay so have you ever had a serious close call the ever had something happened when you go WOW if just this had been different my life would have changed or if just this had happened differently and I would have lost my my house my job my car my family but and if it's very serious you would could have lost your life if you think back on those moments think of those near misses that still stay with you now okay so I wasn't lucky it wasn't just a close call what I went through was worst case scenario again and again and again and again as it says I was wiped to the abilities of a six-month-old and yeah I

died several times through this whole process right here I want to stop and to make I guess a PSA about that when you were going through things the recovery time the is down is not equal to that this was how severe something was so if you are doing incident response or if you are dealing with something personally just because whatever you faced only took a day or a few weeks or a couple months or it was never even discussed again doesn't mean it didn't have impact so as I said it wasn't just a close call it was horrible again and again and again and yet here I am so how or why how does that happen

when I think about that I have to go back through my life and think about all those moments and all those choices that helped me build courage so this is a listing of things that I faced that I have had to deal with in my lifetime what I'd like is for you to look see things if there's anything that jumps out at you something that you've had to face or that you've gone through already pay attention to that and to the skill and ability that you have developed because of facing those so this I didn't have any background or history in dealing with brainstem injuries I didn't have a technical background I didn't have a therapy background I didn't have

a medical knowledge background so when what happened to me happened it's not as if I could just go oh yeah I know exactly what resources to go for here no I had to pull from what was there same thing whenever you encounter a node a or you have a breach or you're going through something massive it's what you already have with you is what will help you so my objective here we're gonna highlight how safe we really are we're at all these security conferences and yet very if you talk about like just go ahead and feeling safe right now we're safe in this room we're safe again security equals the solidness and feeling equal to what may come that is

my definition for security so here's the really really really good thing humans even when wiped to almost nothing rule if you noticed that quote I had at the very first slide from Dave Kennedy so at gurken and one of his talks or his talk there he brought up how it's never the software it's never the AI and it's never the machine learning that takes him down while hacking it's always a human so what does that mean for us what good thing does that mean for each of you I think you're all mostly human that means you pretty much mostly rule right so the timeline for this talk we're gonna have a video of about 21

months into my recovery then we're gonna discuss the life before the Oh day from the Oh day - that video it's a 25-21 about two-year time period I'm going to talk about the tools that courage let me utilize challenges hacking the reverse engineering my way out of that neurological and physical condition and how flexibility and resources helped so before we go on again breathe if you take nothing else from this talk take away the power of your breath take away that it does have complete power and this is something else that I have to remind myself constantly through thousands of hours of laying in dark silence and rebuilding how to move a finger or to even know I had one the

slow way is the fast way we are all about hacking we are all about getting through time efficiency material efficiency all of that we do that constantly and I want to show you from my experience how going the absolute slowest way actually allowed me to recover in ways they never thought was possible or in in time period that was not even conceivable okay video time [Music]

[Music] sorry just a minute

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hey on my test runs the audio was good where's the a/v

it's coming out of the projector oh he's getting okay

so while they're looking into the audio working I'll go ahead and say like what happened basically the cause the injuries I'm not going to go into long haul and long drawn-out don't I don't think you should have any like trigger warnings going on but I was physically assaulted it apparently went on for a while but all I really remember was getting away I have flashes of getting away and then was in the hospital for months and months and months so apparently being strangled tore an artery difficult's caused a left vertebral arterial dissection and that created a blood clot that started breaking off so aside from having other physical injuries the internal strokes there was brain stem stroke and then several

cerebellar strokes that so to give you a little bit of an idea this is in the hospital and going through this in Arizona and it's still used as a teaching case right now because they'd never had somebody survive a brainstem stroke it became actually really difficult to get care or therapy because it was unknown and doctors and therapists wouldn't take on the responsibility because there was no precedent for it the few people that had to survive generally stayed completely locked in which I was for a time but internally even though I was wiped and had like no voice and didn't understand words and couldn't do all that there was overtime impulses and things started to

make sense and that is what I started to build from internally I'll try this again so this video obviously shows almost two years into recovery [Music] without audio I'm just gonna tell you what's happening

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[Music] so saying my brain feels slow and fatigued I don't think you can hear much of what's going on there so we can play it if you want to just watch it but this was in another nursing home this was about two years into it I was in a nursing home and the key point and take away from this is what you were seeing there is absolute peak operating at that point me saying eight words I would have to spend tens and twenties of hours trying to figure out different words to say and I would practice for days upon days upon days upon days upon days to try to say it so what you're seeing here

is that as I'm trying home I'm sitting up because they propped me up and everything my left side was still completely dead and gone

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I'm gonna skip ahead a little bit this is another care facility yeah two months later had been in the hospital still back in a different care facility

isn't even playing I'm sorry uh yeah but I don't know now like what's on time like how we could I could hold the microphone up

I'm not sure actually like if I well if I take the HDMI out

okay we can just set aside the video main thing to take away is if you see it and you see the words that I'm trying to say to get through I'm and then compare it to this moment hopefully you would understand how much progress has been made so from that and you're seeing like to make those few words was taking me weeks and weeks and weeks of preparation to try to speak and that was without dressing myself without showering without bathing without eating without doing anything else the majority of especially the first two years were in dark silence completely flat on my back with no sound no music no TV no reading no talking to people

nothing there was nothing my system was so compromised that sound which shut my heart down and that became a huge deal whenever you're in a room you're in a nursing home and the water running three rooms away would cause my heart rate to drop to 20 or 30 and because my senses were completely aware but my filters were all gone and my compromised system couldn't handle any of the input I'm sorry I can't see how to

okay now we're gonna go back in time just a little bit with you see the videos and you see how I was functioning there and then think about how prior to that birth to age 32 I had done a lot of things I chose just a couple pictures to try to represent that and I can't see why this won't go back to full screen sorry is that it the first one with the blade that's my father and there is a child seat bolted into that seat on the blade that's me so when I say grow up I grew up in construction I mean it that being on heavy equipment being in the ground being out on job sites that was

my life from infancy on through growing up I eventually I did a lot of traveling and a lot of volunteering I traveled all over the place I did a lot of work volunteering with construction projects and with speaking a lot of french-speaking refugees and immigrants I did a lot of custom work with that this on this side is a picture of I also did some commercial interior design and this is a picture of one of the copper sculptures that I designed and made for in there about twelve feet tall and five feet wide and there's two of them and they mirror each other this is on a project in Arizona and to me these both

kind of symbolize like the starting of my life and then getting to do the commercial interior design and designing spaces where everybody enjoyed it and it was functional and creating meeting all the demands that for code and for budget all that getting to do something that was gorgeous and decorative and that people still enjoy we're really huge to me this thing over there you see me that's called an elliptical this is an outdoor elliptical bike it's one of the hardest things on the entire earth by yourself especially up and down hills I lived at the beach in San Diego and I had this and I loved it and so I put this here because it's a reminder to me

of what I had been before and a goal like if I could get back when I all the years of laying in the hospital and Leasing laying in the nursing homes to me I said something that when I can do an elliptic Oh again I'll know that I have mostly returned or completely returned or I have eclipsed to what I was able to do before the other picture to the side is a picture of my youngest sister I adopted her when she was 13 and I raised her until as she was with me until she was almost 21 we had a good relationship we did a lot of things but being a single parent and parenting your

sibling and working and doing all the things I was I put this here because for those who have dealt with teenager angst I felt like this was the only picture that kind of showed the teenager aches because it really was not she was not an angsty teen so this brings us to September October 2012 this and I'm going to choose October 8 2012 as my Oh Day inside now why would I choose that date because that was the day that the first the first time that one of the strokes was recognized as a stroke I had been gone through the attack I had been moved between places and the people were saying that it was really severe flu or

that I had been mixing drugs with something that I got from somebody out in the desert or that I was doing all these different things and I was locked in but I could hear everything that was going on and before more strokes took away memory I do remember those things but this day October 8th was the one first day that a stroke was recognized and the ER doctor said okay we're transporting you immediately so at that point you can say there was a concussion I had had I had somewhere over five or six strokes but after a time they quit it doesn't really matter because that protocols became all the same so I had a mostly

torn artery I already had congenital hemiplegic migraine which caused weakness sensitivity light you know massive migraine attacks and everything I was dealing with complex PTSD now from the past and from that attack I was extremely suicidal and I was for many years following this I had been before and I remained very suicidal for a long time and it's interesting it's interesting to fight to live whenever really what you feel is all you want to do is die but here we were and for some reason there was that thing inside me that honestly I didn't know I was allowed to die I didn't know that that was even an option I thought this was simply something I'd been presented with

that now had to be figured out as quickly as could be so I had it insurance was set to take effect October 20th this happened so October 8th so there was no insurance to cover it I was out of work there was no money and I was completely isolated so if you are looking at an ode a experience or you're going through hack the Box you want to do anything like that this is what we're taking as like this was my OD this was the presenting situation so what did I choose to do with it and if at any time you have questions please speak up I'm going to try to describe it just a

little bit if you want to try to put yourself in my shoes for what it was like to be in that situation my power of attorney described it as all of my insides were on the outside and there screaming and that's pretty much exactly what it was like constantly so it was like that but it was also on a non-stop tilt awhirl that turns sideways and it moved upside down because I had lost all spatial awareness awareness of my body I had no understanding of if I was on the ceiling or the floor or on a wall or where anything was pain and nausea were constant every second I couldn't tell if I had limbs I couldn't make sense of

stuff I knew it was life or death I definitely knew that and I was locked in with about a three-second memory for quite some time that's about how long my memory was so trying you know put yourself in that and these are your parameters and this is where you want to get to how do I do that

oops breathe so breath was what I had there wasn't anything else any challenge that you are facing you have the exact same thing you have breath and if you don't have breath then you probably don't have a challenge anymore that may sound cruel but it's true so if you still have breath you can overcome so put this here because we're going to discuss we're discussing now between the time of this injury up to that video I was at best externally a cavewoman at best and internally what was the weird thing like as as because there was no internal voice and words didn't really make sense internally it would be like what one want and that's all that would

go on again and again and again and again and so eventually over weeks and months got to where I'd be like oh I want water but internally want water water great so now I know I want water and I'm locked in I can't form words I can't tell anybody what is going on what do I do other point on this is really you get to the point where you do not care about appearances or what you look like to other people like if you ever thought you did not care you get to this level and there is no caring of anything at all I was completely dependent so if you were thinking of this in your thing

okay this is where we're faced with this is what we're going to do I'll get up and I'll do this or I'll look this up or I'll do that or I can take care of this know what I had was what was internal I was completely dependent on the external world to provide for me but I couldn't then go out and just get more information or even tell them what was going on inside and I couldn't be moved because of how the artery was torn and all that physically I couldn't be moved but then also I couldn't move anything except an eye so it didn't really matter but I couldn't be moved like to another

facility to some other place to go to so in that situation what did courage that I had already built previously allow me to see what advantages did I finally find because I had the courage to look so here's some principles and tools that came up over the months and over the years first think God's thoughts or and again I didn't have a technical background but I would think try to think mainframe thoughts so instead of thinking about what was going on internally or what I couldn't overcome I would try my hardest to think from like a God view on what was being seen what was externally representing and I had done a lot of isometric drawings and lutein and you

know doing drawing plans and stuff so doing things from an external view made sense to me I it also kept me from pitying myself too much or from just giving in to the sheer horrific terror and pain so I would try to think of the biggest thoughts that I could an impression and a lot of times there weren't words it was just a view it was just an image next big thing that really mattered was that I had to take the attitude or I did no one owes me a single thing to make my life more convenient nobody owes me anything to make it better if they do something that makes it better or more convenient or

helps me wonderful that's amazing I love it and I draw strength and care and love and wonderfulness from that but I am NOT owed a thing and it does not matter what the relationship is through most of this I ended up I was completely alone there was no family with me there I didn't have a mate or a partner or anybody else so I and I did have a good group of friends and people I had volunteered with there are people who came to visit but there was nobody who was invested in the day minute by minute of what I was going through so that required then that I took a certain kind of responsibility

that I think a lot people when you are facing especially health crises you don't take because you're in so much pain you just want somebody to help you I kind of tried to switch that in my mind to make sure that I knew I could get more and I wanted it but I was not dependent on other people so I used humor humor was in fact as the strokes were happening and I couldn't stop that the one thing I zeroed in on the only thing I didn't want to lose was humor because I figured if I was going to be a vegetable I was going to be a funny vegetable why and if there are you

know alien beings scanning my brainwaves or if there are angels who are listening or there are other people I want them to like die laughing because I'm being a great funny vegetable so but prior to that I did have a years-long spiritual practice being able to meditate to silence my mind to pray to focus to journal all that I had done that my entire life if I had not there is no way I would have gotten through the mental hell that being so isolated was it also allowed me to work with my body much more quickly than perhaps I would have otherwise so thinking about those were the tools I had and we had I had breath I had my

tongue against my teeth I could control my tongue and I had because of that muscle resistance those were my baseline starting tools so purpose or my end goal first I didn't know I was allowed to die so I can't say that it was some grand I will live this it was this is a presenting thing we've got to figure out how to get through and I'm not willing to let this be the rest of my life so I wanted it done efficiently I wanted to be able to return to the beach to writing that ElliptiGO I needed to find a way out I had to make connection so many of these talks and these things that we go

through within the industry and as humans we constantly talk whether it's about networking the computer or networking as a human it's all about making connection and I wanted to prove that all fluff people might have thought was there was just purely external internally there was no fluff but I had to know what was going on inside how was I going to do that there was this cloud of overwhelming data as I mentioned before whenever your senses have all their filters stripped and your brain the processing apart is compromised it's overwhelming data there's just stuff coming at you that nothing can process and you don't know how to categorize it or deal with it I did learn very well though if you don't

know what to do it's the wrong time to act just wait same thing in your job in your life and all that if you don't know what to do clearly and you feel like heck yes this is what I'm gonna do right now you are the wrong person to be making the choice give yourself a minute it might only take 30 seconds and the thought will come to you but and it might take weeks or months or years as it did for me but it's the wrong time to act whenever you don't know what to do eventually what surfaced for me was a story from my childhood and it was this old prospector a gold prospector who

used to come and hang out with my dad at times this prospector would go out into the desert into the hill hills and he would pan for gold and other precious metals all kinds of precious metals what returned to me one of the first things that returned to me was him talking to me about how he would separate out the metals he had developed a system using a super bouncy ball on a string as a pendulum he created a pendulum and then he had figured out within his system what the frequency was of that metal by how many times his body moved that string and he would count those and because he had figured out and tuned into his body that

much he could break it down with what metals he was actually had and then he could take it to the assay office and have it broken down and they could confirm that he had done this accurately he got to where he could also test out how many for the percentage of each metal that was in perhaps a lump of ore that he had I remembered that because I remember him talking about everything has frequency everything has an electrical current and everything in your body will always use it slightly differently than anybody else's body so it will be particularly you so I remembered that idea of an electrical current I had my tongue switch mean I had muscle

resistance this was my thought was that a closed circuit is good strong right or on the muscle stays strong anyone familiar with applied kinesiology will understand this concept or a muscle checking or muscle testing I figured then that the one thing I had was my electrical system working internally and that I could harness that by using my tongue pressure against my teeth so I would press let's say one of the text or the doctors or nurses walked in and they asked me a question and my consciousness was so or my brain was so injured that I couldn't consciously comprehend what they were saying I had a lot of trust that somewhere in my body it was

understood I may not be able to access it but somewhere in me it was understood so if it was understood and my muscle could create an a closed electrical system if my tongue stayed strong I said yes that's what it came down to if my tongue was strong I said yes I'd have no idea what was coming I wouldn't know if they were gonna bring me food I wouldn't know if they were gonna bathe me I wouldn't know if we were going for testing I may not have a clue what else was happening but I had used my tongue and I would say yes or no based on that muscle resistance so for you too I think

trusting yourself getting to that core part of trusting you is what will save you a lot of energy I had to wrangle the cloud and I did it what I call analog binary style over these months weeks days and years I would lay there and I would separate out one impulse or one feeling or one thing that I could zero out from the rest and I started creating a system a network like a framework and I started separating out what was words what was emotions what was intentions and it's incredibly complex to think about what that was what I did I then so then if something came up or if I felt something I would simply muscle check using my

tongue and then eventually my hands or something else to know where to categorize stuff and because I started categorizing and knowing how then fear and how memory and stuff worked everything is grouped basically for me by an underlying emotional current the thread or connector of an emotion or a feeling or a response so I started routing things that way these were the main categories that they would go into everything as I felt it or heard it or would try to fount what a word was it would got segregated either into being mental emotional physical or spiritual and then it went through these categories and then in branching into many many other subcategories so even though I may have just been laying there

it looked like I was just sleeping even when I looked completely calm I was working I think for all of us we should recognize that even when you're just sitting here and listening to me you are working you are doing many things when you're at work even when you're just starting there staring off into space you are working give yourself credit for all of those times so 350,000 that's about the number of sessions that I did in that first four two years to start learning how to form words how to use my mouth how to do all these different things I did about three hundred and fifty thousand sessions building all the minut building blocks

to be able to do so and I did it rather obsessively it was what I could do and I had to have like something that even though I couldn't go at my brain stem directly I figured if I could free up all this other stuff it would free up bandwidth and my body could handle the brain stem stuff I needed to be able to handle the other stuff that was presenting I really want to pain to stop - one of the biggest things I had to learn was what wasn't mine I realized somewhere in this eventually that I was also picking up or processing a lot of stuff that wasn't mine I wasn't responsible for it be responsible for it

was somebody else's emotions or memories or their thoughts or their impact it was their stuff and I had to start getting really specifically brutal with segregating what was mine and what wasn't because it still was life or death on my side I would look for then a common electrical signature I allowed my senses to tell me when a common electrical signature was present and I would resegregate out my stuff to that person

so with everything that you're facing or whatever we're going through it's important to find your motivation as I started being able to use my limbs again and this is a picture I did of with my dead hand laying on the thing as I started to relearn to use my other arm this was a pencil drawing of my hand that wasn't good enough like being able to do that wasn't good enough and I needed to relearn how to write so what I did and one of the nursing homes was set there and I heard about the HGTV Dream Home that the dream home contest was going on and I sat there and I wrote out 450

entries so in that dream like then I'd have some ritalin like that'd be great so I wrote out those and something interesting even though I had been right-handed relearning to write I could only write mirror image I could only write backwards for a long time or upside down I couldn't flip it over and write normally for a long time so there were a lot of very interesting things that went on but and I learned how to relegate everything any crisis situation you're in what do we always hear you need to delegate you need to delegate figure out how to delegate if you learn how to recognize within you how quickly you can delegate things out your life

and your choices and reactions and any crucial or crisis time become simple I did this physically and neurologically with relegating everything I could what I call my subconscious anything that I didn't have to because I was having to be consciously aware of my lungs my heart my body like everything that was going on how many minutes my eyes were open all of this stuff I relegated numbers decisions anything that required any amount of trust to my unconscious mind and I would just muscle check for the answer for an example in that let's say that I wanted I had an overall goal of one day moving my left arm but I would have to take inventory of exactly what my

physical mental emotional and I guess not just physical but I had to take account of where I was at every given moment and go okay I want to move my left arm today I can open my eyes for minutes every four hours if I can't open my eyes then I won't know whether or not really I'm moving my arm and the way that I want it to move so this has becomes important I know that I can set up for 20 minutes probably for the entire day I can visualize this though a hundred times and then I have to sleep sixteen solid hours so I would get minut information like that and then stick to

that exactly and that was with doing nothing else I mean what I'm saying this wasn't added in to a day I'm saying there was nothing else going on except those things again the doctors like the heads of University of Arizona different places they said two years and they said all that was expected me for me was death and yet doing this system after that video point in continuing on later on the neurologist said I did about 45 years of recovery and five I had setbacks there were definitely every single minute every single day every week there are huge setbacks for you you have setbacks you have things that don't go the way that you want them

to your job your life your whatever your plans are for the weekend you face setbacks there are constant problems so getting comfortable with that and realizing everybody else has setbacks to accept unless there's some kind of perfect creature that I don't know so that's kind of all we're going to discuss on the particulars of that I'm going to this is a kind of a funny story this talk does not go into how I continued with my electrical system or with my recovery it's just about the starting founding like Incident Response type things that are needed but going back to visit one of the hospitals one of the nurses came over to me and she's like okay now can you tell me like who

are you I said I she's like no I know like you couldn't tell us before but who are you and I'm like I don't I don't know what that means and it turns out that because while I was in ICU and I was in the hospital in acute care and I couldn't interact with people about a hundred and twenty different people had come to visit the hospital and they were all people that I had volunteered with they were all people that I had worked with out in the field or mostly people that I had volunteered with so being at a volunteer con like this when you whether you are actively volunteering or you're attending you're supporting it

however you are supporting it I think it's hilarious to realize that from having done that it improved my medical care because all these people came to visit and there were guys who came in full suits and ties and all that the hospital staff assumed that I was some kind of real estate heiress and so they try to give like extra-special good care because my lawyers and everybody we're coming to see me all the time okay so the reality was I was on Medicaid I had 40 dollars to my name everything was gone from coming up it I had a mount a pair of men's sweatpants I had a broken bra and that 40 bucks that somebody gave me when

I left the hospital so if you think volunteering is just yeah it's not that big of a deal I'm telling you it's a big deal and you don't even realize how it's going to play out so to kind of summarize when you're facing a choice or a challenge however you define that you rarely need more information seriously guys literally very rarely do you need more than what is already within you if you do if it is a particular attack a certain exploit or something yeah get that specific information but for the most part be happy and settled and feel secure in that pretty much anything that you will need to do you already hold within you need more breathing like just

chill and let the answer surface don't beat yourself down and as somebody who lived entirely in my head and it caused me a lot of pain and problem don't overthink as much as you possibly can be nice to your neurons and don't overthink just breathe and let the answer surface increase yourself trust know who and what you're about what you're going for and simplify it next know what's yours know whether or not it's your battle to fight and let it go if it's not and I highly advocate for using humor that's Mike that's definitely a portion I do not agree in belittling things or minimizing whatever you're going through but humor has aided me this last besides

Las Vegas I was really fortunate and I got to work with organizing the first hackers stand-up comedy event that took place at besides Las Vegas this year I also work with mental health hackers and have volunteered at a lot of other conferences and things and I still find that however and I'm autistic I'm introverted all of that still humor whatever your brand of humor is maybe what saves your life

so I definitely recommend for you right now today tonight take a few seconds and write out some things that you've come through write out five things that for you were massive things that you have overcome or that you triumphed in then think back on that and see where the courage and the tools were like how did you have the courage or what courage can you now take from that and see what tools did you already possess that allowed you to get through that and again the slow way is the fast way because I was willing to slow down and not force my body any more than what it took to just keep slowly improving I was

able to make recovery that was never before possible so the slow way is painfully slow and far away as I was from all of society for these years the slow way is the fast way because now I'm definitely doing far better than what anybody in any of the hospitals or the therapists or anybody I have worked with ever thought possible

again so from the video time to now I think you see there's been some improvement I have not been on an elliptical yet I am NOT at that point I still spend about 85% of my time completely alone in silence and all that not because I want to be it's not actually my preference its what is generally required and it keeps I keep seeing my recovery times decrease which is a good thing I do recalibrate daily every single day is different I have to give up plans and ideas that I held yesterday because I have to change to what is actually presenting in the moment but I can't be afraid of losing if we don't be afraid of losing don't be

afraid of losing on anything that you want to go after and at when I spoke it Diana initiative and somebody asked what was the one thing that I would want other people to know I said if you are going through something first of all before anything else figure out if you can feel loved figure out if you ever have and figure out how you feel it ask if you want to help somebody else one of the main things I would ask them is ask them if they are capable of feeling loved it makes a huge difference I didn't feel it until for the first time until about a year and a half ago and it

makes a huge difference so thank you all packed your life and think with your body you [Applause]