Between psychotherapy and password therapy, I’ll stick with the passwords.

The cardinal rule of password creation is skirting the obvious: No names of children or pets, no street addresses or car names. The ideal password is a random combination of letters and numbers, unfathomable to a potential intruder.

My computer system at work requires a password, changeable at three-month intervals, and I dutifully formulate a new one when the request is triggered by the network. I have chosen to pooh-pooh conventional wisdom, though, and enter a word that represents my current preoccupation in life. After all, my files contain absolutely nothing juicy to tempt a potential hacker, unless he is dying to know if he made the cut for my son’s bar mitzvah guest list. I keep a running list of my passwords, handwritten, and I scan it each time I submit a change, and the result is my life story crystallized in one-word bites. I could use it as an outline for my autobiography, in the unlikely event that I would ever presume to write one.

As I peruse my handwritten list, trying to recreate the ebb and flow of my life over the past few years, I learn something about myself. My first discovery is that the list divides ever-so-neatly into thematic chunks. I had always considered myself to be organized, but until I scanned the list from top to bottom, I had never realized that even my preoccupations cluster into neat, schematic groupings. I am obviously not a scattershot worrier, but rather a focused one, a specialist. I agonize over every aspect of a subject before moving on to the next one, gnawing at it like a chicken bone until there is absolutely no particle of meat left, and the subject loses its appeal as password fodder.

My initial run of passwords oozes a nurturing theme. No surprise here. My first computer at work coincided with the arrival of my first and only baby. As befits a woman who came late to motherhood, just at the second-to-last tick of her biological clock, the password list predictably covers all the fears and puzzles that a newborn generates in an inexperienced mother. “Teething, bronchitis, strep,” the list begins, and proceeds to wallow for months in the domain of diseases, stomach ailments, and excretory anomalies.

Then, the siege mentality gives way. Health crises are superceded in the list by normal developmental stages that just happened to coincide with the network summons for a password change, “crawling, walking, babbling, cereal.” And finally, after many months, a mellowing out to “handmedowns, Spock, babysitter.”

The second thematic chunk reveals the moment when I finally relaxed enough in motherhood to extract my head from the diaper pail, allowing more selfish preoccupations to emerge via my passwords. I could dub this the egocentric or, more charitably, the professional segment. “Conference, vacation, workshop, training.” This interlude is brief, though, jettisoned by the next, more overpowering segment: natural disaster.

Montreal is not in the tsunami belt. It does not buckle under avalanches or earthquakes. Montrealers ooze disdain toward the faint of heart who can’t take a blizzard in stride — but we never could have predicted the ice storm.

In January, 1998, a freakish week-long ice storm blanketed the city in ice. Power pylons crumbled like matchsticks under their burden of ice, cutting off electricity and heat to the city, while temperatures outside hovered below freezing. Houses were abandoned, cars crushed beneath fallen trees. Farm fields recalled Pompeii with livestock frozen mid-stride. The armed forces moved in, and public shelters were jury-rigged to accommodate more than 100,000 people. At the height of the storm more than 1.5 million people were left without electricity.

When my computer and I renewed acquaintance after 10 days of enforced idleness for both of us, my passwords reflected the post-storm turmoil, mainly in terms of how my house had fared under the siege. “Roofleak, furnace, sump-pump, hacksaw . . .” Even after the ice-storm damages were repaired, though, the house lingered obstinately in my password choices. After 60 years of patience, the house had finally decided to rear up to demand the attention it had so long been denied under our benignly neglectful ownership, hence “insulation, oiltank, oilspill, driveway, crumbling . . .”

Then, did my body take its cue from the house? Suddenly, an ignominious slide toward decrepitude: “tendinitis, prescription, physio, x-rays, nightsplint, eyeglasses.” Who would have thought that I could look back fondly on the time when a mildew-rotted basement was my uppermost password preoccupation? Right now, I am firmly entrenched in labour-unrest mode, “transitstrike, workaction, picketline . . .”

When the request for a password change next comes along, though, what worry will I choose? On the odd occasion that I haven’t settled on a major personal preoccupation, my kinesthetic memory fails me, and my fingers, rather than flying over the keys as they normally do to enter the password, hover uncertainly above the keyboard.

In a perverse way I am grateful for this periodic prod to reflect on my life, and prioritize my problems in terms of password-worthiness. Deprived of this quarterly opportunity to unload, who knows what outlet my worries would take? In the contest between psychotherapy and password therapy, I’ll stick with the passwords.

(Publicado por Globe News)