Hey everyone, and happy Sunday to you! I hope you all are having a wonderful weekend, and for those of you who celebrated it, I hope you also had a wondrous Valentine’s Day as well.
In my attempt to remain my authentic self — #VulnerablyMe, if you will — I will share that while the past week was busy at work with still fighting small security-related fires (grateful they are nothing blaze-worthy), I haven’t been feeling very creative or inspired. I’ll confess that I’ve also had a bout or two of loneliness. It’s a normal occurrence for me. Thankfully it doesn’t happen very often, but sometimes it can come out of nowhere. So, while I don’t have anything I wanted to share this week, I did have a topic come up last week that I wanted to write up and talk about.
This Got Me Thinking
I was listening to last week’s episode of The Awareness Angle podcast, and one of the hosts shared a story that’s been sitting with me ever since. Their mother had their email compromised — completely taken over — and the person sharing the story said they felt this wave of regret. Their story was saying what was going through my mind as I listened:
“I wish I’d had that conversation with them sooner. I wish I’d helped them set things up differently.”
Why did it vibe with me? I imagine that a lot of us in cybersecurity carry that same secret guilt. We know what to do. We see the risks. But when it comes to the people we actually care about — our parents, our friends, the people who aren’t in this field — those conversations feel impossibly hard to start. We don’t want to sound condescending. We don’t want to scare them. We tell ourselves we’ll bring it up “when the time is right.”
Then something happens, and we realize the right time for that conversation was probably just… before.
It’s’ strange to me that we wait for permission to care for people in this way, that helping someone turn on two-factor authentication or check their password strength is somehow intrusive. It’s not. It’s just another form of love, kindness, or caring. It’s the quiet kind that shows up before something goes wrong, not after.
Maybe the lesson isn’t about having the perfect words or the perfect moment. Maybe it’s just about starting. Even awkwardly. Even small.
Finally, here’s a look back at what I wore to work this past week. I hope you enjoy them. I hope you all have a great weekend, and that your week ahead is full of creativity and inspiration, which is what I am hoping for myself.
-Terry
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