Author: Julie

Categories
Aesthetics Preparedness

Day 206 and Summer Storms

When I was a kid it was considered common knowledge to “get off the mountain” before the afternoon thundershowers. Along the front range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, the afternoon or evening storm is a mainstay of summer. A quick occasionally terrifying show of nature in all her glory.

Lightning in Rocky Mountain National Park

One minute the sky is clear and the summer heat is bearing down on you, and the next torrential rains with lightning and thunder cracking one after the other explode. Temperatures can drop 20 degrees in as many minutes. The wind is the first sign a storm is bearing down on you. A reminder why it’s wise to pack layers and be prepared with rain gear even on the sunniest day.

I personally love the storms. The relief from the heat is welcome. But it’s more than comfort. It’s the emotions that come with something so powerful bearing down on you. The smell of ozone permeates the air. The excitement and fear from needing to get to safety when the first signs of a storm moving in snow themselves.

Most Coloradan that hike have high country lightning safety training to rely on, but it doesn’t make those bursts of light any less terrifying. The hairs standing on end a visceral reminder why the god of thunder featured so heavily in mythology. The power on display is clear. Thunder clapping as lightning strikes a reminder that you are in the middle of a power that has no interest in you. It just exists.

But like a god, natural phenomena is capricious. As quickly as a mountain storm blows in it blows out. The clouds part. Sun shines through. The occasional rainbow will cross a valley. I just watched a downpour from the safety of my house in the foothills. I guess I still know to be off the mountain before the storm comes. It was a beautiful mesmerizing twenty minutes of rain, lightning, hail and thunder. And then it was gone

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 205 and Saying It Outloud

No one would accuse me of being keeping my opinions to myself. I generally say what I mean and mean what I say. I find filtering my thoughts to be exhausting. It’s not that I think manners are not important. I think it can often be a great kindness not to blurt out every thought. Being considerate and not imposing your every thought onto others is part of living in society. But I’m learning that you have to be clear about who you are. Keeping your truth inside will kill your soul.

So it has come as a surprise to me that I am keeping a lot to myself. Mostly emotional and personal things. I still generally go straight to taking a public stand on politics, professional topics and cultural issues. But there are areas where I just don’t have that bravery. Where I haven’t uttered how I really feel to anyone.

I’m working through how to discuss some of these truths out loud. How does it feel to tell friends and family that I just don’t have the same desires, preferences, or mores as they do? Generally I’ve found acceptance. Even some of the more “out there” stuff has been ok. No one has rejected me. If anything people loved me because of it and not in spite of it.

Obviously I’m not in a place where I want to broadcast most of it in public. But I’m slowly realizing that saying things out loud makes me happier. To know my own truth and have it be clear is a great relief. Especially for areas where I feared it might implode my life. Or where it might hurt someone I love.

If you’ve got a truth you are keeping close to your heart consider sharing it with those you’ve already trusted with your heart. If they genuinely love you for you they don’t want you changing yourself to fit some idea of what they want. You may be causing suffering to yourself for nothing. The editing of desires, goals or preferences only limits your life.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 204 and Saying Hard Things

I’ve had to have a number of emotional conversations with people I care about recently. We’ve had miscommunications, failures, admissions, and changes in relationships both personal and professional.

Initially I was worried once it became clear I had to have “that conversation” where unsaid or unspoken truths couldn’t remain that way. I suppose it’s natural to fear sharing hard things with those we love. But avoiding the temptation to “not hurt their feelings” is not right path. It is always more hurtful to obfuscate or be avoidant.

In each of these conversations, I felt utterly unprepared. I cycled through shame, regret, sadness, fear, hurt, embarrassment until I had said my piece. Even if was crying in a few instances, once I got over the fear, the relief washed over me. I felt loving and joyful. Peaceful and lighter in my soul that I had owned the range of feelings & failures with honesty.

We know in our hearts before our minds what needs to be said. If you are struggling with a hard conversation or a relationship that needs truth to be spoken, summon you the courage to do it. Facing our self limiting beliefs and the mental blockers that keep us from having the life we want is always worth it. You can do it.

Categories
Startups

Day 203 and Living Rent Free in Our Heads

There are two kinds of startup teams. The ones that forgive each other, and the ones that don’t. If you are very lucky, everyone forgives each other in time. But for the ones that can’t forgive each other, the pain of the experience is a curse. Your failures and weaknesses live in each others’ heads rent free. And that sucks.

I understand how the curse of the unforgivable startup sins get cast. I understand the pain of having people in your life that you cannot imagine forgiving because their sins against you feel too big. Startups are exactly the kind of place where forgiving seems impossible. Why? Building something new is painful.

New life, new business, new art. It hurts to birth something from nothing. Those laws of thermodynamics seem to indicate that energy doesn’t get made or lost, so sure, getting an idea to come into reality has to have an energy cost that comes from somewhere. I’d argue with startups it comes from our will. Maybe our soul. If you aren’t into that then money and time. It has a cost is what I’m saying and we pay it. And when we feel we’ve paid those costs unfairly it’s hard to forgive those whom we blame.

When you’ve given so much of yourself to make a new reality, the pain of it not succeeding is real. It hurts to realize we’ve failed. To come headfirst at the possibility that your sacrifice was for nothing is existential. That the energy you took to build something was for nothing.

With existential problems you’ve got two choices. Face who you are and your part in it or blame it on someone else. It is a lot harder to own existential yourself. If we are feeling like a victim there are people who we can blame. We hired wrong. We had cofounder issues. We couldn’t collaborate well. We had cultural mismatches.

There are endless reasons our failures are shared. And it’s true. Failure never has a single point. It wasn’t just you. But it’s not your cofounder or your teammates fault either. You have to forgive them. They have to forgive you. If you don’t they will live in your head rent free forever. And no one wants that. Find a way to forgive. Find a way to own your own existential failures. It’s not worth losing people over.

Categories
Finance Startups

Day 202 and Show Me Anything

I’m lucky to see work from founders at the very earliest stages. If you have a problem you are solving for chaotic world I’m generally interested in seeing it even if it’s just in the idea phase. But you have to show me you’ve got a plan to build a product. Any product is fine. Just show me something! Show me how you have the capacity to build even if you suck at it.

Bobby Goodlatte captured some of the sentiment I feel on the subject well with this exasperated Tweet.

What’s a “builder”? Show me something. Anything. Just show me one pixel you’ve created. That’s what a builder is. That’s why PM’s don’t qualify.

Sometimes it can feel hard to build something, anything, when you are very experienced. This is a problem I’ve seen across all kinds of impressive people. Academics, government folks and higher end finance folks, former c-suite executives. They know what good looks like so anything they can physically make with their own two hands will all look like crap.

I’d even go so far as to suggest there is an inverse relationship between how much you obfuscate your lack of existing product and your credentials. There are other corollaries on that basic theme. How comprehensible your product is right now is inversely related to how extensive your service layer is at the moment.

I see a lot of brilliant, extremely credentialed people solving big problems, but because making money is important they will pitch what amount to service companies without an existing product. But they will use extensive jargon and hand waving visionary opportunities to hide the fact that there isn’t any product layer yet. Which is weird because like eventually I’ll find out right? You wouldn’t want to trick your investors on the state of play.

I’d encourage you to stop trying to hide that fact. Don’t be embarrassed that you can’t make things to your standards. None of us can. New things always look like shit. Just own up to that reality and you will find more help from folks who will want to help make it better. Stop showing me CAGR and TAM and possibilities as a way of hiding that you haven’t built a product yet. It’s ok. You don’t need to have built something great yet.

Admit it. Show me some wireframes and a roadmap. I’ll take that way more seriously. In fact, I’ll probably overweight you showing me exactly what you do have and how you plan to use funds to improve it. That’s how much startup people value just building the damn thing.

Categories
Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 201 and Take It Slowly

I woke up today feeling normal. I wasn’t in any pain. I felt rested. The excruciating exhaustion that has gripped me had lifted.

I was a little bit surprised as I’ve been fighting off a setback that has diminished my physical and emotional state. An infection required an anti-viral that just destroyed me for the last week and a half.

The relief I felt at having the energy and desire to do normal tasks was palpable. I started making “to do” lists and plans for how I was going to use the energy during the day. I bounded out the door at 8am to my favorite trail to get in a walk before the summer heat hit. I came back energized and immediately went to workout. And then I realized I was doing it again.

In my relief to have back a functional body I was setting myself up to be exhausted by immediately over doing things. . My enthusiasm to get back to doing “all the things” would again be my undoing. Some residual guilt over needing to get back to people was on my mind and I used this projected shame right back into myself. What a disappointment I was to people and clearly I must set it right immediately that I’d been late by a week. I needed to respond to startups, catch up on my diligence pile, and email back all the folks in my inbox plus I was behind on any number of fund tasks for Chaotic. I justified these obligations as a reason to beat myself.

I have often struggled with the feeling that I need to work as hard and fast as I can when I am physically well. Part of it is my general tendency towards workaholism. But part of it is fear that feeling well is transient and I need to make hay while the sun shines.

I talked myself down from it and kept a steady pace through the day. I didn’t rush. I took breaks. And I didn’t feel guilty or beat myself. Which was quite a relief. It seems I can learn to take things slowly after all.

Categories
Chronicle

Day 200 and Accomplished

When I set out to be more creative in 2021, I set a goal of writing “something” every single day. At first it was hard. I couldn’t figure out what to write, I second guessed myself a lot, and my style varied wildly depending on my focus, energy and attention. But two hundred days of consistent daily writing has yielded significant improvements.

Even within the first month I began to see signs this experiment was making me a better writer and thinker. From Day 31:

The biggest change I’m noticing is a smoother less disjointed focus in my mental processes. This mental fluidity (which requires non judgement) is slowly improving the quality of my thoughts

I’ve covered a lot of ground in 200 straight days of writing. Which isn’t surprising. Every single day I open up the WordPress mobile app and I just start. I’ve become comfortable with not having a topic or even feeling terribly inspired. I just keep writing it out and see what comes of it.

My favorite part of having two hundred different essays is how much it has cut down on me needing to repeat myself. I’ve worked up pieces on so many topics I can almost always find one that is relevant. An extremely handy trick if you have reply guys.

I thought I’d want to do a “best of” round up but I think I’m happier noticing the occasion and being pleased with the achievement. After all, if I do anything but please myself then this becomes a blog with an audience and I’m quite happy enjoying this for its own sake. So good job me!

I hope if you are considering taking on some project or fast that will take hundreds of days to see results that I can provide a little encouragement. I wasn’t even sure I’d make it a month but I just kept at it. If I can do it so can you!

Categories
Chronic Disease Politics

Day 199 and Vaccination

I’m not vaccinated against covid-19. It’s not a political stance. I’d very much like to be vaccinated and have it work. But I’m in the small category of folks for whom vaccinations do not produce antibodies. And to make matters worse, the only way I could “potentially” produce the antibodies in response to a vaccine is so destabilizing my doctors don’t want me to pursue it right now. So before being super smug about how this is a pandemic among the unvaccinated and it’s a “choice” for a small portion of us it isn’t.

I take immunosuppressants because my immune system has gotten some dumb ideas about attacking my body. I have had anaphylaxis a dozen times and allergies aren’t even my primary medical issue. That would be swelling in my spinal column. It was bad enough at one point that I couldn’t walk.

I’ve tried a lot over 2 years since it was diagnosed to keep it controlled. I was on chemotherapy drugs for about six months (I don’t recommend methotrexate at all and not just because it’s mustard gas). I was on high dose steroids long enough to develop a chemical dependency on them that required supervised titration down. Plus it made me fat as fuck and that annoyed me. Eventually my doctors settled into the suppressant category known as IL, or interleukin, inhibitors.

These drugs fucking rock and gave me my life back. Thanks to them I can live basically like a normal person with the exception that I need to be careful as I’m more susceptible to infection. We are quite literally suppressing my capacity to develop immune responses. You kinda need immune responses for vaccines to work.

Immunosuppressants and vaccines don’t really mix. I had to go off them to get a flu vaccine and I relapsed so badly my doctor was like well I guess it’s going to be masking for you in the future during flu season. About 5 months later the pandemic hit. Fucking hilarious.

If I go off my IL inhibitors eventually I’ll relapse. It’s possible I can make myself less prone to inflammatory responses but it might all be bullshit. I go to a stupid amount of trouble and money and engage in a lot of woo to make the rest of my health as strong as possible so I am not as prone to inflammatory responses. Maybe it will work. But quite frankly I’m not interested in finding out right at this moment if I can live without the drugs that saved my life.

Why does all this matter? Because you need to be off of immunosuppressants in order to have a vaccine work. And I’m not fucking going off my suppressants. Nor is it recommend except in stable cases.

It takes three weeks to dose them out of my system, three weeks off them before a vaccine of any sort would have a chance of generating an antibody response, and then another 3-6 weeks of injections get back to a baseline of stability. (their effects tend to be cumulative). And that’s because I would only be able to get one stick J&J as I happen to be allergic to the PEGs that stabilize mRNA vaccines, so I have to do one and done. But that’s an aside.

Basically I’m looking at 3 months of intensive inflammation that will cripple me just to get a vaccine. Because of a host of other complicating factors my primary caregiver physician and rheumatologist have recommended against me getting the jab. It will be hugely destabilizing to me (which is its own risk) and even if I get it, we just don’t know if I’ll produce enough antibodies while I’m on the suppressants. It could be for nothing.

It’s basically lose lose for me. It won’t work if I’m on the drugs and if I’m off the drugs I’ll be so sick it’s a crap shoot if I need to be hospitalized for going off them. Which ironically would put me at even higher risk of covid exposure. My doctors do not love this.

With the Delta variant on the rise I don’t know if it’s actually worth destabilizing me or if it’s a risk worth taking. It’s a crap shoot. I isolate. I mask. We didn’t want to fuck me up. It feels damned if I do and damned if I don’t. And I feel super alone in this status as everyone is acting like it’s a choice. And yes it is my body and my choice. But what choice would you make? My doctors aren’t sure either.

Categories
Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 198 and Kindness from Strangers

I’ve written about how terribly I’ve felt physically for the past 6 straight days. The last positive day of writing I had was 8 days ago. People have noticed the emotional tone of this struggle.

Generally speaking a day or two of being down doesn’t get noticed on social media, but a continuous streak of being “off” tends to get noticed by your community. Your mutuals know who you are even from afar. Your mutuals see your struggles. Your mutuals may know more about you than you imagine. And I’ve found your mutuals may genuinely care about you.

I’ve never felt less alone than I have the past year under quarantine. Maybe it’s because the network of mutuals that shares their personality and life has spent more time on the give and take of commenting, posting, responding and messaging across social media. When we are forced to contend with our own inner emotional lives we can extend more empathy to others.

So while others may have seen politicization, partisanship and other externalized anger on social media, I’ve found mostly grace and kindness. People who I have never met in the flesh have shared their knowledge, their vulnerability and their network with me. When I have opened myself up I have been met with with compassion and understanding.

If you share a period of struggle and your desire to get out from under it you may not be far from help. The kindness of your community is within reach. Even, perhaps especially, your social media community. If you are hurting share that burden. I have and it is much lighter.

Categories
Aesthetics Emotional Work

Day 197 and Status Anxiety

I’m becoming quite bored of feeling like shit as I go on maybe day 8 or 9 of a poor reaction to an anti-viral. It’s not fun when the cure is worse than the disease. I noticed something fascinating as more and more “days off” piled up. I’ve still got a lot of emotional shit when it comes to being sick.

My anxiety over being seen as weak, lazy or lacking in willpower started to compound the more days I’ve needed to recover. What will people think of me that just as I’m making a comeback to full time work that I let myself get waylaid by a virus? Every project and meeting that needed canceling felt like I should accompany it with an apology tour. I felt like I owed everyone my time and energy. I felt ashamed.

The social striving and status chasing that have gripped the aspirational class seems to have its claws firmly in my psyche. At least when it comes to work, I’m convinced I must always be working to be “better.” Where the fuck did this self limiting belief come from?

Who cares if I needed a week off to cope with health care needs when I’ve been on medical leave for nearly two years? What is another week. Why am I so anxious to show that I’m capable of going back to work? Who the fuck cares! It’s not as if I’m dependent on a salary to survive. I’m not chasing a resume or CV polish on LinkedIn. I can just not work.

Technically I’ve already made it out of the status social climbing games. I’ve got money. I’ve got traditional credentials. I have a well compensated skill set that is easily hired out for income without sacrificing much of my time. I should not be experiencing any class anxiety at all. I should happily go into the leisure class and not concern myself that my workaholism isn’t possible for health reasons. And yet I’m absolutely panicked that I’ll be see as lazy and unreliable every time I have a minor setback.

It’s abundantly clear that aspirational class signals, especially around meritocracy and knowledge work, are as bogus as Edwardian England’s aristocracy. Class division can be upended if you just stop giving a fuck. But I’m experiencing exactly this anxiety noted in The Hedgehog Review.

The aspirationals’ endless pursuit of better can produce psychic restlessness and doubts beneath the façade of confidence and accomplishment.

I’ve always thought of my habits as being high status. I read science fiction, make a hobby of macroeconomics, and pursue healthy biohacking experiments. Of course, that I think of these things as having status is precisely what makes me signaling it low status. The perception of me caring so fucking much is proof that I don’t think my status in life is secure. I’m no better than the middle class strivers in Downtown Abbey who miss manner cues. How embarrassing!

But if I can admit that I’m anxious about my place in the world maybe it’s a sign I’m not so beholden to class systems after all. I’ve just now admitted that I’m afraid of how I will be perceived if my climb back to health isn’t perfectly stage managed. I hope that is the first step in letting it go. Fixating on fear and anxiety isn’t great for physical health. So I’m putting it out there that I’m afraid of how I’ll be seen by others. And I’m letting it go.