Category: Emotional Work

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1374 and Acting Anyway

The frustrating part of living with human limitations is that it doesn’t really matter to anyone but you and your family. Life goes on no matter what is going on in your body or personal context.

The constant barrage of anarcho-tyranny across the globe will build up reactive low trust feelings in anyone.

Harden your hearts and open your mind. Find the facts of your situation. The accommodations of your particular circumstances won’t matter if you can find a way to contribute by acting on the world. You need to bring something to the table even if it’s simple as a good attitude.

The current cultural battles of responsibility seem to hinge largely on who has responsibility and at what stage of abstraction and remove (our city, our regional government, our national state apparatus). We are caught in the same system as anyone else to some extent.

What are the ethical ways of being with each other? How do we show up with trust when so little is trustworthy. What do we owe each other knowing not all are good faith?

I think some of this is simple and no amount of effort or obfuscation gets over the fact that you must contribute some good to the whole. You must be high trust to get back high trust.

Humans are on the whole less transactional than we imagine in our fears. I’ve always found reason to be hopeful. You can act in the face of uncertainty. You can act in an awful world.

Categories
Emotional Work Politics

Day 1372 and Everything Is Happening

The last forty eight hours or so have just been nonstop for me. Of course, that’s been true for the last week, the last month, the last quarter, the last year and the last decade.

Check KnowYourMeme for the full history of /pol and happenings.

The “nothing ever happens” bros might simply have made different life choices as from where I stand everyday is packed with happening.

I’ll grant the meme having originated as a geopolitical joke means it’s a little contextually inappropriate to apply to individuals and their own lives.

But what if “nothing ever happens” is just another way of justifying one’s own lack of agency? “Nothing ever happens” is admitting you are comfortable with being an NPC in the great game of life. Even if you are sure you are a bit player of little consequence you can rewrite your own programming.

Maybe we can look to another 4chan /pol meme “It’s Happening” for inspiration. Believe in your own capacity to have agency even when it’s small.

It’s Happening

Maybe world changing systemic change is beyond reach for most of us. That’s ok. But we can have a lot more happening with a few changes. You can play your own games and decide on your own rewards. I have. And it’s all happening for me and mine.

Categories
Emotional Work Politics Reading

Day 1371 and Against The Tides

I don’t swim very much as an adult but I grew up in an era with mandatory swimming tests (even at university).

I was lucky enough to not only learn to swim in the Pacific Ocean but in Colorado I spent a lot of time in our many creek, rivers and lakes. Freshwater has its own appeal and I’ve seen the tides work on the Great Lakes. But little is as magical as the buoyancy of seawater.

I’ve struggled with not having swimming and the joys of warm weather and cool water with some of my autoimmune challenges. A bathing suit I’d never worn came to represent some of that loss.

But today I was able to take a swim. I put on a bathing suit and was able to casually swim with just enough force applied to steady myself in a comfortable place against the increasingly forceful tide coming in. I felt like I’d won even if it was just for thirty minutes. I enjoyed a nice healthful thing in between the chaos of a very busy moment.

I’m not much of a Fitzgerald fan and but the joy of finding the limitations in one’s life as you mature is the relatability of feeling the weight of a one’s years as you push against the tides.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past

So many decisions cannot be undone and yet we steady ourselves against forces much bigger than we are. Pushing against some of the vastness of a sea while relaxing into its much bigger whole is quietly humbling

I feel good about pushing against the vastness but also not being so sure about my own place in much larger forces. It’s no wonder man yearns for the horizon.

I took a shower and immediately went back to work. But it was nice to be a human doing a human thing while all of this is going on around me. I held my own against the tides. And I intend to keep doing.

Categories
Emotional Work Politics

1370 and Ride or Die

Americans aren’t showing the loyalty we used to be known for these days. It’s embarrassing to see the big games we talk from politics to Wall Street. If it’s all big talk then of course the world laughs when we fail to be steadfast.

Maybe that’s why we have such a glorious oeuvre of “ride or die” art. From literature and cinema to Lana Del Ray we want people who commit even when the risks are unquestionably large and success isn’t assured.

That means a lot of hurt. And not caring who knows you’ve committed to a risky or even crazy caper. Lana waited for an alligator wrangler for fuck’s sake.

From her Blue Jeans lyrics it sure looks like she’s seen her share of bullshitters caught up in the game.

I stayed up waitin’, anticipatin’ and pacin’
But he was chasing paper
“Caught up in the game, ” that was the last I heard

And maybe that’s the point of America’s love of the ride or die. The risks are clear. But the reward for loyalty knows a deeper satisfaction than those who get caught up in the game. Don’t chase the paper and expect the game to care. Only people care. And we should all aspire to loyalty beyond reproach.

Categories
Emotional Work Politics

Day 1365 and Good News, Bad News

It seems to be an absolutely awful week on Planet Earth. War, natural disasters, and human venality are on full display. It’s hard to even read the news, political or otherwise.

In contrast, I am myself in a good news place. I have a few leftover health issues as I leave behind the bout of respiratory issues (Covid’s legacy) but am otherwise full steam ahead.

Because I am so busy I find myself offline and missing things. It’s all good news in my world. And then I come back online to check feeds and it’s just all bad news.

I feel the privilege of it but I am also proud to have this stability. We made choices so our lives could be this way. We value preparedness and the calm that comes from planning.

I wish more people could live this way. Focus shouldn’t be reserved for a select few who can make good big life choices. That can be luck of the draw.

I do believe however it’s possible for many more of us to narrow focus so we can let small good choices compound. It’s good to appreciate the value of limiting your attention to your own priorities.

There is an argument to be made that only once you have steadied your own life can you look outside. Given how crazy the outside world can be give yourself the chance to have good news in your life. There will always be bad news.

Categories
Emotional Work Reading

Day 1361 and Temporal Distortion

I dislike how illness messes with your sense of time. One of the themes of the pandemic was how it affected people’s perception of time. We measure time but our experience of it is harder to pin down.

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly distorted people’s perception of time. Many experienced a disconnection between objective time and subjective time, often feeling that days blurred together or that time moved unusually fast or slow.

Perplexity Recap

Temporal disorientation feels as disorienting as spatial disorientation to me. Getting lost in your own personal time fucks with the reality of consensus reality time passing.

Every time I have a couple of sick days in a row I am fearful. You can reorient if you are lost on a road but the world moves even if you don’t. How do you reorient yourself to time?

We humans live forward. If we somehow find other ways to experience the fourth dimension I’d question if we remain human through that. We understand time dilation but living with time as a concurrent dimension to space and having it be mutable warps the mind a bit.

It’s a rich space for science fiction for a reason. Edwin Abbot’s Flatland is a classic of geometry. As a child I was fascinated by the idea of a tesseract in A Wrinkle in Time. A hypercube is a heady concept for a tween.

All this is to say, I was outside some slipstreams of time and I am slipping back in and seeing if I can flow with the tides.

Categories
Emotional Work Travel

Day 1336 and Pick & Pack

It’s possible exposure therapy has worked for me. My worst recurring nightmare always involves packing. And yet recently I’ve come to find packing to be a neutral to even positive activity.

The dream has many forms. Sometimes it’s a permanent move, often it’s about rushing for some type of upcoming unexpected travel like a flight change or worse an “evacuation emergency” like a fire or natural disaster.

My subconscious likes to chew on packing up crucial items and leaving. I moved a lot as a child. My father also valued traveling while my mother and siblings did not.

I assume some of these nightmares are a related to those experiences. Instability is a classic reaction formation process for a child seeking safety. And I’m now as an adult finding that safety to be in reach.

I still have these dreams but I take a lot more pleasure in picking items for travel and packing them up now than I could have imagined. Even over the lifespan of this writing experiment I’ve seen changes in my emotional relationship to packing.

I have whole systems for managing the types of unexpected problems that crop up in modern travel like my three bag cascade. I’ve taken this activity that has had a negative valence for me and turned it into positive experiences.

I travel a lot for work and I can manage that even with health conditions. I have done work on disaster preparedness for myself and for my friends. Always be prepared is a terrific motto for the Boys Scouts and for myself.

Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 1320 and Being “You-er”

You may recall the old aphorism about marriage. Men and women have very different goals for the institution and how it will or won’t change them.

“Men marry women with the hope they will never change. Women marry men with the hope they will change. Invariably they are both disappointed”

I don’t recall having any ambitions for changing my husband when we got married ten years ago. I thought quite highly of him when we got married. I still do.

The irony is that we have both changed significantly not because of any goal the other has for each other but because of the work we do together. Fast growing startups simply demand so much emotional change from their people.

A recent piece in the New York Times discussed how coaching has become the hack that drove emotional chances

Venture-backed startups simply must scale faster than all but the rarest of human beings can acquire emotional intelligence. As a result, startup founders and chief executives, many of whom are trained not in management but in software engineering, face extraordinary risk of coming unglued in ways that vaporize immense amounts of capital.

How Coaching Became Silicon Valley’s Hack for Therapy

Acquiring emotional intelligence quickly becomes a “do or die” skill in startups. And most of us do die. Ego death in mediation like jhanna are within reach because failure and rebirth are such common experiences for the technologists that build quickly moving companies.

Both my husband Alex and I have done family systems therapy as well as multiple forms of professional and personal coaching. If Alex didn’t want change from me as his wife then he is surely disappointed. As his wife if I wanted change from him I very much did get it.

Neither one of us is disappointed, aphorisms aside. If anything, as we’ve done more work to acquire the emotional intelligence required of us to growth and thrive in our work, we’ve become more ourselves.

There is a real joy in becoming “you-er” as essential personality, skills and ambitions become clearer. It’s well worth investing in therapy and coaching to become yourself. Being “you-er” is quite freeing. It’s hard to be disappointed by that outcome.

Categories
Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 1319 and Gimme Fuel, Gimme Fire

I’m a little bit underfed at the moment. If I don’t have someone feeding me I basically don’t eat. And I didn’t eat much this weekend because I was alone. The joyful peace of solitude means I’ll skip every meal I can.

I don’t mind a little feast and famine because I’ve always found food to be at best inconvenient and at worst an actively hostile force that would make me an undesirable fat woman. Elder millennials had terrific culture for women what else can say.

I didn’t come from a family that had a strong culture of food. Scandinavian foods are kind of gross when filtered through American agribusiness. Happy family mealtimes and nurturing through food seems like the stuff of movies not real life. It certainly wasn’t my experience as a kid.

I mostly absorbed the wider culture around me which said food was dangerous for women and should be actively restricted. The experiences I did have in my family’s relationship to food were not uniformly positive.

I’ve had years where I was able to look at food as fuel but those were mostly when I was very dedicated to athletic pursuits.

Alas that’s in the past for me thanks to age and disease. I’m happy I’m healthy enough to squat a few times a week and be out of bed for multiple hours at a time. And that’s still a struggle with my ankylosis.

I don’t crave food or have intrusive thoughts about it. I mostly just don’t like to eat and it has surely contributed to a genetic propensity to weight gain especially when it’s been combined with steroids to manage my autoimmune condition. If I were my body I wouldn’t speed up my metabolism either.

I better force myself into a meal right now because as tempting as it is to just not eat it’s a bad habit. But if someone just solves the problem of food I’d be the first person in line. Especially now that the American food system is beyond tainted. Like truly how can we have the fire to burn if our fuel is this bad?

Categories
Emotional Work Politics

Day 1315 and Ratfucking Season

I’ve been engaging in more of American political discourse online as we head into the main campaign season. That’s probably a mistake.

American is no country for old libertarians. Or in my case middle aged small “l” libertarians who aren’t keen on more government involvement in anything. Cyperpunk is became daily life and the crypto-libertarian instincts some of us were raised into make us distrust this particular flavor.

But I’m in a pretty decent mood all things considered. Perhaps the typical depressive lassitude of the sunny season is being mitigated by the climate controlled extremely online nature of the networked era. Madness without breaking a sweat.

My people are not much for sunnier climes and our popular culture representations have more than a touch of summer madness. Better to keep us indoors when the mercury climbs.

And yet the madness seeps in to the virtual worlds of media. August is full of ugly surprises.Which brings me to the rat fucking.

As I said, I’m watching American politics. It’s definitely Knives Out season and as my friend Jon Stokes points out the semiotics are ugly. Now that we have the Vice Presidency match up set as Ohio Senator JD Vance versus Minnesota Governor Tim Walz we can run cultural scripts. It’s already ugly, sexualized and bullying.

meme warfare b/c it codes Vance as the self-loathing, repressed kinkster who hasn’t yet come out to a loving ally dad who’ll embrace him & pass the torch to him

This is ratfucking season and the Democrats are on top of their game. Politico has a short history of ratfucking which anyone interested in political campaigns would do well to read.

Roger Stone has been with us doing dirty tricks for so long sometimes we forget that both sides are up to it and have been since before Nixon.

Like my goodness how things don’t repeat but rhyme in twisted new ways. We’ve got a Kennedy with a car crash crash and carcasses in the news.

It’s wild that the same people are still around and involved and somehow not dead. You shouldn’t get to do the “Summer of 68” twice in my opinion. And absolutely nobody wants a repeat of the 70s. Can you imagine cultural stagflation? Actually maybe I can

Maybe we are doing reinforcement learning in a simulation of some sort and we actually are in a gradient descent of madness being smeared across an event horizon of frenzied power dreams of an artificial American swampland simulation that ran too long. It’s all awfully crisp.