Category: Emotional Work

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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Emotional Work Startups

Day 1314 and Picking Up Good Vibrations

I am so tired. A wave of good news, good startups, good luck and good vibes has been coming my way. Pet Sounds may be Brian Wilson’s best work but good vibrations are a universal broadcasting frequency.

I am choosing to tap into those good vibes even if I’m concerned about well just about everything. There is nothing to be done but work the problems in front of me.

No blackpilling

So I’ll keep nurturing my good vibes. I won’t be blackpilled. I can make a difference and so can you.

If you want to send some good vibes and solutions my way, I’ve got some sort of neck pain from tension in my traps that is messing with me fiercely and I’d like to work through that. That’s the level of problem in front of me that’s solvable. That’s a vibration that can be raised. Maybe you’ve got some stuff you need help with. Hit me up with solutions or problems.

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Emotional Work Startups

Day 1310 and Zonked

I didn’t get enough sleep last night. Between one thing and another I got about five hours of sleep. Adult circadian rhythms being what they are I still woke at the usual time.

I had a busy morning and afternoon so I pushed through it. Unexpectedly a number of pieces of my investing work were happening all at once. So much for a slow August right?

I was able to get through everything on my calendar but I’m I was starring down a bunch of work even at midafternoon. And I found myself unable to keep my eyes open.

I was zonked. Slept from 2 till I was woken up for a bird dinner. I’ll admit I’m planing to sleep as soon as I can wrap up my evening routine.

I’ve got so much to get through over the weekend. I have two rounds I’m working on (if you like hardtech slide into my DMs), juggling a bunch of inbound, and I’m gearing up for the fall. So maybe I need a little extra sleep.

And to think just a few days ago I was completely despondent over fire season, the sadness of American politics and my own seasonal affective disorder with high summer. If things keep up at this pace it won’t be summer much longer.

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Emotional Work

Day 1309 and Decorum

Youth always underestimates the importance of decorum. Holding yourself to the social standards of existing cultural expectations may feel like a bore or even hypocrisy. Worse you may feel helpless if you are from outside a culture and don’t know its rules. But have faith that you can learn other people’s ways and remain yourself

Fish out of water stories are universally popular. I’d urge you to read the TV tropes wiki on the topic as you are likely to recognize dozens of the variations. City mouse, country mouse, Freaky Friday, rags to riches, riches to rags, trapped in another world, and trapped in another time are just the start.

So why do we chafe so much at learning the rules of a situation and treating people the way they wish to be treated? Setting personal standards for behaviors is a strong basis for trust. Demonstrating respect and consideration for others may sound like mere social etiquette but civilization rests on top of it.

Now you may shout “come see the violence inherent in the system” and I’ll happily grant you that much blood has been spilled to build this endeavor we call civilization. I am intensely grateful to have ended up in this age where we have so much capacity for abundance. I’d like to keep it that way.

We have tools for you to learn about the social rules and the games we play as humans. You can just ask an artificial intelligence search engine now to help you learn the rules. It’s such a terrific advantage and I’d urge you to use it as my younger self had to learn many social learns through brutal trial and error. And hey if you still aren’t sure just slide into my DMs. I have some cheat codes I can share.

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Emotional Work

Day 1306 and What To Do

I am not a summer person so it’s not surprising that as the heat and haze drag on I find myself struggling to remain focused and upbeat.

I do have much to say except I’m sad and probably SAD as in seasonal affective disorder. I’d like to show some agency and fix it but I don’t know what to do from here.

I’m debating if I flee somewhere colder for the month. You’d think Montana would be safe. But fire season in the west means there are precious few places where the air is clean and the temperatures are cool and dry.

I’d like to force myself into a focused work sprint until this passes but I seem unable to do that either. It makes me feel a bit desperate as I am usually quite skilled as forcing myself through life on willpower alone. Except I don’t want to do it. That’s a first for me.

If there is a mass demoralization is a thing then summertime is all it took to achieve Yuri Bezmenov’s four stage campaign.

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Emotional Work

Day 1298 and In My Bones

I got a great night’s sleep according to all trackers. I didn’t feel well when I woke at all despite this.

I had the kind of unsettled unwell feeling that you can’t pinpoint with any precision but you know in your bones something is off. Naturally this meant some shit was about to go down.

We’ve been enduring the summer of political news. The media, the chattering classes and “the opinion leaders” have perfected the art of breaking through even if you don’t pay much attention. And I do pay attention.

I wrote a long essay yesterday on the general state of living in the past’s vision of the future. It’s worth a read if you have an interest in Cyperpunk or anarcho-tyranny. I feel the weight of all the competing narratives fighting for my attention. And I am just tired.