Tag: Commitment

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Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 158 and The Mondays

I feel like Garfield but I don’t like Mondays. After two glorious days of reprieve, on Monday I restart the constant parade of medical appointments, biohacking activities and other habits and routines I maintain to keep my body healthy. And even with all that effort, my health is still bottom decile. The routine I lay out below can feel overwhelming with the amount of time it takes and yet if I don’t care of my body…well it won’t take care of me.

Garfield the grumpy cat falling out of his bed as he realizes it’s Monday

I woke up at 730 and made myself a breakfast of berries and homemade yogurt from raw milk. I used to be an intermittent faster but now I have to take medications with food so breakfast is back.

At 830 I read the news headlines and top articles from Bloomberg, New York Times, and the WSJ as well as listen to NPR’s morning edition. Then I need to do my physical therapy and stretching.

At 9 I go for an hour long walk. In order to keep inflammatory conditions under control, it’s recommended that I do at least an hour of low impact walking to keep limber. During my walk I will listen to more financial news and podcasts. Today I treated myself to Exit Scam by Aaron Lammer. Normally I listen to Odd Lots or something more specific to my corners of finance like Flirting with Models. I decide to go with Exit Scam as Aaron Lammer impressed me so much in Odd Lots a few weeks ago with his episode on yield farming.

At 10am I organize my supplements for the morning. I take Ray Kurzweil levels of stuff that is monitored by not one but two functional medicine doctors. This doesn’t include the slurry of powders I drink in water, just the nice easy pills.

Then I am hooked into a EEG for an experimental “brain training” protocol called dynamic neurofeedback. The best metaphor I’ve got is to defrag your mind and reorganize your pathways. It’s basically CBT with an EEG. The session lasts for 33 minutes I also sneak in a meditation during this time.

Electrodes hocked up to my head for an EEG as I do dynamic neurofeedback

11am means it’s time to lift weights. I can’t do much and I need long rest intervals but I did a full squat cycle.

1130 has me showering and doing doing cold therapy. Yes I stand under a freezing shower for 5 minutes and do Wim Hoff breathing. Somehow I also manage to wash my hair.

At noon I have a banh mi (the pork and short rib from Daikon are quite good) and finish an episode of Mythic Quest. It’s wonderful and I recommend you get Apple TV just for this and Ted Lasso. I needed the break to just hang with Alex and do nothing for a minute.

Finally at 1pm I am able to get some work done. Getting emails out, checking on deals, reading some pitch materials and checking in on portfolio companies. I should have a straight shot through to 3pm to work before therapy but my mother and I ended up on the phone.

3pm is a full hour with my therapist. Arguably the most important hour of the week, especially for getting my mind right for Tuesday’s productivity.

4pm I have a brief break to take more supplements before I go back for two hours of group therapy.

Yes you read that correctly. On Monday I have 3 hours of back to back therapy. What else can I say? I’m committed to my emotional growth. We do family systems work and group work is particularly helpful for seeing your reactive patterns and how they are or are not mirrored back. As much as I sometimes resent how much time I sink into this work I do believe it’s the best ROI on time. We repeat the patterns of our childhood unless we clear them.

Finally at 6pm l have time to do things that are not explicitly for my mental or physical health. So yeah I’ve got mixed feelings on Monday. I want to live life beyond treatments and working on myself. I wish I could live without meds, supplements, physical therapy, walking, lifting weights, meditation, and therapy. But I guess that is what Tuesday’s are for. Monday is just Monday. And yes I repeat some of those activities every single day.

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Reading

Day 143 and Fiction

I like to read stories more than I like to read any other form of writing. I just can’t seem to get into non-fiction. History, self help, how-to just doesn’t grab me. I’ve got a particularly intense allergy to business books of which my aversion is so strong I would rather pulp a “helpful” book than crack it open.

Some of this may be because of how I perceive rest. If I have any indication that something is bettering me in any capacity it’s just not relaxing. Deliberate learning reads too much as work. It’s not that I mind edifying content, not at all, it’s that if it’s meant as some kind of life and skill improving text I’m indignant that I didn’t spend the time doing something restorative.

I happen to think that this preferences for fiction has actually made me a better thinker. Stories and hypotheticals force us to expand our mental models. If I’m being instructed in a useful topic like venture deals or better management I am learning something specific with a perspective on how things should be done. If I’m reading a story about anti-memetic weapons I’m being forced to consider entirely alien ways the world might work. There is no expectation that I find utility in the thing or that I put into practice what I’ve learned. It’s purely an expansion of my reality.

Not being pressured to accept something makes it’s eventually welcoming all the more pleasurable. You’ve simply lived your way into this new mode of being. It’s a little bit like forcing an orgasm, sure we can all do it, but is it really necessary? And yes I just compared sex to reading but that probably tells you a lot about me.

Everytime I try to integrate more utility driven books into my routine I reject the habit. I make time in the day to sit up and do the edifying books. And then I put it off for other activities. But I never put aside fiction. Every night I read for an hour before I sleep. It’s a habit so engrained it’s more necessary to my day than brushing my teeth or my morning coffee.

And so I stay with stories. I look for the most strange and different works I can find. I preference science fiction as it tends to meet that criteria but in truth I will read all genres and types. I’ve loved tight family dramas as much as a thriller. As long as something about it alters my mind even just a little I’m game. Remaking the metaphors I use is ironically the best use of both my leisure and work time. Creativity comes from the hard work of changing who you are to ever truer and more honest forms.

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Emotional Work

Day 137 and Feeling Invaded

The line between feeling abandonment and invaded is thin for me. Being a child that often felt abandoned by my successful but distant father ingrained in me a fascinating pattern as an adult. I fear that I won’t be chosen, but when someone does choose me I easily tip right over into feeling invaded. I suspect this is a pattern many others will recognize.

There is a deep yearning to be the priority. My desire to be the one that gets picked is so strong. Such is the lingering fear of abandonment on the inner child. But because I have more comfort and recognition in the feeling of abandonment, when someone shows up for me it’s a swift inversion to the feeling of being invaded.

How dare this person who I so desperately wished would choose me then actually choose me! I will then become shy, distant, evasive and cold as the feeling that someone has overstepped their boundaries (which they haven’t) makes me retreat. For anyone who has ever been so sure that someone gave them all the signals of desire only to have it feel as if it was yanked away, this is the pattern your desired may be reenacting.

Because the consequence of being wanted is, well, being wanted. They desire something of me. I don’t even just mean this of friends or sexual partners. I can be thrilled that someone has chosen to work or collaborate with me and then when they approach me as if I have committed to them I will seize up with anxiety. The agony I feel at someone wanting something from me even when I gave them every indication that I want to give that thing to them is intense. My chronic fear of calendars is a deeply comical manifestation of this fear. I’ll spend an entire day agonizing over one short phone call in an otherwise empty day.

I doubt I’m special in this pattern of yearning and retreat. One of the most quoted lines from Star Trek is Spock noting “After a time, you may find that ‘having’ is not so pleasing a thing after all as ‘wanting. ‘ It is not logical, but it is often true.” For me it is often true and it is a pattern I wish to break. For when I reach out and offer my time and emotions to others I do mean it. The fear of invasion and patterns of retreat are simply a reactive pattern from my childhood. It is protective, and even in the mind of a child, logical. But children’s logic can only take you so far in life. As an adult I take responsibility for my emotions and through mindfulness can move beyond it.

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Chronicle

Day 100 and Rest Days

When I first set out to write everyday I didn’t set a goal. I think in my mind I meant it as a month long exercise to create more. Now I’ve got no idea what will eventually break the streak. I’m sure when it happens (something is bound to occur) I’ll be frustrated and I will just keep going the next day I hope. I’m trying to remember that Banksy “when you get tired, learn to rest, not quit” graffiti with the little girl sitting staring at a bluebird. I know it’s the stuff of inspiration Instaporn but whatever works right?

I’ve managed to write through a fair amount of awful shit in the last hundred days so it’s not that I’m afraid I’ll quit. I’ve become accustomed to simply opening up the draft space and writing. I just start some days with no particular topic in mind. Its more the knowledge that I am going to need to take breaks. Maybe not from writing but from life.

Today is one of those break days. I can barely tell you what happened today. I’ve got a project with a deadline but as I pushed myself physically yesterday I found that I needed today off. Resting today gives me tomorrow. I know this sounds basic but as a workaholic I’ve not traditionally been good at resting when it’s not been forced on me.

Usually on rest days I’m prone in bed as I’m in too much pain and too exhausted to do anything else. I hid this for so much of my illness and now I’m almost comically transparent about it. You’d think I’d be considered a liability and no one would ever want to work with me (or be friends with me) and yet I’ve found that not to be the case.

The empathy I’ve found in almost everyone makes me wonder if we’ve got our reputation building advice all wrong. I was under the impression I needed to hide my illness and always excuse strength. But the more honest I am about my capacity and my limits the better my work and relationships get. I’m slowly leaving behind the persona of “always on” hustle “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” bullshit of my younger years.

I still have a lot of fear about being perceived as unreliable. There’s not much logic to it. I always meet my commitments head on and when I physically can’t people understand. I work with backups plans and teams so that its never a crisis if I simply need to rest. The work gets done with or without me because my reliability is a function of preparedness and collaboration now instead of will force and midnight marches. If anything I think this makes me a better partner to work with ss instead of relying on my “at any cost” personality you can rely on me simply slowly and with planning getting your further than we could have gone alone.

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Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 93 and Distrust

I’m feeling pretty good these days. I’ve written about my progress and my biohacking. But one area I’m not improving in is consistency. Despite meticulous record keeping and a routine I maintain assiduously, it’s almost impossible to predict when I’ll have a bad day. They appear at random!

Most days were bad days the past two or three years. The good days really stood out. I noticed them because they were rare. Now I’ve got a pretty consistent pattern of several days on and one day off. Sometimes I’ll even wrack up almost a week of good days. I used to have bad months and bad weeks. Now it’s rare for me to have more than three bad days in a row.

But I’m still regularly caught off guard by bad days. Out of the blue for no discernible reason I’m in pain, exhausted and struggling with basic function. The pain is the first symptom. Radiating out from my upper spine it pins me flat on my back in bed. About all I can manage in that state of pain is my phone over my face and the light gestures required to work a touch screen. But I don’t know why I have these bad days.

I can do everything “right” and be feeling terrific and then I’m fucked up all over again on a dime. Now I’ve got a small pharmacy I can toss at my symptoms now so I can often medicate myself back to a tolerable baseline.

The issue is what should I do once I’ve recovered? Do I rest? Build up my strength? I used to practice “active resting” where I would engage in restorative practices even when I felt well. The idea was I was building up a reserve of energy for the next crash. But was that the wrong approach?

I’m beginning to think I should take advantage of every last moment of health I have. If I feel well then screw the “active resting” I’m going to use every good minute I’ve got to pursue my goals. Active resting doesn’t seem to have any benefits I can reliably track. And it seems no more likely I’ll have a good day if I have rested then it is I will have a bad day. At best it’s marginally related to a poor night sleep but once I’ve woken up to face the day the day is cast there isn’t it?

I hate that I’m unreliable. I hate that I can’t track triggers. Doctors have seemed largely sanguine on the issue. Some days will just be bad. Sometimes your immune response will be off. But I’m feel lost and angry that I don’t know how I can live life without some degree of predictability. The only thing I can rely on is that on good days I feel good. So maybe I should just pack shit in on those days. No restorative crap. Just go hard at my goals. I’m not sure this is a good plan. It’s probably a bad one. It could just be my addiction to work talking now that my mind knows my body can handle my hard living again. At least for a few days. But if hard living doesn’t produce predictable crashes then what should my takeaway be? Fuck if I know.

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Chronicle

Day 86 and Persistence

I’m learning to live around my routines. Or maybe my routines are what I live and everything else that I perceive as life is just moments in between meals, meditation, supplements, treatments, workouts, walks, and pharmaceuticals. Who is to say what forms the contours of life?

When I first picked up the daily commitment to write I struggled to find a topic to write about each day and I would find myself stressed if the end of the day was nearing and I felt I had nothing of value to say. Now I am realizing that having something to say isn’t the point of this daily discipline. It is the persistence that matters. The content is secondary. The knowledge that every day I will write and so I do is what matters. I will exercise the willpower necessary to form my thoughts into words. I will place them in public to prove to myself that I have remained committed. This is like any other aspect of my routine. Breath in and breathe out. Lift the weight. Take the medicine. Write the words.

Daily disciplines bring about breakthroughs. The individual acts maybe don’t matter so much. Some days will be better than others. But persistent effort brings about quality inexorably. It forces a standard of quality that improves at each repetition in some meaningful way even if you cannot see it in that moment. I find the act of creation easier now. It doesn’t feel like a burden. It is nit a source of stress or anxiety. It’s just something I do.

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Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 60 and Never Saving Anything For The Swim Back

I’m feeling scrambled today as I’m not quite in a place where I can push myself without consequences but I’m also not so sick that I can’t work at all. It’s an awful liminal state where I’m working what is probably the actual productive output of an average person but still need to buffer in time for medical shit.

I honestly contemplate just lying about being sick some days. I could hide the disability of chronic illness and no one would be any wiser. Well minus the public posts about being sick but you get my meaning. I’d probably have to get a little bit better at scheduling work during consistent productive hours, push through when I feel like shit, and then crash when I wasn’t on the clock. I’d be seen as a little unreliable but definitely enough that I could manage as a director at some company.

I’m not sure if this says something bad about me or about the expectations of the American workplace. Probably a little of both. I’m clearly a bit of an outlier and we don’t actually expect that much output from the average worker. When I’m operating at my full capacity I blow away workloads. I sometimes doubt if I’ve ever been at full capacity and I’ve been faking it my entire life. I’ve never been completely hale and hearty. I’ve always had a tendency to put on a show when I’m in public and then retreat into recovery when in private. I’ve been a very boom and bust person.

I don’t really want to live this way though. I’d rather run a marathon than be a sprinter that is collapsing after each race. I recognize that in some way this pattern of intense work and recovery isn’t sustainable. It’s also clearly an addictive pattern. But I’m too scared to admit that I don’t really know what a consistent healthy working life looks like. I’ve been an addictive compulsive worker my whole life because I never trust that I can rely on my good hours to be consistent. I gulp at each hour of feeling well like I’ll never get them again. The fear that this is my last shot at feeling well is palpable.

One of the most formative pieces of art in my narrative self is the movie Gattaca. In a dystopian future, children have their genes edited before they are born. The protagonist of the film “Vincent” played Ethan Hawke is an “old fashioned” human conceived without any edits. He has a heart condition and other frailties. His brother Anton was given edits. Despite being an “in-valid” Ethan Hawke is able to find his way in to a space program using contraband genetics. His brother is furious and cannot figure out how his disabled brother is able to beat him. This fraternal tension plays out in two swimming competitions. The invalid brother Vincent bests his genetically superior brother Anton. Twice. How did he do any of this!?!

“You wanna know how I did it? This is how I did it, Anton; I never saved anything for the swim back!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe9Fc34GozY

I really internalized this logic as a teenager. There is no gene for the human soul. Winning is not about being superior it’s about giving it your all. I bought this. So I never saved anything for the swim back. Except that maybe this is a shitty strategy for anything but races. That if you need more than to win a swimming match you can’t go all out every single day. That this is actually a strategy that will kill you.

Of course, I am petrified that this isn’t true and I should be swimming like Vincent every day. That he was right that greatness is forged in extreme effort. That I should give my all till I collapse. But then what?

I’m stuck in a behavioral pattern of self limiting fear that I must always be striving or I will literally be dead. It’s live at the edge till I win. But win what? Sometimes you fail. That’s how you learn. Failure is a crucial part of success. But if I am always swimming to failure I’ll never recover enough to learn from my failures. I’ll literally be dead in the water. So I’m stuck in this place of fear where I know I can’t always give my all but I don’t really yet believe that there is any other way to succeed.

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Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 40 and Forgetting

When I first committed to writing “something” every single day I didn’t have a lot on my schedule. I was busy with routines for my recovery (I’ve been busting my ass to overcome an autoimmune issue that presents in my spine) but most of those obligations didn’t require coordination with anyone but myself and my doctors. It can be a full time job between medicines, supplements, treatments, testing, and insurance. But it wasn’t hard for me to find time to write something. Hasn’t always been polished but I’ve always got “something” out the door.

Today is the first day since that commitment to write pushed up against a building set of obligations to other people and projects. My medical stuff felt easy and part of a natural routine. And I didn’t take any downtown for recovery between obligations. I used to buffer my obligations with naps or even whole days of rest. Increasingly I have the capacity to do big blocks without any breaks. Which is how I find myself at 9pm without having set out a quiet block to write my thoughts.

I cannot tell you how exciting it is to have a productive day of work and healthy habits and find myself thinking well huh 15 hours have gone by since I woke up and yet I found no time to write? I look back and see no there really wasn’t an hour or two where I was in bed on my phone. That’s a first for me in quite sometime. I don’t feel exhausted or depleted. I feel if anything pleasantly energetic. Like I need to begin my bedtime routine to let myself come down. And I cannot wait to pick back up what I didn’t accomplish today first thing in the morning.

My human capacity to forget is kicking in. I’m forgetting what it was like to be unable to walk. I’m forgetting what it was like to be in so much pain I couldn’t think clearly. I’m forgetting the soul crushing exhaustion that took all but the most basic activities from me. I wouldn’t mind forgetting the bad parts to be honest. If I could just remember the emotional depths and new strengths I discovered I’d be pleased. I’m sure I’ll have a flare soon and become newly intimate with the ways pain overtakes all life. But I enjoyed forgetting it today. And maybe if I’m lucky I’ll have more time to keep forgetting.

Categories
Chronicle Politics

Day 38 and Better Fear Than Anger

Culturally in America we’ve lost touch with the value of fear. Which is a shame as fear is a root emotion (along with sadness and happiness). We’ve became enchanted by anger instead. But anger is not a root fear. Anger is the steam rising off of fear. Cultivate, explore and release your anger and underneath you will find the fear that drives the issue.

We’ve decided we don’t like fear though. We’ve perverted it into a weakness. Especially during the pandemic. Anger on the other hand as won cultural acclaim in America. We use phrases like “right to be angry” and “righteous anger” rather than exhuming a deeper truth that will be more revealing. Fear is good though. It cuts deep. Fear shows us the child that lives in our innermost self, revealing the terrors and traumas children feel from being powerless, abandoned, and small.

Even as we cultivate strong bodies and swift minds as adults, the child who was betrayed by the accidental lapses by our parents remains inside of us. In psychology they call that the inner child. Perhaps your inner child is angry. Mine often feels anger. But at her heart the child is just scared. But rather than answer the questions raised by our fear and overcome it, we are seduced by the power of the anger steaming on top. We cultivate heroics to nurture the anger. Americans craft elaborate myths about the heroic value of anger.

I’m not suggesting you are not angry. Or that your anger has no place. Nor am I invalidating the source of your anger. I am however asking us all to dig deeper. Learn why you are angry. Then go deeper. Find the fear of the child that is inside you.

My fear? That I’ll be abandoned by my people during this pandemic. Just like I was abandoned as a child. I got angry seeing the choices people made. But underneath it was simply the fear that repeated a childhood trauma that I wasn’t important enough for anyone to save me. Knowing that helps me save myself. I take responsibility for my own fear. I can use it as an edge if others don’t work on their anger. But I’d rather we as a nation work through our shit instead.

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Chronicle Internet Culture

Day 31 and The Goal

I feel a real sense of accomplishment that I did what I set out to do; write one piece of long form content everyday for a month. Now of course having achieved my goal I would like to do it for two months straight but I’ll give myself a moment to enjoy the happy feelings that come from finishing what you set out to do.

On the first day my writing muscles felt atrophied. It has been sometime since I wrote regularly and here I was committing to do it every single night. But I was able to get into the habit and quickly found myself enjoying the routine.

The biggest change I’m noticing is a smoother less disjointed focus in my mental processes. Rather than needing to work myself up to writing or pick a topic and commit to a narrative, I now ease myself into the threads from the day and see where my imagination takes me. This mental fluidity (which requires non judgement which is a struggle sometimes) is slowly improving the quality of my thoughts. I look forwarded getting ideas on paper and tying together disparate thoughts now each day. To seeing what strange new connection might emerge from the day. Like limbic memory and crisis or the power of loosely organized crowds

I’ve also noticed a distinct uptick in the momentum of life. That a daily exercise of writing could push forward my focus shouldn’t be a surprise but nevertheless I’m seeing progress on ideas that may become a reality. Because I’m using this space to think about my investing, finance, and cultural chaos a daily writing habit means I am makings fast progress on a thesis. Writing is an excellent forcing function for seeing ideas more clearly but also for seeing if you may have the seeds for something bigger.

If you are considering a writing exercise like mine I highly recommend doing a month long commitment. Do it in public. You may be surprised by where you end up. I covered a lot of emotional ground which has been a really boost to my spirits.