Tag: Emotions

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Chronicle

Day 130 and Smiling When Sad

If you asked me my dominant emotion when I was younger I probably should have said anger. I was a fired up young woman. But as the years have gone by and the social benefits of seeming happy have piled up I’m finding it easier to spend more energy on smiling. This isn’t the same thing as being happy.

We like when people are friendly (even if we actually prefer they be kind) and I seem to have bought into it as a moral virtue over the years. I thought it was a gender thing but now I’m much more convinced it’s part of a family trauma cycle set in motion by my father who is exceptionally good at being liked. Cue Bojack Horseman joke.

You inherit your parents’ trauma but will ever fully understand it. Haha the cop is a cat.

Naturally I rebelled against perception of happiness and likability thing with a lot of anger as teenager. Cue lots of screaming stuff like “why do you care more if other people like you more than family” and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what I repeat to my therapist now as an adult.

And because intergenerational trauma and family systems work actually isn’t bullshit I’m starting to realize I stopped being angry and started smiling at some point not because I’m happy but because it’s a learned behavior from my childhood. And the smiling is papering over a lot.

What used to be passion, intensity and anger is fermenting into sadness over the years. Not because I’m actually sad inherently but because it makes me sad to lie about how I feel all the time. But I’m not entirely comfortable expressing any emotion. So now I smile when I’m sad. I’ve absolutely smiled when crying from sadness and grief.

Thankfully I hasn’t yet started laughing and smiling when I’m angry, but I fear if I don’t resolve this pattern and move on it might not be far off. I’ve still got significant work to actually feel my emotions in any given moment. Anger feels like it’s too reactive. Sadness like it’s a sublimation of something else. And if I actually am happy then I need to feel that. But I can’t force it with a smile.

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Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 129 and Worried About Wellness

Last week I felt like I was struggling to hold together level emotions and coherent thought. I had a lot of “feels” posts where I spent more time inspecting my interior world than I did analyzing exterior events.

When I feel energetic I can take in more information and engage in synthesis but when I’m feeling tired or otherwise am flaring from autoimmune condition I requires more mindfulness. This mindfulness lends itself to more of an inner focus. Often this brings me a sense of peace and emotional well being. Lately my case has been well controlled to the point of recovery, yet I haven’t felt as emotionally joyful about the development as I thought I would.

Then around Thursday or Friday of this week I found myself turning a bend. I was excited to think about very abstract ideas like the aesthetics of finance and how critical theory and how great works culture is colliding with Gen Z vibes.

I struggle with wanting to lean into enthusiasm though. Too many days in a row of exertion or excitement and I fear I’ll set myself back. That’s a kind of self limiting behavior that I hope I can let go. I want to feel confident in my energy but I do not want to turn myself back into workaholic habits either. This is a fear so persistent I’ve tagged eight posts in the last five months with the topic. So great is the fear that I felt some relief that I felt physically unwell today as I could blame my body instead of making the choice for myself if I wanted to be driven by energy and not recovery.

I can’t put off the mixed emotions on wellness and how I feel about working in the world. My capacity is nearly there. I’m taking on more and more. I have even plotted some of my next moves. But I’m feeling Augustine about the whole affair. Oh make well God but not quite yet!

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Chronicle Internet Culture

Day 123 and Being Liked

I asked if folks cared if other people liked them today on Twitter. The results are surprisingly mixed on the issue.

A Twitter poll asking if folks care if others like them with 4 options: yes, no, yes but I like about it and no but I lie about it.

The four options were Yes, No, Yes But I Lie About It and No But I Lie About It. It is fascinating to see the breakdown in responses even a few hours into the poll. I don’t know what I thought the response would be but I don’t think it was an even split.

Now, of course, I didn’t ask if being likeable is good, or bad, or even helpful. I just asked if people cared. It’s likely people who do care don’t think it’s good that they care. And there are people who don’t care that maybe which wish did as caring about being liked may have benefits. I don’t actually believe that a third of folks don’t care as frankly society would look pretty different if 35% of us just didn’t care about perception. And sure you can argue that you don’t care but you hide the fact, but then your answer would have been the least popular option “no and I lie about it” which is lagging in the results. My guess is that a number of folks are aspirational “no” votes which I can respect. I’m confident I would have voted no in my twenties. I used to be an aspirational no vote

Currently my vote would be “Yes But I Lie About It” but I’m not sure if I’m lying to myself or others with that answer. I don’t generally care what people think of me but I think I lie to myself about needing to care. I think being liked is important and I want to act like I care more. I’ve got some hang ups about not having been a more palatable person when I was younger. Maybe if I had been nicer or better behaved or well…just more likable I’d be richer, more loved, have a better relationship with my family and other fantasies. I’m also not convinced that changing myself for others has the benefits I think. That’s just some 4 year old inner child trauma emotions. How others feel about me has little to do with me and a lot to do with them. That’s true for how I feel about others. My reaction to you says a lot about my emotions, trauma and hang ups than it does about if you are likable.

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Aesthetics Chronicle

Day 116 and Taking Up Space

I take up a lot of space. I spend time on social media because there is so much space you can literally be the President or a celebrity billionaire industrialist and there are still corners of the web you don’t penetrate. There is a lot of room for loudmouths, so much so that even someone like me still has plenty of room. I barely rate on the Elon Musk attention scale. Even when I’m screaming at best I crack into D-list zeitgeist. It’s like the privacy that comes with living in New York City. You can have some notoriety but the web doesn’t care. I like how you can feel alone.

The irony of course is that I think no one is paying attention to me. I think I’m an average Joe nobody that no one ever notices. This despite the fact that I am paid to be an expert in getting attention. No literally I cost a fortune (I’m worth every penny) but I’m somehow convinced I’m invisible personally. I can feel lost in a lonely world where I’m not even sure the people that love me the most can see me. I’m stuck in some lonely portion of my childhood where I felt abandoned so I’m replaying it out now as an adult. It’s not great but I get something from it.

Except this is a fantasy that is not true. I’m not that child anymore and I know how to get attention. I’m not alone. Even when I’m not consciously drawing energy to myself, people do see me. I can simply be myself and be seen. I command attention. It’s who I am.

You always think as a kid you will get some cool superpower like laser eyes or flying but nope you are going to get a super power like public relations or brand marketing. And honestly, when I’m not a self pitying victim I know those to be awesome super powers. You can make money and direct business and politics with those super powers. I just though I’d get something a little more aesthetic you know? It’s dope but also like adult superpowers are a letdown for your inner child.

I just need to remind adult me that I am seen. That even my normal personality not exerting her will force onto the universe is actually still quite visible. I can just exist and I’ll be holding space for myself. And it’s a good space with plenty of room for all of me. And still intimate enough to feel the love around me.

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Chronic Disease Chronicle Startups

Day 114 and Resistance to Change

Crash landing my life into a medical sabbatical really fucked up my headspace. Around two years ago I was beginning to realize I didn’t have a choice in accepting that I was sick. My identity as an always on, gets things done, reliable, entrepreneur got replaced by an entirely new self conception as “ill person” in a matter of six months. In August of 2019 I disclosed that I was officially sick. I sold my company and was going on leave.

It wasn’t a pretty adjustment. And I’m probably lying to myself when I say it took months to accept. I hated the new me. I felt weak and out of control. Willpower and muscling through did very little to help an autoimmune disease. If anything that mentality of “working on the problem” made it worse as I needed to rest and let my doctors do the work. I was resistant to change.

I think I’m going through a similar transition now as I did in 2019. I began seeing a new doctor in Colorado in October of 2020 and I made more progress in six months than I did in the previous two years. I’m beginning to face a new identity change as it becomes clear that I won’t be “sick” forever. While autoimmune diseases aren’t like an infection, there is no “cured,” it is beginning to look like I will be healthy enough to live normally. You won’t be able to tell I’ve got anything wrong with me soon.

And I have to admit to myself it’s a mindfuck. The emotional and psychological work I had to do to accept losing my entire identity is happening all over again. Who the hell am I if I’m not sick?

You see for the past two years I got used to explaining to people I was a sick person. I was disabled. I needed accommodations. I couldn’t work in ways I felt I would be reliable. I came accept my identity as someone with physical limits. And I slowly figured out ways to communicate that new reality others who has previously seen me as this abled person.

I guess you could say I was at peace with my situation. The pandemic helped. I know it probably sucked for you but I really enjoyed having a year of my recovery coincide with others having to live the way I did. I know it’s selfish but it helped! I felt less alone.

And yet just as I’m finally feeling like I really got a handle on my new identity it’s not my reality anymore. I’m not going to be a sick person. And while I thought I’d be overjoyed it turns out it’s a little more complex emotionally.

Let’s try a comparison. Imagine you broke your arm. You keep it in a brace and you can’t use it while it’s healing. And then the cast comes off and you are unsure if you can go back to using your arm like you did. You used to move your arm without thinking. You don’t worry about applying pressuring or picking things up before the break. But after it’s scary. You don’t want to set yourself back. You are scared to lift things and scared to apply pressure. I am in that place with myself. I know that the break is healing. The cast is off. But the muscles are atrophied and I’m not sure I trust that everything is knit back together. But the reality is that soon I’ll have the all clear.

But who I am now? I’m not the entrepreneur I once was. That workaholic Julie won’t be coming back. But the disabled sick Julie won’t be with me forever either. And I’m a little scared about it what’s coming. Who am I going to be next?

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Startups

Day 112 and Unknowability

Human minds seem to prefer predictably. The back brain craves knowing what is coming even as our flighty consciousness seeks novelty. Talk about a tension that sucks. We’ve all seem just now much this is a recipe for misery when you live in a world with no predictability but easy access to low stakes novelty during the pandemic. We are twitchy, bitchy and miserable as we have no idea what our world will be like but we can dopamine drip our pleasure seekers with social media, food and substances for an enjoyable now.

I’ve written at length in this experiment about my frustrations with unreliability especially when it comes to my own body. It’s one of the hardest aspects of managing a recovery from an autoimmune disease. I need to be mentally strong enough to not let bad days shake my routines so I keep building towards the wider goal. I can’t be distracted by one data point. It’s about movement towards the goal. Ironically this is a skill I learned from startup life.

While the entire planet is getting a crash course in unpredictable futures now, startups are defined by their desire to solve problems that don’t yet have defined solutions. No one in a startup knows if the predictions will be right. If they are working on something that will have the intended outcomes is unclear. You work on faith. You trust that over a longer time frame the daily tasks and routines you push (sometimes we give them dumb names like OKRs to fake a sense of control) will actually get you where your mind’s horizon sees.

I sometimes wonder if those with religious faith would do better on average in startup life. We have some degree of comfort with the inscrutable. Mysteries are sources of joy rather than fear. We trust that there are things beyond our knowing and our control and yet we must live on despite that.

The obsession with data and trend lines and the potential for prediction, surety or knowing amuses me. Sure sometimes you can plan a lot. You should plan. You have some inputs that consistently deliver the predicted outputs. Your best guess are better than other people’s facts (thanks Spock!) But if it were all so neatly defined there would be nothing new to create. We wouldn’t be able to build value. It’s the undiscovered country that we seek.

In faith, in life, and in startups you must manage your squishy human mind that is constantly tortured by its own biology. We want to know and we want it to be predictable. But we also love the tickle of a new experience against our dopamine seeking biology. The spike of pleasure we find pleasure in the newness. That’s why we do it. And it’s on us to balance the tension between our need to predictably build and our addiction to novelty. Manage that and you may get far in your journey. Or it’s a miserable sine-wave that makes you nauseous as you go up and down trying desperately to bring the future forward between impulse and planning. It’s usually both if I’m honest. So if you don’t enjoy roller coasters I wouldn’t get on this ride. But if you do well you just might see God.

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Chronicle Internet Culture

Day 108 and Energy Vampires

Recently I’ve been watching a mockumentary about vampires living in Staten Island called What We Do in The Shadows. It’s surprisingly funny for what you’d imagine is a set of basic gags. My favorite running joke is a type of vampire called an Energy Vampire. Everyone in the house is your standard drinks blood loved forever vampire except “Colin Robinson” who is an energy vampire. He lives forever by draining the life force out of people. It’s the most common type of vampire.

As you probably guessed Colin Robinson is meant to remind you of vampires you probably have in your own life. The show runs heavily off “boring” jokes but the real kicker is how energy vampires are perpetual victims. Colin Robinson is always sucking you in with pity and apathy. Energy vampires prey on your emotions.

As you might expect they have an episode about social media and Colin Robinson gluts himself on the low quality but copious amounts of energy available. There is also a troll joke. It’s pretty funny because it rings true. One accidentally viral tweet and suddenly your energy is being sapped by a crowd of vampires. The extremely online eventually pick up some Van Helsing skills to keep their energy from being drained. I like to think I rarely spend time online without my garlic, holy zingers and reply through the heart stakes.

The real issue is when you discover you’ve got an energy vampire in your real life. I recently realized someone was draining my life force. I thought they were a friend but a set of misunderstandings I finally realized they’ve been sucking me dry for years. They are pretty good energy vampires as I actually thought I liked them quite a bit. It took one overdrawing of my energy to wake me up to the reality that their tactics exhaust me. With the energy vampire metaphor you can enjoy a laugh as to whether this behavior is malicious or not. Energy vampires need to feed! But the end result is you feeling shitty.

As much as Colin Robinson jokes amuse me I do think I need to keep my energy vampire away. Their last feeding left me feeling tired and obsessive. I let the shitty feeling they induced in me upset other people close to me. And that’s just fucked up. Then energy vampires get even more energy. So I’m going to try to keep them at bay. I don’t need to prolong the life of someone feeding on me and I certainly don’t need to waste my boy immortal life as someone else’s emotional food.

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Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 106 and Perceptual Drift

I often find it easier to talk about the darker parts of my journey from chronic disease once I’m already through the worst of it. If you are hearing about my long dark night of the soul it’s probably because I can see dawn breaking.

Maybe it’s because it’s hard to discuss the challenges when you are in the thick of them. Having any amount of perspective when life is at its worst is a skill reserved for religious scholars and internet advice gurus. The rest of us just try for hindsight being 20-20 at best. I admire the stoic philosopher types but I’m generally just happy to be able to survive rough days with a minimum of pain and angst.

It’s likely this tension between a better current reality and the heaviness of past challenges that made me so confused by the reaction when I posted about the envy I felt towards people who live healthy normal lives. A number of people checked in on me worried or concerned about how I was doing. I didn’t get it. I had just been discussing how well I’d been doing so why was everyone offering to pray me me?

I’d come to terms with some of the sadness and anger I’d felt during the worst days of my illness because I was doing well. I’d been posting about how excited I was that I felt great, had clean bloodwork, and was seeing better days. It was because I was doing so well I decided it was best to ruminate on the challenges I’d experienced. I was on the other side of it. Feeling well and energized meant I had the capacity to explore the dark places. When I’m actually in a dark places usually all I can do is survive the experience.

But I get that others didn’t see that now. They saw darkness and sadness and reach out to me with kindness. The love and support from people close to me and the messages and prayers from my internet friends all added up to me feeling like the good times will just keep getting better. If you are reading this I encourage you to share your journey. You just might get back the same love that I got. People are great that way.

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Aesthetics Chronicle Startups

Day 99 and Swag

My favorite item of clothing in the pandemic has been a Facebook hoodie. It’s the perfect garment for long days indoors, not too heavy but not too light. It zips so it’s easy to get on and off. It has pockets for stowing my iPhone. It’s got a snuggly fuzzy inside but a smooth cool texture outside. I’m not sure I’ve been more dedicated to a piece of clothing.

Years of living in New York, where dragging dirt and debris in from the city was a real concern has made me a almost compulsive aficionado of “indoor clothes” which were not besmirched by the grime of subways and pavement. My Facebook hoodie remains my default “indoor clothing” top layer. At night I unzip it and place it carefully beside my bed. In the mornings if it is cold I put it back on before starting my day. The chances are good that if you’ve been on a Zoom call with me I’ve been wearing this hoodie. It’s just on screen and a strange affectation for someone that has literally never been a fan of the traditional Silicon Valley boy wonder aesthetic. The only item I have gotten more wear out of is a pair of Gucci boots I’ve owned for 12 years now.

To say that they are very different garments is an understatement. One is a thousand dollars worth of black Italian leather crafted into the Platonic ideal of day boots. They are feminine with tight knee high lines that maintain the slightly militaristic echo that typify the Italian school of fashion. The other is a baggy slouching genderless sack of blue with an embroidered white logo that splits with a zipper tight down the middle between Face and Book.

You would not imagine the owner of one garment was the owner of the other. Even when the tech plutocracy decided it wanted to play with high fashion status games (thanks Marissa) the two stylistic poles never really gained much common ground. Still tech has inspired a significant portion of modern fashion and fashion craves the semiotic power of Silicon Valley. I’m sure Willian Gibson could explain the common lineage but I doubt I have the chops. Nevertheless I do consider both pieces to be emblematic of my personal style. Something about utility I suspect. The two garments are not from entirely different worlds

Ironically I don’t use Facebook anymore (though I still have an account) and I don’t even support what the company has become. So you might think it’s odd I own a piece of swag from the company. I got the hoodie after I had already given up on the place. But I got it from a Facebook employee who I consider to be one of the best humans I have ever known. His name his Dan.

I didn’t ask him if I could write this little remembrance so I won’t give his full name. Thanks to the efforts of one of my investors he was an advisor and investor to one of my startups and was unfailingly the kindest person I had the privilege of working with. On a trip to visit him in Menlo Park he took me to lunch on the Facebook campus. We had tacos. Afterwards as we were walking we passed the swag store. I said that I thought it was a brilliant bit of marketing that they sold hoodies. Pop culture has long cemented the status of the hoodie with both the company and with founders in general. To have a specific Facebook hoodie seemed a powerful talisman filled with irony and hope. Without missing a beat Dan bought me one.

There was no way of knowing at the time, for either of us, that this garment would end up a significant figure in my daily routine. It remains an emotional link to Dan and the support he always showed for me. He never wavered in his belief in me. This is a trait he has demonstrated consistently with those in his life. One particular example is a dear friend of mine who worked at Facebook thanks to his efforts. She is also brilliant and kind and at the time Dan worked with her the victim of a deeply Silicon Valley crisis. The kind you might even associate with tech bros who wear hoodies with logos on them. An irony that is not lost on me. The tech industry truly contains emotional multitudes.

I’d encourage you to inspect the garment in your life that holds the kind of significance and emotional resonance that this hoodie does for me. Fashion exists in even the places we think are furthest from style. Like corporate swag. Like a Facebook hoodie. There is always a story and a reason behind what we wear. Indeed this was a topic I thought I’d make my life’s work when I first stumbled onto the internet. I kept a fashion blog on WordPress maybe starting in 2004 or so. I didn’t end up being a fashion critic. But I still get to blog about clothing if I feel like it.

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Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 90 and Health ROI

The American attitude towards healthcare leans heavily towards pharmaceuticals. Much of what ails us might be mitigated by nutrition, supplements, exercise or physical treatments. But we tend to prioritize a “one and done” approach that lends itself to prescriptions for any ailment you can pinpoint. It’s not unusual to be on upwards of ten pills a day if you are chronically ill each one treating a distinct symptom. You mostly pray they don’t have any interactions and that the cure isn’t worse than the disease especially when it comes to drugs like opioids that can form dependencies.

I’m not entirely opposed to this approach if I’m being honest. A wholistic approach is a lot of work and when you are sick having the energy to do a bunch of shit is unrealistic. Even as I’m rounding the corner on controlling my autoimmune disease I still find it time consuming and often exhausting to manage all aspects of my health. The meal planning, the physical therapy, the body work, the exercise protocols, the sleep regimens, the supplement routines (mine easily costs upwards of $500 a month and no it’s not covered by insurance) and the nonstop recording and monitoring is practically a full time job. And you can’t even tell if it’s working half the time with crashes and system cascades that require heavy duty intervention. It’s hard to spot signal in the noise but that doesn’t mean it’s not there

Being sick in America feels surprisingly similar to being a startup founder. You get dismissed constantly. The workload rarely relents. And progress is only visible if you are diligent about monitoring core metrics that might reveal a trend line. It’s no wonder that entrepreneurs can be avid biohackers. We record and measure and monitor and hope that some higher authority (a physician or a venture capitalist) will spot the the key inflection point that may change our lives.

I have over 1,000 recorded data points just on my usage of pain medications and it’s correlation to my functionality. Despite my meticulous tracking and my adherence to protocols, I regularly have encounters with medical professionals that discount what I have to say. Like a founder I may be an expert on my “startup” but a physician or other expert has a lot more longitudinal data. The question ends up being do you as the operator (or the patient) have some insight the professionals do not? Honestly it’s hard to tell. Being wrong is pretty common. Doctors and venture capitalists know this. So do you as the patient or founder. Trust in these interactions can be low because of this.

Unlike with a company where you can walk away, being a patient means you are stuck with it. I have to work through the blocks as if I don’t I’m resigning myself to a life of illness. Which isn’t to say I can’t tolerate being ill and disabled, merely that I don’t believe that “this is as good as it gets.” I’m happy with my life but I do believe it’s within my control to do and be more.

For me this has meant juggling the pharmaceuticals that control symptoms but don’t heal me alongside an elaborate functional medicine and biohacking routine. I think of these drug for symptom regimens a cash flow business that can do well but will always remain the business that it is without a creative owner pushing for more.

I don’t want to just run my “business” even if it might be a self sustaining one. I’m at a point where yeah I can live like this for the rest of my life. But I want more than having a store or a service. So I test. And I experiment. And I throw tons of time after protocols and treatments that may be woo or bullshit. Or they may in fact be the turning point that lets me be more. And if it is then it’s all worth it. Much of what I’ve done has been worth it. But how the fuck do you determine that in a system that has so little interest beyond simple solutions like a pill? If I had the answer I’d tell you. Until I do I’m spending my time on machines that shoot electromagnetic pulses into my spine and glugging down micronutrient slurries. I hope the hacks turn into sustainable growth channels. But I could have just waisted a few hours on nothing. Until then I’ll record the data and hope the trend line reveals something.