Tag: Emotions

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Emotional Work

Day 310 and Short Burnouts

Is it possible to have brief periods of burnout? I’d always associated it with the years on the other side of a startup. If you’ve put in long hours for an extended period it makes sense to have a year or more of recovering from dipping into reserves for too long. But I wonder if it might be possible to have a week of burnout from a couple intense months.

I wrapped a few big projects last week. It was easier than anticipated and I felt a real sense of joy and accomplishment. But then this week I was a bit of a mess. I had several days of terrible sleep. Then I burned my hand making breakfast. Fun fact blisters are a form of burn, which finally made sense once I experienced a real burn as it’s healing looked exactly like a blister you get from a hiking boot. I’m feeling a sense of overwhelm with the drumbeat of preventative care and appointments that comes from 20 months off from things like dentists. I just felt like I got nothing done that was important to me this week. It was one thing after another. And it seems like others are feeling the stress as well.

Maybe it’s alright to have a week of feeling unproductive. I was very on for all of September and October and then I wrapped some stuff so it’s possibly normal to feel like all focus and willpower has gone out the window. But the temptation to force a fix on it is quite strong.

I’ve got a habit of turning everything into an opportunity for self improvement. I’ve been concerned about my capacity for using self control as a way to abuse myself. It’s been a running theme that I find myself concerned about the work that goes into keeping myself productive and healthy. So maybe it’s just par for the course. But I’m already worried about next week as I’ve got 4 fucking doctors appointment including one that involves a long drive. Maybe there is never a world where productivity is easy to come by and I should let go of the worry. The days are short but the years are long. And progress compounds over time.

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Startups

Day 305 and Request for Founder

I was having an emotional conversation with a friend. They were giving me a piece of feedback that was truthful but hurt me. Because I feel psychologically safe with them, I was able to take the feedback in a receptive and open manner. I could incorporate it into my mental framework immediately because I trusted my friend. And I knew that their feedback was important and accurate.

One of the traits that I feel is most central to success in founding a company is the ability to process feedback effectively. Founders are constantly getting feedback. An average day might include angry customers with product complaints, a venture capitalist with heartfelt but partially useless advice, an unproductive strategy meeting where no one can seem to align, and a bunch of smart ass shitposters on social media with job advice for you.

A startup CEO gets a lot of feedback. Every day is a deluge of the stuff. And founders have to be gracious about it. Even when a lot of the feedback is useless, or even occasionally downright bad. You as a founder have to decide what to take and what to ignore. Because learning how to synthesize and integrate feedback; positive, negative or even profoundly unhelpful, is in fact your job. Being good at it matters. It’s the closest thing I have to a litmus test as an investor.

This is a trait I prioritize highly in founders. If you yourself are a founder that is working on improving your capacity for feedback processing, I want to hear from you. That mental flexibility is one of the core criteria I look for when I decide on an investment. Do I think you will be able to intake enough information about their market to get to product market fit? Will you be able to adjust your mindset and mental models quickly enough to outrun inertia? How emotionally strong are they that there can hear constant negative input and still hold their positive vision? But equally can you adjust that positive vision when negative feedback that actually matters presents itself.

These are the questions you need to have answers to for yourself. If you can drop me a line on Twitter DM. I’ve got an entire primer on now I like to get to know founders.

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Emotional Work Startups

Day 296 and Under Budget

One reason I’ve been comfortable working in startups my whole life is I’ve never been a big spender. My biggest expense is probably takeout, as I find cooking to be a waste of time. As long as I can afford medical insurance (I’d get a job somewhere with socialized medicine if it came to that) I’m pretty happy with a one bedroom and Chipotle for dinner. Some people get used to their lifestyle as they make more money. I just haven’t yet.

If I go bankrupt (and sadly I lived through that emotional roller coaster as a teenager with my family) I could find a way to live within new means again. I don’t have to be in the top 10% to have a good life. I only need that for health care costs and sorry America but there are other options. I’ve got skills that could earn me stability if I wanted to make that choice. Hear that Canada I’m recruitable!

But I do need to learn to live comfortably with my current means. It’s alright to live within your budget. Sometimes budgets bigger and you can easily spend more on disposable income. And this was a year where my means finally got comfortable. And I’m still sort of afraid to use it. I had to really talk myself into a chair that that was functionally a workplace accommodation. Instead of just jumping at a chair that lets me work comfortably for longer hours I spent several years just not working as many hours.

This tendency to live under budget comes everywhere. I wanted something I considered fairly lavish for dinner. But I thought how ridiculous to spend an extra $15 on dinner. I got a little worked up trying to think of other options that I wanted as much and my husband said “fifteen bucks isn’t going to make a difference get the damn thing.” And so I did and it was fantastic. I’m super happy about my evening and the spending will have no impact on my total budget. Anyone who tells you that money or privilege can’t buy you happiness are lying. Happiness is a choice and it’s an easier choice when you can make the choices you want.

I had mental upper bounds on what I think it is responsible to spend for years. I ran an Airbnb side hustle out of an underpriced two bedroom in Chintatown while I had a six figure salary, because I wanted to live so far under my means I could take risks if I wanted. That under budget mentality let me save up 70,000. It’s also how I met my husband but that’s a different story.

That kind of thinking let me enjoy startup failures for the priceless learning that they are. But now I realize I’m afraid to live on my budget. Unless I’m living massively under budget I’m a little uncomfortable. So I’m going to try to let that one go. I can just live on budget.

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Emotional Work Internet Culture

Day 293 and A Good Cry

I’m a cryer. I hear the swell of trumpet from the Star Trek theme song and I’ll start welling up. I’ll read a poignant passage in a cheesy airplane novel and my chest will tighten with emotion. My eyes will tear up when I tell a friend that I’m proud of them. I’ve found myself sniffling over a set of emotional text messages. I love a good cry.

I think I’m a cryer because I bottle up my emotions otherwise. I’ll share feelings in public but the real deep down core emotions are harder for me to express openly. The fear and hurt and sadness that make up the core of my emotional unconscious take some coaxing and a lot of psychological safety to get out into the open.

One of the reasons I find social media so much fun is it is a cesspool of emotions. Much of shitposting is just rage and anger expressed with a joke. And the shitposts that are sad are often told with a kind of vulnerability that I more commonly associate with 12 step meetings or group therapy. Internet culture has become an escape valve for emotions we didn’t know we even had.

The more I see the negatives that comes with keeping emotions bottled up the more I appreciate ways to let them out. If it is a good cry then I’ll take whatever brings it on. If you need something stronger than I highly recommend a light dose of Internet emotions. Just don’t let it overwhelm. Ease into the shallow end with an anonymous shitposting account first.

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Emotional Work

Day 291 and Self Control

Self control is a form of self abuse for me. Early in life I learned that I could control others by controlling my emotions. Instead of showing my feelings, I’d distort my emotions into whatever got me attention from adults. That’s pretty clever for a child, but is the road to misery once you’ve grown up.

Alas I’ve kept up the habit of self control. It might not look like it from social media or press narratives, but I self censor a lot. I’m often conscious of what others will like or dislike and I will edit my feelings if I feel it isn’t to my benefit. What can I say, I am still hurting from feeling like I wasn’t loved as a child by my father. Same old story that everyone has in their lives (well maybe for you it was your mother but same idea).

But it hurts to keep your emotions inside. Eventually it will turn into pain or sickness. Not that I’m saying all pain or illness is caused by emotions (that’s some bullshit) but the mind body connection is real. The point is it’s only hurting myself to exert so much control over my emotions.

I need to get more comfortable with being uncomfortable with other people and how they feel about me. The control I have is largely a fantasy. It’s not that it’s not possible to change how others perceive you. Hell I’ve picked professions where that’s practically the main skill set. I love the perception game. Public relations, fashion, even venture capital are all games you win by building a good reputation.

Having a good reputation doesn’t mean turning off honesty. If anything reputations are built on being trustworthy. And that generally means saying what you mean and meaning what you say. So I’ve got to stop abusing myself by choking off emotions I don’t think others will like. Maybe it’s a gender thing. I learned pretty quickly no one likes an angry woman. But sometimes I get angry. Whatever excuse I’m using for hiding unpleasant emotions has got to go.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 287 and Routines

I haven’t figured out how to incorporate my routines into my busier workdays. I feel like I’ve written this blogpost at least 3-4 times but somehow I never seem to find balance easily when I make big changes to how I spend my time.

All the self care efforts that has become comfortable rhythms go by the wayside as soon as I add in new obligations. And then my body gets pissed that I’m not taking care of it and I get into the same pattern of two steps forward and one step back.

You’d think after experiencing this issue multiple times I’d be better at ramping change slowly but I remain the sort of person that loves to dive into shit head first.

After much enthusiasm and progress I’m writing todays post from a physically mediocre places. My stomach is upset. I am fighting off a migraine. My muscles are tense. I’m anxious about all of these symptoms turning into a messy cascade. So I’m turning to my pharmaceuticals, taking a mess of prescriptions, and going to bed. Maybe tomorrow is another chance to find a better balance.

Categories
Aesthetics Emotional Work

Day 284 and My Birthday

I’ve not enjoyed celebrating my birthday the past few years. There hasn’t felt like a lot of joy to go around which hinders my appetite for celebrating. I was struggling with my health and then the planet was struggling with a pandemic, and frankly I was just too sad to see my way into being happy about a birthday.

Not that I’ve traditionally been a big believer in birthdays. Some people love them and I find that lovely. I think it’s nice to celebrate another turn around the sun but it’s not generally been the mile marker for my own life. I’ve looked to other markers like the new year or the start of a new project. This post is title day 284 because on New Years Day I committed to write on essay every single day. But I don’t entirely write off birthdays. I do have little rituals that I enjoy for my birthday, and I was relieved that they felt joyful again this year.

I like to call my mother at precisely 7:14am California time as that was when I was born. I have always felt like my birthday was as much about her as it was about me. She brought me into this world, so taking a beat for the exact moment of my birth with my mother has felt like the most important ritual.

We were texting before the clock turned as we are on mountain time now. But at 8:14 MTN, I turned the text into a call and we got to enjoy the moment together.

It’s been hard to find the right ways to spend time with people as the various worries of the pandemic added rules and concerns to interactions. But today we just celebrated. I had lunch with my mother and my husband. We got an enormous sushi lunch. And then a surprise chocolate cake. And while this was all decadent it was also normal. It was normal to have a fancy meal and cake on your birthday with your family. I’d like to have more normal because that means more joy. And that’s my wish on my birthday. That we all have more normal joys.

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Emotional Work Internet Culture

Day 283 and Presencing

Nick Couldry uses the term ‘presencing’ in his book Media, Society, World to talk about how we go into digital or media spaces to manage our presence over time. It’s a way we cultivate a sense of wider purpose through a public presence. And because of the way suffering and trauma marginalize people, this act of making yourself more visible is even more important.

I was browsing Anne Helen Peterson’s newsletter Culture Study when the above quote hit me over the head. The interview was on the topic of ambiguous grief with a media studies professor Samira Rajabi. While the writing is almost uncomfortably academic it resonated with me immediately. I have been engaging in presenceing for the entire course of my illness. I just never had a name for why I felt like a public presence mattered to me.

While it sounds unbelievable, I never considered that I might be using social media as a way to give myself visibility in the face of the trauma of an extended and chronic illness. I’ve always been a heavy user of social media so I didn’t find it unusual that I spent significantly more time on Twitter and blogging as I went through the diagnosis and recovery process.

I had been used to being visible in my previous life. I was regularly in media for my startups and I had cultivated some amount of public presence on and off since I was in college. But I didn’t really become a Twitter personality that cultivated a presence and interactions and a voice until I got sick. Without knowing it was presencing myself.

In American culture in particular, there is a strong preference for triumphant stories. So we can conceive of suffering if it can be managed and overcome, but rarely do we know what to do with a story of chronic pain and suffering and how relentlessly it reminds a person that they no longer fit into the so-called “normal” world. To me, it becomes even more important for those people to be seen.

I really wanted my story to fit into a narrative when I first got diagnosed. I had all kinds of ambitions of overcoming and healing that were quickly dashed on the reality of my life. I was never going to be normal again. And I hated that. I still find myself overcome with grief at the prospect that there is no triumphant return.

But I want people to see that grief. And see that it’s alright. That life went on. I didn’t lose myself. Even in pain and illness, or perhaps because of it, I’ve gained ground in finding myself. The pain and degradation of illness is ugly and shitty but also powerfully transformative.

I have not given up just because the narrative isn’t clear and the story has no simple arc. Any impression we have that stories have structure is imposed in hindsight. We love our post-hoc rationalization. We love our pattern recognition. But the through line is never clear in the moment. And that’s why presence matters. We all need the visibility of the truth even if it doesn’t fit neatly into the story our culture has given us.

Categories
Media

Day 281 and Villains

This is a post that will have spoilers about the end of the second season of Ted Lasso. Do not read any further if you have not seen it. I’ll put an extra paragraph to keep it from your eyes and we can meet again tomorrow.

SPOILERS BELOW

The first season of Ted Lasso may be one of the most perfect seasons of television ever made. It’s like being inside the best session of therapy you’ve ever had. The kind where you have a breakthrough so profound that the hurt and agony of your worst childhood trauma suddenly feels not only bearable but also the reason to fully love yourself. It’s just that good on the emotional truth scale. The warmth and safety and growth is beautiful.

But season two leans into tropes and villainy where it used to rely on nuance and kindness. Rather than feeling the pride and hope of emotional truth that has been hard gotten (the truth will set you free but first it will piss you off), we are given the obvious end of Nate betraying Ted and Rebecca by going to coach for Rupert’s new team West Ham.

Nate makes a massive accusation that Ted abandoned Nate emotionally but we are given roughly thirty seconds to wrack our brains for these betrayals before it is revealed that Nate has chosen to abandon Ted. How do we feel about this? Wouldn’t we normally explore how both people contributed to the feeling? But nope it’s send Nate right into insecure narcissistic reactivity rather than mine for the potential nuance.

We could have been given a story where we see Nate and Ted equally participating in the traumas they each carry and how it affects their relationship. Ted with his fear of abandonment brought on by his father’s suicide very well may play out that pattern of abandonment on Nate. But that’s left largely unexplored. Perhaps it could have shown us how Nate intuitively sees that because of Ted’s unresolved pain with his father, Ted in fact isn’t fully there for Nate in his new role as a surrogate father figure coach.

The struggles of a young man coping with a new position and unexpected authority granted by father figure like Ted juxtaposed against Nate’s own issue with his father who doesn’t show him respect would have been an empathetic story in the hands of this show.

There was so much fertile ground for how each character could trigger emotions in the other and for how they could own and resolve these feelings. But instead it’s straight to villain don’t pass to don’t collect 200 dollars. By the end I wasn’t even sad about the loss. I’d resigned myself to the conclusion. But they could have done so much better by everyone. Even if Nate must experience his darker impulses we would have been wiling to see the full journey of how he arrived there and the pain other’s traumas has inadvertently wrecked on Nate.

I guess I’m not sad. I’m just disappointed. And that’s how you know it really mattered to me.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 278 and Overshooting

I have been feeling terrific. That means I’ve been able to do a lot more. But it’s also one of my tendencies to overshoot my capacity. Workaholism, like any addiction, is something I’ll have for the rest of my life. Being in recovery for it means recognizing I could relapse.

I feel a bit of that overextended twitchy feeling at the moment. That jittery adrenaline fueled vibe that proceeds a crash isn’t something I’ve allowed myself to feel for several years as frankly I was worried I’d go on a bender. A bender for me is perceived as societally approved. Look at that work ethic!

So this is me recognizing that I feel like I could go over the edge and I’m not going to do it. The temptation I had to find something to prolong the adrenaline of my winning work streak is heavy. I have a number of topics I’d like to write about today. I’ve got to do lists with tempting targets. But I’m not going to overshoot. I’ve written my paragraphs. I’ll tag it. I’ll send it out into social media and then I’m going to watch some trashy tv. Hold