Tag: Fear

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Medical

Day 2028 and Get Better Sometime

I’m going on week three of a crash out in my autoimmune situation and I’m not going to lie it’s scary.

My spinal pain is flaring, my migraines are relentless and I have no timeline for a resolution. I’m not even sure what’s wrong. Did I just overwork myself?

My symptoms are getting better albeit unevenly. And it’s just not very fast. I had many steps forward in my case in the last year thanks to artificial intelligence aiding diagnostics and protocols.

So having a few steps back worried me. As if I can’t know consistently what is going on in my own body, can I ever I trust my health?

I am in a perpetual loop of questioning how hard I can push. Clearly the hard push I did for spring was too much but where is the balance? I feel good and I exercise and then I’m crashed out. I feel bad and keep calm and I’m still crashed out. Cause and effect are not clear this last month.

It is always a confusing experience for folks who don’t see me as sick. And I forget as I’m very open about managing a chronic disease. And I have looked almost indomitable most of the year. Bets from years ago are on a winning streak and it feels amazing.

So there are people new to my life who have mostly experienced a fully functional globetrotting Julie. Why would they know I manage that at a knife’s edge? I haven’t had extended down time till this summer. So now I’ve had three weeks of struggling, it’s a tentative “hey feeling better?” line of questioning. Sort of? Depends on what hour of the day you catch me. I keep thinking I’ll be better when I schedule work and then I am not.

And I hate saying “No I’m not really feeling great and I don’t know when I will.” That’s a scary answer to anyone who doesn’t live with a complex chronic disease. It sounds like I’m unreliable when in truth I don’t want to commit to something I can’t be sure I’ll accomplish.

What should I say? “Don’t worry I’m a cripple so being sick and down is sort of a semi-permanent state. It’s fine!

What about “it scares me more than it scares you. You can move on. I have to live like this.” That is some TMI boundary crossing for most, but I’d also prefer people get an honest answer. There is no guarantee of ever getting better. It’s called chronic for a reason.

I used to try to be a little gentler about this reality. Thanking folks for asking and explaining there is no “better” just yet. I say maybe one day we will figure out what’s wrong and find a cure. And I mean it. I work so hard at getting more functionality back. And sometimes I have functionality for an extended periods. That’s been amazing for me.

I’m less reticent than ever to articulate that chronic illness is quite common. Yes I have a complex case and yes it’s cause is tragic (we tried to have kids) but it’s not a get better situation like a cold. It’s a sometimes it’s better sometimes it’s worse disease profile.

After the pandemic the sheer number of semi-fucked post viral covid adjacent chronic illnesses I encounter are so numerous, I figure why sugar coat it? It’s a get better sometime situation for most of us. I just hope that sometime is soon. So vote for the right to try and the right to compute. For all of us. So that sometimes becomes now and that now becomes permanent.

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Uncategorized

Day 2026 and The Year 2026

One consequence of consistent writing is having a large number of data points on my past predictions. I can go back and see how often I am right.

There is predictive value in back testing is clear. And in five years of writing I have lots of opportunities to apply my current dilemmas and compare them to what I’ve seen. If you’ve not heard of back testing here is a little summary from my Claude query.

Backtesting is a form of retrodiction—a special case of cross-validation applied to past time periods, used across finance, meteorology (where it’s called “hindcasting”), and other modeling domains.

In investment contexts, the underlying logic is that if a strategy performed poorly historically, it’s unlikely to perform well going forward, and vice versa.

The year 2026 has gone pretty well for me. I’ve made some good calls even as other situations globally look very chaotic. I feel like I’ve largely published my predictions and taken my shots and this is working out for me. The more I can look back on where I’ve been the better I get at acting on my calls.

I do continue to wonder how much anyone is paying attention to anything even as a huge amount of attention is being paid to manifestations that are only being seen as secondary or tertiary effects of bigger geopolitical and monetary events.

I don’t know if going into the future this corpus of guessing and noting and committing to thinking on the issues of the day will matter. Or might make life worse. But tomorrow on day 2027 maybe I’ll learn something new and put it into action and continue turning myself with the tides.

Categories
Aesthetics Startups

Day 2022 and Let’s Dance Quince

I have complained in the past about the slow degradation of quality standards in contemporary fashion and the negative consequences it has had on quality for consumers who are not in the top half of the K-shaped economy.

The shrinkflation and reformulation that’s rampant in food has hit clothing quite hard. And has made much easier to justify simply buying fast fashion that’s disposable simply because the quality bar for even beloved basics like L.L Bean has gone down.

I actually sent a note to the Chief Merchandising Officer of Gap, who, of course, did not email me back, about the loss of a particular pair of basic straight-leg black cotton sweatpants. I asked if it was possible to bring it back, as I had discovered a number of other internet complaints about its discontinuation.

The sweatpants had cost somewhere in the realm of $30 for a decade, I owned at least a dozen, and have now worn them all out entirely. They were cotton with just a hint of elastane, very lightweight, and the ideal pant for sleeping and home wear.

Now you find pants that are 30-40% plastics of various blends that promise super soft or super drape-y silhouettes consumers don’t know or even mind that the clever branding of “scuba” pants is just marketing for thick polyester knits.

I’m not against some of it. Somewhere between 2% and 5% works just fine for most fabrics, but I’m up to 10% for some garments as I’ve got boobs to work around. However when things are close to your body, particularly in the intimates category, 100% cotton is absolutely my standard.

To be clear, I have no problem with technical fabrics and am a great fan of innovators in that space, from Uniqlo to Norma Kamali, both of whom I wear. I do care about using the best possible quality in any given category. I also look for that in my wool, silk and leather goods.

This is all a somewhat elaborate setup for the fact that, having been sick in bed for the last week or so, I spent a lot of time browsing Quince.

I have not successfully found garments from them to work, though as a regular reader of things like Wirecutter and The Strategist, I notice when their items get put on lists. Or when people are skeptical of its promise.

The idea that you should be able to get something high quality and tasteful is, alas, becoming a luxury. Even when you spend full freight. A Substack called Magasin today seemed excited when most pieces were “under a thousand” when despite doing alright, I am entirely an under $300 shopper for most items. Coats and bags I’ll go higher but I’m not crossing a thousand. I’m from the industry I know what this costs thanks.

I am also no stranger to the direct-to-consumer world. I was a long-time shopper of Everlane as their founding team was close to me. I’m also a big fan of previous attempts in the category, like Italic, to bring the factories that we in the fashion industry know so well closer to the consumer.

However, I don’t think any of us expected the category winner Quince. That we would get one giant sourcing machine whose entire philosophy appears to be that merchandising is unnecessary. They will allow whatever the market pulls forward. On to the website and take customer demand pulls from there.

Which I suppose I’m going to have to get used to, because why hire a merchandising team when you can just make the market do it for you? Unfortunately, the market isn’t always as good at the job as somebody who is actually a capable market editor or a top merchandising manager. It’s maddening for many consumers to have no sense of quality, fit, style, color or other characteristics we might like from an online retailer. And yet here we are.

So I did something insane. I went through the entire women’s section of Quince. I scrolled through shirts, skirts, pants, dresses, sweaters, blazers and layers, accessories, hand bags and shoes. I didn’t set out to do it as I just added on what I thought might work for me to see if this was part of the appeal. The sense of hope was always there but it was easy to spot where corners had been cut and the reviews are often hit or miss unless it’s a definite best seller.

I ended up selecting what I thought would be a comprehensive capsule wardrobe for what fashion calls pre-fall. It’s the maddening middle season where you have to layer but it also can get very hot.

Sixty nine items culled from mid July Quince I could see being useful in the next quarter.

We will see if I can reconstruct a capsule wardrobe from what is merchandising that has no sense of what will fit, what will flatter, how consistent their sizing will be, how consistent the quality will be, or if entire categories will fail me.

Now some categories are heavier weighted as I’m trying a lot of bags and travel. Some are light like shoes as I have basics from actual functional fashion lines from my past but I’ll try these out. I don’t know what fabrics will flatter in what cuts so I got multiple colors but if it doesn’t fit I am likely a full pass as I don’t want to double the order with sizes so if it fits I sits.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 2020 and Summertime Sadness Sick Season

I am feeling better today after a what felt like a long week of crashing out from a busy quarter of work, travel and side quests. As I was looking at my archives, it seems like mid July has traditionally been a time for medical crisis.

Last year it went from surgeries in foreign countries to two years ago hacking a long covid Nicotine experiment, but even further back I have struggled with energy and vitality and viral infections in these months. It shows up in my data year after years and the tags like up.

Maybe these heat death statistic needs to include the general quality of life dip that comes with a hotter climate. If we once went inward in to our psyche in winters and enjoyed summers of slightly crazy hot joy that life is passed.

Maybe the long now of the perma-weird has cast a shadow of stuck culture which that I see more clearly when life becomes unlivable outside. If you keep living out in the world things do move forward. It’s less pleasant to touch grass when it’s dead and a fire hazard. And so the summer slows us down enough to see inside ourselves

I spend more time inside in the summer than I do in the winter. And given that my home is in Montana, you’d probably expect it to be reversed. Thankfully we only have two months where the weather gets into the “indoors between 9am to 9pm” heat risk. Other lower latitudes have more troubles than we do and blessedly our power comes from our own solar grid so I never worry about running air conditioning.

Categories
Community Culture Finance Travel

Day 2012 and World Maps and Network Nodes

A long block of travel to sync in person with diverse nodes in my network has been invigorating but also exhausting. I’m sure some of the travel looks quite glamorous, but it is always in service of furthering my longterm goals.

Venkatesh Rao published an essay today suggesting that the dark forest theory of the Internet is over. Our digital public commons has been in retreat

For a decade, we have explained the retreat from the public internet using Yancey Strickler’s Dark Forest Theory. People withdrew into smaller, quieter spaces because speaking in public became dangerous…

The resulting cozyweb—private group chats, Discords, Slacks, newsletters, encrypted messaging groups, invite-only communities—was understood as a strategic adaptation. The public remained a single connected univers

– Dead Forest Theory

The ecosystem of private spaces were connected, but as they accreted power these cozy web communities saw their gravity increase. Eventually some collapsed in on themselves. And thus we have black holes of public collapse in the dark forest; out of which none of us are able to escape.

What Rao calls “inaccessible interiority” traps some of us. We may have visibility to other communities through the byproducts of our niches but that does not mean a shared reality where we can reach consensus with others outside of our space.

My strong fear is that without a possible consensus reality for larger groups like nation states citizens, we lose the basic capacity for productive interactions that move us forward. Only inside a community that has swallowed us whole can we progress. And if we find something novel inside those gravity sinks we have no way of sharing it. Only some of us enjoy progress.

Which might be fine for those who wish to live lives quietly out of sight. But it isn’t a world that enables strangers coming together through public global communication in a shared commons.

And this has serious consequences for investing, and especially so in venture capital where a diversity of worldviews is precisely what allows for uncorrelated returns.

Novel worldviews emerge from genuinely new observations of reality. If we all live in disconnected realities of collapsed worldviews what happens?

This is why, as an industry, venture capital is uniquely vulnerable to the seductive coherence of simple ideas, rather than complex truths. That’s unfortunate, because venture capital is also uniquely dependent on intellectual diversity, as evident in the damage done by group-think versus the extreme profitability of contrarianism. 

This stacks on existing research which illustrates how social media creates echo chambers that amplify consensus ideas while filtering out unconventional or contrarian views — which in turn builds on existing theory that describes how individuals self-censor opinions when they suspect they are in the minority.

Dan Grey “The Venture Capitalist Worldview” in Odin Times

When the dark forest was scary but still possible to traverse, we still had a chance to explore and find reality, even if we lived in a consensus bubble most of the times. Dead forest theory means we are past the event horizon, from which we cannot escape. We are locked in whatever consensus reality emerged inside the event horizon.

Digital Public Sphere and the gravity of mass opinion leaders from Odin Times

And so despite its expense, its troubles and its costs, I still push my work into the public commons with the hope that I’ll circle the accretion disks but can fight against falling into one forever with a steady acceleration to preserve a visible orbit.

What both Venkatesh Rao and Dan Grey posit in different ways, is that it is worth understanding where we might be cut off from reality.

Further, who knows what new kinds of horrors we will endure as we lead separate lives online without any contact with real life and real people. We crave community with those whom we can maintain consistent context and contact. That’s why I still get on the airplane, or get in the car, or hop on the bus and show up. I want us to share reality.

Categories
Startups

Day 2008 and From Running On A Dream to Running On Our Reactor

I’ve got to remember to keep tissues in my purse. I’m prone to crying when I’m proud. I am a crier by nature and the experience of pride and awe is becoming distressingly common. Woe is me right?

My very early bet on Valar Atomics (I wrote about it on Day 1145 but met Isaiah closer to day 900 early 2023) is paying off years, if not decades, ahead of my expectations. Never did I expect arguably the hardest operational bet in my portfolio to be such a fast breakaway hit. And I owe it to an executive order from Donald Trump and the efforts of patriotic Americans committed to regulatory reform. Which is crazy.

As it turns out, if the government gets out of the way of talented people, nay, if it demands that our state institutions help them, the impossible becomes possible in shockingly short order. The reports of America’s death are greatly exaggerated.

Today in front of a crowd of hundreds of current and potential investors, employees, Orangeville community members, government officials & scientists and most importantly our family members, we watched a reactor (that might not even exist without my first check), power an Nvidea Blackwell chip.

In a demonstration rivaling the greats (Ballmer, Jobs) Isaiah brought up NuclearWebsite.com and asked the audience to load it with him.

“Oh no it’s not loading?!!?” What’s happening? Do we have any electricity on site? Quick someone run the GPUs to the nearest electricity! Go go we can’t disappointment all these people!

And then the Blackwell is rushed into the Ward250 reactor. In real time the chip is run to the control room, gets hooked up and boom the website loads.

The first entirely privately funded nuclear startup was critical, stable, producing electricity and powering state of the art silicon.

We actually did it. The mad lads and ladies of Valar Atomics swept ahead of the competition in a frenzied year of progress (Day 1510) from seed round and Ward Zero to producing electricity to power GPUs.

After a twenty four hour travel marathon to get from the Ionian in the Mediterranean to the southern Utah desert, being back at the Valar Atomics reactor facility for a demonstration of this magnitude felt surreal.

Just a few weeks ago (Day 1969) the reactor was days away from being shielded and then fueled. We’d driven down to see her before she was wrapped up in shielding.

Proud first investors in front of Ward 259

Now not only has she gone critical (Day 1996) but I was able to walk into the running reactor room and see the live reactor for myself. The operator Ben (a former naval nuclear operator) seemed surprised and happy to see me. “Julie! Hi!” He exclaimed as me and the other early lead investors piled in for a tour.

I won’t lie it felt really cool that the team knows me on sight. The perks of being the very first believer (Day 1145) are worth the risk. Sure you get called crazy quite a bit, and only half the time does anyone mean the good kind of crazy, but sometimes you get to enjoy being right.

Jason Calacanis (also a master of the live demo) never lets anyone forget he invested in Ubers seed round. I get to brag I wrote Valar’s very first check

And while success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan, I’ll always enjoy the satisfaction of being the very first to take a chance on a long shot no one thought had any business even trying. And well they were wrong. And I was right. Not just right but really fucking right. I backed the long shot dark horse (somewhere around day 950) because my gut told me that the kid had the right stuff. And wow did he.

I only had a dim hint of exactly what we’d be seeing today as the invite said “Watts Next” cohosted by Nvidia and Valar. Clearly a number of us connected the dots because it was packed. The atom would power the compute and we’d get to see it live.

The team after the demo

Every existing investor, and quite a few later stage firms, came out to the middle of nowhere to see if these longshots had really done it. And indeed in just three years the impossible became reality. I’ve never felt prouder to be American. And clearly everyone around me felt the same.

This is a win for all of us. The families who gave up time with their loved ones so their loved one could pursue a dream. The policy makers and scientists who did everything in their power to prove we could make nuclear work again. The investors who wrote checks that no one else wanted to write as it was too risky.

And most importantly, it was a win for the team, led by the indomitable spirit of Isaiah Taylor. Their long nights and constant doubt paid off. The road ahead is long but no one is likely to doubt that we are serious contenders anymore.

I always say there was never a doubt in my mind. I had faith. Isaiah joked he had moments of doubts. I say I’m blessed that I got to be that first believer to say “I think you can do it and I’m going to help.”

And whenever he doubted that we’d make it (there are always near death experiences in any startup) it was my privilege to remind him that doing the impossible is just what we humans do.

Like Captain Kirk, I don’t believe in no win scenarios. I hope you consider joining me for more impossible long shots. Because sometimes taking the shot is worth more than anything else you will ever do.

Want to run your compute on clean renewable cheap American energy?
Categories
Culture Travel

Day 2004 and Heatwave Scandals

I’m in the middle of a miserable heatwave that is cooking Europe. You probably know it’s a heatwave over on the continent even in America as anytime Europe has a heatwave, the internet starts debating whether Europe has a degrowth mindset or if all this bitching is just Americans misunderstanding European culture & using anecdotal evidence. Even Europeans get upset at how this makes them look.

I’ve been hiding out from the heatwave in a hotel room. I am one of the lucky ones. Europe is as diverse as America so it’s a little silly to discuss it as a whole but only 20% of Europe’s housing has air conditioning. Germany is at 3%. The United Kingdom is at 5%. Honestly the mind reels as in America 90% of our housing has air conditioning even if we can’t all afford to run it.

It’s not just the housing either. A hotel room with strong air conditioning is a rarity in Western Europe. They will claim they have air conditioning at corporate chains and in Airbnbs, but it is not always the air conditioning you’d expect in America where you have more control.

In Europe you have a few options generally. A corporate hotel will be controlled by a central HVAC system. They may pretend that you can change it but in Germany they won’t let you go below 72 degrees at a Marriott. Ask a United Airlines pilot in Frankfurt what block of hotels they stay at to get a decent night sleep. It’s a nightmare and hacks are numerous but usually fruitless.

Your other options are finding independent hotels or Airbnbs with a mini-split. But good luck with that. The Germans and the French will tell you off for running it. There are towns where you need to show a medical need. I once had this happen to me.

So yes it’s usual that I’m in a comfortable hotel with a central HVAC system with individual room controls (not a mini-split) that allows me to get it down to 18C. That’s pretty unusual.

Why am I so lucky as to have air conditioning in a European hotel room that is central air and not a mini-split? Well I picked the hotel that the diplomats stay at in the capital. They don’t suffer at all.

The private small independent hotel I am at has NGOs staffers constantly winding people in and out of. It is a well maintained beauty of an independent hotel in an era of corporate standards. So it has a wiff of the old patrician smell to it and they enjoy their perks.

There are zoomers outside protesting corruption but inside technocrats and policy analysts and other bureaucrats enjoy cool temperatures at their control as they go about their work being high minded about democracy and equity.

Alas that isn’t a perk that everyone even working for the European Commission enjoys. While Ursula Von Der Leyen isn’t in control of much, she exerts influence and power over culture and expectations in Europe she doesn’t suffer herself.

During the current record-breaking European heatwave, the European Commission’s Berlaymont headquarters in Brussels experienced an AC system failure — or forced shutdown — on Friday, June 27.

Staff on floors 1–7 received an urgent text message at midday reading: “BERL — URGENT — Due to extreme weather conditions, forced shut down of air cooling system from floor 1 to 7 for the rest of the day” The Express

I’m glad my hotel was allowed keep its cool since her lower tier staffers don’t have that luxury. I understand why it’s a scandal. French and German cultural leaders can discuss their hospitals and schools without air conditioning with as much pride as they like. I am not buying it. Europe can fix this problem if it likes.

Categories
Biohacking Chronicle Emotional Work Startups

Day 2000 and Don’t Stop Believing

Well I’ve done it. I have written and published to the internet a blog post every single day for two thousand days in a row. So I am going to toast myself to a job well done.

In earlier milestone posts, I was always surprised I’d made it, but now the harder thing to decide is if or when I’ll stop, not if I’ll keep going.

Half a decade goes by a lot faster than you think. The accomplishments actually do add up if you keep yourself pointed in the right direction.

In a personal capacity, we got ourselves to Montana, set up a life that let us live the way we’d always dreamed and invested in the future we wanted to see.

From a civic perspective during that time we helped pass meaningful reform in housing, testified for crypto rules of the road and worked to ensure Montanans have a right to compute.

A new era of networked algorithmic power has been building for many years and our rights to use compute as we see fit is bolstered by our 1st, 2nd and 4th amendments.

From an investing perspective, we have been first in Solana’s most crucial infrastructure player Squads. Because yeah crypto is going to matter a lot in an artificial intelligence age. We have stuck to our core mission of adaptation by backing the tools needed to benefit from our new AI speed run.

And yes we care about open source. From vector databases to inference labs to experimental dueling models, we have snuck into some strange experiments. And oh yeah we were the first check in a small modular nuclear reactor that is winning the atomics renaissance race (at least this week having achieved criticality).

There have been a lot of failures in those years though oddly not investments or policy. I have battled health issues and fought to not just maintain working capacity but to gain back the capacity I thought I’d lost forever.

I did woo woo whacky things from PEMF and HBOT to peptide stacks and traditional biologics. Thanks to the horrors of hormones and steroids I was early to GLP1s and made some good investments there too.

Maybe I’ll tag all of this more cleanly later but I do think it’s important to remember the days are long but the years are short.

Get on the airplane. Go meet up in person. Buy that dream house. Build a solar array and a sauna. Do wildly romantic things and go to galas. Say yes to more.

And open your heart to the heroic efforts others are also putting into making our lives and our world better. We live among every day heroes. And yeah lots of bad shit has happened in this time too. My father died. We failed for five years straight at getting a visa for a close family friend.

I am aware of the shitty compromise we all make to survive. But you have got to hold on to that feeling. So yeah on day 2000 I think I’ve earned the right to be corny as hell. Don’t stop believing.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1999 and We Are Going To Party Like It’s 1999

I’m so old I viscerally remember the Y2K panic that ate up the emotional bandwidth of the American media class who then stoked fear into the hearts of the doomer classes from system administrators to evangelical millenarians.

I was very much online during the Y2K era though I didn’t start blogging (unless you count girly message boards or Geocities) till much later. I was however happily a cybercore hippie girl. If you want to feel jealous and are a Zoomer, I owned a teal iMac G3 and iPod. So I it delightful that a younger generation has decided to dust off some of the silliest times of my youth and refurbished them into Instagram and TikTok aesthetic trends.

What is less funny is how much past fear mongering over technological doomsday scenarios look exactly like our current ones. I remember the simmering fears, the debates over types of damage, and extensive coverage of weirdos who were preparing for a kind of end times.

It feels familiar to how very extreme our reaction to artificial intelligence is being portrayed by both the media and its wildest singularity evangelists. I say this as someone who readily calls themselves a doomer so it’s not a milieu that’s foreign to me.

Here is a brief synopsis I patched together from a Perplexity query with links included if you are too young to remember it.

The Y2K crisis was the feared failure of computer systems when dates rolled from 1999 to 2000, because many programs stored the year with only two digits and could misread “00” as 1900 instead of 2000.

In practice, it became a major prevention project rather than a disaster, with governments, banks, utilities, and other organizations spending years fixing code, updating hardware, and testing systems before midnight on January 1, 2000.

The most dramatic predictions were widespread power outages, banking collapse, transportation shutdowns, and chaos in critical infrastructure, but those outcomes did not materialize at midnight. More extreme claims, such as nuclear systems failing and detonations occurring, also did not happen.

Instead, the world saw only limited glitches, such as small database errors or minor local issues, not the civilization-level breakdown many feared. The unusual part of Y2K is that success looked like nothing happening, which is exactly what the preparatory work was meant to achieve.

So here I am on Day 1999 of writing every single day, and I’m waiting to turn over into my own 2000th day. I have no anticipated bugs for that event. I stayed up till midnight with my mother walking the main street of our town with a bunch of others waiting to see if anything happened. Nothing did so we drove home.

But it’s enjoyable to remember the kind of disasters that were predicted with such anxiety ended up being problems we worked our way through. We keep at problems by naming them early. Humans intervene and we change our behavior. That’s something you celebrate about us as a species.

I am excited to have achieved such long tenure of daily public writing because much of it covers we have worked our way into a new panic that I’ve been watching for over twenty years. Singularity thought and the extropians have been part of my daily internet diet for quite some time. I think we will find a way to survive this too. Though I grant it sounds a bit more complicated.

I’m sure 1999 me would be proud of the strange futurist I became in my adulthood. I doubt she would have expected that I’d be investing in nuclear power or that I’d have managed a career in cosmetics as a side quest. This is actually a side quest another nerd pursued. I don’t even wear makeup in 1999. I occasionally do in 2026. But if I need to party my way into the singularity I’ll probably at least wear lipstick.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1998 and Daddy Issues Post Mortem on Father’s Day

It’s my first Father’s Day since my own father passed away last year. I never had an ideal relationship with my father in our daily lives and in death this did not change. I was blessed with a complex father and his gifts outweighed any failings in the final tally for me.

Despite our complicated relationship, I credit my father’s example for much of my professional interests and ultimately my success in my career. My love of technology came from his love of technology.

I loved him so much. I always feared I loved him more than he loved me. That fear led me to shape myself to appeal to his preferences so I could more easily fit into his life and how he spent his time.

I took up his work, his hobbies and his ambitions. I never felt I was enough to sustain his attention just because I was his daughter. So I made every effort to be the ideal Daddy’s Girl. I knew he was proud of me when I achieved something he valued.

I don’t think that his disinterest in spending time with his children was a reflection of his feelings for me or my brother, but rather his own preferences for living his life. His love was unspoken because that was his way of being.

He had an outward orientation to the wider world. He loved the comings and goings of world affairs and its impact on business. He loved to golf and travel. He was an avid reader of books, periodicals and newspapers. He took great joy in seeing more of the world than what his childhood has offered him.

He only turned to family at the very end of his life when he took stock of his decisions and their consequences and found he had some regrets. We did our best to reassure him of our love. I told him over and over, I forgave him for anything he felt he had done wrong.

I loved him for who he was no matter the imperfections or mistakes. His humanity was enough for me. Any anger, sadness or resentment I had as a child was let go through my adult life as I worked to become my own person who didn’t wish to carry certain things forward.

My life turned out so beautifully in no small measure because I strove to be part of his world. I may never have fully succeeded with him, but I succeeded in the wider world which is an amazing gift to pass on to your child. .

I prefer to think the best of my father, as I believe he did the best that he could. I’ll never know if my interpretation is correct. As in life so in death. He remain/ as distant and unavailable to me as always. At least now it’s permanent and not a function of my short game or my latest success.

My grief for his loss (which started long before he left this mortal realm) will always be a part of me. Just as the love for technology and the building new things will always motivate my life’s work. Our blessings are contoured to the shape of our lives. And I am happy this is the fit of mine.