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Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 1920 and Walking The Dream Roads to Costco

Yesterday I was really struggling with pain. It was all I could do to scribble up an appreciation for my 18th anniversary using WordPress for my writing.

I am doing everything I can to biohack my way around a chronic autoimmune condition that interferes with my quality of life. My love for my life and work is strong.

Sometimes it is strong enough that I willingly try all kinds of therapies from oxygen to hormones. Now I am working through a hormonal treatment recovery (my 2nd attempt) as I believe it is working.

Of course, life happens constantly, which means juggling deep dark horrific pains while the business of war and the business of my own portfolio goes on.

I’ve not had good sleep this week between the excitement of huge wins and the terror of facing down another global crisis brought on my conflict.

You’d think I’d be used to it. Russian invaded Ukraine the week before I left to live in Frankfurt. I was living in Tallinn when 10/7 happened. I was also there when Estonian cables to Finland were cut. One of my best performing companies has had to work around three kinetic wars.

No wonder sleep can be elusive. Yesterday all dream roads carried me to horrors. I woke myself multiple times. You can literally see in my sleep tracking the spiking heart rate and my forced waking.

The positive side to this fitful pained sleep was being up early enough this morning to prepare for a Costco preparedness run and still arrived before their executive member hour was finished.

We rotated our basics like rice and beans. Tinned fish, chicken and other canned and stable shelf proteins are just part of preparing for a nightmare that we hope never comes. Preparedness is a civic obligation. Help yourself to take the strain off the system so we all make it.

It’s possible we are facing an industrial process cascade thanks to the war in Iran and I like us have supplies just in case. We can’t know what comes next but it’s good practice to check expiration dates and make sure you have everything from first aid kit supplies to soap. You’d be surprised at just how much processing fuel fuels the rest of the world’s production.

After all this, I was happy to get stumble into bed and take a long nap. I didn’t even wash the sunscreen off my face. I was running a deficit and wanted to have REM sleep where I wasn’t trapped in horror. Thankfully I got almost two hours of restorative sleep this afternoon and I am ready to go back to bed as soon as I can.

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Culture

Day 1918 and Other Lives You Could Have Lived

I was talking with my mother today as I was organizing some logistics for her birthday. Don’t tell her that though as it’s a surprise. Just kidding she knows I’m up to something.

As we talked shared pictures from a recent work trip where she was able to visit our extended family. Her brother lives in Texas after a long military career. It got me thinking about the very different lives it’s possible to live even within one family.

My mother has siblings that she is not related to by blood that are nevertheless our family. Her mother was unable to stay with her father. She married a man I consider my grandfather and gained a large family in the process.

One of my cousins (not by blood but through love) had her children when she was still a teenager. We are roughly same age. She has nearly fully grown children while I will likely never have children. We had very different life trajectories.

She didn’t have an easy time when she was a young mother, but seems to be in a good place now. She is married to a kind man (not to her children’s father though they were married for a time), enjoys watching her son play varsity baseball and football, and lives near her parents. She earned a beautiful life the hard way.

My aunt and uncle are hard working, deeply kind and patriotic people. They supported their daughter every step of the way. Which in the late nineties and early aughts was harder than it looked for a conservative military family in Texas.

I feel lucky my mother got to have such a wonderful brother (and other amazing siblings). My grandmother was an incredible woman. She got remarried at time when single mothers had it even tougher than my cousin did.

I think of the lineage of my mother’s family and wonder which of us made the right choices, which one of us thinks we made the right choices, and how we feel about those choices in the grand scheme of things. Lots of my family believe I made all the right choices. And maybe they are right.

Both my mother and grandmother heavily encouraged my interest in academics and the sciences in particular as they both wanted to pursue scientific careers and were unable to do so. I know I am their pride and joy.

But as I think of my mother’s upcoming birthday I know she won’t get to see her grandchildren playing varsity sports under Friday night lights in Texas with her mother sitting beside her. Her mother, my grandmother, has passed.

There won’t be three grown generations to coincide together because that’s just not how it works any more. And I don’t believe she is disappointed. And I know my grandmother wasn’t either. They wanted this life for me.

And it’s a good life. But I am also glad that my cousin was able to have a good life too. If only it were easier to balance some of the choices. If they were choices at all.

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Aesthetics Travel

Day 1893 and Gusty Groaning Roaring Winds

Yesterday I went from the bright blustery Pacific surf beaches of San Diego to the fault block ridges of the Bridger Range in Montana’s Rocky Mountains. Going from one climate to another in the span of a few hours remains a wonder for me.

While I enjoyed the nervous system soothing peace that comes with watching the waves, I did feel a sense of relief coming over the snow capped peaks into the Gallatin Valley.

It’s been a dry winter with very little snow pack, ans the accumulation is much needed. It’s odd for Montana to have had so little snow this winter. I missed much of it but in truth I’ve seen more real winter in the mountains of Sarajevo and Greece than Montana.

I’ve been at sea level for long enough that I am nervous about my adjustment to altitude. After unpacking and restocking groceries, I went for a mile and a half loop that is my usual leg stretching route.

My V02 max remained identical to the scoring from the day before at sea level. My other biometrics are in a difficult place with my resting heart rate high and my heart volatility quite low

Twenty mile an hour gusts wiped across the valley which encouraged me to move a little faster than usual and breath deeply when I could. It was a stark contrast from the slow ambling cross sandy beaches that made up my recent exercise. The stress of altitude isn’t just the oxygen and exposure to the sun but the generally more challenging conditions.

While the mountains have enjoyed some fresh snow, the valley is brown and dry. It’s bizarrely warm at 58 degrees as we spring forward. The record high for March 8th is 62 in 2004 but we are meant to see an inch of snow and a drop back into the lower 30s.

We shall see how I adapt but I need some rest as the rate of change for everything is as jarring as waking up on the beach and falling asleep up in the mountains in the space of one day.

Categories
Biohacking Homesteading

Day 1788 and Where is Our Winter?

We’ve not had any real snowfall in our corner of Southwest Montana just yet. It’s not unusual to get snow in September but it is now late November, and I can only recall a smattering of frost and a light dusting of snow. We’ve not needed to shovel the walkway, let alone plow out the drive.

The Bridgers are bare without even a hint of a snowcap. It has been 50 degrees and sunny for too many days. It just doesn’t feel natural.

Last night we set ourselves up for our idea of a wild Saturday night with sauna session after sunset. It was a balmy 180F inside our cedar sauna. Cooling off was a little trickier than usual though.

We set a sand timer for 15 minutes. When it finished we rush out with our felt hats and drop our towels to let the sweat evaporate. It is glorious to go from heat to cold shock.

Alas that doesn’t work as well when it’s in the mid fifties even in the November nighttime. Staring up at the stars, we could see the heat mist off our bodies and our breath but only just. It was twenty degrees too warm for that party trick.

Getting back in the sauna for round two was harder than I expected. The rush from heat to freeze to heat is part of the experience. Without the full range of our normal temperature change it just felt a little off. Stimulating but also a little scary. Where is our winter?

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Homesteading

Day 1767 and Muskrat Love in Montana at MilFred Pond

And what feels like a lifetime ago, when Alex and I were searching for the perfect property on which to have our little homestead experiment, we were on our second scouting trip in the Gallatin County area when an almost impossibly perfect property went on the market.

I was particularly adamant about finding something that had its own water, and not just on a well. Ideally, something that had a stream crossing it. As silly as it sounds, you really are looking for a river that runs through it sometimes.

What we found was a farmhouse with a giant yellow barn that had a perfect pond fed by a mountain stream coming down straight from the canyon above us. It was honestly so perfect, it was a little bit terrifying to make the decision to offer on the house the same day. But somehow we had the guts to make the move and make an offer, and we got the property.

That pond has provided us with so much tranquility and beauty over the years that I almost can’t imagine why hesitated in the first place, except that the leap of actually doing the thing felt so enormous at the time. It was exactly what we had wanted to find, and with everything we had on our list. It is a treasure in all seasons.

Not that we fish in it, but trout do come down the stream as it flows year-round. We have a family of ducks, and during migration season, Canada Geese will often be attracted to it as well. Thanks to the stream that feeds it. It seems to be a thriving ecosystem even though we have quite a bit of work that we really need to do in order to deepen it and really let it breathe.

But clearly it can’t be doing too poorly, as we have found a new creature who has made a home with us. Over the fall, we have noticed that anytime we walked past the pond, a small mammal would splash and immediately disappear.

Now the temptation, of course, was to think that maybe we had a beaver as we found a dam. But this is as unlikely as finding river otters, although that would be a fantasy life to have such creatures nearby.

But of course, the real indigenous aquatic animal in Montana is the muskrat. They are actually quite common in several areas of our state. Being known for our rivers, means Montana has an ideal wetland environment for the funny, web-footed voles known for making the occasional frustrating dam, their very fine pelt and amusingly “odoriferous secretions from the perineal glands.”

The Milfred Muskrat in what we hope will remain their home for some time.

For weeks now, we’ve been trying to quietly walk up without upsetting or alerting our new mammal friend as quite obviously we wanted to get a picture. They (or maybe it is just a singleton) had moved too quickly at every turn for us to ever get a good look.

But today, Alex managed to quietly snap a few photos of the muskrat, happily swimming about the pond. It’s been hard to see or hear anything but a quick splash as we go by, as they are so swift in their movements.

Muskrats are very effective swimmers, and ours is clearly a fine specimen who has decided our cat tails make for an excellent food source.

Now, they are allowed to be trapped over the winter if one has a permit. So perhaps it was Providence that allowed us to see our new neighbor today. I have no intention of letting anyone take our Milfred Muskrat away. So just know if you come across the property line for him or her, we will defend them vigorously.

But if you come visit and are very lucky, you too might catch a glimpse. And you too might fall in muskrat love like we have.

And they whirl and they twirled and they tango
Singin’ and jinglin’ a jango
Floatin’ like the heavens above
Looks like muskrat love

Captain and Tennille

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 326 and The Long Now

A culture lacking optimism is a culture without a future. Even before the pandemic, American youth had plenty of reasons to temper their optimism. Inequality, corporate dominance, rising debt particularly for school, unaffordable housing, lack of social support for family, the changing climate and the frequency of natural disasters all tend to weigh on you.

I’m a optimistic person so I always presumed I’d find a way around things. And I largely did. I got an education. I started my own company. I sold it. I found I had developed a valuable skill set. I met a man through one of my best friends and we got married. All was well in my American dream for many years.

But cracks had always been there. Little details that made me question common cultural, social and political assumptions. I discovered the limits of modern medicine with a chronic disease. I saw the disaster that financialization could wreck on families with a bankruptcy. I wasn’t naive about our systems and their inequalities.

But the knowledge that the future could be worse than today wears on you. Once you start living in a liminal state it gets worse. The pandemic made it harder for me to believe in the future because the present became a holding pattern. Ben Hunt at Epsilon Theory calls this The Long Now.

The more we put off investing in a future the more the long now stretches on. We borrow against all the things that could build us a better tomorrow. And we fall back. We put off doing things that would make our future better because it’s rational to do so. What if things get worse?

I’m tired of living in the long now. I’m investing in myself. I have been investing in my body and my health. And I’m ready to invest in a home. Not because I particularly want to own property but because I want to stop the long now and believe that my future is something I can build.

Categories
Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 191 and Logistical Leverage

I hate logistics. It’s not that I am incapable of operational tasks, but I do not find them enjoyable or energizing. I’m happiest working from the 30,000 foot vantage point and most stressed when keeping tabs on the 1,000 foot details. Thankfully I discovered this about myself early in life and had the good sense to choose a life partner that feels the opposite.

My husband is a genius operator and loves logistics. He can find efficient ways to manage nearly everything. He is a COO both professionally and personally. He manages everything about our household. I used to feel a bit guilty about the fact but I’m objectively terrible at home economics as frankly I just get in the way when I try to pitch in. All those sit-com jokes about husbands who can’t fold laundry right? In our house it is reversed. Which is a bit embarrassing as I worked in fashion but bygones. I just get in Alex’s way and he would prefer not to be slowed down by my bumbling efforts.

Recently I had to take on life & home workload in addition to my own. He had to take his first trip since the pandemic began. I haven’t been without him since February of 2020 so it has been a while since I’ve had to manage without him. And wow did it show!

I maintained the same of basics into my system, the same routine, supplements, diet and treatments with the only addition of Alex’s workload. I only added an additional 2 to 3 hours to my time obligations, so roughly an extra 9% my day, but it had close to a 30% impact across all my core metrics.

Because I track so many biometrics on a daily and even persistent basis I know my physical and emotional baselines. Without Alex managing life, my physical capacity dropped across the board over two days. The additional household logistics, errands, cleaning & cooking & overhead dramatically impacted my capacity.

Within 48 hours all my body’s baselines worsened. My HRV went down an astonishing 22%. Whoop gave me recoveries at 33%. My RHR went up by a full 10%. My qualitative pain scores went from consistent 3s and 4s to a 7. My energy scoring went from a perceived 6 to a 2. Gyroscope dropped my health grade from 85 to 78. It was a mess.

It turns out that Alex has added significant capacity to my life. Work that takes him just a few hours a week enables me to thrive. It takes very little from him but it means the difference between barely getting by and having the capacity to work for me.

Maybe it wouldn’t be as easy for another person. Alex is a very high leverage person in general but particularly for me. 10% of my day for a 30% improvement is significant. If your spouse is the operator in your partnership it may be quite fun to quantify their impact. Nothing says I love you quite like proof of how much their efforts impact your biometric data.