Tag: Inner Child

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Emotional Work

Day 535 and Daddy’s Girl

I hate Father’s Day. I find myself debating if I can get away with a text or an email marking the occasion. I do this as I’d like to make it through the day without crying. I almost never can. Sometimes I just ignore it entirely.

I’ll reach out to my brother and ask how he is doing. He’s the only one that seems to have a better grip on the “our father” feelings. They are complex for me and untangling them is always painful.

I am a Daddy’s Girl. Everything that’s good (and some of what is bad) about me is a refraction of my father’s ambitions, interests, desires and personality.

I got my love of technology from him. I got my career in startups from him. I learned to socialize and leave a good impression from him. I got my optimism from him. I also got my need for distance from him. My preference for keeping my loved ones a little further away is from him. My struggles with intimacy and emotional availability are his too. I am my father’s daughter. I suspect I’ve also acted as a proxy for what he wanted in a son as well.

Even after years of therapy, unpacking how I feel about my father has not made the tender feelings any less acute when I touch them. I merely understand that my trauma is my father’s trauma and his trauma is his father’s and so on stretching back to who knows when. We carry our heritage.

I tell my father I’ve forgiven him for his mistakes. That I understand he did his best. I don’t think he believes me. I hope he does one day. He done what he could.

I am the absolute best of my father’s good traits. I am also the absolute worst of them too. Most of the good I have is because of him and most of the bad too.

Which makes me so angry. The steam rising up that my mother did all of the emotional work, gave me all of the love, and yet here I am a reflection of him and not her.

I’ll never understand how divorced parents can live with that kind of betrayal. To have done all the emotional work of parenting and yet see their child as a reflection of the other one. Anger is usually just hurt. And I do hurt. Not on my mother’s behalf. She is fine. I hurt because I wanted my father to be there too.

My father tried so hard to be a good father. My dad paid the bills. My dad was funny and well liked by everyone but his immediate family. My brother and I love him, but for a long time I don’t think we liked him. Maybe I’m wrong as my brother has been working through his feelings longer than me. Maybe he always liked him. I know we always loved him. I still love him.

I like my dad now. I can see him as a human as I get more distance from my childhood. He can be an old man now and not the father figure that let me down. Which is a relief when I can hold that thought. I see all his good and how he passed it on to me. And I can see how even the bad, perhaps especially the bad, what made me into the woman I am.

He is smart and loves technology. He has never missed a Comdex or eventually a CES. He always has the newest gadgets. His enthusiasm for new things has never waned.

Like other Boomers, his belief in the future and in youth, let him retain a kind of enthusiasm for what’s next even in hard times. And that inspired my entire life’s trajectory.

There will never be a time in my life when I don’t seek his approval. He loves the future and I want to create the future for him. The new and the next will always be for him as much as it is for me.

Which is impressive as the “new” hasn’t always been kind to him. He suffered for his optimism. I have no fear going into this recession because I saw him be broken by one and come out the other side. He is still the same enthusiast he was before the markets crashed and bankruptcy hollowed out his American dream. He got it all back and more. And that belief that we can build back always stuck with me. I’ve never been afraid of hard times because of him.

I’m moving to Montana soon. He moved there first. He’s like that. Always seeing one step ahead. I fought against the idea of Montana for a bit as I wasn’t sure I could make the same decisions he did. Even though I often do.

But I do believe he is right about the last best place on earth. And true to our preferences for distance he will be a comfortable five or six hour drive away. Neighbors in the end but with plenty of space.

Fathers and daughters have it tough these days. Sexism and expectations for how to live are in flux. My father did his absolute best to never let me see myself as anything less than equal. Which isn’t always an unqualified good but I’m still grateful for all of it.

If you’ve ever felt let down by your father even as you know he’s buoyed you up your entire life, then this post might make perfect sense. If not then it may seem offensive to codify the complexities of a familial relationship in public. How could she write something like this? To which I say sometimes the only way to love someone is to say your truth out loud.

Happy Father’s Day Dad. I love you. And I know that to be true because love is having someone betray you, utterly let you down, or even do the unforgivable, and yet you still love them all the same. I forgive you. I am still Daddy’s Girl.

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Emotional Work Travel

Day 530 and Social Burnout

The week or two before I attended Consensus in Austin I could barely talk about anything else I was so excited. But I’ve barely said anything about the actual experience after the fact I feel so burnt out from the social exertion.

A friend of mine was a little hurt I didn’t tell them anything about my experience. They pointed out that it was a bit like watching a movie as it built up to the narrative climatic scenes and having it cut straight to credits. They were invested in my trip and then I didn’t do anything to tie up the story.

And boy did I have a negative reaction to that. I felt like absolute shit. How dare they feel like they were entitled to hearing about my life on a timeline that would make sense to them. I waffled between anger and shame. I apologized. I thought I’d made them feel shitty by not sharing. Maybe I did owe them a narrative as it was happening.

I went into some of my core childhood fears. Was I actually being withholding and deliberately creating distance because I felt I had violated my boundaries by over socializing? Probably! But also my friend kindly realized I was freaking out said “chill bitch I’m kidding tell me when you are up to it.” And then the relief flooded my body. I could just say no and my loved ones would understand.

I am feeling so burnt out being being around people I spent the morning debating if I should use my energy on a shower or save it up for a doctors appointment. Which is clearly a stupid and chaotic other/or agenda I shouldn’t engage in. If driving to an appointment that is supposed to be restorative for my health is so overwhelming energetically that I am not showering I probably should go.

I suspect I’m going to need a few days with substantially lower social engagement to recover. If I’m ignoring you it’s because I quite simply can’t be productive in a conversation with you without compromising my own boundaries. I appreciate everyone’s understanding.

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Emotional Work

Day 515 and Rules

I’d never really thought of myself as a rules follower. I wasn’t a particularly troublesome kid but I had a healthy disdain for authority. I made a lot of teachers really miserable and confused the fuck out of my parents with some fairly radical choices.

And to my parent’s credit they just absolutely rolled with the punches. My mother was a champion at the sport of coping with teenage girl shit. Which lets be real should absolutely be an Olympic sport.

But I do think I give way more deference to social mores than I fully appreciated. I’ve got plenty of shame about how I’m not doing things right and that I’ll be judged by everyone for utterly failing. So I try to abide by certain expectations so that I won’t be judged.

I’m sure this is wild to plenty of people that know me who don’t see any of this shame or fear. I’ve got a big loud public persona. Im a shitposter. I’m not exactly going along with a lot of popular opinions.

But I am still strangely really worried about being seen as too radical, too much, too angry, too crazy, too weird. I don’t want to follow all the rules but I am afraid I’d I deviate too far something bad will happen. Though what I am not entirely sure. And that’s probably an assumption worth questioning for all of us.

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Emotional Work

Day 512 and Not So Glamorous

Remember that respite I had yesterday from the flu? Yeah me neither! I barely crawled out of bed this morning after some pretty gnarly dreams. My subconscious was going through it.

I had a three hour session of biofeedback yesterday working through some of my self limiting beliefs. It’s truly wild how you will just perpetrate the worst emotional violence on the people we love the most. Alex and I in particular love acting out various O’Henry stories in our marriage. Gift of the Magi is a particularly favorite where we will actively sacrifice something we love for the other only to discover we’ve destroyed the very thing that our partner loved. It’s a super fun cycle and every time I think we’ve found a way out of the cycle we manage to do it all over again. The problem is the glue.

So I was a bit frazzled today from working through all the emotional stuff. I need to stop giving Alex power by letting him take care of me. He needs to drop care taking me. You know standard marriage stuff. I can write whole love letters about it. Anyway I digress.

I was a bit fried today as I was recovering from pushing yesterday. I happened to have a friend that wanted to talk about how I was doing. I think he was expecting a more glamorous even sexy answer. People often think I’ve got a more interesting life than I do. Which is funny as I feel like I write about the mundane details of chronic disease with some frequency. But today I was not swanning about in Europe or writing love letters. I was in a dark cold room fighting off a migraine and some spinal pain. Because sometimes life just isn’t all that glamorous. And honestly that’s ok.

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Emotional Work

Day 494 and A Place to Stand

It took me a long time to come to terms with the idea of investing in a home. I’ve moved 38 times over the course of my life. The constant instability in my childhood gave me the capacity to tolerate a lot of uncertainty. It’s an incredible piece of leverage for living life. But it’s a super power born out of trauma.

Give me a place to stand, a lever long enough and a fulcrum and I can move the Earth

Archimedes

When your normal is starting over again and again, eventually you become comfortable living in chaos. I can achieve a lot things fall apart and life starts anew. It’s why I work with early stage startups. The current market and the volatility inherent in the chaos makes me feel safe.

But there are limits to chaos. I can’t live in it perpetually and make gains without some kind of safe harbor. Otherwise it’s just a repeat of my childhood and I’ll constantly be starting from zero. What I really want is a safe home so I can take advantage of the chaos around me. I want a place to stand so I can move the world. While everyone else is out surviving the chaos I want to have a firm ground under my feet.

The world is going through massive changes and constant upheaval. That’s an opportunity of a lifetime. All of those moves I made prepared me to shine during this moment. But if I cannot have some about of safety, the land on which to stand, then I’ll merely be surviving yet another move. And I’m over that. This time the world moves for me.

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Emotional Work

Day 487 and Grocery Stores

I love settling into a new home by going grocery shopping. I’ve had the opportunity to be in a new city for an extended period twice now this year. And each time the joy I’ve taken in going to pick up groceries is palpable. Going shopping for food is my happy place.

I’m in Bozeman with dear friends and one of them noticed just how excited I was for the grocery run. We had a mostly empty fridge and I made a beeline to the nicest grocery store in town. It was a hybrid fancy yuppie grocery wrapped inside a big box grocery store. It’s a chain local to the pacific and mountain west called Rosaurs. I highly recommend it.

A grocery store is a powerful space. I’ve written before about my love for the American grocery store. I think it’s unique in its position as a functional and emotional retail space. It needs enough structure and repeatable patterns that anyone can shop a store and have an intuitive sense of where the basics are merchandised. But grocery relies on novelty and newness as much as any other retail store for driving order size and additional Martin.

The presentation of new brands and new products is fraught. The need to display something new competes against the need for repeatability and ease of locating core items in grocery. Grocery can be seen as human nature reflecting core tensions as it balances desire and safety. We yearn to feel nurtured by food but also crave to be stimulated by new tastes.

I spent an hour and a half wandering the aisles filling out my grocery list. I had done meal planning and had specific needs for the weeks meals. But I am also an inveterate shopper looking to feel excited by what was on the shelves.

To this day that I can look at any item in the store and buy it remains a surprise to me. It’s a luxury that never fails to delight me. If I want to get something I can. There is no budget or restriction on me like I remember as a small child. And yet I still couldn’t bring myself to buy a full size Turmeric spice jar. Reflecting back childhood emotions I didn’t even realize I had. A small reminder of how much seemingly mundane acts like grocery shopping can reflect much bigger things.

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Emotional Work

Day 480 and Responsibility

I usually have therapy on Mondays. I stack all my emotional work into the first day of the week so I can be my most present for everyone in my life. But today I just couldn’t show up for my emotional work. I’m in a lot of pain and a bunch of things are up in the air professionally and personally. I’m just not able to be here.

Thankfully I’m lucky enough to be surrounded by people who are working on deepening their emotional practice. Someone was able to help me see that I wasn’t able to show up even though I physically showed up. They did it with one insight too.

Responsibility is having ability to respond

One insight and my mind was blown 🤯. In that moment I didn’t realize I didn’t have the ability to respond. I was abdicating responsibility. I was reactive. It wasn’t under my control. I couldn’t preserve my ability to today today. I was not preserving my response ability.

I quietly bowed out of therapy for the evening. Well not so quietly I cried a little and shared my disappointment. I needed to take responsibility for myself in that moment. So in order to preserve my capacity to respond I had to make the decision to bow out. I needed to be the adult that would take care of whatever portion of me was incapable of working through the physical pain of that moment. My inner child needed me to parent and I did. Now hopefully I can continue that streak through mealtime, bath time and bedtime so that my adult and my inner child can respond to the best of our ability to tomorrow.

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Emotional Work

Day 473 and Technical Difficulty

I have a long-standing appointment on Monday. It’s had the same Zoom link for almost two years now. A function of pandemic necessity has made this link one of the anchors of my calendar.

It wasn’t working today. I got on at 415pm and was faced with a “host is in other meeting” sign. I thought ok whatever I’ll wait. But then I started to blame myself. Maybe I got the link wrong? I went back to my calendar and clicked in. Still wasn’t working. Let me reboot the application. Still isn’t working.

Needless to say my mind kept winding itself up about all the ways in which this minor technical hangup was obviously my fault. This despite any significant amount of evidence that it was in fact a mistake or error on my part.

And it’s just a fascinating thing to see how much I’m willing to accept all of the blame for something. Even in an instance where I bear no responsibility at all for the outcome. I suspect I’m not alone in this. The feminine urge to apologize is a punch line. Hell it just made it into Saturday Night Live joke this week. Ironic as Lizzo was hosting and she is one of the least apologetic woman I’ve ever seen.

I’d like to think it’s a kind of small narcissism that drives these obsessions with being at fault. To think that we have so much power everything that has gone wrong must be directly attributable to our actions. Except women being gluttons for punishment couldn’t ever enjoy the fun kind of narcissism where everything is a function of your genius. I’d love that on the next lifetime if I’m honest.

Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 466 and A Painting Without Shadows

I take therapy really seriously. I’d put being emotionally capable of managing myself at the very top of my life priorities. Honestly it should be number one and if it isn’t I need to stop and ask myself why. Being an adult requires an intimate understand of one’s emotions and the capacity to share them with others.

To further this goal I do a weekly session as well as group work. It’s meaningful to me and I recommend to all my founders that they find a way to get into coaching as well as therapy. Taking care of your own inner child is the only way you are going to be able to lead a team. If you want to build a billion dollar company and manage thousands of people you better be able to manage yourself first.

Where I think people can go wrong is treating this process as if it’s one of optimization. Do I think founders who have taken the time to understand themselves do better? Absolutely. It’s pretty rare that someone’s coping mechanisms help them reach the heights of their talents. A chip on your shoulder is great but eventually you learn to transcend it.

I think this is because if you don’t understand yourself you are a painting without shadows. It’s flat. Boring. Doesn’t read as true or trustworthy. Maybe you are really good at showing emotions to get your way. Lots of people are but if they just off enough from genuine then it reads as the uncanny valley of empathy. People just know when you are hiding something. And hiding your dark side means hiding your shadows. Without them you are a flat human.

A painting without shadows wouldn’t be any good. You without your shadows wouldn’t be who you are. The best of you exists because of the worst of you. I really do hope more people are able to see that truth and love themselves.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 457 and Pedicure

I did something today I haven’t done in two years. I got my nails done. And it felt so luxurious and yet also somehow normal. This regular act of grooming had once been a staple self care activity but today felt transformed into a ritual of joy.

I feel free and lucky in this moment. Getting a pedicure done means I have someplace to be where someone will see me. It means I am healthy enough to be going somewhere. It means I have a desire to be somewhere. All this cascading luck mixed to show me that my life was ok. I felt so much gratitude and self love in that moment. I am ok. The ok-ness of the universe in an act.

I know it sounds heady and existential and also a bit ridiculous as I elevate the act of a pedicure. But truly I feel so good about where I am in life that I can get my toes painted coral.

Also it’d worth noting that less glamorously cutting my toenails is hard for me to do on my own because of my spondylitis. So a necessity and a luxury in its own physical way. It is a quality of life improvement. So I’m grateful that this is where I am. May we all get little joys of normal in this chaotic world.