Tag: Life

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 919 and Thin Skin

I am experiencing very palpably the literal meaning of being “thin skinned” this week. All the areas where my skin is thinnest (eyes, lips, fingers, and other more delicate spots) are inflamed.

I’m beating back some kind of this autoimmune response to having some pets in the house with everything I’ve got, and have thus far kept it from cascading but only just. It’s taken a lot of pharmaceutical intervention. I’m high on anti-histamines, cranky from the itchy, and fearful it’s already turned into a systemic infection.

I’ve got some animal allergies that I’ve kept from being isolating and overwhelming by simply not keeping pets inside. I can usually tolerate some exposure if I’m very careful with hygiene. Please ask me about my psychotic indoor clothing routine. And yes it was developed with an allergist hospitalist when I was 15. I’m beyond embarrassed by it.

I suppose this approach might make more sense if you knew that I’ve had my immune system rebooted with drugs as diverse as cyclosporine (they use that for organ transplants) and chemotherapy injections (methotrexate the WWI superstar).

I take regular immuno-suppression for ankylosing spondylitis which is functionally psoriatic arthritis in my spine. I have inflammation inside my body & outside on my skin depending on the flares. And I’ve done everything I can for it from allergy shots to 4 separate daily antihistamines

I am more reactive to my environment than your typical take a Benadryl allergy type. If you’ve seen that video going around of the 300mg THC pizza joint and thought “what the fuck who has that kind of tolerance” well I’ve got that kinda tolerable but with allergy medication. I can toss back 100mg of Benadryl and remain conscious.

I’ve got no Darwinian explanation for how someone like me is an end point for evolution except that we must value the extremely sensitive for some less legible but nevertheless crucial pro-social function. Maybe we spot the danger sooner? I truly do not know.

But I am thin skinned. I’ve been trying to manage additional allergen exposure all week as we’ve had dogs in the house that I very much would like to be able to tolerate.

I really thought with proper medication and cleaning I could keep reactions to a minimum. I didn’t want to make it a thing. And it would seem the reward for being thin skinned is actually having to inconvenience people by telling them that my having thin skin has consequences.

It’s unlikely I can get my symptoms down without having a total reprieve but we’ve done what we can. We didn’t resort to steroids so it could have been worse. Though part of me wishes we had as some skin is beyond uncomfortable.

I feel both embarrassed and frustrated that no one noticed my discomfort till I had to say I can’t tolerate it any more.

It makes me feel like I don’t matter unless I come with a story of misery and pain. Having to speak up for needs with extremely firm uncrossable lines always feels like abandonment to me. I wish people would see the discomfort, misery and isolation isn’t a choice so much as a medical necessity. I do my best to manage it but it’s easier when it’s a shared priority.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 916 and Safe Spaces

Remember when safe spaces burst into a whole discourse thing? Maybe it was when the timelines got crazy around Harambe. I couldn’t pinpoint it but somehow “feelings aren’t facts” turned into a slur instead of commonly agreed upon consensus reality.

And now everyone is slinging insults to land points instead of finding a way to incorporate the duality of feelings and facts into civil society. Some trickster Demi-god is probably very pleased with his work. Maybe a goat or a Loki type.

There are many spaces that can feel unsafe depending on the context and the person. If I am aware that one of my choices provokes a strong response in another person, I may lay it aside for a minute so we can find common ground on choices and values we do share.

My sense of self is strong enough that I don’t have to hold every piece of myself tightly. I can empathize with someone I disagree with and find my way back to myself. Backbones and core beliefs are important.

I am finding myself in a number of situations right now where I wonder if I am too accommodating. My desire to empathize must meet the hard reality that is some people don’t feel safe empathizing with me.

Some of my reactions and feelings recently have left me feeling a bit abandoned and alienated. I am grieving for a lost matriarch in my family. And my grief manifested as a focused gratitude for finally seeing that I could live her lessons on my own every single day. And I have been living more joyfully because of it.

My reaction hasn’t been considered appropriate in some corners. I didn’t feel safe expressing my gratitude and focus and the happiness it brought me to have her thoughts in my head every day. And I realized then that not everyone will be able to feel safe with all your choices and decisions and emotions. Not every space can be safe for everyone.

Categories
Homesteading

Day 913 and Offline

The social internet is having a bit of a chaotic moment. I haven’t been able to send Tweets consistently for about a day. And I didn’t miss it that much. It felt a little weird at first as I could load tweets, like them and chat in DMs but it was clear none of my replies were sending.

It’s a holiday weekend so for Twitter’s sake I’m sad to report I had other things to keep me occupied. That’s probably bad news for the platform.

We did a big kitchen clean out. Organized the meals for the upcoming week. Like any weekend lots of chores from laundry to deep conditioning was on the to do list.

The real prize of being offline is being outdoors. The weather was absolutely gorgeous this weekend, practically begging us to spend time on the porch or in the Adirondack chairs we put out by our small pond. The air was so clear today you could see from one end of Gallatin to another.

Two Adirondack chairs on fresh cut grass with a blue sky behind it. Is this what they mean when they say touch grass?

Categories
Emotional Work Politics

Day 910 and The Chessboard

You can feel it. I know you can. The chessboard is being reset. Pieces are being moved. Gambits are unfolding. Absolutely everyone you know is going a little bit nuts.

I would not be surprised if these small informational disruptions will be recognized as part of a global conflict in a hundred years. I hope my heirs recognize that their mother fought as an information resistance fighters in The Great Dislocation Wars. Or World War 3. Just spitballing.

It’s humorous to me to talk in such a grandiose fashion because the reality on the ground is much of life is just a little bit harder and a little bit worse. But we still presume the world is basically still abiding by the same rules as yesterday.

I often forget how much people don’t want to hold power. The current moment shows a strange ambivalence about wielding anything yourself. Anyone with power is bad right? Well, it’s nuanced.

I want to assure you that your instincts in this matter is largely correct. You should distrust anyone that wants power. Be skeptical of the impulse.

Because being in charge sucks. It’s a shitty job. Anyone who has wielded any power from parenting a toddler to being a CEO probably intuitively knows this.

But once you have been given any legitimate form of authority, choosing to ignore that you wield power is a dereliction of duty.

The trouble with all reactionaries is that they assume once they take over, that their experience of power will somehow be different from the current horrors in charge. If they had bothered to crack open their minds while reading Shakespeare (or Thucydides or the Artashastra or literally any Great Book) they would know all men are subjected to the laws of power.

We lie to ourselves about how power functions because it’s very energetically easy to hand over your power to someone else. To be aggrieved is to have power over those you hold in contempt for exercising their power over you. Don’t be tempted by this trap no matter how righteous your cause.

Once you have picked up the mantle of power you must see through. If your people have given you authority you must see it through or hand it off to someone who will.

It’s very hard to own power. You most likely will not enjoy it. And you will be tempted to shunt off your agency. Just remember that you never carry power alone. It is always in concert with those who have consented to give it to you. Good luck on the great chessboard of life.

Categories
Homesteading

Day 909 and Uninterrupted

I’ve got two uninterrupted months in Montana ahead of me. Maybe I mention this as significant because I spent so much time on the road this spring. I’ve also had multiple catastrophic level dislocations professionally and personally in the front half of the year.

Catastrophic dislocation seems to be the new normal for everyone. I hate to consider that I may have some bargaining & denial about my own thesis at chaotic.capital. But I find myself wishing to be wrong about where I see the future heading. Wouldn’t it be better if our modern lives were getting simpler instead of more complex?

I know that’s a childish fantasy. The complexity in our world has brought about so much good. The costs have been high but the benefits were tangible.

And yet here I am hoping to have some uninterrupted time in a quiet corner of the American empire so that I can cultivate my own strengths. I want to reconnect to myself and recovery from the effort, pain, and grief of living. I want to live and work and build without the chaos of history turning back on again. I dislike how much I now believe ignorance to be bliss.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 908 and Joyful Grief

I’ve had enough emotional and mental work to know that grief is a complex and personal process. I knew as the death of a close family loved one came on the summer solstice that I needed to grieve.

I revisited the frameworks. There are the three Cs (chose, connect, communicate) for a simple framework to prioritize your needs. There are the 4 Rs Recognize Reality, Remember, Reaffirm, and Release for memorials and funerals.

And of course, the most famous remains the 5 stages of grief from Kübler-Ross’s “On Death and Dying,” the 1969 book in which she proposed the patient centered stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

I was prepared to go through all of it. And I did. The shock was immediate as soon as I learned she had passed. I was angry she was gone. I asked why someone else couldn’t have been taken instead of her. I was sad to carry on with out her. Acceptance seemed distant.

But as I started to communicate my own feelings I recognized an emotion I wasn’t prepared to encounter so soon. I felt immense joy. Losing her overwhelming made me feel grateful for the joy she’d given me in my own life.

What incredible luck I had to be a part of her life and receive so many emotional gifts as a result. The freedom she encouraged in me gave me the capacity for boundaries and needs and wants I’d never accepted fully.

And then, even though I was prepared for the possibility, she was gone and I realized she had been right. I could accept things that I’d distrusted for so many painful decades.

And here I am. And here I remain. And what she has given me is permission to thrive. Even in the immediate wake of her loss I felt lightness and ease permeate my work. I wrote my investor updates. I gave an interview to Axios Pro Rata. That interview lead to a substantial feature on my preseed venture fund chaotic.capital. I worked on my immigration policy advocacy.

I felt the joy of living a life I had chosen because someone had loved me enough to share that I could chose to be free. And that fills me with joy.

Categories
Media

Day 905 and Shilling Myself

I should be shilling myself in today’s installment of writing everyday. But I’m a little tired to pull off the full bragging I’d like. One of my favorite financial news and analysis sources, Axios Pro-Rata, featured my little pre-seed fund chaotic.capital with an in-depth look at resiliency technology.

It’s a big deal to me because in-depth trade reporting is where the nuts and bolts of an industry are discussed. Anytime I’ve built something of value it was always the beat reporters who recognized it first.

Women’s Wear Daily was my big break in e-commerce and social media for my first startup Coutorture. Beauty Packaging’s company of the year award was a huge win for my cosmetics brand Stowaway. CoinDesk recognized my work on corporate governance structures and financing coordination. The trades matter more to outcome than glossies in the early days.

I’d like to think the LPs who will appreciate me as an emerging fund manager will find me from Axios Pro-Rata. And I sure would like for them to see my expanded viewpoint on the space right here on my daily essay.

I even had the good luck of preparing my quarterly investor update the day before this article hit everyone’s newsletter inboxes. So I’ve got all the materials ready to go.

Alas I’m wiped from a week of life happening (a death in the family) and the general excitement of the global summer solstice mania that’s gripping all the timelines.

So I don’t want to shill and flak myself right now. I just want to enjoy the feeling of pride that comes from seeing your work recognized with a proof-point all your peers respect. I’ll make sure to copy over the investor letter tomorrow. Stretch out my own little news cycle.

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 904 and War Dogging on Mobile

I was busy working for most of the day on an investor update for chaotic.capital. It’s really dope and I’d love to have any prospective LPs read it to see how we are navigating the moment. Chaotic is my humble pre-seed fund for weirdos building shit to survive the current planet wide disjunction. The general sense of history restarting from its fuck Fukuyama slumber is a clear and there is stuff to build.

When I do deep work I try to give myself some space between me and information feeds. But I find it hard to entirely shut for more than a few hours. I monitor many threads across many interest groups with vastly different interests. I flow it back to me and my investments.

As I sit comfortably in my Montana home on the edge of the American empire, I obviously can’t help but worry I’m a Cassandra doomed to know horrible truths. But this becoming a bit of a hobby for all of us isn’t it? We all watch nervously as history unfolds with little influence on the broader strokes.

My fear is that we’ve all become armchair war dogs cheering on whatever professional grade propaganda works for the current moment. And we must be careful not to let ourselves be controlled by that chaos nor amuse that we know what is happening.

I firmly believe in having a locus of control and acting within it. Today I wrote up the current state of all the vibes I’ve seen and synthesized in my market status report. I then named the bets I’ve taken with our capital. I explained why I think have the greatest chance at resilience in a world that is more and more chaotic by the hour. And then I showed the work on how I found the deals and made connections for my portfolio that was unique to me.

After I’d wrapped it up and got my operating partner Alex to be sure all the operational work was settled I opened up my feeds. It was Swan Lake time. The head of mercenary organization Wagner Group was maybe, or maybe not, declaring a coup against the Russian Defense Minister. Who knows what’s going on! Certainly not me.

Cue the rampant speculations. My Telegrams are going wild. Signal is on fire. I am scrolling through sick jokes and CIA theories and extremely funny memes. Everyone is rushing to exert influence and partisan narratives on top of what looks like a Tom Clancy novel. And even he’d agree this week was a bit on the nose with the submarines and the Soviet comebacks. So let’s all remember the world is complex and we know so very little so let’s keep taking responsibility for the moves we can make and helping others do the same.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 903 and Life Goes On

I just didn’t want to write today. I am all over the place with pain and grief even as the world keeps on spinning. I lost someone very important to my family yesterday. A matriarch if you will.

My biometrics are a mess. You can see the stress spiking as I got on calls to both do business and then also discuss the business of life afterwards. Because life does indeed go on. My Whoop said I had 108% more stress today than a typical Thursday if you want to know what grief does to your stress levels.

My Whoop detected grief

I have written so much today on so many other mediums. I’ve texted and direct messages and tweeted and probably wrote several novellas in various group chats. But I just couldn’t make myself write my essay here. So like I would on any other day, I’ll give my myself permission to carry on. I’ll tag this, Tweet it and go to bed and hope I can do more tomorrow.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 902 and The Singer Lasts A Season But The Song It Lasts Forever

One of the matriarchs in my life died this morning. I am devastated. Because, of course, you are devastated when you lose someone you love. To not know the pain of mortality is to not know your own humanity.

We spend so much of our lives in the art and literature of the human condition that we can sometimes forget we are actually living it out right now every single day.

Your own life is just as rich a tapestry of meaning anything Dostoyevsky ever wrote. Losing someone close to you who really lived their life occasionally gives you sparkling moments of crystalline clarity on what matters.

All of living is struggle. We find the boundaries of the world through trial and error. We find each other as we negotiate the rhythms of each other’s lives.

The old cunt had the balls to die on the summer solstice. She was extremely Swedish so on aesthetics grounds I feel happy about her moment of passing. Midsummer. What a witchy thing to do. I love it for her even as I am weeping.

The last thing she said to me was so poetic it almost makes me angry. She told me that she had repeated herself a lot across the years. I said I knew and I appreciated that she’d helped me learn the tunes by repeating the songs with me even as I stumbled to commit things to memory.

Her response? Now that you have sung the melody with me, you can sing it on your own. Which is a very beautiful good bye worthy of anything I’ve ever read in a book or seen on screen.

But also the fucking temerity of that woman to deliver folkloric wisdom on the way out. Our elders know a thing or two.

The singer lasts a season long, While the song, it lasts forever

Unknown (to me at least) folk song

May your solstice be as bright and true as mine. I will be trying to carry this tune on my own and if you like I’ll try to teach you to sing along with me. May we have a chorus of love songs on our longest day in the sun.