Tag: Life

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Chronicle Internet Culture

Day 123 and Being Liked

I asked if folks cared if other people liked them today on Twitter. The results are surprisingly mixed on the issue.

A Twitter poll asking if folks care if others like them with 4 options: yes, no, yes but I like about it and no but I lie about it.

The four options were Yes, No, Yes But I Lie About It and No But I Lie About It. It is fascinating to see the breakdown in responses even a few hours into the poll. I don’t know what I thought the response would be but I don’t think it was an even split.

Now, of course, I didn’t ask if being likeable is good, or bad, or even helpful. I just asked if people cared. It’s likely people who do care don’t think it’s good that they care. And there are people who don’t care that maybe which wish did as caring about being liked may have benefits. I don’t actually believe that a third of folks don’t care as frankly society would look pretty different if 35% of us just didn’t care about perception. And sure you can argue that you don’t care but you hide the fact, but then your answer would have been the least popular option “no and I lie about it” which is lagging in the results. My guess is that a number of folks are aspirational “no” votes which I can respect. I’m confident I would have voted no in my twenties. I used to be an aspirational no vote

Currently my vote would be “Yes But I Lie About It” but I’m not sure if I’m lying to myself or others with that answer. I don’t generally care what people think of me but I think I lie to myself about needing to care. I think being liked is important and I want to act like I care more. I’ve got some hang ups about not having been a more palatable person when I was younger. Maybe if I had been nicer or better behaved or well…just more likable I’d be richer, more loved, have a better relationship with my family and other fantasies. I’m also not convinced that changing myself for others has the benefits I think. That’s just some 4 year old inner child trauma emotions. How others feel about me has little to do with me and a lot to do with them. That’s true for how I feel about others. My reaction to you says a lot about my emotions, trauma and hang ups than it does about if you are likable.

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Aesthetics Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 122 and Soul Delay

There is a line in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition that has stuck with me for years. The context isn’t all that crucial except to know the hero has just taken a long flight.

She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.

Sadly I am not jet lagged, as that would imply international travel which is a context I doubt I’ll have for at least a few more months. But I’m finding soul delay can happen even without jet lag. The separation between one’s body and one’s soul is a rich emotional issue. For the past week or two I feel like I’ve been reeling from a gap between my soul and my body. It came on suddenly, despite all the disparate causes been easy to see coming and not remotely surprising.

The dawning realization that I may not be stuck forever with a chronic illness hasn’t been the unmitigated joy I anticipated. In fact, it’s been fairly miserable realizing that the convenient excuse to keep me from workaholism won’t be an available crutch forever. I’m assessing all the things I take for granted in my life and their myriad benefits and it’s not pretty. It turns out even the most joyful possible goal attainments come with a host of introspection.

And that generally means you can’t lie to yourself. It actually feels a little bit like attaining wealth overnight. All those excuses you used to have about how you’d just pursue the life of your dreams if not for financial limitations? Some of them turn out to be lies you’ve been telling yourself for years. And then how do you feel? It turns out much of your circumstances were self imposed.

Which isn’t to say that I’m finding out I need to make drastic life changes and that I’ve been living a lie. That would actually be easy! It’s more that the sum of dozens of self limiting beliefs need to be assessed, turned over for utility, and discarded or repurposed. Why was I a founder? Why am I married? Why do I pursue attention? All of these are little bits of honesty that are giving me soul delay. Because finding out what I actually want, without the benefit of a circumstance preventing me from achieving my desires, is going to require reconciliation between my soul and my reality.

So right now I feel a kind of emotional jet lag. After intensive work and a significant amount of willpower I am getting what I wanted. I’m getting my health back. But I’m still reeling in my soul from the journey. The cortisol spiked adrenaline of the effort is wearing off. I need to recover from my recovery. My soul needs to reel itself in. But I don’t know when it’s arriving at baggage claim. And I’m so very tired from the effort. So even if I have arrived it doesn’t feel like I thought it would. I hope I can be patient with myself while I wait. It’s been two years so I figure what is another few months?

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Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 117 and Drained

I feel like my mind hasn’t caught up to my body this week. Usually it’s my body that isn’t caught up to my mind. But I’ve been fighting so hard to get physically healthy that I don’t think I fully considered what it would mean to achieve it.

I’m exhausted as the reality of a change is hitting me all at once. I’ve been having a roller coaster of emotions trying to figure out how I feel. Some of it is a resistance to change. But I think some of it is simply that even positive changes require emotional adjustments. Adjusting to a new self requires a lot of energy.

A part of me feels like I’m fighting some boss that if I can just defeat will let me get to the next level in the game of my life. And I’ve used up all lives trying to get through it. I’m pretty sure I’ve figured out how to make it happen but I’ve been at it for so long I can barely see straight. But who wants to take a break when you are so close to leveling up?

I really don’t have it in me to say much more today. But I’m pretty sure I’ll have more once I can just get through it.

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Aesthetics Chronicle

Day 116 and Taking Up Space

I take up a lot of space. I spend time on social media because there is so much space you can literally be the President or a celebrity billionaire industrialist and there are still corners of the web you don’t penetrate. There is a lot of room for loudmouths, so much so that even someone like me still has plenty of room. I barely rate on the Elon Musk attention scale. Even when I’m screaming at best I crack into D-list zeitgeist. It’s like the privacy that comes with living in New York City. You can have some notoriety but the web doesn’t care. I like how you can feel alone.

The irony of course is that I think no one is paying attention to me. I think I’m an average Joe nobody that no one ever notices. This despite the fact that I am paid to be an expert in getting attention. No literally I cost a fortune (I’m worth every penny) but I’m somehow convinced I’m invisible personally. I can feel lost in a lonely world where I’m not even sure the people that love me the most can see me. I’m stuck in some lonely portion of my childhood where I felt abandoned so I’m replaying it out now as an adult. It’s not great but I get something from it.

Except this is a fantasy that is not true. I’m not that child anymore and I know how to get attention. I’m not alone. Even when I’m not consciously drawing energy to myself, people do see me. I can simply be myself and be seen. I command attention. It’s who I am.

You always think as a kid you will get some cool superpower like laser eyes or flying but nope you are going to get a super power like public relations or brand marketing. And honestly, when I’m not a self pitying victim I know those to be awesome super powers. You can make money and direct business and politics with those super powers. I just though I’d get something a little more aesthetic you know? It’s dope but also like adult superpowers are a letdown for your inner child.

I just need to remind adult me that I am seen. That even my normal personality not exerting her will force onto the universe is actually still quite visible. I can just exist and I’ll be holding space for myself. And it’s a good space with plenty of room for all of me. And still intimate enough to feel the love around me.

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Chronic Disease Chronicle Startups

Day 114 and Resistance to Change

Crash landing my life into a medical sabbatical really fucked up my headspace. Around two years ago I was beginning to realize I didn’t have a choice in accepting that I was sick. My identity as an always on, gets things done, reliable, entrepreneur got replaced by an entirely new self conception as “ill person” in a matter of six months. In August of 2019 I disclosed that I was officially sick. I sold my company and was going on leave.

It wasn’t a pretty adjustment. And I’m probably lying to myself when I say it took months to accept. I hated the new me. I felt weak and out of control. Willpower and muscling through did very little to help an autoimmune disease. If anything that mentality of “working on the problem” made it worse as I needed to rest and let my doctors do the work. I was resistant to change.

I think I’m going through a similar transition now as I did in 2019. I began seeing a new doctor in Colorado in October of 2020 and I made more progress in six months than I did in the previous two years. I’m beginning to face a new identity change as it becomes clear that I won’t be “sick” forever. While autoimmune diseases aren’t like an infection, there is no “cured,” it is beginning to look like I will be healthy enough to live normally. You won’t be able to tell I’ve got anything wrong with me soon.

And I have to admit to myself it’s a mindfuck. The emotional and psychological work I had to do to accept losing my entire identity is happening all over again. Who the hell am I if I’m not sick?

You see for the past two years I got used to explaining to people I was a sick person. I was disabled. I needed accommodations. I couldn’t work in ways I felt I would be reliable. I came accept my identity as someone with physical limits. And I slowly figured out ways to communicate that new reality others who has previously seen me as this abled person.

I guess you could say I was at peace with my situation. The pandemic helped. I know it probably sucked for you but I really enjoyed having a year of my recovery coincide with others having to live the way I did. I know it’s selfish but it helped! I felt less alone.

And yet just as I’m finally feeling like I really got a handle on my new identity it’s not my reality anymore. I’m not going to be a sick person. And while I thought I’d be overjoyed it turns out it’s a little more complex emotionally.

Let’s try a comparison. Imagine you broke your arm. You keep it in a brace and you can’t use it while it’s healing. And then the cast comes off and you are unsure if you can go back to using your arm like you did. You used to move your arm without thinking. You don’t worry about applying pressuring or picking things up before the break. But after it’s scary. You don’t want to set yourself back. You are scared to lift things and scared to apply pressure. I am in that place with myself. I know that the break is healing. The cast is off. But the muscles are atrophied and I’m not sure I trust that everything is knit back together. But the reality is that soon I’ll have the all clear.

But who I am now? I’m not the entrepreneur I once was. That workaholic Julie won’t be coming back. But the disabled sick Julie won’t be with me forever either. And I’m a little scared about it what’s coming. Who am I going to be next?

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Startups

Day 112 and Unknowability

Human minds seem to prefer predictably. The back brain craves knowing what is coming even as our flighty consciousness seeks novelty. Talk about a tension that sucks. We’ve all seem just now much this is a recipe for misery when you live in a world with no predictability but easy access to low stakes novelty during the pandemic. We are twitchy, bitchy and miserable as we have no idea what our world will be like but we can dopamine drip our pleasure seekers with social media, food and substances for an enjoyable now.

I’ve written at length in this experiment about my frustrations with unreliability especially when it comes to my own body. It’s one of the hardest aspects of managing a recovery from an autoimmune disease. I need to be mentally strong enough to not let bad days shake my routines so I keep building towards the wider goal. I can’t be distracted by one data point. It’s about movement towards the goal. Ironically this is a skill I learned from startup life.

While the entire planet is getting a crash course in unpredictable futures now, startups are defined by their desire to solve problems that don’t yet have defined solutions. No one in a startup knows if the predictions will be right. If they are working on something that will have the intended outcomes is unclear. You work on faith. You trust that over a longer time frame the daily tasks and routines you push (sometimes we give them dumb names like OKRs to fake a sense of control) will actually get you where your mind’s horizon sees.

I sometimes wonder if those with religious faith would do better on average in startup life. We have some degree of comfort with the inscrutable. Mysteries are sources of joy rather than fear. We trust that there are things beyond our knowing and our control and yet we must live on despite that.

The obsession with data and trend lines and the potential for prediction, surety or knowing amuses me. Sure sometimes you can plan a lot. You should plan. You have some inputs that consistently deliver the predicted outputs. Your best guess are better than other people’s facts (thanks Spock!) But if it were all so neatly defined there would be nothing new to create. We wouldn’t be able to build value. It’s the undiscovered country that we seek.

In faith, in life, and in startups you must manage your squishy human mind that is constantly tortured by its own biology. We want to know and we want it to be predictable. But we also love the tickle of a new experience against our dopamine seeking biology. The spike of pleasure we find pleasure in the newness. That’s why we do it. And it’s on us to balance the tension between our need to predictably build and our addiction to novelty. Manage that and you may get far in your journey. Or it’s a miserable sine-wave that makes you nauseous as you go up and down trying desperately to bring the future forward between impulse and planning. It’s usually both if I’m honest. So if you don’t enjoy roller coasters I wouldn’t get on this ride. But if you do well you just might see God.

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Chronicle

Day 100 and Rest Days

When I first set out to write everyday I didn’t set a goal. I think in my mind I meant it as a month long exercise to create more. Now I’ve got no idea what will eventually break the streak. I’m sure when it happens (something is bound to occur) I’ll be frustrated and I will just keep going the next day I hope. I’m trying to remember that Banksy “when you get tired, learn to rest, not quit” graffiti with the little girl sitting staring at a bluebird. I know it’s the stuff of inspiration Instaporn but whatever works right?

I’ve managed to write through a fair amount of awful shit in the last hundred days so it’s not that I’m afraid I’ll quit. I’ve become accustomed to simply opening up the draft space and writing. I just start some days with no particular topic in mind. Its more the knowledge that I am going to need to take breaks. Maybe not from writing but from life.

Today is one of those break days. I can barely tell you what happened today. I’ve got a project with a deadline but as I pushed myself physically yesterday I found that I needed today off. Resting today gives me tomorrow. I know this sounds basic but as a workaholic I’ve not traditionally been good at resting when it’s not been forced on me.

Usually on rest days I’m prone in bed as I’m in too much pain and too exhausted to do anything else. I hid this for so much of my illness and now I’m almost comically transparent about it. You’d think I’d be considered a liability and no one would ever want to work with me (or be friends with me) and yet I’ve found that not to be the case.

The empathy I’ve found in almost everyone makes me wonder if we’ve got our reputation building advice all wrong. I was under the impression I needed to hide my illness and always excuse strength. But the more honest I am about my capacity and my limits the better my work and relationships get. I’m slowly leaving behind the persona of “always on” hustle “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” bullshit of my younger years.

I still have a lot of fear about being perceived as unreliable. There’s not much logic to it. I always meet my commitments head on and when I physically can’t people understand. I work with backups plans and teams so that its never a crisis if I simply need to rest. The work gets done with or without me because my reliability is a function of preparedness and collaboration now instead of will force and midnight marches. If anything I think this makes me a better partner to work with ss instead of relying on my “at any cost” personality you can rely on me simply slowly and with planning getting your further than we could have gone alone.

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Chronicle

Day 94 and Moods

I got some great news today. All my most recent round of blood work came back in the healthy range. After several years of piss poor inflammatory markers I’m thrilled to see it getting back to normal. But I’m somehow I’m a foul mood for the day.

I talked to a friend about some exciting work we want to do together. It’s exactly the kind of work I’m looking to do in the future and their take on the problem is especially creative. But somehow I’m in a foul mood.

It’s a beautiful Easter Day and I’ve done nothing but enjoyable activities. I went for a hike. Are a gorgeous meal made up of ingredients from our local dairy share and greens from the hydroponics we grew ourselves. But somehow I’m in a foul mood.

I can’t remotely pinpoint why I should feel angry or sad or in anyway negative and yet I’m just a half a step off from the reality of my life today. Not even a viral tweet is doing anything to cheer me. And I usually love dopamine hits. I only had one minor setback in the whole day. I wasn’t looking at a timer and I had a gaming account get zeroed (it will cost a little money to rebuild). Ironically the last time this happened was over Christmas. Apparently holy days and games are a poor mix. But that shouldn’t account for a mood.

I guess some days are just moods. But I’ve got some nachos and tomorrow is another day. I bet I’ll be happy tomorrow.

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Chronicle

Day 92 and Creative Muscle

The more writing has become a daily habit the more I can feel the ebbs and flows of my own voice. Some days I feel a passionate need to share some story or insight, and others, I feel like my voice can barely muster a sentence let alone a full fledged argument.

There are days where fully thought through essays seem to emerge with little effort. As if I wrote them in my subconscious throughout the day and it’s only the slight flick of focus that brings it fully formed to the page. Other days I need to scrape at the contours of my mind to see what fancies or novelties has passed through my attention through the day. Often in theses cases a bit of zeitgeist has stuck in a crevice and I can pull it out and expand on it. I can take a small nugget and chew on it till I find the juice.

I don’t mind the days where I need turn my eye within. The self reflection and additional effort is what I think may slowly be making me a better writer. While I don’t struggle with needing discipline to write everyday, I do need to exercise effort to find ideas that haven’t formed yet. The daily nature of the experiment is building out new thought muscles. It’s making my thinker clearer, faster and crisper. The regular exercise of thought and mind, whether I’m inspired or not, feels as if it’s making inspiration strike more often and my mind see clearly.

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Chronicle

Day 86 and Persistence

I’m learning to live around my routines. Or maybe my routines are what I live and everything else that I perceive as life is just moments in between meals, meditation, supplements, treatments, workouts, walks, and pharmaceuticals. Who is to say what forms the contours of life?

When I first picked up the daily commitment to write I struggled to find a topic to write about each day and I would find myself stressed if the end of the day was nearing and I felt I had nothing of value to say. Now I am realizing that having something to say isn’t the point of this daily discipline. It is the persistence that matters. The content is secondary. The knowledge that every day I will write and so I do is what matters. I will exercise the willpower necessary to form my thoughts into words. I will place them in public to prove to myself that I have remained committed. This is like any other aspect of my routine. Breath in and breathe out. Lift the weight. Take the medicine. Write the words.

Daily disciplines bring about breakthroughs. The individual acts maybe don’t matter so much. Some days will be better than others. But persistent effort brings about quality inexorably. It forces a standard of quality that improves at each repetition in some meaningful way even if you cannot see it in that moment. I find the act of creation easier now. It doesn’t feel like a burden. It is nit a source of stress or anxiety. It’s just something I do.