As I sat inside our hyperbaric chamber for my 26th sessions of oxygen therapy, my mind was on commitment. I like a routine and a plan and being locked in on my follow through.
I don’t recall when I was introduced to the concept of optionality, but it wasn’t something I recall being raised with. Despite being raised by hippies and yuppies,who themselves struggled with commitment, I never doubted that loyalty and stick-to-it-ness were crucial personal values. I don’t like to quit.
Maybe somewhere in my 20s though it became clear that many of the people I dealt with in “the big city” always had their eye on their next move.
Maybe it was campaigns like the World Economic Forum’s infamous “You will own nothing and be happy!”
Trends slowly put the meta structure of optionality as a construct into my mind. And it wasn’t too foreign to me.
We moved a lot as a child, and I never felt like I could get too used to anything because change was such a regular part of my life. I could reconcile being committed to always changing as the balance.
So the idea of always trying to add in additional optionality struck me as a little bit funny. Why would I always be looking for the door, or looking for my next move, or the next upward opportunity, when so much of what I longed for as a child was a basic sense of stability in my own home life?
Now, of course, the idea of optionality is baked into almost everything we do. Owning things is expensive, and financial challenges made the sharing of resources and assets like homes and cars seem perfectly natural to a millennial who had barely gotten by in the Great Recession.
But now, as I watch reality television like Love is Blind, a dating show designed to result in commitment, we see so much fear.
An inability to choose a path or to consider changing the path you are on to be with another seems to plague participants the further they take the franchise. Optionality is one thing but we’ve stumbled into a world where commitment is a foreign language.
They say you shouldn’t make any significant changes after a death in your family. Grieving is a process and allowing oneself to feel the range of emotions in loss is important.
You might not feel your grief if you jump into something new. Making a change could be hiding your grief from yourself. And so I am trying to sit with my grief.
I wondered about which parts of my history and my identity gave me my life. If I wanted to make changes in my future, or to broaden my horizons, what would it look like?
Somehow I am happy. I feel more love for myself as I see the ways I tried to love my father, and how he tried to love me as his child.
Being who we are, means seeing the child in ourselves who wanted to be loved for who they were, while learning as an adult that acceptance is up to us, not the generation who birthed us. The liberation of birth anew.
I hope the many experiments I’ve run with my biohacking over the last two months are helping me stay in my body during this process. I am on my 25th hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy treatment today. Which is fortunate as I am healing yet another skin issue as I try to find ways to have the strength to be myself in my very challenging body.
And so I wonder, am I the same without my father as I was with him? I am always searching for ways to become better, stronger, more informed, more capable, more successful and ultimately I fear those are all synonymous with finding ways to be more lovable to him? I couldn’t always tell.
I’ve found myself wishing to indulge a past professional calling with a side project. I’ve been writing a beauty shopping column where I go deep on my autistic special interest in skincare and the business of appearances. It’s been making me happy.
And so I ask does this count as a change? Am I jumping into something new, even if it is small, too soon?
All I know is that it feels right and like a joyful offering, even if there are parts of me that hurt. Perhaps there is a good kind of change to be had in endings with new beginnings. A personal passion once put aside, reemerges to serve others.
I think that is something my father would have liked to see me do. I have pursued so many of the things I know he wanted for me in this life. I do have a future full of technical change and a portfolio focused on the future of computing.
And yet here I am feeling freed to show that some aspect of who I am as a woman does want to serve others. If it is in the cause of helping be comfortably in your own skin that seems rather a positive thing to become after this life change.
Alex and I love a Costco date. The beloved warehouse cooperative sells bulk goods and the luxury surprises to its members at fair prices. It remains a top notch place to enjoy time together in search of treasure. Which is why we choose it for my birthday celebration today.
We got some groceries, walked every single aisle, found surprise and delight, and wracked up a couple thousand steps indoors in rainy weather
A birthday date inside Costco in ok
I don’t know quite how we started on the Costco date. It was probably one of our preparedness habits as we check our stocks and resupply as basics get used up and items expire. But Costco is also about the hunt. This Pendleton throw is a fine birthday present.
The seasonal arrivals for Halloween were still going strong but we saw Christmas ready to go. Thanksgiving hasn’t popped up yet but we did see a turkey order form.
You also learn a lot about the biggest trends in health and wellness as their supplement and beauty aisles are the stuff of legend. Creatine and collagen have hit the big time for men and women and everyone is thinking about hormones.
DHEA is a better mix but adaptogens are good
Now the real coup de grace of a Costco trip is the food court. Which is never the caliber of high quality and healthy that you can get in other areas. But it does make for excellent birthday party food.
I had a slice a pizza, half a strawberry smooth and half a cookie The famed $1.50 hot dog
Alex got himself the infamous hotdog and turned it into a proper Chicago style dog with onions and relish and mustard. I won’t eat encased meats myself.
Julie, a good learning experience. These 2,050 calories will cause a massive insulin spike followed by a post-meal crash. Increased hunger 3-4 hr later. Your arteries constrict and blood vesselsl stiffen. The nitrites are a group 1 carcinogen (increased colorectal cancer risk). Acute oxidative stress. Impaired endothelial function by 20-40% for several hours. Gut microbiome will shift towards pro-inflammatory Firmicutes, an obesity-like profile. The dopamine spike from fat+sugar+salt mimics an addiction reward pathway. Repeated, will desensitize dopamine receptors causing you to escalate stimulation to achieve the same pleasure. Happy Birthday.
Contemplating life choices is the perfect way to enjoy the day. Plus how great does this new blanket look on our couch?
She raised me with many amazing stories from Grimm’s fairytales to Madeleine L’Engle. Michael Ende and J M Barre were the storytellers which taught me to love reading and left in my heart the joys of literature through stories of adventure & growth.
J.M Barre’s Peter Pan in Kensington Garden and Peter Pang and Wendy. Michel Ende’s Momo and Eliot Pepe’s Ensorcelled
It is with great pleasure I read Eliot Peper’s enchanting novella Ensorcelled. It’s part coming of age story meetings great adventure in the wilds and a delight for young at heart & young readers of literature.
I don’t know if he meant it as a story to be enjoyed by children, as it was such a delight for me as an adult that I went through it in one sitting. Though I do think it would be wonderful reading for young people.
It’s a beautiful printing so you might be inclined to want to keep it pristine but it’s perfect for an afternoon outside. Maybe go touch grass with it in hand. Find the enchantment for yourself.
I’ve been a fan of Peper’s science fiction so it was a real change of pace to see his range. I felt lucky to have an early copy and I genuinely enjoyed its spirit. I went I was going to read a near future thriller and got joy & delight. Which I very much needed.
I am giving myself till the end of the day to feel the anger, pain and frustration that has come to define the grieving process I am in. I lost my father quite recently and it has been an awful experience.
After the memorial ends at 5pm today I intend to let go of what I can even though I know I don’t have full control over it. I had little to do with it at all.
I won’t lie about how much this experience has hurt. I was able to handle a few emotional body blows as I know my father and I have forgiven him a thousand times over for any pain and trauma as it got me here.
That my father struggled to forgive himself seemed a given to me and I intended to extend whatever grace was necessary to those who carried him through his final years.
In grief, whatever one has to do to the villains you have built in your head is alright by me. It hurt but I don’t think I am hurting as much as someone who would do this. I am doing what I can to not become inflamed by it. These choices are what was deemed necessary.
I do however think we are unprepared for the many private painful emotional moments that will come with the fourth turning as baby boomers pass and their children across modern families grapple with what was broken and its costs.
I consider myself to be incredibly lucky in this regard as I knew it was coming. I am less sure we are prepared as a civilization for the pain that will arrive as more change and death arrives.
It’s been a weird week. I’ve kept a slight distance to the logistic of it for sanity, but my father’s memorial is being held tomorrow. He passed over the last long weekend of summer. I found out by voice mail.
It is a complex family dynamic and I am not (insofar as I can tell) invited to event. I know it sounds odd to be unsure, but given how the information has flowed, who has been prioritized, and the reactions to condolence communication I’ve done my best to keep a respectful distance. My grief isn’t the most important grief.
Neither of my father’s children nor his previous wives will be in attendance. It’s not necessarily our choice, or even our place, to have an opinion as he had a third family who welcomed and loved him and I am grateful for their generosity. He had no further biological children but he had another family.
We’ve spent the last few weeks doing a comical amount of legwork with the help of kinds souls, friends and my mother to acquire the ideal floral arrangement and make sure it arrives alive and healthy.
Two Venus fly traps carefully placed in a cardboard box for travel from Colorado Springs to Boulder
In an age where Miss Manners would find few remaining social mores, a respectful but symbolic floral display seemed the most likely to be acceptable and held the most meaning for me and the father I remembered.
He loved Gary Larson, and in the early nineties convinced him, through a bouquet of carnivorous plants to participate in calendar application for Macintosh. Gary decided the Internet wasn’t for him later but that early desktop computer program and its genesis remains a favored family story. A creative and bizarre tale of making something happen.
The Far Side Computer Calendae
Alas it’s not all charming anecdotes. Yesterday a large box arrived with a return address in Big Fork Montana. That is where my father had retired so we knew it was likely from his estate. Part of our hopes in moving here was to be closer to family.
Inside was a mess of the broken glass, old picture frames and hundreds of photograph of a life that my mother, my half brother and my father lived quite happily for a time.
Hiking, fishing, skiing, my first golf lessons, and horse back riding photos filled out the details of a childhood between spectacular eighties family portraits.
Little evidence of the hard years of poverty in tiny apartments was included. It was entirely the glory years of boom times. They were happy memories.
There were also glamorous soft core pictures of my mother in lingerie or swimwear which my father had apparently taken himself. I was initially quite shocked.
Nigh professional grade photos of my mother posed like a pinup are not exactly what one expects in an estate dump of memories. Especially as she is very much alive and well.
My mother’s has given me permission to discuss the images, though she was a bit shocked to learn they still existed.
She swore she had them destroyed but I’m glad they were not as I enjoyed seeing her beauty and vitality. Everyone deserves to remember the years where they were at their physical peak.
My father was a man of many talents and interests and he loved to learn new skills on the latest gadgets. I just didn’t expect to learn he was that sort of artist.
I hope the flowers and our card will be accepted tomorrow. I’ve been reeling slightly from the photo dump and its unheralded arrival. It felt like one last piece of unkindness when magnanimity would have been simpler.
I don’t know if anyone will understand the story behind the flower, so we have made arrangements for the plant’s well being if they are not. It is an imposition to send a living thing and it was my hope to do as little imposing as possible that might cause distress.
My grief is my own. A whole life was in that box and I have no idea if anyone will remember or recall any of it as anyone who was there isn’t invited. But I remember and I will treasure it. He’s on the far side now and free of petty concerns. I love him and I always will.
Being a victim in your own life is a choice. We get dealt a hand of cards and we have a say in how we play it even if it’s a crappy hand. The odds being what they are you probably got dealt some bad cards.
I’ve learned the most about empathy from the men in my life. It’s not always true for women but being raised to accommodate is part of being the weaker sex. One need not always accommodate in life though. Sometimes their problems just not about you at all. And that is ultimately alright. Everyone hurts including you.
Of course it’s unwise to reinforce a victim mindset in people, but sometimes people actually just have been victimized, sometimes repeatedly and brutally, and lasering in on their small slice of responsibility just reinforces their pervasive sense of being totally alone. At some point you hope they look at their patterns and see if change is possible. But if they’re going to get there, it’s going to be because someone was kind enough to sit with them, believe them and hold space for them until they were ready. VividVoid
Letting someone see you in the way that they need to see you has its purpose. It’s a beautiful thing to sit quietly and let someone really blame you. Be disliked. Letting someone who has genuinely got shit going on just be furious at you is a form of empathy. Be their villain.
I’m learning to sit comfortably while being someone’s villain. If that’s what they need in their hardest hour I can be that. It’s not something you should give too freely but this is where boundaries are a blessing.
I’ve seen more men than women be capable of handling this kind of rejection. The empathy of not engaging. Let them be hurt. You can suck if they need it. I believe it’s a strength to cultivate comfort being the bad guy
Every parent learns to do it, anyone with responsibility for making a goal or a bottom line or a budget work knows that sometimes you just have to be the bad guy to make it work.
The parameters of all of that is hard and we are reworking our way through helping people overcome their hurt. We’ve let cultural expectations dictate so much.
Everyone is fighting their own hardest battle and if you let them be mad at you and don’t take it personally you just might help.
I am having a rough week what with my own chronic health challenges and the death of my father over the long weekend. My husband is also brutally ill with the flu. So it’s just generally 2025 on maximum. All brakes and no gas.
So I took a break from reality. to watch the reunion for Season Two of Love is Blind: UK aka the working class multicultural Manchester season as well as test out a South Korean dating show for forever singles or motae-solos in Korean called Better Late Than Single.
Now I’m a middle aged elder millennial who turned over into her forties with ten years of marriage so keep that in my mind. My husband and I met through a mutual friend and now I wonder if we were on the last helicopter out of Saigon.
We worked in the nascent New York startup scene. Over the course of two birthdays, a year apart, for that same friend, we got our act together (ok I did) and began dating.
A few weeks before we got engaged, that same friend showed us this new dating app called Tinder. We laughed at the bare bones profiles as were used to involved questionnaires from OKCupid.
It’s clear that these applications have left a cavernous void in the culture of mating and dating not only in America but across the world. From Raya to AMANDA (a very judgmental Korean dating app) we’ve found all the ways to maximize for the most superficial aspects and signifiers of a person.
Some cultures seem to have taken this to extremes. On rainbow coalition class coded Manchester season of Love is Blind: UK we had Indian posh girls dating down class half Pakistani guys and Albanian girls falling for Lebanese guys. It was a clusterfuck. I won’t spoiler anything but the disposable attitudes clearly came from long habit you associate with dating application culture.
Meanwhile the forever singles have taken the opposite approach. Rather than sweetly autistic singles being helped along as Love on the Spectrum does, social media personalities roast painfully awkwardly awful members of the opposite sex fail to listen to each other. Holding eye contact and grossly insulting someone via misunderstanding was the tone.
If those media pieces show anything it’s the utter lack of tenacity being displayed by everyone involved. Sure, someone willingly going on a reality show is extreme. But the deep desire to be seen and loved goes beyond any culture or awkward social technologies. We’d all do with learning to fight more for love and family.
I’ve got my over the ear noise canceling headphones on playing a Solfeggio frequencies of 396 Hz which is labled as “liberating guilt and fear” on my Endel mobile application (which I recommend though I’m not involved with it).
My father died this weekend. While I had been preparing for the possibility for sometime the reality of the moment is never what you expect.
Grief is a strange emotion. You forgive your parents but they don’t always forgive themselves. And then it’s over and everyone is free. The pain is over and the past arrived and your present is without them.
The past becomes a foreign country and you don’t speak the language and as you become middle aged you see your life reworked through success and failure and the hard costs which your ego previously obscured like too much greasepaint.
It is maudlin to stay in grief but if we do not let go of the past we will project past pains and old understandings of reality onto others that do nothing but harm.
It’s a beautiful thing to watch these huge emotions play out in your life. Death offers grand dramas when all you can offer is having built a future on the foundation they gave you.
I am “enjoying” the monthly gift of a horrific migraine pattern courtesy of my Aunt Flo. It appears to be one of those all day twenty four hour beasts. I am laid out flat from it.
My suspicion is I made the symptoms modestly worse by barreling through the past two weeks in my enthusiasm for my life. Life is good and that presents some challenges for me in over doing things.
The world may be unraveling but the personal realm of Julie Fredrickson has rarely been better than it is now. As it turns out, moving to Montana was an inspired long term investment right from the get-go. So naturally I want to share this good fortune with my most beloved. We’ve had an influx of friends and family.
I can feel myself expanding and reaching for new competence and new horizons through the efforts of my friends. Elle made a Coq au Vin. Is there anything that says a love language quite like feeding someone? My love language might be writing but I think this gesture is easy to translate.
Coq au Vin or Chicken in Win with rice pilaf.
But nothing sweet can be enjoyed fully without a hint of bitterness for contrast. Light is only illuminating against the presence of the dark. A painting without shadows is flat. And so the flat lay photographs of sumptuous gourmet meals made with love and care by someone I love perhaps has to be contrasted by being laid out flat with a migraine.
So as I lay flat in bed yearning for the energy to be with Elle, with my work, and with my life, I must remind myself that the work of art that is my life needs the shadows too.
