I felt like I was on fire. Itchy skin, weeping eyes, coughing and wheezing, a sympathetic nervous system run amok. I was on my second histamine reaction in less than two weeks.
I have had two days of intense emotional work. One tragic aspect of a daily chronicle that’s public is dancing around some of the more private aspects of one’s life while still managing to write. I’ve been doing “a look ahead” exercise for the next decade with my family. Our goals and our challenges and our structures were all on the table. What do we want and how will we pursue it and what stands in our way?
So I found myself needed to sooth the systems. Reactivity is a choice. I wanted to feel my emotions but I’m less convinced I need to feel my hives.
So I downed 50mg of Benadryl, a couple other generic anti-histamines, a white girl downer, and I plugged myself into noise canceling headphones and a face mask. I did a few rounds of Non Sleep Deep Relaxation nervous system exercises. And slowly I was able to subdue reactions. I slipped into real sleep.
I feel better for it. But I also know I need more restorative time. Remaining subdued would be valuable.
It’s been a terrible week. I feel stupid even typing it. How many times can I state the obvious? It’s as if the repetition of stating that I’m in a hard place physically, and emotionally, somehow shames me. Can’t I say or feel something new?
But I don’t have any desire to dig any deeper into the wounds of the present. I am in too much pain. I am deeply emotionally affected by the situation in Israel. In ways I frankly didn’t anticipate. Those horrors overlapping with being sick, being far from home, and having a significant personal milestone, have collectively laid me flat.
I’d prefer to remain silent but the exercise of daily writing pulls at my habits no matter the extent of the misery. And maybe that’s the point. No microcosm of personal suffering or global macro view of atrocity changes the reality. Pain is an equally shared human condition. And we walk through it no matter our circumstances.
I have to assume I am not alone. The ambient misery is both personal and collective. The human experience is terrifyingly universal. I am fearful of my own physical fragility when abroad certainly but it’s bigger than being away from home. I’m afraid of being fragile in a cruel world that is getting crueler.
I’ve struggled to maintain a level head and a healthy routine this week as the whiplash of a hostile immune reaction and steroids took me from one misery to another. Prednisone is a cruel drug. It tamps down any reaction from your immune system. It’s a hard reboot for a physical system gone haywire. How appropriate given the circumstances.
It wasn’t quite how I envisioned turning over from one decade to another. And while I appreciated the stormy Baltic solitude to savor the weight and significance of my personal milestone, I can’t help but also notice that carrying on feels like a heavy burden.
My circadian rhythm has succumbed to the shock of the current crisis. I’m currently on the same time zone as Israel as I’m in Tallinn in Estonia. It’s been a windy weekend with a record breaking wind storm so folks have been advised to stay inside.
That means I’ve been online watching a war breakout with no news delay or influencer filters. There is no defining set of news narratives. Twitter is broken but it’s still largely moved by the enormous traffic of the American dominance on its algorithm. Stories build but American news can whipsaw a single image into our consciousness.
Except there is no one to trust on the platform. The old verification system of the blue check didn’t provide much except that if someone said they worked confidence that the source. It was not a great system. But now there is no system.
It doesn’t seem as if there is a functional trust and safety team at Twitter. So a lot of people have seen horrors that has previously been buffed away by content warnings and nerfings. It’s a good thing and a bad thing.
Keep in mind “trust and safety” is gone might be a fancy way of saying none of the intelligence services have any natural dominance, none of the legacy news institutions are caught up to internet OSINT and you will see things.
And I have. By the time something hits the American audience I’ve had almost an entire work day with the information you are just seeing. And it’s been horrifying. Because it is. And being on the same time zone really lays bare just how much narrative fog permeates war in a crumbling corporate internet.
Every time I have have cause to interact with any medical speciality I find myself blown away by just how little we know.
I’ve been going back to doctors to understand what my options are for living with an autoimmune condition and having children. And the truth is we just don’t know much.
I made a life altering decision several years ago by letting a medical decision be framed to me like a consumer product. We opted to freeze eggs and embryos and it turned our entire lives inside out. It triggered an autoimmune response in me that I’ll live with forever.
Somehow in the intervening half decade years we’ve learned precious little about women’s health and fertility. And we are advocating for somehow knowing even less.
Because that’s what we’ve done by letting the government into our health decisions. Don’t kid yourself into thinking when we involve government and bureaucrats we somehow improve our knowledge and safety. At it’s most friendly, when the government shows up it’s about ass covering. At it’s most hostile it’s about control.
We argue about ethics, safety and life as if we even have a shared ideal of any of those concepts. Whose life? My life? My unknown children? I’m not convinced we ever cared about women’s health as an independent variable. We treat fertility as a sideshow and hormones as some variable over which we pretend to have control. And yet every time I try to assess my own risks I find out that we known just about nothing. There are no good answers. And it’s all poorly understood risks.
I had a bad migraine over the weekend that simply took up all the space in my mind and body. I woke up with a break in the pain and a deep urge to throw myself into something that felt like momentum.
I found myself awash in sadness. I couldn’t stop myself from crying. It was as if my entire body felt despair. I’ve come to accept the value in embracing emotions as they come. “The only way out is through.”
I trust that my nervous system knows as much as my cognitive mind. I go so far as to say it knows more but that sounds a little woo to folks. And so I listened to my sadness. I cried. I rambled at the many problems large and small facing my corner of the universe.
It’s hard to understand how we came to this point across a generation. But easy to see why millennials are unsure if any of our institutions can be trusted. And I wonder what it’s like to have no memory of a time before 9/11.
It’s a war of all against all on the internet. And I don’t recall being conscripted into any kind of war but here I am up to my neck in ontological shock and crisis of meanings as I read the news.
It’s our autonomy of mind that is threatened by this unholy troika of smartphones, social media and linguistic weaponization, and there is no more important struggle today than to defend ourselves against that threat.
Humans have nervous systems that are easily hijacked. You give us something to imitate and within a few weeks we’ve learned a new way to get a social advantage. And so we have massive social cataclysms as the rules change. And the rules are changing fast.
It’s not as if America gives a shit about maternal health or women but hey here is a podcast about a porn star who specializes in anime’s less savory fetishes. Is your teenage boy an Andrew Tate fan? It’s time to enjoy a reactionary period.
Obviously this has anyone older than forty asking if the western world under attack. Is questioning liberalism actually the psy-op? Are we fighting amongst ourselves? Do you even know what memetic agents you are infected by?
I sure don’t what brain works in carrying but I don’t think animated porn is for me. But I also got taken in by lots of questionable narratives on modern medicine, fertility and children too. Untangling yourself from the desires you were given is exhausting. Good luck unpacking who jacked your frame!
My day has been a little off as I’m nursing my husband through some surgery. Through frankly he’s recovering so well it’s mostly just keeping him company while I do my regular workday. But I have consumed some good content in the process of keeping him company and making sure ice packs are rotated & medicine is taken.
I watched John Mulaney standup special Baby J which was surprisingly good. My main takeaway was “being liked is a cage” but also you’ve got to watch out for how selfish everyone is in the process of managing their own traumas and addictions.
Mulaney is a fascinating example of someone going from beloved to fuck up as soon as it was clear he was a human and capable of sinning and hurting himself and others.
He got a good dose of being condemned while being shitheel as an addict. Who he really hurt other than himself I can’t say. But he was problematic says many inches of gossip writing and critical reviews. Wrong speak and shame and condemnation is so interesting as a social engagement issue for culture. It’s never really about them. We can all be assholes and unlikable in the process of being hurt and healing our hurts.
I suppose this is why I believe it’s better to never take anything personally and be sure you take care of yourself if you find yourself reacting strongly to a person’s frailty. The ones who love you will forgive you if you need to reorient yourself into doing what’s right for you so long as you don’t hurt anyone in the process. And oftentimes even if you do.
The follow up movie we watched was also about wrong think. But instead of it being about the addiction and selfishness of a celebrity it was about the selfishness of trying to decide what’s right for an entire nation. We watched the Tetris movie.
Which is quite a dramatization of how totalizing even the most glorious of ambitions can be in the hands of hands of normal frail humans. Yes I think wrong think comedians and communists are related and I swear I still think Bari Weiss is kind of an asshole. Most of the comedians asking for forgiveness for wrong think aren’t actually that funny to begin with. Back to Tetris
I found myself inspired by the frustrations that come from human nature & self dealing while glorifying ambitious end goals for social good. The collective good can often be patently false if someone ambitious enough gets perverted. Maybe I’m just being that asshole capitalist but I think nepotism and corruption come in many forms. And it’s easier to spot it in British billionaires and communists bureaucracies. But we’ve got plenty of right speak and “for your own good” pleas right here in America.
It’s inspired me to look harder into how we are perversely seeking control and benefits for large corporations and political parties in our current race to regulate new technologies like crypto and artificial intelligence. If you want a hint as to where I’m worried look no further than Gary Gensler and reinforcement learning for artificial intelligence alignment. And yes I’m making bets to that effect.
I feel like I’ve been caught in a loop of shitty things that has me in a “fight or flight” pattern that I can’t find a way to release myself from.
I’m having a very “if it’s not one thing it’s a other” summer. And it has to stop here. If I don’t let it all go I’ll be miserable and it will have been my own choice. I’ve got a choice to prioritize the well being of myself and my family.
I’m writing this at the oral surgeon’s office as my husband’s wisdom teeth removal is today. I’ve been given several lectures on how challenging his recovery will be as he’s so much older than the ideal extraction age.
Teenagers have a lot better bounce back rates than even late thirty something apparently. Fingers crossed being fit and healthy counts for something.
I’m stressed by the prospect of prioritizing myself and family. I like being open and available to the universe.
So I’m just going to start saying no to more and more things until I feel like I’ve got myself out of this misery loop. My priorities will remain my family, my fund, my founders and myself. Probably not exactly in that order but pretty close.
I’m going to be nursing my husband through oral surgery recovery this week. He’s run out the clock on wisdom teeth and they all need to be removed.
We will miss a few obligations this week but such is the nature of medical need. Necessity doesn’t always come when you want it. If we don’t do it this week we’d be waiting till November for the next appointment. Such is getting medical care in this day and age.
I’ve been in a bit of a frenzy preparing as I myself have some medical issues that are chronic so if we are both fucked up physically it gets a little tricky to manage routines. Particularly because we live a little bit country these days in Montana.
I’ve gone down a deep rabbit hole of procedures for surgical recovery. I looked up standard operating procedures for inflammation and surgical recovery from every source I could find. I consulted with our doctors. I looked at risk factors.
You’d be surprised at how optimal procedures differ from the standard median recommended ones. The fear of overprescribing pharmaceuticals runs pretty rampant even when it’s clear that some protocols would be beneficial like say post surgery prophylactic antibiotics. The NIH, Mayo and Cleveland Clinics agree it’s a effective way of preventing complications related dry socket. The condition can turn into a painful infection that is relatively dangerous if it gets out of hand given it’s proximity to your brain.
But we can’t make an antibiotic standard operating procedure as it’s not technically necessary. Especially since we have prioritized using less antibiotics overall as a public health policy for the wider social good of preventing antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria. Good of the many versus good of the one. I’ll admit I’d be inclined to say that my husband deserves the Spock treatment even if it is illogical.
I’ve written out an hourly schedule for the recovery procedure I intend to follow. I won’t post it all here as it’s obviously not in my best interest to disclose it. It’s involved and intended to reduce inflammation and have the maximum pain management that is responsible so that my husband’s body can recover quickly with no unnecessary stress.
Proteins powder, bone broth and soft foods
It seems as if a lot of recovery comes down to simply retaining adequate electrolytes balance with enough liquid calories. You have to meet a macronutrient balance that gives enough protein to knit the tissues and not make the body think it’s resource constrained. Which is harder than it sounds when you can’t chew or even suck on a straw.
I’ve got a number of techniques to leverage from lymphatic drainage massage to the woo woo options to reduce stress and promote recovery and I intend to use all of them. And yes I’m available for nursing.
I myself am going through an exercise of ruthless prioritization of my own focus and find. As in any portfolio, write downs are inevitable. It’s easier to write something down when it’s money. Investments of time, energy, social capital and presence are much harder to let go. A sunk cost never boils? A watched pot never catalyzes? Sometimes a group or a movement chooses to remain outside their power.
I have so much less capacity to be present than I’d like. Others may prefer to be distant and still shower up but I find I’m happier with boundaries that are firm and great remove. That means when I do show up you have my full and intimate attention. It’s only right.
As more of us rise up the acceleration curve of artificial intelligence and must maintain our capacity to sense-make, this will help your mind and body function in a chaotic world.
I myself have taken Jonny’s Bootcamp, intend to be in the next cohort (my code JULIE gets you a discount), and I’ll be sponsoring a founder to attend the September cohort so consider this a chance to see if these tools are right for you. My revealed preferences tell you what you need to know.
