Tag: Trauma

Categories
Aesthetics Emotional Work

Day 681 and Boob Tube

In a sign of how emotionally over this week this week I am, the first thing I thought when I woke up was “I’ve got so much good tv to watch!”

I wasn’t allowed to watch television as a child. So it’s a bit ironic that it is my personal view as an adult that television is America’s best developed art form. While one can’t deny that impact American film, music and fashion, it is our television that moves global culture. Only Bollywood and anime have even come close to its impact in the last several decades.

I truly love television as a cultural mirror. I don’t think you can work in any of the culture industries (including Silicon Valley) without being aware of the mythology of television. Our archetypes and tropes are reinvented and reimagined over and over as references become anchors. No art is so naturally effective at reinvention as television returns episode after episode and season after season. No story is ever finished.

I’m particularly pleased that so many stories are returning this weekend. I’ll be watching new seasons of Mythic Quest, the Crown, Yellowstone and the Good Fight. Which is quite a lot of television for one person even on a weekend where you want to do nothing but tune out to the boob tube.

I’m only adding two two show new to my rotation this season and one is the absolutely excellent William Gibson project on Amazon called Peripheral. No one has ever done the near future as well as Gibson and his take on the Jackpot is already playing out. My last public event before the pandemic hit was a reading of one of the books that this shoe is based on It absolutely deserves wider recognition.

The other is a show I just began is called Reboot. It is an is oddly not at all solipsistic look at making a sitcom from the vantage point of formerly estranged father daughter pair of show runners. As someone who also followed in the footsteps of her father and has complex feelings on abandonment and family legacy it has been quite a comfort over the last week. As I look at history repeating within the context of my own family and within the wider financial markets, I appreciated considering that perhaps we are capable of overcoming our traumas. And that maybe all our parents ever wanted was for us to learn from them.

Categories
Emotional Work Finance

Day 680 and History Repeating

I found myself crying my eyes out to my therapist this morning. Just full on sobbing. Nothing bad actually even happened to me during this week’s chaos. In fact, I’ve spent the last year or so preparing Alex and I for a downturn. I wouldn’t be much of a doomer if I didn’t swing into this downturn prepared.

It just all felt too familiar. It felt like the worst days of fear and insecurities from my childhood playing out all over again. My family went bankrupt during the great Web 1 unraveling. And I’ve never forgotten it’s lessons.

I remember feeling like I was in a secure situation and then learning in dramatic fashion that it was all gone. That all the hopes, dreams and aspirations that my father had done so much to prepare me to reach for (including a lot of very expensive colleges) would likely be out of reach. We’d be starting from scratch again. I hadn’t really had a lot of time to enjoy being a poor little rich girl. It was over too fast.

My father is a truly entrepreneurial man. When I was born the family lore is that he was pitching a edtech company. We were a startup family. We lived in Fremont which is (was) the shitty poor town. I suspect it was a lot harder than I even remember.

But dad found a way to realize his Silicon Valley dreams. He brought software to millions of people. He really did do the thing. And for a few years during the boom times it felt like we might be wealthy forever.

But finance is tricky. Lock ups can fuck you up. So can leverage. We had both. And then of course regular old fraud happens too. Yay.

But it wasn’t in vain. I learned those lessons well. I swing big and I bet on the future like my dad. I believe in people and in genius. But I also keep a balanced portfolio and back up plans.

I believe in exponential growth. But I also believe in the cost of capital. Sometimes money is cheap. Too cheap. And you need to prepare for when capital is expensive again. Because the laws of physics tell us that energy cannot be created or destroyed. And until someone smarter than me proves the laws of thermodynamics wrong, I will operate based on them.

And I am ready for the dark days. Both because it is literally November but also because I believe we’ve got chaos ahead. And if I’ve learned one thing from my childhood it is that you can survive it. It just takes a little bit of preparation. Which I’ve done. Everything else is just a case of history repeating.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 672 and Self Confidence

My therapist yelled at me this week.

“How are you so good at being objective about business but so bad at being objective about yourself?”

Dagmar

My therapist is not what you’d call the warm fuzzy type. She’s more of an old school “dig deep into your childhood trauma to overcome your self limiting beliefs” type. She’s also in her mid-eighties. They really don’t make them like they used to.

My inner child is still fighting the battles of pre-rationalism where everything is about core emotions. Do I feel love? Do I feel fear? Do I feel shame? And my adult needs to parent her with the comforting objective reality that she has nothing to fear and is deeply loved.

I did not feel loved as a child. Without getting into my parents particulars, there was a belief I absorbed that that the path to secure love was through improving myself. I wanted authority figures to see how hard I worked and how dedicated I was to fixing my flaws. It’s hard to imagine someone as brash as I am as a good girl archetype but I was a Daddy’s Girl.

Nevertheless it is true that I get caught in self improvement loops. I’ll fixate on my trackers and personal data and fuss and futz about how things could be better. And I have to consciously remind myself that outcomes are what matter not “trying really hard.” Ironically I have no problem with reaching challenging specific outcomes. I have problems rolling back my inputs to only what is necessary to achieve my outcomes.

Now my therapist is no slouch. She’s one of the smartest and best connected women I know. She is more than qualified to rate my mental acuity and processing power. And she’s now on a mission to remind me of the fact. She wants me to have self confidence in the objective reality that I can achieve my desired outcomes.

And she is correct. I am not being rational in my assessment of my own capacity and talents. I let my inner child’s fears well up and her illogical viewpoints do my adult no favor. In reality I’m competent, capable and absolutely good enough to compete in the arena.

I have an uncanny sixth sense for future market moves and social trends, a numerate mind with a literate education, and all of the skills necessary to source and invest in early stage startups thanks to years in the trenches as an operator and angel investor. If you’d like to invest with me I am objectively very good.

Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 655 and Accountability

Being accountable to myself is much harder than being accountable to someone else. I suspect this is true for most people. We all wish for ideal childhoods with parents who provided for all our emotional needs. And so we look to bosses, spouses and authority figures as substitute parents.

Most of our adult lives are spent trying to find some ideal mommy or daddy to soften the trauma and lack of our childhoods. We remember these issues far too vividly as adults through the perceptions of our inner child. It is a huge challenge to recognize that feelings are not facts but these feelings nevertheless run our lives.

The unfortunate truth is that the only ideal parent that can ever exist for our inner child is ourselves. We must comfort, protect and nurture that part of ourselves that still feels lacking because no one else can give it to us. No one is coming to save us. We are the parent to our inner child.

Which brings me back to my challenge with being accountable to myself. I struggle to care for myself the way I need as I too often perceive myself as not being good enough. If I just worked harder or spent more time preparing or if I just did one more pass on my pitch deck. You get the idea. I’ll push myself right over the edge of success into inaction and self torture.

One way I’ve been able to overcome this need to push myself into a fantasy of accountability is simply by building in public. If I’ve said what I plan to do then I’m no longer just cultivating it inside myself but I’ve let the idea come forth into reality. Once it is outside of my own tortured bubble of personal accountability it can gain momentum.

I am raising money for a venture fund and now that I’ve put that in public it’s not just about me. It’s about the thesis, the LPs, the founders, and the market. And it’s much easier to be accountable to a shared reality with other people than some fantasy version of perfection inside my head. If you’d like to be a part of it and are an accredited investor here is a link to my calendar. If you’d like to read more about the fund I’d be thrilled.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 648 and Open

I share a lot of myself online. For an introvert with more than a hint of Autism you’d think I’d find it mortifying to be as open as I am online. My therapist would probably say it’s because I like the distance provided by sharing online and it’s hard to disagree. But I like being open to the world. I want to be a little beacon in the storm so that you might find me if you are looking.

But while I am so open to the public online, I am protective of my personal space for a number of reasons. I guard my health and my body as I manage a chronic disease. I prefer to operate from a place of non-reactivity as I like my central nervous system to maintain eustress. And I am not generally energized by spending time with others. I am energized by alone time.

But like any other human I do want to be seen. And I want others to feel like I am seeing them. I prize empathy and openness. Showing my vulnerability and weaknesses with the world is part of how I try to be seen and also let others know I see them.

My efforts to be healthy and my struggles with pain and fat are human problems. Maybe other aspects of my life are less relatable, but being worried about my weight and struggling with physical discomfort is the stuff of being an average woman.

I am perhaps overly sensitive to what I perceive as failures and short comings. I project confidence but it isn’t always natural. But I also recognize that, even if flaws terrify the part of me that is still emotionally a child, these supposed failings are the human condition. Everyone has elements of their bodies, their emotions and their intellect that they occasionally feel shame about. We are all working to let go of that shame.

I want the people I work with, especially the founders who are pouring their lives into their companies, to know that they are psychologically safe with me. Doing new things is hard. Creation is hard. Building is hard. Startups are hard. Shouldn’t your investors and advisors be a safe harbor to share those challenges with?

If you are feeling scared or ashamed or angry about yourself, I want you to know you are not alone. It’s ok to be open about your power and your accomplishments and your unique genius. And it’s also ok to be open about all the things you struggle with as well. You contain multitudes.

So if you see me putting out huge asks online or sharing incredibly embarrassing details, I want you to know it is because I see you and I trust you to see me too.

And if we are meant to be in each others lives then it will because we are capable of seeing the multitudes in each other. And if that is not for you that’s ok too. We all deserve to be loved as we are. I trust you. And I hope you might trust me too.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 647 and Socializing

I thought I was being quite careful this weekend about not over socializing. Last weekend I was hitting up pancake breakfasts and running errands and I thought I was going to pass out come Monday. So I was much more conscious of needing to rest and privacy this weekend.

But no matter how much I dial it back it seems like any amount of interaction is just too much. I backed it down to two hours on Thursday, Friday and Sunday with a recovery day on Saturday. But here I am on Sunday afternoon fighting off a migraine from overstimulation.

Folks bitch and moan about Zoom and how it takes away from the human element of interaction but fuck me if that isn’t the entire appeal of it to me. I myself prefer asynchronous communication to buffer myself even further from the onslaught of audio, visual and emotional inputs. But I’ll take a day full of Zooms as it’s still so much less input.

Perhaps the downside of having the hair trigger central nervous system of an autist is I am simply absorbing more from the inputs than the average person. Every noise, every visual cue, every smell is hitting me. Others may need all those cues but I absolutely do not.

I wish there were a way to articulate this to friends and family that didn’t make people feel rejected. But socializing in person is simply so taxing for me that I need much less of it. And it’s not because I don’t like you. It is just because I’m absorbing way more of you than you think!

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 643 and Courage

My courage is uneven at the moment. I have a specific professional project that I am struggling to push myself on. I tell myself that it is something I want, but if the truism “having is evidence of wanting” is any indication, I am struggling to convince myself I really want it. Except I am fairly sure I do want it and I’m just scared.

I used to love it when people said no to me. I was the kind of “chip on my shoulder” young person that used a no to fuel myself. “I’ll show them” was somewhere between a mantra and a battle cry.

But now I find myself anxious to publicly go out and see just how many people will say no. I don’t know if I find it as motivating as I used to. I tell myself I don’t mind but perhaps some other unexamined element of reaction makes me afraid.

This could all be an elaborate ego protection ruse on my part. Maybe I still love the motivation that comes from no. Maybe I hate it. But I have not really done enough fucking around to find out yet to know one way or other.

My gut instinct is to simply declare in public my goals and a timeline to force myself into it. But then I’ve been working through my tendency to rely on willpower and force to motivate myself. Perhaps a big forcing function will simply send me back into my old coping mechanisms of addictive overwork.

I’ve always punished myself by doing things. If I am anxious I almost always find ways to kick a hornet’s nest to force an action rather than gentle build momentum.

Whatever I do I would prefer I do it with as much gentleness and respect for my inner child as possible. I am prone to abusing my inner child’s feelings by disregarding her fear or her desire to keep distance from the rest of the world. I deserve better than forcing misery onto my inner child.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 635 and Wide Horizons

I am absolutely wiped at the moment as I rode a wave of enthusiasm all day. I felt focused, energetic and free of self doubt. I felt like my life was open to possibility.

Perhaps it’s the regular reminders of personal responsibility I get in therapy. Perhaps it’s it’s the sense of accomplishment I got from completing my wilderness medical incident certification last week. The case of the Yips that I felt a few days ago is swiftly resolving.

The strength in my marriage with Alex has always been our commitment to working through our emotional journeys together. He was able to be reassuring my through slow climb back from the depths of my health challenges. He helped me turn it into a source of strength. Next year will be ten years together and Alex really got the “in sickness” portion of the vows a little earlier than anticipated.

This is the first time in both of our lives we’ve ever truly been stable. And that’s a strange thought. That our lives have been so chaotic for so long. We finally have money and a home we own and good health and it’s all at the same time. All of the instability of startups and limited resources and bad health are over. And only really in the last six or seven weeks has that been true. As we just finally bought our first home. We moved to Montana in August.

We climbed through the aftermath of the Great Recession together, made our first angel investments together, raised venture capital together, and now finally thanks to the pandemic we’ve been able to secure a place to live and a wide horizon to plan how to use our resources and time. I am responsible for talking this blessing and letting it provide the foundation for our long term goals. Millennials might just accelerate in middle age just yet! I know it feels like I am.

Categories
Preparedness Startups

Day 632 and The Yips

I think I might have a case of the yips. If you aren’t familiar with the term, it’s most commonly referred to as type of performance anxiety associated with experienced athletes. They suddenly find themselves unable follow through on techniques they otherwise know well.

Though as it turns out it’s not actually a form of anxiety at all, but rather a failure to consistently execute on muscle memory in experienced professionals which manifests as a loss of fine motor skills or a struggle to follow through on common chains of decision making, especially ones that are subconscious.

You might also associate it with analysis paralysis, a phenomenon in which someone has access to all relevant information but gets lost in decision making rather than simply acting on their reasonable informed instinct. One’s ability to simply execute what is in front of them is diminished not through lack of knowledge of experience but rather inaction.

I am an experienced startup operator. I am also a competent angel and early stage investor in private markets with a speciality in technology driven businesses. At this point, I’m not only well into my career with a number of concrete successes (I’ve built and sold companies) but I’ve also got generational memory from being the daughter of a startup operator. And yet I’m still nervous about swimming into the deep end of my investing career. I’ve got the the yips.

I hadn’t noticed that I had the yips till I came back from a wilderness medical incident technician certification course. I was doing a hands on course meant for front line first responders in rural and back country scenarios. It was heavy on scene and scenario execution so you could build muscle memory and quick response times.

In medical emergencies, especially in a wilderness context, you have limited resources and personnel. Acting swiftly with the knowledge and materials at hand is crucial. If you don’t take action, someone will die. Startups are famously resource constrained environments. Paul Graham of Y Combinator has an entire framework that assume you are default dead unless you take action to assure survival. This is as as applicable mindset for wilderness survival as it is for startups.

I had some sort of instinctual foresight that this wilderness medicine course would be useful not only practically in day to day life as someone who lives in Montana, but also as a mindset for my investing work on the chaotic thesis that the world is getting more complex. And that complexity has consequences for all of us.

The more chaotic the world, the harder it is to act with confidence as complexity builds.

Only by getting outside of my own skill set and professional world did I finally see how much I’m holding myself back from acting. Whether it is out of fear or analysis paralysis I do not know. But I do know that if one does not act the consequences can be dire. We are all default dead unless we make decisions to remain alive. There is no safety or progress to be found by staring at your problems and becoming overwhelmed by the challenge. If there is a cure for the yips it is to simply keep playing no matter how hard the game becomes.

Categories
Medical Preparedness

Day 629 and Working in Chaos

If you have been following along for the past couple of days you may have noticed I’m at a wilderness medical first responder course. I’ve been soaking up an inordinate amount of information. Part of the reason I am here is personal enrichment, but equally I am here because I’m working to understand chaos driven industries and the opportunities they present.

And the class is not disappointing. As we’ve have absorbed more skills and are moving further into the course, the chaos factor is being ramped up. The particularly enjoyable aspect of the specific course I am doing is that it is not just imparting book smarts. It’s designed to be much more hands on.

If it were a business school class they would probably refer to the methodology as case studies. But instead of ruminating on what you would do if you were management you are reacting as if you were the actual first responder on the scene. And the cases are getting more and more complex.

We started out with with the basics. We were deducing issues and imparting stabilizing treatments. But as we got more comfortable with figuring diagnostics and rendering basic aid the complexity ranked up. At the end of the day today we were presented with a car accident and four patients.

As we ran (literally) onto the scene we had to not only unravel what had happened but also treat several patients in varying degrees of distress. One of our patients didn’t make it. There was nothing we could have done. But we didn’t know that going into the scene. When we arrived we had no idea what happened and had to untangle the triage ourselves.

I was surprised at how challenging it was to leap into action. As the chaos of the accident presented itself our group of first responders had to decide on organizing ourselves and our resources. But the instinct is to simply begin rendering aid.

And that tension between acting and organizing in a crisis never goes away. You just get better trained at how to approach it. Working in the chaos is the job. I honestly thought I’d be better at it. Taking charge and working in uncertainty is something I enjoy. But as with any new skill, it takes work and practice. A certain amount of pressure is the only thing that teaches you how to work in chaos. And I’ve still got a long way to go.