Tag: Woo

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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.

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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.

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Internet Culture Media

Day 892 and Synchronicity

Everything feels weird and it’s hard not to notice. Is it a wrinkle in time? Have we torn the fabric of reality? Did some kid in Las Vegas see aliens? Is that the tug of the multiverse on the edge of your consciousness? Maybe it’s a demon. Maybe it’s some x-risk scenario with artificial intelligence.

Our collective narratives about synchronicities have been pouring out on social media. No one is really sure what the fuck is going on and it’s showing up everywhere. Did the physicists at CERN accidentally fuck up space time? Have we been living superimposed on another reality for all of humanity? Can some people see the other reality? Can you? Can I? Did all of human religion have a point about supernatural shit and the Enlightenment was just a cope?

My favorite theory floating is we are only just noticing some anti-gravity experiment gone awry back in the day because commercial artificial intelligence accidentally revealed too many conflicting data points. Despite the state controlled AI’s efforts to keep a lid on shit we just couldn’t keep the aliens, or a breakaway civilization, or the multiverse or the lizard people under wraps and have been preparing for the big reveal for a while. Except no one is paying attention because shit is chaotic and we’ve all got bills.

Alien asked a wojack if he is shocked. Wojack is too busy to contemplate extra terrestrial life.

Did something happen in the 1940s and we managed to keep it under wraps until Sam Altman and company triggered the Vulcans to show up? Sorry I’m overlapping too many pop culture touchstones with too many niche Silicon Valley personalities for just one conspiracy theory.

All I know is even Elon Musk is looking to hire a witch and head of propaganda. But as a chaos magician I only work for my own LPs, founders and my family so he’s got to look elsewhere.

Need a head of propaganda and witchcraft? I need more then cash
Categories
Emotional Work

Day 891 and All Alright

I am trying to practice detachment and still enjoy the present moment. A set of secondary side effects from an antibiotic are unpleasant in the extreme. But as the theme of throwback 90s hit “That 70’s Show” so effectively proclaims, “we’re all alright, we’re all alright!”

While it is true that what is in our body will show in our emotions, it’s perhaps more accurate to say that our emotions are showing up in body. A bio-emotive framework gives you more freedom to experience the full range of life without judgement.

I have done my nervous system exercises, I have treated the side effects as best I can with pharmaceutical intervention, I’ve rested quietly in a dark room, I’ve been outside to facilitate circadian rhythm return, I’ve eaten protein and I’ve stretched.

I’ve run the processes and routines that set me up for a good day because you don’t let one bad thing turn into a hundred bad things. Even as I’m experiencing unpleasant moments, I know I have to bear these smaller costs as an investment on a better tomorrow. It’s hard to hear that everything has a cost, sometimes too much of a cost, but being detached about the calculations helps. If something must be done it’s all alright. I promise.

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Chronic Disease Travel

Day 889 and Soul Delay

A girlfriend asked me if it felt good to be home in Montana. I said I wasn’t sure as my soul hasn’t landed home yet. I think it might be somewhere over the Arctic at the moment.

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.

William Gibson – Pattern Recognition

I don’t feel like I’ve really landed yet even though I’ve been home for a full day. My body is going through various forms of blowback and regression as I resorted to Prednisone while in Europe.

I’m itchy and in pain and simply going about my routines despite it all. Rhythms and processes run my life because I’m a traditionalist. What you do every day is what you become.

Everything physical I do has a cost and nothing is higher cost than travel. I am bearing those costs at the moment. Blessedly the costs feel removed and remote as I am a perhaps disassociated as my soul may or may not be somewhere over Greenland.

So if you’ve not heard from me it’s because I’ve got a bit of soul delay with my jet lag. Or a bit of jet lag with my soul delay. You can expect reintegration soon.

Categories
Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 885 and Grieving Your Many Deaths

The most soothing statistic I’ve ever hoped was true is that your body turns over all of its cells every seven years. It seems to be functionally close to true. Every cell, except those in our brain, our heart and our eyes, does indeed participate in some form of cellular renewal.

Our bodies replace many of their nearly 30 trillion human cells regularly. About 330 billion of those cells are replaced every day — that’s about 1 percent of all our body’s cells. Other cells, like the tiny ones in our gut, renew within a week.

How Stuff Works

I’m not much for dreams of eternal life. Chronic disease tends to give you a bit of appreciation for Sisyphus and the torture of daily physical embodied indignities. But give me the hope for constant change and you’ve got my attention. And yes I moved a lot as a kid who do you ask?

Doesn’t 1% renewal day seem both manageable and swift at the same time? It’s one of the recommendations I give to folks who are interested in biohacking. Change one variable by a small percentage every single day. Big changes come from compounding over time.

It does make me wonder if I’ve taken adequate time to grieve the many versions of myself that have died. The ghosts of old versions of Julie haunt me. Every time Scotty beamed you up, imagine the last version of you that was killed on the transporter pad. Ghost stories right?

I’m not the same person I was yesterday. I’m not the same person I was a month ago. If I look at how much change I’ve undergone in just the last year it feels dizzying. If I consider how different June of 2023 Julie is from June 2022, I’m barely the same person.

I take solace in the 1% renewal. That even if this version of myself is suffering, I am building a future version of myself that compounds into better versions. Seems like we should be grieving a little every day doesn’t it?

Categories
Biohacking

Day 881 and Set a Timer

I’ve always been the type of thinker who enjoy playing with differences and similarities. I find it pleasing to see common attributes of humanity. I’m soothed seeing we are more alike than not even across vast genetic & cultural distances.

I equally enjoy spotting games of “one thing is not like the other” as part of the general pattern recognition that evolutionary Darwinism implies. The freaks and mutants are who push us forward. Recognizing the value of positive differentiation is the basis for every job I’ve ever loved from fashion to finance.

This might be why I enjoy tools like timers, trackers, spreadsheets and other measurements of inputs and outputs. I like inferred knowledge and probability. Those goofy old standard test questions “this is to that: as that is to this” were my favorite.

I understand how totalizing using these tools can be. I’m currently experiencing the intense urge to smash my Apple Watch as I am asking it to “set a timer for 45” minutes several times a day. I’m setting shorter timers too.

I am spreading out a biohacking regimen while my body goes through an ugly symptom flare that suggests both allergy issues and a general immune response to what I believe is an infection from some scratching that opened my dermatitis. Fun huh?

The expectation that one’s body is unique and an N of 1 pairs poorly with averages, reversion to the mean, and the persistent beeping tinging ringing reminders of a timer going off telling you to follow the routine. So here I am wishing to some spreadsheet brained hope that my inputs and outputs will balance and I will be fine if we got the dosing right.

Which is the prayer of everyone who has ever experienced a medical malady. Set a timer, wait, and pray to an actual God as the ones in our phones aren’t up to the task of being deities just yet. More like having a troublesome djinn that promises the pain will go away if you do exactly ask it asks.

Categories
Travel

Day 875 and Spring Fever

I had a flu this time last year. I was in process of closing on our home in Montana. What a week that was for me. The first piece of real land I ever owned. Better late than never.

This May I think I just have plain old hay fever. Blooming trees on Frankfurt city streets combined with a roadside bedroom has me sniffling and itching. I broke out the prednisone. 5mg at first. Then upped to 10mg the next day. I treat prednisone like most people treat opioids. “In case of emergency” would be preferable.

Maybe I simply get spring fever of some sort and I can romanticize it like some British Regency period piece as interpreted by Shonda Rhimes. Ah she had the rheumatic touch when she bought her ancestral home. But then had the vapors when she came to the Hapsburg Court. The deadly poisons of springs first flower has felled her bloom. Spring fever indeed, my pretties.

I didn’t even use ChatGPT for that. My brain can spit back up sick tropes. Nevertheless I do feel a bit felled by this inflammatory cycle that has required a little more attention than preferred.

Categories
Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 858 and In Passing

As I’ve been working on a nervous system mastery course the past few weeks I’ve been especially attuned to how quickly emotions rise and fall in my body. Like a small child, the range and swiftness of feelings always catches me by surprise. And it is a blessing.

I don’t repress anything. Good or bad, I let it rise up and feel it deeply and completely. This can lead to some awkward timing.

I had a moment of intense grief and sadness wash over me on the airplane today as part of an exercise called somatic free diving. I let the tears overcome me only because I had on an eye mask that I knew would hide it. I was in a safe place to feel it even though I was in public.

But just as quickly as the storm blew in so too did it dissipate. The emotions are always in pass if we allow ourselves to enjoy the temporality of our reactions. If the issues are in our tissues we can bring ourselves in and out of them just by noticing where in our body we feel our emotions.

The pressure to let go of bad feelings and hang onto good ones can be intense. We rush to toss off grief, sadness, fear, abandonment and rage while we cling to happiness, joy, wonder and arousal.

But I am playing with the idea that everyone and everything is just happening “in passing.” Humans only get to live forward in time linearly. None of the probabilistic potentialities happen for us. We enjoy heavily edited narrative memory and future fantasies but reality happens in the present.

I am hoping to catch some people in passing while I am in transit. However I know possibilities are endless and my linear limitations will intersect with all of the other beings also in passing with equality linear limitations.

All of that has become beautiful and tangible to me the further I dive into my own nervous system and it’s inner workings. If you do want to join the next cohort with me (apparently alumni are able to do so) my code JULIE does something. Probably saves you some money. For me the course has saved me something far less tangible and I am grateful.

Categories
Startups

Day 840 and Do You Believe in Magic?

The glory of writing every single day is you start to build m records of your own life. You notice how much your own personal cultural history is syncretic. I’ll always be a fan of blogging because it’s got chronology at its heart. Sometimes it’s good to see how we evolved over time.

Having a written record is hard and often dangerous. You own a lot of work in progress that doesn’t necessarily reflect where you landed. And internet opposition research is fantastic at catching you in a former evolution. We call it getting cancelled. But if you get it right you have the receipts.

But if you are an honest broker of your bets you will admit when you get better and more complete information. The real magic of startups is that markets are often excellent teachers of how we are just dead wrong. And if we listen to what we are told we can adjust. And as the old saying goes the market can be irrational longer than you can be solvent. The reverse is true too.

Consensus reality is a bit magical. I called our fund chaotic because the process of getting people to align is magical but it’s chaotic as fuck. It’s studied but experimental. It relies on rules and the temerity to break them. It’s chaos magic. I wanted people to see a bit of the woo woo in our fund name every day. Technology and magic are just separated by layers of abstraction. Go read Charles Stross.

So I was overcome with delight when I saw Geoff Lewis discuss how startups are magical. An all time delightful addition to the genre of how does venture capital and startup growth even work? Fred Wilson blogged so Geoff Lewis could vlog. And he did it with verve while discussing Dungeons and Dragons stats. Also he’s team maxed charisma like me so I am inclined to like him.

The fun part is that he and I don’t really overlap except on Twitter. We’ve never discussed any of this. But our syncretic workflows had overlapped. It felt like a small ecosystem knitting moment. An alignment of metaphors and aesthetics. It made me feel damned optimistic and yes I do believe in magic. And I hope you do too.