love enshrined in invention: our relationships and the worlds they create.
I’ve been looking into the underlying love beneath everything, and what it means to means to have something so vibrant in an otherwise brutalizing world. I’ve been thinking about love not in terms of the emotions, but in terms of actions. When you love someone, what do you do? How do you act?
Quite simply, I fell in love with my best friend. After we casually dated for a year, I ended things to fully focus on taking care of my mental health.
The last year pushed me to the absolute edge, and almost made me quit Astra and leave tech as a whole. I was shattered and our break up was me awakening to the broken window, and starting to grab the glass with my bare hands to save what I could.
For the past year, I’ve been in recovery burn out mode: reading all of the therapy books to understand my patterns, working to become a better leader for Astra, finishing my tiny house as a therapeutic goal, and more.
And in that year, a year of consistent and close friendship. Even removed from romance, the love created a bloom that pushed me forward.
Long story short, I’ve been preparing myself to be ‘me’ again, with a large heart and a brain without fear. After a year of separation, I realized I didn’t want it to continue. I asked for what I wanted, and it fell into place.
Like anyone who finds themselves the recipient of love where they expected silence, it feels like I have a star caught in my heart.
My last ‘steady’ relationship was at 17 with someone who was quite abrasive (and ending with a friend telling me he thought I was in an abusive relationship). I grew up as the child of divorce, and models of healthy relationships that I want to emulate have been few and far between.
Thus, my obsession with learning about love. What does it look like in practice? How can I learn to be someone worthy of coming home to? Most importantly, am I doing it correctly?
To me, what I’ve come to so far is that love that’s kind is a sort of transformation. To be loved is to be affected, at some level.
When parents raise kids, their childhoods are usually guided by what they don’t hear, as much as they do. A parent is always thinking about not cussing, turning off violent shows, avoiding weird situations, creating elaborate stories about Santa and the Easter Bunny, and beyond.
Love is transforming our world for the people we love into a place they actually deserve to have.
We build worlds filled with stories and folklore, small moments of joy and release, care and devotion in otherwise unremarkable moments.
Love is a domino effect where the first push cascades forward, and you’re excited to watch the things that once stood, fall.
I keep thinking of a Neil Gaiman quote from his book, ‘Fragile Things’.
“She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrows start here.”
I think a lot about this man on TikTok (take this with a grain of salt, my memory isn’t strong) whose daughter was killed by an improperly installed guard rail, who now goes around making content about if other rails on the road are installed properly.
Someone else’s love lives in the most oblivious things. Where can mine live?
For me, everything that Astra has ever made can be traced back to a single person or a group of people in my life who influenced me to develop that piece of software. I’m obviously quite anxious about how in love I am, but in that anxiety — I’m learning to find excitement and improvements in the world again.
I’m learning what it’s like to offer your future to someone, and to let them do what they want with it. There’s a new found gloss over the world, and I can’t wait to see the thing I’ll build, or the person I’ll be because of it.
