on a cycle of cruelty and compassion: moving to California, being a fuck up, and going to the beach.
TW: mentions of suicide, self harm, body image issues, and eating disorders.
Something about startup culture turns me into an abuser of myself. I want to win so badly that it terrifies me.
It’s not about the money, it’s about being able to say “I dreamed this and I did this”. I constantly live in this dream world in my head because I can’t cope with the one we have.
When it feels like the fluid running through your body is made up of your dreams, you would do anything, too. It’s about finally being able to feel as though I’ve put out a response to the horror running through my body and our newsfeeds on a daily basis.
I moved to the Bay Area for the summer to work with my co-founder, and it’s been the best and worst decision of my year.
Genuinely, I feel so fucking grateful to be here. I’m accessing resources I never had in Oregon (like the expansive programming book section at the SF public library, where I spend a majority of my time just learning). But also, I’ve become harsh to myself.
It feels like my eating disorder trailed behind my car as a ghost the second I crossed the state line from Oregon. Startup life is fucking terrifying. I don’t even know where I’m going to be at the end of the next month. All I know is that I just have these immense desire to perform at not only one, but two different companies now.
With that amount of pressure, I’ve been returning to old habits that I hate. I used to feel that I never wanted to become like my mom, and that every step I took towards her would lead me to an assimilation that would spell the end. But now, I see exactly how it happened. She de-stressed with wine a lot. I’ve been a habitual smoker for the past year. She hated her body, and now I can’t even feel happy to look at mine.
I’ve also been struggling for a vacation, and pushing myself to immense levels of stress as Astra preps our gen 2.0 launch , and as Faura starts our pre-seed funding.
So, when Valkyrie (my Faura co-founder) told me today that we would be going to Half Moon Bay tomorrow, you would think that I would be ecstatic. But, the only thing I could think of is how all I had was a bikini and that my full stomach would be on display.
I started having an anxiety attack, and immediately felt the urge to just starve myself. When I was younger, I always associated the beach with needing to not eat, and needing to cover self harm scars. I associate the beach with needing to hide the magic behind the curtains, the true cost of how I was able to do everything I was able to do so young.
Yes, I was a 13-year old app developer. I was also constantly circling the drain of suicide, and used self-harm as a way to punish myself for my perceived misdoings to god, my family, myself, and most importantly — to others.
I feel like I’ve failed. Just in general. I feel like a total good for nothing fuck up who has failed Astra because I’ve spent the last year getting high out of my mind to distract from the fact that my dreams seemed to disintegrate mid-air after a severly traumatic event with someone I trusted, and that I had nothing to catch me.
I keep on trying to forgive myself. But I feel as though no one else will understand the immense pressure of millions of people seeing your work, seeing the worst moments of your life, and telling you that you are responsible for the future and the world and you fail to deliver when it feels they need you the most.
I feel as though I’ve let everyone down by being a human who needed time to figure out human things: as though somehow the pit of drug dependency and isolation I’ve crawled into was a moral failure of mine. I still get so frustrated with myself, although the circumstances surrounding that depression are something no human should have dealt with alone.
I met someone incredibly kind at a party recently who knew me by my previous work, and said, “used to work on safety apps”. It stung, and it had no reason to. They were genuinely so sweet and kind, and all I did was turn 5% of our conversation into a blade to hold myself over.
Publicly, I haven’t released anything since 2020 (although I’ve never stopped working). And the pressure I feel every day to be doing more is leaving me in a chokehold.
More than winning, I want to feel as though I’m doing something for this world besides being an alien on a foreign planet. I want to treat the world as a guest who picks up the dishes after a particularly tasty dinner. You’ve shown me such a beautiful experience. Please let me pay it forward.
I’m still learning what it all means: to be a CTO and executive director intertwined into the lives of millions at 21, to push myself into softness instead of harsh edges, and to stop continuing the cycle of being my mom. Not because I don’t love her, but because I really do. And part of loving your parents is not carrying their pain, so that you can achieve things they didn’t.
At the end of the party, I left to program in a dark room while everyone else mingled, and I finally finished the MVP layout for Astra’s natural disaster evacuation app. A kind person found me, and then only talked to me enough to tell me it was important and made of substance before leaving.
Two juxtapositions: the person who knew what I was, and the one who knows what I want to be. I feel trapped in between the two more than ever.
I don’t fucking know. How does someone go to living in a severely abusive situation to being a world-famous app developer at 15, to being an autistic adult burnout with an extra side of bootstrapping a non-profit for 6 years and having my first CTO position?
I wish I had the answers. There’s nothing about me that’s relatable or normal developmentally speaking, and some days it collapses into my lungs more than others.
I’m just learning to try to hold onto these things: I love my mom, and I know enough about how she struggled to not want that for myself. I love Astra and Faura, and I need to learn to hold that love without destroying the object of my affection in the meantime. I know I need to be kinder to myself. And most importantly, I just need to get the fuck out of my head, eat, and go to the beach with my friends.
