the brutalization of becoming.
I’m freshly 22 now, and it’s been crushing. Yesterday was 4 years since I last talked to my mom. The day after I returned her Ford Fiesta, I left a note in there saying something along the lines of ‘I have to find myself and then come back’.
I always wondered after I left: would I ever come back? What would happen if someone in the family died? What if I went into the world and realized it was not the place I wanted it to be? What if I lost my ambition for my dream and the self confidence to get there?
All of those things happened. I felt like a piece of shit for not coming back for my Uncle’s funeral. I lost my ambition (and am working to find it), amongst a world that I struggle to navigate or understand.
I finally gained the courage to start repairing relationships with my family on her side last year, culminating in calling my Grandma the other day.
That was something I thought I would have to forego forever. I imagined over and over again having to explain to her with teary eyes why I don’t talk to her daughter because we don’t get along and I’ve decided to play God with computer software.
She didn’t ask why I don’t talk to my mom. She asked me about work and if I was still doing my non-profit. I chuckled and said yes. She asked how it was going, and I answered like a politician: without a direct lie, but obscuring the true cost of it.
Recently, I made a very hard leadership call to reduce Astra’s staff down to just me prior to one of our biggest relaunches possible. It’s turning out to be what’s best, and I don’t regret it.
The knife of consequences presses harder. I’m the sole computer person for Faura’s pilot coming into January, owning the product development, design, and programming in under 3 months. I’m driving myself fucking nuts with Astra: I’m forcing my brain to come up with how to build the most impactful non-profit software I can possibly imagine.
Every day, I’m shoveling marketing / product development / management / DevOps / backend sytem architecture newsletters into my brain. When I’m not reading, I’m listening.
I am learning everything. I’m refreshing my email until the refresh indicator goes numb. I’m crafting cold emails, deleting then, crying, crafting them again.
Now it’s time to design this product. I fucking hate this product. I cannot live unless this product can exist, this world needs it. I close my computer and re-open it. I fucking hate this product.
Ashley messages me and asks me what’s happening. My answer is “I am still in the jail box and working“. I am always in the jail box and working.
I have to move fast for us to survive, but also move correctly, but also move in the right direction, but most importantly: fast.
If I fail, dozens of younger and brighter kids than me would tell anything to a VC to take my place. Most of them would probably be richer and better connected than I am, and the only thing I bring to the table is sheer will and shreds of talent.
We get rejection emails left and right that tell us people don’t believe in our ability to survive. I review them to refute their points to future prospects in the future, delete the emails and immediately go back to work. I think about how Valkyrie is the closest thing I’ve had to a best friend in a while, and I’m watching her get chewed up the same way I was trying to fundraise for Astra. I wish I was more connected and better at fundraising to protect her from it.
I work really hard to not think about the rejection email.
When I’m not working, I think about when I achieved a dream of working for my ex-idol and how I had to leave in the middle of the day because I was so suicidal that I was going to break my phone by throwing it so I wouldn’t hurt myself.
I cried and stumbled through corporate office parks in the middle of the day until I found a barren of nothing between buildings. I had a panic attack in the dirt, the empty California landscape around me dotted with the world’s top tech companies being perfect analogies for the fact that I achieved my dream, and it meant nothing.
In the dirt, I realized it’s probably the most impactful thing I will ever do and I want to scrub my touch off it until any traces that I synthesized it vanished. The ambition left. I chased it until it beat the shit out of me and abandoned me in the Bay Area.
Something died there that I will never get back, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing.
A year or so ago when I lost my nerve after that project, I kept asking everyone I could trust: Am I crazy? Am I fucking nuts for trying to build Astra? No one answered. I realized the answer depended on whether or not we would succeed. The fate of your reputation is locked in the future, the consequences seeping through time waiting to find you when you rest from the past.
This is the ‘becoming’ that everyone loves to reminiscence on but never relive. You sharpen, you go from dumb fuck to business leader, you learn and you push yourself and learn until you think nothing else will fit in your brain. And then you try to learn more.
For years, I imagined that I would leave my notions of a big city and go into the woods and a tiny house. To become the best in my field. To dominate myself, my past, and my future. To create what’s burrowed inside of me, and what would never come out. To not only build, but to serve my community. Now it’s time.
I’m either going crazy or I’m actually going to fucking build the most impactful non-profit software company possible, while building an insurtech company too. I’ve thought for days about building an AI companion that built care plans for humans to help them escape terrible situations and I couldn’t imagine if I was onto something or if I was hallucinating buzzwords.
My friend made a remark before my birthday about how I’d soon be gone and would become one of the world’s most famous tech executives. I laughed and thought about the dream I had the night before where everyone threw tomatoes at me and left me in a barrel.
I think about my mom a lot, how the last thing I talked about to my mom before I left her was the fact I wouldn’t leave Astra for her.
Every day, I look at everything I’ve built and say “This is what I left for?”.
Someone last summer in Oakland asked me if I would want to re-experience my childhood. I said no. “Nothing at all?” returns to me, with a glimmer of disbelief and pity. “Nothing” I respond, knowing the pain of creation and becoming. No experience strong enough to forge you is pleasant to relive.
My friend during my 22nd birthday dinner told me she doesn’t believe I can do any net good for the world because the net bad will even it out, so it’s not worth trying. I responded by drinking more whiskey.
I’m holding the praise everyone has ever given me in my hands like evidence of my own capability. It crumbles in my hands as I decide it’s never enough. I want to be the best programmer, the best designer, the best product developer, the best manager.
I think about crying in the office park, losing my mom, evading my grandma, leaving my mom’s car. I thought about the woman I met on the train to Seattle the other day who just got into coding and is trying to raise her kids, and how I wished I worked harder so I could employ her. I thought about Valkyrie and how I wanted to be a better leader for her, and to be a better friend. The pressure hits me like a fucking hammer.
I need to be better. I want to be better. I have no choice but to get better. I have 2 widgets on my phone: one showing me how much of my life is gone and another showing me how much code I wrote.
I wear my dreams everywhere, but I don’t really sleep. I sat in a coffee shop today and wondered if anyone ever got seriously hurt or died because of a bug I found in our security system. I wondered if the time I took to recover from my childhood the past 3 years made our users feel abandoned, the same way my idol made me feel.
I asked my biggest supporters to leave Astra for it to survive: some of the only people around who believed in me. I wonder if they feel the same way I did in the office park. Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that every day he wakes up and it feels like being punched in the face. I laugh, because I don’t have billions of dollars to ease the pain. I take the punches anyways, because I can’t imagine not building the worlds in my head.
This is my future, the one I begged for, the one I dreamt about to orchestrate my survival. I don’t know who I’ll become, or what I build. I just know that whatever it is, I know the price I’ve paid for it.
I’m sorry. I don’t know if I can come back.
