I’d like to say I’ve been busy and that’s why I haven’t written in a week but I’ve actually been struggling a little to stay productive.
I blame Brotato.
I need Brotato intervention. I used to make fun of my roommate for being addicted but now I think I’m worse than she is.
I did work on my app, customd.app a little last weekend, upgrading angular to 18. I really really really need to get back into that. I use it for so many different things in my life and I’m convinced that other people could find it useful.
But why am I not spending the time I should be on it? Is it fear of success? Like I don’t deserve it? Am I scared of all the stress that comes with running a software company?
Like what’s stopping me from really diving in and getting this out there?
I guess money a little bit, like before I bought my new house back in March I was investing $500 per month into advertizing it, but I’d hired a group from I think it was Pakistan on Fiverr and they really did not work out, like they never accomplished much of anything advertizing wise in I think three or four months.
I want to try it again with someone local. Hire a marketing director with no experience for like super cheap, give them creative control and a share of the profits, and hope they figure it out 🙂
Is that how you start a software company?
I also have been thinking about my previous few entries. I’m glad I wrote them and got them out there. It’s like now I can move on spiritually, at least from a lot of the anger. Cuz now that I’ve got it all out there and it’s there for the relevant people to find or I’ll direct them to it. But it’s kind of freeing and making those entries and posting them publicly has allowed me to take a step back a little bit and look at my own behavior. Because it’s not all about them and the things they did. It’s really more about how I reacted and adapted to their behavior.
And I made a lot of mistakes.
After writing those entries it’s like I can take a better look at my own mistakes. Like how I never talked about any of it. I know that’s super common to have tons of trauma that you never talk about, but that doesn’t make it okay.
I needed to talk about these things decades ago. That was my responsibility and I failed.
Part of me feels like a coward for waiting until now to let all that out. I could have prevented so many family issues if I had just gotten it out so so long ago.
I could have set reasonable boundaries.
I was going to a place where I felt deeply unsafe for many years and I did it out of this vague sense of loyalty to family and I never admitted how I felt.
Brad was never going to murder me.
It was just an empty threat.
Kids make empty threats all the time.
Or maybe I didn’t want to talk about it because I didn’t want to be called out for my own violent tendencies.
But now I feel like I can look back on it and learn from my own behavior and set up rules and systems in my life that can prevent this type of thing from happening in the future.
Healthy boundaries, enforced in a clear and respectful manner.
Even just a few years ago I didn’t realize this.
Like during COVID I had a roommate who demanded total lockdown. I wanted a more reasonable approach to COVID where we could still go to the store or have people over but she was hard-core nothing is more important than COVID and I went along with it even though I knew it was wrong and was sure that the psychological harm of the lockdown would outweigh the added safety. It was my life and my house. She was my tenant and I still let her dictate my daily life for an entire year to the point where I nearly had a psychological breakdown.
But I’m not doing that again.
Finally, after all these years, I finally feel like I have the emotional and communication tools to understand where I need to draw the line and how to do it respectfully instead of allowing people to force me to follow rules that I’m not okay with like “don’t air our dirty laundry” or “COVID is more important than all other issues”.
And another thing is that I can do a better job now of looking back on all this and thinking of it as a story, like a work of art.
I never really hear about that much, this idea that you can look back on the horrible things that have happened to you and see them as a beautiful yet tragic work of art. Because without the awful things in the world, how can we really appreciate the beautiful.
… but that’s no excuse to let awful things happen.
And you can do the same thing with your own mistakes. Instead of looking at your failures as something to be ashamed of, look at them as chapters in the story of your life, pieces of your character development that have created this amazing complex work of art that is you.
I started taking Brazilian jiu-jitsu classes the other day with a partner of mine. Will be good to do a new physical activity. I’ve been slacking on most of my other exercises.
But I did download a new game for my Stealth Core Trainer: Metalstorm. It’s a 3d fighter plane game. It seems to be online, like I’m playing against real people, but I think the game is faking it and they’re just bots because I’m not getting my ass kicked. But the matches are like 3-5 minutes or so so my abs can’t make it through a whole match. My goal is to keep my plank through a whole match, but it’s going to take some time.
But I was thinking about how I’m a non-violent pacifist, like that’s one of the most important aspects of my identity these days: the fact that I don’t believe in violence or vengeance of any kind toward anyone. I don’t know anyone else who has such a Jesus-like kumbaya view on the world like mine.
But here I am taking jiu-jitsu classes and playing fighter plane games.
But it’s like the peace and love thing really really works for me. I wouldn’t be doing my life like this if it didn’t have massive benefits.
Some days it feels like nothing can go wrong for me and everywhere I turn people are trying to hand me things on a silver platter. I feel that way because I’ve spent the last few years dedicated to being Kind and forgiving and “getting right with Jesus” as I call it (but from a sort of atheist perspective of course).
And I’m far from perfect of course. All Jesus really needs you to do is try… but you gotta actually try… like for real. You can’t just go through the motions or follow the “Jesus kindness script” if they have such a thing.
But I’m not sure why more people aren’t doing it like me when it works so damn well.
Everywhere around me it feels like nastiness everywhere, everyone descending into this us-vs-them mentality, gotta defeat the enemy, gotta “fight for our rights”.
People call me crazy, like if someone breaks into my house to steal my TV to pay for his meth addiction, I’m seriously going to think about that person as an equal to me? His mind and soul are just as important to God and the universe as mine, even as he’s ransacking my home and scaring the shit out of me?
Yeah, that’s not the easiest thing to think and feel, but yeah that’s how I feel logically and in the moment, that’s how I would strive to feel.
But this pacifist perspective is so so rare these days and I don’t understand why when it brings people like me such massive rewards in terms of more friends, more allies, more people wanting to work with me, more people saying positive things about me, more trust and respect.
So why is the world filled with so much nastiness and vengeance?
Maybe I am becoming a believer again. Maybe I’m not an atheist haha
The metaphor of God just kind of works for me lately, and it really is like Satan has captured us, taken over our churches, our government, and dominates our social media and driving everyone toward anger and bitterness and away from the things that can bring us together and gain us success like compassion and communication.
Maybe Satan has convinced us we can’t control it, that we are all just slaves to our urges so we might as well just give in.
Like me and Brotato.
But no. We can control it. We can decide to be better and come together. Just like I can decide to not play Brotato.