Psychology Hack
How My Father’s Cruel Words Shaped My Life for 45 Years
“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.” ~Toni Morrison, Beloved
My father was on the other side of my bedroom door, banging hard on it with the flat of his hand, screaming at me to get back to the table and finish my plate.
I told him there was no way I was going anywhere near my sister after she’d just hit me.
That’s when he said the thing that gutted me.
“Well, you know, I used to give your mother a good swift kick in the ass when she deserved it. You act like that, and you get …
How I Found Hope After a Life-Changing Diagnosis
In 2014, at the age of thirty-one, I was told that I might soon have serious difficulty walking.
For months, my body had been sending me signals I did not understand. I experienced numbness, vertigo, falls, loss of coordination, difficulty reading, disorientation, bladder problems, and other neurological symptoms.
I would walk down the street and suddenly lose my balance. I would look at a page and struggle to process the words. Parts of my body stopped feeling familiar.
Eventually, an MRI revealed more than thirty lesions in my brain and more than twenty in my spinal cord.
I was diagnosed …
What My Tired Eyes Taught Me About Paying Attention
In my second year of Ayurvedic medical school, my eyes started burning around nine o’clock every night.
I did what most students do. I rubbed them, blinked hard a few times, and went back to the screen. Exams were close. The lecture slides were on my laptop, the reference texts were PDFs, and the practice questions were on my phone. My whole education had quietly moved onto glass, and I was reading it for twelve or thirteen hours a day.
The irony took me an embarrassingly long time to notice. By day I was memorizing Shalakya Tantra, the branch of …
The Hidden Danger of Burnout No One Warns You About
For most of my career, I trusted my ability to assess risk.
I spent decades working in technology, much of it in information security and startups. Risk was not an abstract concept to me. It was my job to anticipate what could go wrong, question assumptions, identify vulnerabilities, and make decisions when the consequences mattered.
And yet, at one of the most important moments of my life, I failed to recognize a vulnerability in myself.
I was severely burned out.
I didn’t understand how much it had affected my judgment until after the financial consequences could no longer be undone.
