what's unhealed in the creator shows up in the work

Crying as I’m writing this and also worrying that the small group of people who have read recent blogs and watched recent YouTube videos - though it’s felt so difficult to try and make a video in a way that felt nourishing, rather than depleting, that I haven’t felt like I could manage it for the last month and a half - are tired of me expressing difficult emotions.  Maybe it is oversharing.  But I know that I trust the people who share in the way.

And I’m pretty sure that the sense that people are tired of my saying anything has a lot to do with what I’ve internalized growing up in a narcissistic family structure, and the feeling of being continually despised that I wish wasn’t an integral part of being the scapegoat child.

It’s coming up for me quite heavily lately, along with its relationship to the way my family structure worked to convince me that what I have to offer this world doesn’t have much value, and that I don’t either….and then I feel melodramatic writing that and like I’ll also be hated for having said it. 

…and then I want to make sure to qualify it from all angles. My family members mostly aren’t conscious of doing this, even as they treat me with disdain so intense they have to be at least somewhat aware.  None of them have shown any interest in therapy or practicing some form of self-reflection, as far as I know.

They were trained to do this by my malignant narcissist father, I remind myself.  I automatically default to giving them the benefit of the doubt, to closely examining what I’ve done to contribute to this situation that feels like a hole. But my father, the originator of this, has been dead now for years.  I wish I could say that the horrible energy that came from him, and the damage its done to me, didn’t live on through the rest of them, and that the sort of matriarchal puzzle piece that meets it - the part that believes I do deserve to be shunned and abandoned by my mother - didn’t carry on inside my own mind as well. I healed a lot of the narcissistic dad stuff, but the roles everyone else played in that awful dynamic live on, and they came into sharp focus for me when it was time for my father’s funeral in a way that I couldn’t see before then, because he placed himself so at the center.

I know that eventually Vipassana will eradicate this from me.  But it’s a deep sankhara, and it seems to be surfacing more of late.  In the past, that’s happened before something was about to clear.  So I’m hopeful that this pain is releasing soon.

All of this coming up - and of course many people have a hard time sort of being plunged into a revisitation of family trauma around the holidays, whichever holidays you may celebrate - had me reflecting again on the idea that what’s unhealed in the creator of a thing, whether it’s a work of art, a non-profit, or Facebook, shows up in and through the thing that person creates.

I think a lot about this concept.  It’s a big part of the reason so much of Big Tech is terrible.  That plus capitalism.

And so it’s important for me to be really mindful of this phenomenon in myself as it relates to Seeds, so that Seeds can be as healthy an organization as possible, and so that I can be a healthier, happier human being too. 

I think I know what this means in the immediate term, as I’ve been navigating this pretty deep, old wound from my mother, which led to a painful interaction with her today that I sort of can’t describe.  I feel the sankhara in my heart chakra and it gnaws.  It comes with an intellectual understanding that sometimes helps, that knows her behavior is irrational and unkind, that it isn’t my fault. But the emotions those behaviors in her trigger are so much stronger. When I spoke to her today, she went so far as to tell an obvious lie, a stupid one she knows I know isn’t true, that there’s written proof that it’s a lie, so that she could devalue me and something I had done for her in a genuine spirit of generosity and gratitude. 

I’m crying a lot more as I write that because there was that purity in the intention behind the thing I did for my mom.  And the way she shunned that and went so hard to devalue it also devalued Seeds, and the almost 15 or whatever years now that I’ve worked on some version of it.

It made me think about an interview I saw recently with the actress Kathy Bates, who’s great. She talked about what her narcissistic mother told her after she’d won an Oscar, how she dismissed it and said, “it wasn’t like she’d cured cancer.” And Kathy thought she’d forgotten to thank her mother in her Oscar acceptance speech. The interviewer told her that she had in fact thanked her mother, and Kathy was so grateful to him. She had been carrying guilt about something she’d never done for 30 odd years.

It’s sort of like that with my mom. But Kathy Bates is 77 years old. I hope to not carry this with me for that long.

…and I think typing this, treated this as a journal even though all of tech and “business” and “professionalism” would say it’s inappropriate to share something like this on our website, has led to something of a breakthrough right now for me as I write this.

I already knew the shape of it, but now I feel a much greater sense of clarity, because what my mom said to me today regarding me and my work and Seeds is the energy I have stayed in, so far, for all of my life. 

I may have escaped it for pockets of time, but it’s been my consistent state.  And that has led me to more of the same energy, because that’s what’s so familiar to me. So I was unconsciously continuing to align with it and attract it even as I became more aware, increasingly conscious of the fact that I don’t want to be on this wavelength anymore.

So this cruel thing that happened today, I think, is a gift in that sense.  It’s making me really realize that I want to leave this behind.

And then I also feel strange about speaking about her at all, as though that’s ungrateful, even when it’s about bad things that have happened that I think it’ll help other scapegoat kids of narcissistic parents to hear, as vague as I’m being, which is also about protecting her out of guilt.

The main problem I see for Seeds - the challenge it must clear to reach the next level, at which it’s able to rapidly connect with many kind people at once so that it really begins to grow - has to do with what I’ve internalized from my family of origin about my “having less value.”  Very related to this is what I’ve internalized in this misogynistic world regarding women “having less value,” and then it’s very painful to me when I see that play out within my family of origin too.  

That’s then played out through Seeds in some ways I have no control over (at least, not yet), like the fact that 1% of VC dollars are invested in solo female founders like me, and the number is getting even worse, and also no one really seems to give a fuck.

But I hope to have control over that someday in the sense that I want Seeds to be so widely used and available that it makes VC as a sector die.

Then again, that ambition relates to Bitcoin’s initial aim in a way - it wanted to transcend flaws in the legacy economic system.  But what we’ve seen since the Bitcoin ETF was launched in January 2024, especially, is that institutions like Blackrock and Goldman Sachs have simply glommed onto it and made it an ugly extension of the awful things they already do.

I think it’s a blessing that Seeds is not yet on the radar enough that we were seized by that.  It’s really fucked up Ether this year. 

Ether should be $12,000 or so right now, if it had maintained the ratio to Bitcoin that it more or less kept up for many years.  But it isn’t, and the more I trade it, the more convinced I am that this is because Blackrock or similar is using it as a Bitcoin hedge.  I’ve noticed that there will be a small move each day around 6 a.m. my time - so right as New York is getting to the office.  I’d guess that Blackrock has like 5 traders assigned to used tens of millions of dollars to move the Ether price around for ~60 minutes at market open, to draw more retail traders in…and Seeds was never meant to be trapped in that sort of vise.  It makes me sort of devastated to see that Ether has gotten caught in these weird clutches.

But I digress. I feel clear that the family of origin I chose - because I believe I chose to be born to them to help me learn certain lessons that would be useful in this life, that will help me bring Seeds to many, many people - were meant to play out this mechanism that has felt like an unceasing assault on my sense of worth by the people a child is most supposed to trust.  My natal chiron is at 29 degrees of Taurus, the anaretic degree, and I understand that that means a person’s primary healing in life will be about their sense of value - and the anaretic degree is the most intense in this context.

So I have to fully let go of any voices in my head that tell me that I deserve to be devalued.  And Vipassana will get me there in the truest way, because it will remove the sankhara that has programmed that into me. But since it comes from my mother, it’s maybe the hardest form of this to shed. Maybe the deepest version of this wound.

Seeds has other flaws.  Our product has needed improvements for far too long.  We’d like our users to have a dashboard that allows them to quickly understand the impact of their gifts and the value of the SEEDS they’ve received in thanks for giving. The SEEDS mutual aid pool is currently very depleted, and we have to find a way to prevent that from ever happening to this extent again.

But that’s a function of my sankhara about value as well.  I have hired many engineers, especially, who undermined and devalued me.  Some of that is a function of misogyny in the tech sector specifically, but it’s also an extension of this patterning I’m still playing out from within.

I’m writing this the night of New Year’s Eve.  I understand that the astrology is meant to really pick up beginning February 20th, 2026 or so (at least, Western astrology points to this).  There are also going to be big activations in Aries in April, I think, and I have an Aries sun, moon, and ascendant.

For this reason and several others, I think this means I’m about to be activated.  And so these things that really are quite painful for me, about not having a safe parent I could trust or consistently rely on, and how I took that in as a reflection of what I deserve….the pain seem to be debilitating me to a greater degree lately because I can’t take these old beliefs with me. And once they go, I suspect Seeds will soar.

So I’m trying to just feel the pain of it with equanimity, practicing Vipassana as it comes in waves.  

I’m already able to feel some gratitude toward this old pain, for what it’s taught and is teaching me. 

But it’s time to move on.  Time to go.

-R