thoughts

Tonight I am tired. Not physically tired, but emotionally tired. I’m tired of people, and the next three days don’t look like they’ll be offering any respite.

Despite all public opinions to the contrary, I am a decided introvert. It suppose it’s hard to look past the playing in a band, working with clients, being loud, and having massive hair. When I took my first Myers-Briggs test back in college and my type started with “I” everyone was surprised but me. I felt suddenly sure. This piece of paper with its little lead-filled ovals had confirmed something I had intrinsically known for 18 years.

What I knew was that I always preferred a book to other people. That was one of the questions, actually, “Do you prefer to read a book or go to a party?” I thought. “No contest! The book. Obviously.” What I didn’t completely appreciate at the time was that a spectrum of introversion and extroversion isn’t measured purely on an interest in reading over talking, but in where you draw your energy.

I do not draw my energy from other people, which makes my chosen professions as client guy and band leader a little suspect. Aren’t I exposing myself to people by definition in both of those settings. Well… yes. But, it’s important to remember: I never meant to be an account man! I was obsessed with communications, and the next step was managing creative projects, and those projects had clients, and I had to talk to them, and the whole thing just snowballed until I was overseeing hundreds of clients. It’s the same with the band, really. I wanted to write music, and then I wanted to play the music I wrote, and then I figured I had to play it in front of people to know which songs were good, and now I’m in a cover band that plays five hour sets.

The distinction is that I don’t really draw energy from the clients or the crowds. I draw energy from the problem solving and from bettering my own last best solution. It’s a lot like yoga, actually. I’m in it just to deepen my practice.

Which brings me back to today. I’m out of energy. I’m like an electronic device with a desperately blinking “charge me” light, hoping to be plugged into a wall. It’s hard to find enough non-sleeping time to get that charge back, even by expanding my bubble of introversion to include E, EV, and even some of my bandmates, colleagues, and close friends. Sometimes there just aren’t enough hours in the day, and then your weekend is parties and shows and rehearsals and dinners, and then it’s right back to the energy depletion again.

As I look forward to my birthday next week marking another year of introversion, I think I might need to learn some new techniques. I know there are major music stars who are introverts, but what about business leaders? CEOs? Media darlings? If I want to keep leveling up in this life, I need to figure out how to recharge better and faster, and how to run near empty longer.

Hopefully I can learn that all from reading a book, and not from going to a party.

Watch as Jeff Lemire (who I genuinely really love as an author) undoes the past three years of progress in X-Men books in his first issue of Extraordinary X-Men by returning us to a pre-Avengers vs. X-Men “no more mutants” situation that is the fault of the Inhumans. To be fair, this has been rumored for months as an editorial directive, and if anyone can make it palatable it’s probably Lemire (or, you know, Gillen).

Here’s my reaction when I read this page last night…

 

Looks like I’ll still have plenty of hate reading to do in All-New, All-Different (but completely the same) Marvel!

 

It turns out if you have striking, dark blue hair that fades up to a sort of silver and glows in daylight a lot of people stop you to tell you, “Cool hair!” Any time I leave our building for a walking meeting it’s interrupted by at least one comment.

The occasional street comments or catcalling I’ve previously experienced have been occasional homophobic comments and threats, because I apparently walk very gay (???), so the first few times strangers called out to me I was on the defensive. I was certain they had to be mocking or belittling me in some way. Then, for a few times after that I just blushed and gushed, “thank you so much!” And now I just reply out of reflex, “Thanks!”

It took a week for my response to become reflexive. I’m not tired of the comments – it’s kind of people to notice! Yet, I colored my hair for me and not for a single other person on this Earth. I also know that if I reset my hair to dark brown, or even bleach it again, the comments will cease. I will return to being an unremarkable guy on the street.

I also know that the hair changes people’s perceptions of me. Demographically, people are saying “hi” to me who usually would not give me the time of day. My hair signals some element of counter-culturism to them – shared membership in a club. Similarly, I cut a peculiar figure on the train reading my comics or wrapped around a laptop.We all know appearances can be deceiving, but I don’t suspect people assume I’m off to direct a multi-million dollar book of accounts!

All this makes me wonder how must it feel to be a woman, whose mere existence seems to invite both kinds of comments – the violent catcalls and the appraising mentions, and the assumptions of your facility or lack thereof. As a feminist and someone who tries to be a good ally, I have read countless articles and followed movements like Hollaback, but it’s one of those things you don’t appreciate until it happens to you.

Actually, this is on my mind not because of it happening to me, but because of EV.

She is a striking little girl. All of our friends tell us she’s the perfect blend of E and, the classic curly-haired Italian toddler with hints of E’s Chinese heritage across her features. Everyone we know has seen her before, and they know us, so they’re not making a lot of comments about her appearance past the normal “oos” of cuteness. However, if we bring her to a store or to a place with people we haven’t met, here are the two comments we get most frequently: “Her hair is amazing!” and “She’s beautiful!”

Clearly I don’t mind the hair comment (it’s really quite incredible), and I’ll take “beautiful” over anything related to “princess” (and, yes, I’m still responding, “Oh, is that some level of Engineering degree? Princess in Engineering?”). Yet, this past week it’s struck me that I had to wait over three decades and dye my hair blue to get strangers to comment on my appearance, but it’s the first thing they do when they see EV. I’m not certain what parents of toddler boys get, but I don’t feel like I go around telling them “He’s so handsome!” as one of the first remarks out of my mouth.

My invariable response to the “beautiful” comment is “and she’s very clever.” People have surprised me in how much they get the hint and ask what she enjoys or if she likes books. Every so often we get someone who doesn’t take the hint. “What a heartbreaker,” they’ll reply, “just wait until she’s a teenager,” or some other such sexualizing nonsense about my two year old.

Which they think they have the right to say because she is a girl. Mostly we just shuffle away but someone eventually will catch my wrath. It will be words smooth and slick as the sharpest blade and I will slip it across their neck so fast EV will never realize what happened until they are crumpled behind us without a response.

We’re both happy to hear about you liking our hair, but we both already know we’re beautiful – you don’t have to tell us, and it doesn’t matter all that much anyway.

Despite being a parent for two years now and working at a startup a bit longer than that, I don’t think the idea of “Start-Up Parenthood” really hit me until earlier this summer. That’s despite my colleague Anita Andrews doing some very compelling and data-driven writing about the concept both on her own blog and our RJMetrics blog, The Data Point all this year.

I’ve learned there are two sides to the Start-Up Parenthood concept. One is the commiseration side – being able to discuss the ups and downs of parenting while also making a company profitable for the first time with your peers. That’s the same as it is for anyone in any unique industry.

The other side of the coin is the non-traditional, highly-flexible, very transparent world of start-up culture, and how that world accommodates your life events (or doesn’t).

The first week of July an avalanche of positive life events toppled onto the people close to me all once. They are not all my stories to tell, which is why this post is coming to you two months after the fact, but the upshot was that both our child care and E were suddenly unavailable to hang out with that toddler while I was in the middle of one of the busiest and most high-difficultly months of my career to date.

The answer? I left the office for a week with hardly any notice. Effectively, the least important aspect of my positive life equation was me physically being in an office from 9-to-5, or even working within those hours. From the CEO down to people reporting one manager below me, everyone at RJMetrics was okay with that. As a result, I got to spend an unadulterated week with my little girl, working during naps and in the evenings. It’s the most time I’ve spent with her in any one week since she was born. We had so much fun. I also did a lot of work. The thing that probably suffered most was my sleep.

My startup let me do that – it’s one of the many opportunities that come with the challenges of startup parenthood, an insane circus act of juggling chainsaws while swinging from a trapeze waiting to be caught midair in the mouth of a lion.

(And, I have the added bonus of my spouse, E, working in the same trapeze act – sometimes we’re bodies flying past each other through the air, others being the net that catches the other when we fall.)

Here’s the thing: I don’t think any of that exclusively has to do with me being a parent, or being married, or working at a startup.

I’ve seen these crisis weeks before. The week we bought our house. The month I was writing the first draft of my erstwhile book. The week E was recording and mixing an album with her collegiate acappella group. Some of my non-parental colleagues have had these weeks when they adopted a new pet, refurbished their house, or hosted family traveling from abroad.

It doesn’t take a baby to be busy, and it doesn’t take working for a startup for every second of every workday to contribute to the compounding future value of a business. Anyone can have a demanding job and everyone has a passion or a responsibility outside of work – and some of them can be as 24/7 and all-consuming as having a child.

I haven’t written about Start-Up Parenthood in so many words because I don’t want it to be a conversation just about a protected class of parents in exclusive unicorn jobs. It’s a conversation for everyone about flexibility and that the fiction of home/life balance is that you can separate the two from each other.

When we frame the conversation about a need for balance primarily around parenthood, it hurts everyone – parents, too. It makes it easy to turn the world into parents vs. not. I’ve never been interested in that world. My professional life was challenging and rewarding for a decade before having a baby, and it’s going to be just a vibrant for the following decade and beyond. I wanted flexibility pre-baby and never had enough of it, and now that I have it post-baby I am not going to hoard it from my colleagues who want the balance but not the baby.

Parents who work at startups are people who by definition have two unrelenting duties, plus many others. We can share and cope with each other while we give aspiring parents a glimpse into our lives. But we can also model what balance can look like for anyone – no matter their job or their family life. We can inspire anyone to find a way to do what they love in every waking hour and leave little time wasted.

I am going to start writing and talking about my own Start-Up Parenthood, and when I do I want you to know that it is a story about you, too, even if your hashtag would be #CorporatePolyamory or #ArtisticSingledom.

We all want love, success, happiness, flexibility, and balance, and #StartUpParenthood is just one model of having all of that and more.