Rough Patches

On dealing with some self-disappointment

Being self-aware isn’t the most fun, I have to admit. The upside is that you have the words and metaphors to discuss what’s going on and why you feel the way that you do. The downside is that it becomes painful to be yourself. Perhaps it can become painful to be yourself while also not understanding the mechanics of the pain. That’s not really an experience that I can speak to lately.

A while back someone asked me if I was ‘burned out’. It’s not burnout, it’s more like self-loathing? It comes from a place of wanting to have a character or self-attributes that I don’t, currently (like discipline or more compassion towards others). A desire to be making the things that I committed to making happen in the world a few days or weeks or months ago actually come into being, but instead watching myself painfully do a million other things than execution.

I’ve been struggling the last few days. Part of it is a string of personal disappointments, hearing about how other’s think about things or are choosing to move forward with their perspectives and money in ways that aren’t supportive. Part of it is knowing that I have had the luxury of time and resources but feeling as though I’m not really putting them to use. I’m squandering them out of self-pity, or something. Part of it is knowing that some of the tasks I’ve set out to do are ambitious and not feeling particularly up to the task. Part of it is having said I would do a thing and then just not doing it, day after day after day.

One example is that Base58 is a nonprofit. We have a board, and quarterly board meetings. I missed the last board meeting which was back in September (or October?) and said that I would send a written update to the other board members. I never sent the written update, and now I’ve forgotten what I’ve been working on or what the todo list is. There’s plenty of things to do but I’m running away from it.

I feel like my character is being tested lately, and I’m failing the standard that I’d like to live up to. That’s a standard of communicating with others in a timely manner, if nothing else. It’s also as simple as doing what you said you would do. I don’t do what I’ve set out to do, and then as a result I don’t communicate with others because there’s nothing to communicate that I’m proud of. I think that’s the root of the pain: I have an image of who I’d like to be, or what I’d want my life to be like and I feel like I’ve fallen short and am unable to do the work necessary to bridge the gap.

It’s interesting that this is similar to how depression works, at least in my experience of it. I spent a good amount of time in my twenties in an emotional rut that I would describe as some form of depressed. The worst bit of being depressed is that talking to friends or family becomes a sharp reminder of who you’re not, and how painful your life feels at the current time. I would stop wanting to talk to friends, and ignore people’s phone calls because talking about problems or hearing about their life didn’t seem like something appealing to do. It goes on for days or weeks or months and then you just don’t really have a life anymore. You have an embarrassment at all the television you’ve watched or the number of posts you’ve read on the internet. There’s not much to tell other people, nothing has changed in your life. You still feel bad about yourself and your relationship to the rest of the world.

It’s hard to get out of ruts, even when you know you’re in them and which direction small progress could be achieved.

What Happened The Last Month or So

• I gave a talk at LABITCONF and Satsconf about how introspection opcodes work. I re-recorded it in English this week, you can check it out here (English) or here (Spanish). I also did it in Portuguese at Satsconf but I don’t think the recording is out yet.

• My friend Isabel is launching a podcast all about Bitcoin Layer-2s. She was super gracious enough to invite me on as her first guest! You can watch it on X.com here.

• I posted almost daily travel vlogs as I went through a bunch of events and countries! I stopped when I had a private trip through Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil with some friends and also quit when I went home for Thanksgiving two weeks ago. You can follow along on my journeys on Tiktok or X.com or nostr.

• I was a mentor for the Bitcoin 4 Open Source (#B4OS) project that Libreria de Satoshi held in Buenos Aires for two weeks in early November. I was there for the second week, and gave a lecture on how lightning works along with an informal conversation about the process of applying for grant applications in the bitcoin ecosystem.

• Julie did some amazing work getting bitcoin++ talk and workshop videos posted! You can check out her work on YouTube. I’m really excited about the shorts format that we got together to help feature all the people that talked at our events over the last year.

• Made plans for bitcoin++’s upcoming 2025 year and put together a pitch deck for our upcoming events. Hoping it share it next week. We’re looking at something like 6 events on five continents next year.

• I attended the Bitcoin Research Day at Chaincode Labs last month, and hung out with friends (old and new) in NYC for a week. It was really interesting to see Matt Corallo of Spiral’s work on routing lightning payments using replayable data from his node (blog post here), and getting an update on the state of MuSig2 and FROST integration into libsecp256k1. Congrats to Jonas, Chelsea, and the rest of their collaborators for their work on the MuSig2 paper, BIP, and implementation.

• Went home to Houston to celebrate Thanksgiving with friends and family.

Things I Could Use Some Help With

• I’m looking for sponsors for the upcoming bitcoin++ events in Brazil and Austin! Stay tuned for more information about how to get involved. I’ll also be sending out some volunteer signup information. Finding and managing sponsors is legitimately the most stressful part of running a successful event series, and I’m grateful to all the people that have reached out to help out the last few days/weeks/months.

From Around the Web

• The CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot in NYC this/last week. They’ve been hunting for the guy who did it, and just pulled in a man named Luigi Mangione. His mugshot got released. I dunno ya’ll, this photo of him at booking and the picture taken from the night of the shooting show the shooter missing the unibrow. Can you grow one back in a few days?

• Britney went all the way to Nairobi, Kenya and made a Base58 LARP happen for the Africa Bitcoin Conference this year. Really stoked to see her pulling it off!

• Long-ish Twitter thread about the five pairs of ruby slippers that were made for the Wizard of Oz, and where they ended up in the world all these years later.

Alright, that’s all for me. Feels like a mistake to have let this drop off for so long. I’m looking forward to sending the next update!

Lisa