Reflections on Being a Female Founder
I had mixed feelings reading this. The writer seems an inspiring person, who went though a hard time having a baby. I feel less inspired when I see that even someone capable of such an amazing sequence of choices to create her own success, seems to succumb to the temptation to blame others for her own anger, both at externalities and at her own choices during early motherhood.<p>But I suppose it&#x27;s also humanizing because stress affects even successful people. I guess I hoped that people who had made it world be better at this stuff... but that&#x27;s probably just me hoping my own future success will make everything easy.<p>I like how she shares her journey even if I don&#x27;t always agree with her reactions. It must have been really hard to go through what she went through. And that doesn&#x27;t mean it was anyone else&#x27;s fault or that it&#x27;s just because she&#x27;s a woman.<p>I think reaching for the &quot;this happened because I&#x27;m a woman&quot; model of the world is a mistake because it&#x27;s probably not accurate and in any case if you believe that it&#x27;s disempowering because, like, you just have to accept &quot;well I&#x27;m a woman that&#x27;s my lot now.&quot; And if you believe that and then can&#x27;t do blissful acceptance, the only natural consolation from that position is to take out anger on others. Which is not healthy for them or for you.<p>That&#x27;s a model of the world from which you can&#x27;t make effective change so you&#x27;re just left with anger at the difference between the way you want things and the way they are. blame and anger are tempting constellations but they don&#x27;t help you make effective change and they speak out of powerlessness. so no individual is ever really powerless. it&#x27;s okay to have those reactions of course it&#x27;s normal and the choice comes in do we emphasize those and to what extent do we act on those and to what extent do we choose other actions and perspectives to emphasize. what leads to the best result for an individual?<p>must be quite the identity crisis to go from not being a mother to being a mother and then also from being a founder and CEO to feeling out of place as an employee and finally exiting. in such an experience where all your former pillars of self-identity I changed or move away it&#x27;s challenging to work out your orientation in the world and who you are so it&#x27;s natural to reach for something that seems secure and seems to offer consolation. but I would warn against reaching for something which is a temporary consolation and not a long-term empowering perspective. if I was in this position I believe the best thing for me would be to try to integrate all that I&#x27;ve learned about myself into a empowering perspective on myself in the world and when I felt confident in that and then I&#x27;d work out what I wanted to do next. John Lennon said &quot;you say you want to change the world, why don&#x27;t you free your mind instead.&quot;<p>I think we owe it to ourselves and to &quot;our sons and daughters&quot; to discourage people from adopting disempowering self-identities and perspectives and encourage them to adopt individually empowering ones. One of the things that can be emphasized by that, is personal responsibility. Another, as hinted by the writer, is managing emotions. I think another is owning emotions.<p>I especially liked this part, and found it very empowering, and in my experience it&#x27;s one one right way, &quot;What I have found is that I cannot stop myself from being human, but I can practice dialing down the duration of negative feelings like anger, fear, and sadness.&quot;