“Once the therapeutic process wears down these defences [sic] and while we work through the emotions they were defending against, we feel worse because we’re now feeling the original pain. But better out than in, as my grandmother would say.”
Wendy Bristow, May 4, 2017, www.wellbeing.org.
It’s the fall and I’m brimming with hope for the future. I return to this blog and find that I had not written anything since February 2017. Embarrassing. It’s easy to explain that spring of 2017 was an extremely busy time. We were wrapping up testing and debugging the updated version of the Descant platform (mostly on me to identify the biggest issues) and I was writing a followup to our patent filing. And then there was my search for an apartment of my own in New York City and organizing that move.
Then stories started coming out that a shocking number of prominent venture capitalists in Silicon Valley had been hitting on female founders who were hoping to raise money for their startups.
It hit me hard. I had my own deeply buried experience with a VC in my first startup. I say buried not in the repressed memory sense but more a longing to only see my experience leading a venture-backed startup in glorious terms. It would take another year before I was diagnosed with acute PTSD and began therapy.
Hence, the gap in posts.
This has been the hardest, but also most essential as in life-saving, journey of my life but I did not stop writing. I never stopped noticing news that relates to my work with Descant. It’s just that in keeping with how therapy forced me to confront how I had lost my voice, I stopped exposing all that work that continued.
There you have it. A very limited exposure of all that I have been through and how that affects this blog. I will write more of the details elsewhere. I touch on it here to explain why I’m going back and filling in the gaps and, in other cases, bringing an old post up to date.
Also, it is core to my conviction of the importance of ensuring people have a voice in how they are judged in credit and risk decisions.
— LaVonne
descant labs 