SIGNAL 08. The Real Sickness is Abuse Part I

In 3-weeks my life completely unraveled. The shaky ground I was on, fully crumbled and I hit rock bottom. Abuse is the real disease: normalized, systemic, and hidden in plain sight.

It’s pervasive.

Spreading silently through our homes, our screens, our systems. The real disease.

It’s what so much of this world is built on: fear, control, and suppression. Abuse doesn’t always look like bruises. Sometimes it’s the silence. The dismissal. The tension in the room that nobody names.

It shows up in the way we speak to each other, the way we defend or deflect, the way we shut down instead of soften. Across media, politics, relationships, and business. We tear each other apart in subtle, habitual ways.

It’s unkind. It’s ruthless. And it’s robbing us of the real work we came here to do.

We need a new code of language. A new ethic for living.

We need to remember difference is not danger. It’s by design. Each of us holds a distinct expression meant to be lived, not suppressed. The fallacy of separation, of domination and disconnection, has run its course.

We are not here to compete for safety. We are here to build a sanctuary for each other.

Interconnected. Interdependent. That’s the truth we’ve forgotten.

And it’s time we start acting like it.

DISCLAIMER:
What follows might make you uncomfortable. I hope it does.

Today, try one thing that shifts your pattern:
Listen without defense, without fix, without the need to be right. Choose one mammal in your life: your child, your partner, your colleague, your dog.

1. Ask them: How are you doing?

   Pause. Be still. Observe.

2. What are they really saying?
   Not just with words, but with their body, their eyes, their energy.

3. Ask yourself:

   1. Can you receive it without needing to protect yourself?

   2. Can you stay present long enough to break the cycle?

That’s where the healing starts.

If you want to do a deeper dive, I highly recommend Brent Robertson’s Generative Listening workshops. Here is a podcast I did with him.

La Oroya vs Peru, Inter-American Court of Human Rights

My Own Sickness Taught Me This Story

It didn’t start with a diagnosis.
It started with a whisper.

The kind of whisper that creeps into your body when you’ve been overriding the signals for too long.
It started with itchy eyes, nausea, headaches that flattened me. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t move.

But I could feel.

Two weeks of lying down forced me to get honest. I had no choice but to face it all.

The work wasn’t working. The clients were slow, my investors silent, my nonprofit client gutted by sweeping government cuts I thought we had insulated against.
My last relationship detonated, only after I gave more than I had.
My children were struggling.
And I was pretending it was okay.

I was evolving quicker and felt happier than I had ever been and yet, somewhere deep inside, something was quietly screaming:
You haven’t solved the real thing yet.

So I started to dig. Not methodically. Not in spreadsheets or strategic frameworks.
I call it rapid self-interrogation. A wild unspooling of questions, of triggers, of truths I’d been too busy, or too afraid, to examine.

Start with one knot. Follow it to the next.
Let the pain speak.

And what unraveled surprised me.

I saw the patterns:

• I walk away when it doesn’t feel right. My parents called that quitting.

• I bend under pressure, clients expecting too much, me delivering beyond capacity.

• I feel like I’m never enough. People in my life regularly sharing what they don’t like about me.

• I silence my own needs. I keep the machine going at my own expense.

And then came the deeper layers.

I saw the architecture of the world I was still trying to survive inside:

• Law offices where women get butt-slapped and laughed off.

• VC firms where the model is to extract, not nurture, brilliant ideas are dying.

• Sugary and unhealthy brands (I call them ‘drug dealers’) getting rich while the government injects our neighbors with Type II diabetes meds, on our dime.

• Professors at Ivy League institutions trying to mold me into a sanitized CEO, pressing me into a box I never belonged in.

↳ I saw my father paralyzed by regrets he never unpacked.
↳ I saw my mother, her body unraveling from years of suppressed truth, buried language.
↳ I saw my children, cracking under pressure, caught between parents who still haven’t made peace with their own survival.
↳ I saw how money had become the symbol of winning, but at someone else’s cost. That big house, that sleek car, someone’s labor, someone’s land, someone’s silence was traded for it.

Even if that someone was me.

I saw that in trying to belong, I had become the host of my life, never the attendee.
Always showing up, never being seen.

I had abandoned my art. My drawing. My stillness.
Because I thought success had to be earned by force.

And in that state, flat on my back, finally listening, I began to remember.

That I had been suppressed.
Stifled.
Pushed.
Physically, emotionally, and systemically.

I reconnected with my meditation practice.
The teachings of slowness, of cycles, of impermanence.
Not as some abstract spiritual exercise.
But as the only map back to myself.

It all came into focus:
We’ve built a society where someone always loses for someone else to win.
Where extraction is the default.
Where “more” is the answer, even when the soul is begging for less.

But I am not here to win that game.

I am here to remember.
To create.
To question.
To build in harmony with nature, not against it.

My sickness cracked me open.
And what poured out wasn’t weakness: It was clarity.

Not the polished kind that lands in boardrooms or bios.
The kind that whispers: You are rich by nature.
Not by what you accumulate, but by what you carry inside.

Each of us comes here with a gift. But we bury it. Our parents and our teachers show us how to bury it: Under performance. Under productivity. Under the language of survival that society teaches us to speak.

We are taught to suppress what is most alive in us.
Taught to trade our truth for approval, our artistry for achievement.
But no system, no job, no identity will ever make you whole if it’s built on forgetting who you are.

The truth is: we don’t need to be fixed.
We need to be found.

And that’s what I’m doing now.
Digging out from under the weight of other people’s definitions.
Unearthing the gift I came here to give.
Letting that be the map.

This next part is where it begins:
The real work, the real alignment, the real return.

Let’s go there together.