In Silicon Valley (A Prologue)
In Silicon Valley, I will like starting tech companies in my thirties for the same reasons I liked having open-heart surgery when I was four, or kissing my high school track coach with wine coolers in the parking lots of meets when I was fourteen. I will like it for the same reasons I liked toiling over chemical physics, multivariable calculus, and computer programming in graduate school at twenty-four and pulling all-nighters as a product manager at twenty-eight. I will like it for the same reasons that, later, I will like sitting in the dark and eating an entire bowl of Halloween mini-sized Twix and Snickers after my investors fire me from my own company at forty, and for the same reasons I’ll like exercising to the point of exhaustion, or swimming through the suicide straight beneath the Golden Gate Bridge with my son as witness, as if I might prove my invulnerability or submerge my shame.
I used to believe that only those who had experienced violent trauma or abuse, or who had done things well outside of socially acceptable or prescribed narratives, deserved to feel, or even could feel, shame. But I see now that I hadn’t understood the terminology. Shame is the universal feeling of not being good enough, of being unworthy, and studies show only sociopaths don’t feel it. They also explain why some of us feel it more than others.
