Prelude
It was a crisp November morning in 2019. The clock had just hit 3:42 a.m.—time for Bellatrix to transmit her recurring encrypted message: a two-beat ticking. It had started a few nights prior with the mysterious appearance of an Orion-constellation-shaped mark on my left cheek, tucked beneath the crease of my extra-dark circles and perched above the zygomatic arch. Bellatrix’s star position pinched at the exact moment the signal was transmitted. Just as I was about to begin an obsessive decryption session, reality, ever sardonic, intervened with a blunt verdict:
“So this is what it feels like to go completely insane.”
Dear Reality, please elaborate.
Based on my records:
The pattern on the cheek was acne—from a furious, bleeding gut rejecting the anti-inflammatory med meloxicam with formidable conviction.
The “ticking message” was simply the heating system adjusting to the seasonal transition; for some reason, it always ticks exactly at 3:42 a.m.
The sci-fi adventure was a prednisone-induced psychosis.
Escapism was a lovely alternative to a seemingly insurmountable reality.
To make things exponentially worse, my Vipassana meditation practice had sharpened, which meant I knew that I knew that I was experiencing psychosis. I couldn’t really tell if I had spoken to—or dreamt of talking to—the people around me. That’s sort of… not cool… at the workplace. My trust issues with myself were faring quite poorly.
I began questioning the nature of my “reality.” As my intricately designed illusion of “safety” started to crack, everything I’d conveniently deprioritized and shoved deep down started to ooze up like a tsunami. My thoughts were firing at a rate well over my processor’s pay grade. And the worst part was that there was nothing I could do about it.
Now What
Seven months of sleepless nights,
Herculean efforts to not buy into the conspiracy theories my mind was concocting,
a body trembling like a malfunctioning engine,
and a dissociated, Joker-like grin dripping with childlike folly—
I told my therapist the whole saga, the broken-record montage that had been holding me hostage.
She didn’t flinch. She invited me to lean into the crash with a tool called Internal Family Systems (IFS).
Oversimplification of IFS: a technique for identifying your internal “parts,” accepting them as though they are members of an inner family, and assigning them tailored roles and responsibilities.
I liked that it was an evidence-based way to manage my cray-cray.
The War Dynamics
Before I met IFS, my internal dialogue looked something like this:
Mind: I’m not giving my career up for “health.”
Body: Cool. Watch me shut down.
Mind: FUUUUUU—
Body: Lights out. Spine out. I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.
Career: dead.
Corporate America: “Come back healthy or not at all. We wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.”
Mind: sigh… fine.
Here’s the silver lining, though: I had managed to identify two dominant parts:
Kali, the Body (?)
Ramona, the Mind (?)
I had a starting point.
Diagnostics
This Ramona-sided war had accumulated a substantial amount of emotional and physical debt by prioritizing fast living and financial gains over all else—a garden-variety 21st-century mindset. It was a lose-lose strategy, though. With lemons for leverage and zilch for sanity, my optimal choice was pragmatics over pride.
I begrudgingly acknowledged that a change in leadership was not only warranted but overdue. Kali got her first victory in years. I asked Ramona to take a step back. Calling her a sore loser would be an understatement.
The Art of It All
As a peace offering, I handed Kali a blank canvas and switched into listen-only mode.
I made three earnest promises:
The new operating model would be co-built.
Its sole input would be empirically backed, objective observations.
The imaginative escapism skills would be repurposed as a creative tool for expression.
Given my history, Kali was skeptical. She hesitantly opened an extremely confusing, weirdly cryptic line of communication through art. But hey—she was willing to let me in.
In an excruciatingly slow burn, through vivid renderings, Kali lifted the veil on:
Her layers.
Her pain.
Her misgivings.
Her shame.
Her anxieties.
Her prism.
Her memories.
Her wisdom.
If I’m being honest, I was quite overwhelmed. I didn’t do emotions. My therapist taught me a new, elusive technique—crying. It was liberating—shout-out to our ancestral engineer who designed this sophisticated exhaust mechanism.
The Science of It All
While I knew the emotional layer required its own strategy, I also needed to keep things objective (Promise #2). To create a controlled environment, I stripped away non-essential interactions, cut external stimuli, and narrowed my focus exclusively to the experiential layer.
I isolated the language layer from causality, as the inherent bias in language was distorting my observations and, consequently, altering my choices.
This exercise led to two milestones:
The distinction between Ramona (language) and the Observer (previously acknowledged as “reality”) became clear and tangible. I now had a net total of three discrete parts.
I had established a single source of truth: the Observer’s Observational Database.
I assigned a restless Ramona to implement a classification algorithm—to decrypt Kali’s multisensory renders, label them, contextualize them using the observer's database, and articulate them in the language layer.
With my art and science in place, it was time to test the hypothesis.
The Roll-out
Initially, the system ran like any start-up.
The discovery phase was long.
Chaos.
Teams at each other’s throats.
No benchmarks.
Roles made up on the spot.
More chaos.
Then, about 1.3 years in… my new governance structure started to pay off. The standalone epiphanies began to converge.
The compounded epiphany landed.
The patterns were my organ systems!
Pleading from their cubicles of flesh,
waiting—almost desperately—
to be heard,
to be nourished,
to be held,
to be loved.
I had been a pretty terrible god to my inner world—
a tyrant in a meat suit.
I had prioritized “success” with some mind-over-matter BS.
I devalued the one material belonging I have any autonomy over: my body.
I was filled with such regret and remorse.
Adulting 101
In a reversal of intent, the atonement efforts took center stage, and I established a Fellowship.
Rewired the motherboard.
Built a council.
An executive committee.
A democracy of organs.
To contextualize their patterns.
And synchronize my actions.
The committee meets weekly with occasional meet-ups on an SOS basis.
Ex-Co Meeting Notes
Kali (Digestive System/Gut), Chief Financial Officer:
“Lupus has around a 55–85% resource-utilization rate. Apart from gluten, if we quit sugar and dairy, it will free up resources to stay functional, make half-decent art, and tackle some backlog.”
Ramona (Nervous System), Chief Technology & Product Officer:
“How about I just head to the assisted-suicide facility? We already quit alcohol. The quality of life leaves much to be desired.”
Little Girl (Cardiovascular System), HR:
“Ramonaaaa. We’ve already made the choice… to be. Can we do your morbid jokes later?! How about some concessions for special occasions, Kali? Let’s quit gluten for good (obviously—allergies), but sugar and dairy sometimes? Prrreeetty please?”
Kali:
“I think that’s doable, Little Girl. What say, Tula?”
Tula (Musculoskeletal System), Chief Operations Officer:
“Sugar and dairy make everything achy and inflamed. But sometimes a delicious something-something is worth the pain. My only condition is that we choose a low-pain day.”
Woman (Urogenital System), Head of Mergers & Acquisitions:
“Over my dead ovaries! I need my dark chocolate much more frequently than ‘sometimes’!! It is my poison of choice to regulate the murderous rage that you all refuse to grant me the processing resources for!!”
Aura (Respiratory System), Chief Communications Officer, steps in with three deep breaths:
“Let’s keep it light and breezy. When Woman gets all wound up, Tula clenches, and I can’t breathe. So, unless y’all are looking for another panic attack or fibromyalgia episode, I say we let Woman have her stash until we figure out how to deal with the rage.”
Everyone:
“Okay, let’s take a vote.”
Bill passed: Quit gluten; drastically limit dairy and sugar, with periodic dark-chocolate supplies for Woman.
The ‘It Is What It Is’ of It All
Yes, the workplace is still quite toxic.
Yes, I have achieved Cold War status with a fragile democracy—for now.
Yes, I’m working on inner-world peace through a benevolent approach, whatever that means.
The stars are quieter.
The committee is louder.
It’s a fair trade. For now. ;)
The CEO,
Some no-one
P.S. The Observer is a board member and will be explored further in the Core workstream.
