2024: Emotions to flow through 🐉
EOY lessons & intentions for 2025 + a long story
2024 challenged me with all kinds of strong emotions. I felt infatuation, rage, beginnings of depression, and embarrassment like never before. Ironically, my main intention of the year was to #ThinkDifferent… and hell did I dislike the change! However, I now see the value in rebuilding virtues like confidence in a healthier and wiser way. Instead of doing things to prove others wrong and feed a never-satiated ego, I can just flow. Instead of fretting why I’ve failed so much, I can just embrace everything as part of the journey. I’m grateful for everyone who was a little or a big part of my year.
There’s nothing to fear. If you are positive about your future, plan for the details, and create it every day, you will enjoy the present and rest assured that life will happen as it should. You won’t need to accelerate or halt the process artificially. Everything you need to know, and the ability to figure the rest out, lie within you, you know the answer, you are enough. You don’t have to adjust to or follow other people’s agendas because you are earning and creating your own glory. Though you can’t avoid mistakes and you won’t get it right on the first go, you can flow through them, do your best, be grateful for the data points, and bump into another wall. If you listen to your heart, body, mind, and spirit, any kind of positive change will be easier. If you follow your intuition fast and wholeheartedly, if you express your emotions in the moment and don’t carry them with you, you will live in peace, happy and without regrets. Do not escape, produce. Create quality time with your family because you love them and they love you. Write things down so you don’t forget them. JUST FLOW 🐉.
Winter
After >2 years, my family and I finally had a family (road)trip. We chose Oaxaca. Though I think a lot of it is overly romanticized in social media, I fell in love for the Tule tree, the Monte Alban pyramids, and my own romanticizing of a presynbiotic era
After that, we drove my car to Monterrey so I could finally explore the city on the weekends. Monterrey is not a walkable city at all, especially not from campus. Since public transport is not the cleanest or safest and UBERing all the time would be too expensive, driving was the best solution for me — Yeah, uni life in Mexico is quite different to Europe/US. Most students in my campus are local so they live with their families, and only drive to school during work hours.
Anyway, gaining the confidence and freedom of driving around in a bigger city, doing my groceries on the weekends, going to some restaurants and some cafés (even when doing this alone) were little game changers for me this year, compared to 2023 when I mostly spent my time at the school’s empty library on Sundays.
The downside was how I made a lot of these mini-adventures an effort to please the people I wanted to befriend. Being the most prestigious university in Mexico, Tec’s campus in Monterrey is where a lot of the Mexican rich kids go to. I started to feel like I wasn’t wealthy enough to hang out with the cool guys.
I obsessed over posting Instagram pics of me eating at the trendy restaurants to prove my worth, or even WHOOP stats of my runs or how well I slept. As a non-athlete, I didn’t end up finding this gadget valuable after all, and I’ve done more progress in my diet and exercise routine now that I’m not distracted by it.
Spring
Speaking of which, my biggest win of the year happened a little later in the year. After years of blindly feeding the terrible habit of emotional eating, I became aware of it. Moments of enlightenment combined with a terrible stomachache and nutrition counseling to help me change my eating habits for the better. Now even back home, I don’t recognize the cravings I used to have. Even if I didn’t get in much better shape, my mental peace is priceless.
Back to March, I made fibers from agave waste in 18 days (from ideation to bottling). It was a wild experiment because I needed to boil the fibers with some acids and no professor would lend me a fume hood so I ended up buying a gas mask and doing the experiments outdoors on a Sunday morning.
Though my mini stove couldn’t go as far as to make fibers that could actually be used in clothes, I did make myself proud. I could finally look at the goals I’d written down in 2021 and 2022 about touching lab-grown cotton I made with my own hands, and say “It’s not cotton, but I made it!”.
Alexis and Lissie from the 776 foundation were incredibly kind in believing in me when I had nothing but drive, and idea, and experiments. It was so humbling and inspiring to meet founders from the first and second cohorts in Austin, and to take a picture with Alexis and my scrappy creation.
While LinkedIn is all roses and celebrations, many of the first cohort fellows were radically transparent about their journeys. More than two had major pivots, some took time to explore what to build next, some who seemed to be doing well ended up closing their venture after the program… a few alchemists went from an idea in their heads to innovative companies with sales and millions of dollars in venture funding — It’s all part of the journey.
Hanging out with those 20-year-olds was the best part of my journey. To outsiders, my next decision would be completely irrational: I quit the fellowship.
It was by far the hardest decision I’ve ever made, and only what I do during this time will determine whether it was a good one. I’ve previously written and spoken a lot about the multiple factors that drove my decision. First I subconsciously saw fellowship more as an end of itself than a means to an end. Second, I thought the science was more important than making something people want. Third, I put myself in the worst environment for this: I was not taking classes but I was living on campus and doing experiments there (I had no community).
Getting punched in the face this early was the best life education I could get. I’ve heard “many people would love to have had that experience and lessons at your age”. I rather like to think of a universe in which I learn that way later and spend a lot of time trapped in my own mind. Yes, I miss my ego, but having crushed it means I can rebuild it in a much healthier way. In short, falling is a chance to start a new.
Back as a college student, I took the only two synbio/molbio courses Tec offers for undergrads. Sadly, I had a terrible professor who excused himself of knowing basic molbio stuff (let alone more advanced techniques like CRISPR). For some time, that reinforced my great discontent with authorities. I couldn’t believe how someone couldn’t take the responsibility of teaching the next generation of biotech builders seriously, especially when we’re paying the institution thousands of dollars to do so.
Nevertheless, I made a very good friend in that class and met very smart and dedicated people whom I’m surprised to call friends. They were all a break to my ego. They challenged me, they let me see that my unfair advantage called curiosity wouldn’t last a minute if it turns into overconfidence and lacks continued hard work.
After months of unsuccessfully attempting to get someone’s attention through those Instagram post, I gave up and deleted my account on April 27th without letting anyone know. I ran a 21K at 30ºC which was the most terrible running experience I’ve had, and I participated in my country’s presidential elections for the first time. I’m not proud of how informed my decision was. I’ve allowed myself to be a history and economics ignorant all my life, it might be time to change that.
Summer
Aspen is the most magical place I’ve ever been to. The greatness of nature inspires me like nothing else does. When I look at them, when I’m in the middle of such a pure place, I get reminded of how wonderful life and our world are, and I’m compelled to pledge I’ll be my best self and give back the beauty that I’ve been allowed to experience in the way that is pure to myself.
Whatever this whole thing is. God. Universe. Thank you for letting me experience that beauty.
Next, I went to London. And I spent a lot of time thinking about the question “what will my work be?”. I thought I needed a great grand vision to be excited for and wake up every morning to work on. I thought I needed to find the answer within me, before I started. So I didn’t.
Naomi Nakayama is the incredibly kind and creative person who welcomed me into her lab those weeks. Through patient conversations resembling socratic dialogue, she taught me lessons worth more than any experiment I could’ve done there. She let me know “this is a safe space, tell me what you really want to do in this life so I can know how to help you advance through your journey”.
So she put human and lab resources at my disposal so I could realize, as people now say, that I can just do stuff.
I thank God for the opportunity to get to speak with people like her. Calling her my summer mentor is something my 15-year-old self could imagine but not see as clearly as it actually happens.
Then SciFoo. One of those groups and times when you realize there are crazy people out there doing crazy things. Like, are you really telling me there’s a Google engineer that makes a living out of making silicon universes that evolve on their own? Or people that spend their days figuring out how humans will evolve into cyborgs?
Thank you, universe, for the hell of a ride it is for even one of these people to consider I should spend a weekend with them.
Fall
One of the personal blog posts I wrote this year was called “Between the top 0.1% and the bottom billion”. I wanted to capture how weird it is for a Mexican 20-year-old to spend a summer between people at the “caliber” of Sam Altman (I did see him at Aspen) and feel so welcomed by incredible scientists like those at Naomi’s group… to then go “back to normalcy” between college students and professors in a still developing country, most of whom are in a rat race for grades or money instead of a personal journey of significance. Exceptions exist in both worlds but most of the time it’s clear in which one I feel a greater sense of belonging.
I recriminate myself for feeling discontent where I am because a) I have the agency to change it (I could buy tickets to another city in a matter of seconds and get a job that I like) and b) I’m actually part of the privileged 0.1% who not only has all her basic needs covered but has a loving family and crazy opportunities to fulfill professional dreams, like the ones I’ve told you about before.
And still I’m biologically wired to traitor emotions of infatuation, envy, and inadequacy. Through a great deal of courage, I did something I became really embarrassed about. After that, most of my semester I felt the most self-conscious I’ve ever been. I felt like people were observing me and making fun of me, even if they didn’t know me (like security guards). I wouldn’t say a word in class, and would feel a very subconscious sense of envy of strangers who seemed happy, confident, and smart. Because that’s the version of myself that I didn’t yet know I’d lost.
Reading Malady of the Mind, a book about schizophrenia, might have been detrimental at this time. It made me really sad and reflective about people who have unjustly lost their ability to discern fantasies from reality. The saddest part, is that sometimes medicine is not a cure but a tradeoff. The person who used to be (and who, by the way, is often a high-achiever) is never the same again.
We know so little about the mind that conditions like this have only got reasonable treatment (medicines instead of electric shocks) in the last 70 years and have only defined diagnostic criteria in the last 50 years. The lack of awareness of such symptoms, and the fact that it’s often not directly inherited from parents, means that most go undiagnosed in the CRUCIAL early stages of the disease. Some are abandoned, some are stigmatized, a lot of patients and their families suffer even if treated. Many can’t afford the expensive medicines required to live a life with dignity. This happens in the US, you can only imagine what goes on in other countries.
As hard as it is, one of the greatest college courses I’ve ever taken also made me think again about what we consider a “normal” state of mind. The course was on utopias and dystopias of the Renaissance and beyond. We read books ranging from Utopia by Thomas More to 1984 by George Orwell, and discussed films like Matrix and The Truman show.
This last movie felt like a “reverse-schizophrenia” case study. Give that baking soda to a synbio dreamer like me and you get a crazy person — At one point, I just felt like anything was possible. If I could take skin cells and turn them into egg cells and make a baby, what are the odds that there are just crazy worlds out there that we don’t know of? Like a planet that is built in the shape of an iron that leads to weird societies, or that somebody else actually created us?
But hold on, because we also read Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach and we read about ecofeminism. Throughout all these works, we learned how language shapes thinking, like how calling a woman a “bitch” and that word having a negative connotation implies a simultaneous patriarcal offense to nature and women alike. Don’t even mention 1984 and how language can literally be an oppressive weapon for entire societies.
So how do we determine something’s an illness? Is it that the person him or herself suffers? Isn’t the acknowledgement of suffering the realest life can get, according to Buddhism? Are we oppressing people with conditions like schizophrenia, TOC, or even homosexuality?
Contrary to all other courses I’d taken, my greatest takeaway from this one was not along the lines of “we should respect women, nature, and our neighbor”. It was: question everything — For example, what if my family is actually right in saying that homosexuality is a digression from an ideal state? What if, as my mom thinks, it is being lazy by not acknowledging our nature? Or, what if Silicon Valley culture is not the best the world can get? Why be a college dropout founder when you can spend more time deepening your knowledge, for instance?
Some of you might get mad for me making such questions about sexual preference, especially knowing that they’re mislead and biased. This reminds me of Paul Graham’s question “what can’t you say?”. I think it’s totally okay to question why climate change or homosexuality exist and whether our current understanding could be wrong. After all, it’s questioning about its effects that has lead us where we are.
The next crucial step, which most people miss, is looking at the data and “updating their priors” (as elegant people say). Simple contrarianism is very stupid. As far as my current understanding goes, the difference between a conspiracy and a hypothesis is that the latter is refutable, and is backed by data that makes sense.
Winter
The rest of my college term felt eternal. In fact, every year since I entered college has felt like a never-ending ride. Maybe because one of the stories I blindly believed in was that I could only be wildly successful by dropping out of college. The more times you look at the clock, the slower time seems to pass by.
“It’s only four years and you’ll be done for life. You’ll actually miss it” is what most of my family, especially my mom always tells me. It’s complicated that we grew up listening to such different stories. While my family is sad because I’m actively rejecting what they see as a lifetime opportunity, I’m sad because I feel like I’m “only” sitting in a classroom while I could be “changing the world”.
I tried yoga for a month, which was a chance to practice discipline, meaning “do something you committed to, especially when you don’t feel like doing it”. I also tried leg machine exercises which helped me run faster than I could ever get myself to run by just running. The last 10K of the semester was an ecstatic night run in the rain, and I broke my PR to 55 minutes.
I cultured cotton calli but then didn’t know how to build a business around it. I brainstormed and conceptualized “YOI: the longevity towel” which would be made out of cotton infused with vitamine E and resveratrol so the towel was part of your skincare routine, working for you instead of against you (most towels harbor a lot of microbes that you rub your face with.
Unfortunately, growing cotton with such properties makes no sense whatsoever. Some people have tried a similar concept with GMO cotton that grows colored so you don’t have to use dyes afterward. However, it’s hard to standardize that color, control the supply and demand, make enough colors, etc. Similarly, YOI could rather be built by adding those substances to the yarns or the towel AND the actual benefit people’s skin would get from using it (compared to a direct application) is unclear.
In any case, I still believe there’s an opportunity for innovation in home textiles like towels and bedsheets, given they’re in constant contact with our skin. Bryan Johnson, for instance, sleeps with copper bed sheets as they have antimicrobial properties — metal-infused textiles are already common place.
As part of my entrepreneurial scholarship at Tec though, I got a trademark for my brand, TULE, and I incorporated the company Tule Biotechnologies. I will likely have to pay to close it down though, since I can’t keep paying Stripe to maintain it, I’m no longer in “my startup era” and don’t have plans that require a US incorporation in the near future — Worst $500 ever spent, or “just part of the journey”? 😅
I didn’t read many books this year, but Shoe Dog, The Timeless Way, and The Alchemist, reminded me that I just need to flow more. Stop forcing things. Do what comes naturally to me. Don’t be the person coming up with startup ideas, or worse, things to do with my life. Just go fully down on the things that I’m interested in, double down on what I’m good at.
My father also helped me see that the reason I’m often so anxious about the future is that I’m not optimistic about it. I worry that “I might not make it” or that “I’m falling behind”. When you believe that the best is yet to come, and you’ve planned for it according to your terms, and you’re working on that, there’s nothing to fear. The future is planned, and things will happen at their own time. You can focus on acting in the present, and enjoy that.
On campus, I felt a aversion to trends like using Stanley bottles, wearing Alo hats, or long socks on top of leggings. Looking back, my lack of mimetic desire for those things was genuine, but I did develop an opposing desire of not having them. In my mind, I was still signaling something but instead of that signal being “look at me, I’m cool because I can buy these things” it was “look at me, I’m superior because I don’t need to buy these things”.
This thinking goes way beyond fashion. I started to feel the same about entrepreneurship and Silicon Valley culture. In retrospect, I was a fox who’d tried so hard to get some grapes and failed, so copped by saying they were sorrow anyways — Social media is already cheap anyways, Alo hats are now basic anyways, run clubs are cringe anyways, entering YC is now mainstream anyways.
I shall find the balance. There is such a thing as seeking attention for being different by rejecting “the current thing”. The cure, again, is to flow. If there’s something about startups that you do like, you’re not just gonna stop doing it because you think it’s not trendy anymore. If you don’t like the expensive bottles, you’re not gonna buy them just to fit in.
As mentioned elsewhere in this post, it came a point in which I exploded like a pressure cooker. I realized how much of a Grinch I’d turned into and acknowledged that was not “my essence”. I’d been so quiet, hadn’t spoken my mind for so long, and had surrendered to so many of people’s ways, that I only wanted one thing and one thing only: REBELLION.
I told myself that as soon as the semester ended and I went back home for the holidays, I would sing SO FUCKING LOUD. I would dance, I would express myself, I would be free and happy again. Though that sounded like a nice weekend plan, it would not suffice to get release my all of my creative energy. I needed something else, something bolder.
Fuck it, I’ll either travel the world or move to the city of my dreams for a whole semester, figuring how to financially maintain myself there while doing what I’ve always dreamed of: make GMOs and tell stories.
Sometimes I question whether I was being naïve and emotional or following my true essence, and whether telling my family about it before I had everything figured out was detrimental to my plan or did let me see that my plan was just a vision — More clearly, I was wondering whether the decisions I’ve made these past two years have been based on escapism and proving something to other people 😬 🫤.
Regarding escapism, I think the answer depends on whether you are producing and the reasons why you quit the current road — When I came back to university after the fellowship, I wanted to make sure that I wouldn’t be lazy. I rose my GPA and delivered nearly all my assignments (which I tend to be forgetful about 🙊). Same went for the fall term. Even when I hated some courses, I made sure I finished them, passed them, and handed in my work.
As for proving myself… I had an interesting call with a psychologist! 😂 So yes, some things I’ve achieved in my life have been because I wanted to prove my mom that I’m not the submissive cute lady she wants me to be. That I can be independent and superior to any man she wishes I marry, and surely independent from her too.
HOWEVER! Aren’t some great entrepreneurs also motivated by the desire to prove other people wrong??? Can’t this be my fuel? If I reject it, will I ever achieve anything? Can I really find genuine motives to achieve great shit and leave my fucking mark in the universe?
We go back to this: just flow.
My first weekend home during the holidays I ate with my grandparents and talked about my plans of taking another semester off school. My grandmother gets really nervous about this thinking (my parents have opened their minds a lot throughout this time but my grandparents are, well, older). She said THE MOST HURTFUL AND WRONG thing someone can EVER tell me: YOU CAN’T.
I remember the feeling of RAGE as I’m writing this. “WHO THE F DOES SHE THINK SHE IS TO TELL ME WHAT I CAN AND CAN’T DO?! SHE IS NO ONE. SHE HASN’T ACHIEVED ANYTHING I CONSIDER GREAT. SHE WANTS ME TO BE A MEDIOCRE STAY-AT-HOME WIFE LIKE MY MOM AND HER BECAUSE SHE DOESN’T KNOW ANY BETTER.
I WILL PROVE HER SO SO SO SO SO SO WRONG THAT SHE BEGS SHE HAD NEVER EVER OPENED HER SINFUL MOUTH. I WILL MAKE SO MUCH MONEY AND IMPACT THAT I’LL NEVER HAVE TO TALK TO HER AGAIN AND SHE CAN ONLY TALK ABOUT ME TO HER STUPID SIBLINGS ABOUT HOW GREAT I AM, ONLY REGRETTING THAT SHE CAN’T TALK TO ME ANYMORE BECAUSE OF WHAT SHE SAID”.
That type of anger is one of my favorite emotions. It makes me feel empowered, and it reminds me of my younger self who used to feel that way most of the time. It motivates me. Or I should say, it used to.
Again, I don’t know if I should reject or embrace this apparently wiser side of my which has grown this year and invites me to take a lighter approach to life: “don’t hate her. Forgive her because she doesn’t know better. If you build an empire just to prove her wrong, you’re only pleasing her in your mind. She will neither be hurt nor surprised by what you do. Whatever gains or pains you get from your emotions and your actions, are only yours to keep”.
Apart from that, how long can the rage fuel really last? Will it get you through the hard times? Will it serve as company when you’re lonely? Will it make you happy? Will it really fill your heart? Will you think such a life was worth living? Is it the maximum, the highest, expression of your self?
Emotions are powerful, and they can build empires. The question is whether we could have built better empires with a cooler head. Could Luigi Mangione have made a bigger change by starting a movement or an organization that changed healthcare more than killing a person? Was his rage short-sighted in terms of time?
Could Elizabeth Holmes and Mark Zuckerberg have built better companies had they not let their egos get in the way? Though Zuck got his way, could he have prevented a lot of social media’s negative effects had the company been conceived under different circumstances? Could Holmes have quit at the right time and started another company that did change the world for the better?
For exaggerated it might sound, there have been times when I feel I could be on a road like Luigi’s or Holmes’ — I can feel my rage and ego so deeply that I will do almost anything to feed them — “Almost” makes the difference. Though I’ve wished some people didn’t exist, I would never kill if someone else’s or my life aren’t at risk. I can be persuasive enough to get things I want, but I’ve promised myself not to lie myself and others in my way towards achievement.
Because WAY MORE than external recognition, I want to know I WON. I want to know that whatever I get in life, I EARNED. The point of the video game, to me, is not getting passed on to the next level, but challenging yourself and realizing that YOU leveled up. That’s the real, healthy ego. Making yourself proud while keeping your virtue.
To end this year, I spent a lot of time with my family. I hugged my mom, I chatted with my dad and my grandparents, I laughed with my cousins, I went to the gym with my mom. I couldn’t believe how two years ago all I wished was to go away, and all I wished for now is I could stay a little longer.
I felt love for my family again and deep nostalgia for the scarce time we have spent together since I moved to Monterrey. I’ve cried a lot about this and I’m crying again now. Because I wish so hard they could follow me wherever I go, whether that’s the US, Europe, or Monterrey. I wish we could have dinner together again and talk about our day, and we could see each other grow.
But I know that they have their life here, and I’m starting to create mine elsewhere. The best I can do for now is treasure the calls and the holidays, keep them updated on the ups and downs, and listen to their stories too. As an only child, the whole family tends to revolve around me, but we can all benefit more from a more 360º relationship.
I read part of Charlie’s Almanack (the Stripe Press version) and got to think about old age differently. The more years, the more experiences, the wiser, the better life tastes.
Don’t Fear, Just Flow 🐉
