pony

Free Markets

Editing Self-Censorship

To combat some of the stress last year, I started a companion site for my more personal relationship developments. It's been nice to have a place like that where I can synthesize some of my more raw journaling thoughts surrounding my partner.1 To put it very briefly, I've made significant life changes lately to get closer to markets and further from draining distractions.

Along that journey, I came to understand self-censorship much more intimately. It's something I've dealt with for a really long time, so when I saw it pop up in a GitHub issue this morning, I knew I had to write about it.

Childhood Labeling

I've thought a lot about how to bring this into my work, and I just don't see any way to explain all this without it. I've elected to keep it explicitly out of written regulatory drafting because I think it reads off as an excuse, which it is not. That said, I was put through therapy for behavioral problems from 12–13 and labeled with Asperger's.

It was framed to me as something that could be good. For instance, I was told that successful people like Mark Zuckerberg had the condition. All I knew was that I harped on small details like a LEGO missing or out of place.

Over time it started making more sense as I didn't really feel the same emotions I saw in others. That was when I started really understanding masking, which is putting on a face for others. The act involves much mental effort to project what most consider normal emotions.

Social Politics

I did this constantly all through life2 until I finally met the incredible DRS community members who embraced me and my work. My insecurity in showing my true self likely contributed to my success in ossifying and penetrating key bureaucracies.3 These years of discovering accepting friends also led to my understanding that I was trapping myself in a masked relationship.

Background Skill

Over about a decade of practicing masking, I got extremely good at it.4 For example, I sweet-talked an administrative aide in college to apply an unqualifying elective to cover a science credit needed to graduate because I thought the required classes were boring. That took a few months and paled in comparison to the popularity feats I achieved in high school.5

It also showed up quite discreetly in my video meetings with the Commission, which is one of the reasons those sessions took such a high toll on me. I specifically recall getting 12 pints of ice cream two days before our second call just so I'd have enough energy to mentally prep the masks I'd need depending on the different directions the conversation went. I was so anal about the process that I created a retroactive planning document of all meeting attendees, their exact attire, background settings, etc.6 It was on maximum difficulty7 because these were video meetings where what I wore and how I performed facial expressions directly affected how much leeway regulators gifted us.

And of course, I've used this understanding for years in the Community Fund to slowly shift public sentiment towards my message of independent asset management. While I don't yet have explicit results in that field, I have substantial private correspondences and internal effects on operating policy which buoy my aims. I wrote at least three pieces there last year which took hours of contemplation per paragraph, a key sign of heavily masked wording.8

Altering Example

One thing I love about these Micros is that I just get to write my truth. That unfettered output gives me the freedom to fill an infinite space with my working revelations. I find that approach works wonders in creative efforts where expression can flourish without constantly checking output against centralized guardrails, standards, or policies.9

I have done a good job of keeping masking out of my Syndicate work on GitHub, especially within issues.10 But today I noticed myself removing phrasing to soften my initial conscious reactions. It happened after I decided to reference a PR I completed on stellar-protocol which had Leigh speaking somewhat confused in response to some grounded code changes I'd done which had out-of-scope context.11

I understand that these Foundation members receive an inbox ping after my reference (or at least there is a paper trail in the Stellar repo), so I write with the same preparatory caution as a communication right to them. At least that had been the case with my past Discussion posts, but it was wildly out of reasonable scope in this situation describing a technical TAD3 encoding idea. So I edited12 my incisive diction back in after posting the issue, ignoring how it highlighted another's mistake in an environment I'm attempting to politically influence.

Unencumbered Transactions

As a brief preface, many of my first economic transactions in the fandom come after establishing either a friendship or a political relationship (difference being the extent to which someone helps me achieve my aims).13 I was coming from my work mode and using the art as a crutch to structurally support my stress, which made this inevitable. But finally, now that I have my own space as a single stallion again, I can approach trades purely for their personal joy.

This appeared yesterday in a DM with a vendor from Ciderfest who routinely sold me artsy keycaps. When I messaged them with a massive personality on Etsy asking about some more, they sent back an appreciative but resistant, professional response. It's made me realize that it's okay for personally charged exchange to happen without emotion.14

Life is just so much easier when simple purchase (allocation) decisions rely only on capitalist equals going back and forth with currency. Purchases don't have to be their own adventure, as I was taught in childhood journeys to acquire technology, and relationships don't have to last forever after a trade. It's how economies move forward at the velocity of capital rather than the speed of feeling.

Sentence Perfection

As you might've noticed, I tend to write in sentence groups of three,15 often building paragraph groups of three. I find this lets me express my thoughts in a strong, flowing manner without leaving incomplete concepts hanging out on their own. It is a style choice that aligns with how my mind thinks things through and develops concepts on paper.

Coincidentally, I've found this style often fills up GitHub comment boxes in a particularly appealing visual fullness, where the end paragraph horizontally fills a code block perfectly. Previously, I allowed visual conformity here and in other docs16 to override my original diction in favor of wording that would fit into a perfect text alignment. Like I would replace a word with a shorter synonym just to keep the text from wrapping onto a fourth line and "breaking the format flow."

You can't build a house without tearing up some dirt to level nature for a strong foundation. Achieving anything when building something means going against the natural inclination to do nothing. It means getting messy and bending the world to your way and will, even if that means an unnatural-looking scaffolding snaking around a project.

It was silly and naive to adjust my writing so much based on the expectations of others' reactions or the unknown, powerful hand of line spacing. I chose instead to break things17 when necessary to become everything I can be in service of my aims.18 And if my projects happen to conform perfectly to text spacings or relational platitudes that satisfy others, well that's just a nice cherry on top.

  1. I've always used the "partner" diction despite only dating women. I think it does a lot of good things regardless of gender. Firstly, I can't picture myself writing something professional with the word "girlfriend" in it. And I find "spouse" equally questionable given it completely contradicts the concept of voluntary, non-coercive human relations in the free market (presuming government involvement). ↩︎

  2. See, for instance, all my old YouTube videos, playing the persona of an extremely energetic personality in courses and promo videos. My real life was a slightly tuned-down version of this, where I'd routinely spend half an hour dressing properly or cleaning up my cheeks. I always saw the mirror as someone else to put on so that others would accept me. ↩︎

  3. This is more of the focus on that other new site. In a perfectly free market, raw meritocracy would obviate the need to do this as is present in a world full of emotional people (for defensible reasons). But as I'll soon make clear, this is just a completely different mental track for me. It has little to no connection with quality asset management. ↩︎

  4. Most of my formative experience with the practice came when managing optics between my parents, who divorced around the time of therapy. I've come to recognize that my mother has an extremely dependent emotional regulation system, which led to disruptive consequences in my own emotions if I failed to calm her anxieties. This would show up, for example, in limiting and reframing details of the descriptions of what my brother and I did when we spent the weekend with our Dad. I remember one of my first YouTube videos was me walking around in a parking garage describing the intense ongoing effort of de-escalating evening verbal matches between them on the phone. ↩︎

  5. These are discussed more in the introduction to the Dale Carnegie course on my YouTube. That content also differentially covered my security in Friendship is Magic, which was the one place I could feel at home as myself growing up. I thought the creative energies in the fandom died out until I rediscovered everyone last year. That has been unbelievably refreshing and the first source of community in my personal life which I can align with without masking c: ↩︎

  6. The exact document gets into the minutiae of apparel choices and some bits of speaker tone. I planned written response narratives based on things like who showed up and how much they spoke. And I could visibly see the concepts I brought up communicated through other Commission policy announcements throughout the review period. That is to say, I feel my efforts well proved their worthwhileness as they set the stage for what is now an unbelievably friendly working environment of safety, compared to last Administration. ↩︎

  7. I normally take video conferences for external (masking) parties standing up, partially to open my airway for more lung capacity. It's a trick I learned from high-school band that carried over into my educational speaking. I dread engagements where I need to get a point across while seated because I know I won't have the same persuasiveness of electric oratory. Hence, it meant a lot when I needed to sit down for one of the meetings to conserve energy. ↩︎

  8. This telltale advanced phrasing ties back to my points around societies at large and bureaucracies in specific. People generally associate a lot of emotions with money, unfortunately. This was really easy to hear when Anke talked about allocating ~30M in grants, which is not substantial in real assets. I'm taking my time because I need to divorce their connections with control over money to embrace a more trusting environment based on SCP. ↩︎

  9. This is not to say that there should not exist collaboration agreements such as social consensus around common techniques. But it does mean being able to understand all these rules on a broad industry-wide level before approaching a specific challenge with all one's faculties and none of the traditional commanding oversight. This independence when creating lets builders shamelessly integrate personal faculties into their best efforts with zero masking for superiors. Anything else is a slippery slope down to acting like a job robot without personal alpha. ↩︎

  10. There are, for instance, large swaths of the TAD3 docs with pretty egregious formatting and incompleteness. And, apart from code shipped with typos, all this is public for anyone to criticize. Thankfully, because of our present tightness, there's been no public response, and my direct publishing with incompleteness has been fine. This really helps develop complex systems which can take a long time to think through and get working their best. ↩︎

  11. That is to say, one would have to examine more public information than just the lines of code I changed to understand why I made the changes I made. I've opted to keep a lot of my communications with the SDF vague and open like this to track the amount of my institutional acceptance. For instance, it's clear when I receive candid and free responses from DevRel members that they have not talked to engineers about my work and intentions. Once I mention anything technical on my working agenda, they chat internally and become much more formal, just like how the examiners had to escalate to SEC leadership and align to strict procedure. ↩︎

  12. It looks pretty weak politically to edit a message, as it conveys either a lack of confidence in what was written or inept publishing contemplation prep. But I just couldn't care anymore with this and other recent messages. I noticed my mistake, whether typographical or self-erasure, and I fix it when it happens. I'm getting used to the idea that I need to take the project in a direction to move things forward. And I accept that the whole world may not always see me as making the best choice they might consider from their own different perspective, limited or not. ↩︎

  13. I suppose that isn't the only factor, as I'd consider Chives a friend despite his greatly helping my mission. But certainly in the early phases of a connection, the starting point and first impression connect greatly with whether or not I see an objective to be gained from someone like Prince, as an example. It reminds me of the Bon Bon reveal in that everything is still real once we're at Slice of Life, but obviously it does affect internal optics and participates in the amount of energy I devote to masking. While I can speak raw and freely with most with common show interests, I put in considerable efforts to hasten my rapport through similar professional interactions with AJ. ↩︎

  14. This contrasts heavily with my choice in 1558 to spend so much money circuitously advocating for DEX development rather than just deploying that capital by hiring freelancers. I thought I had to do all this complex emotional politicking, which I pulled off very well in the aforementioned headshot commission through unrelated injected public (feminine) remarks. I'm adapting the insight now as there's an artist I want to commission and support for my intimate Sombra headshot. As I spent weeks planning out my approach and relationship, they broke their computer, and I realized that I could just do both through their popularized Ko-fi page with order detail input boxes—no guessing required. ↩︎

  15. With 3 or 4 sentence footnotes to support. The extra space down here really lets me squeegee out the insights I'm circling around upstairs, while keeping a direct main narrative. The deviation depends on whether I really love what I'm writing about. If you see an extra sentence in the footnotes, then you can tell I'm conveying something sitting close to my heart. ↩︎

  16. See, for instance, the first pages of the original OCC comment, which flow in left alignment like the ends of a wave. I also have aligned the ends of lines to match each other pretty consistently in my TAD1 VS Code drafting. I thought it was a sign that I was aligned on what must be the proper "answer" for a problem's context. I see now that it was probably compensation for the lack of alignment in my relationship. ↩︎

  17. For instance, I ceased my word editor when drafting a technical, legal response to Orbitzen's questions of my interpretation of StellarBroker in the context of securities law. After trying to reconstruct the many pages of contents for hours, I settled on a conversation which orally affirmed our existing public code's alignment. Had I really wanted to nail the points into term, I could've finished recreating the preamble. As it stands now, they don't understand the impassable problems with central routing which are blatantly apparent to anyone familiar with Wall Street's corrupt infrastructure. ↩︎

  18. This includes when it takes dedicated time to rebuild walls I find need to crash down. For instance, I've spent the past couple months painfully learning Dvorak, which has been on my agenda for years and vocally noted in my journal as needed at the end of 2024. Like, yeah, it does suck to get over these construction humps, but we're going to need to overcome these roadblocks at some point to reach the final destination. So I just take pride in knowing we can get things done now in happy times. ↩︎

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