For 20 years, Emily Kischell of California suffered “unrelentingly painful and gruesome periods” before doctors found an “excruciating” chocolate cyst — a cyst containing old blood, fluids, and semisolid materials — on her left ovary that required surgery. A surgeon had to untangle her “mangled-by-adhesions fallopian tube” from the scar tissue that is a hallmark of the autoimmune disease endometriosis, in which tissue that normally stays inside the uterus grows outside of it and can be extremely painful and interfere with menstruation and reproduction.

Kischell was relieved to receive a diagnosis after years of vague answers from doctors.

But after the birth of her first child, she was hit with months of “severe joint and muscle pain” that began with what she thought was a sore throat and would later be diagnosed as an inflamed thyroid gland. “I could barely walk, every bone in my feet felt on fire, and I could barely lift my tiny newborn,” Kischell said.

Now her doctors had no answers for her — except to say that some women experience pain after childbirth. “I was completely frustrated and felt utterly nuts,” Kischell recalls. “How could I be suffering this acutely and not have something medically awry?”

It wasn’t until five years later, after the birth of her second child and the same acute pain flared up, that finally, after pressuring her doctor, she received a referral to a rheumatologist — a specialist in autoimmune diseases. A series of simple blood tests revealed that Kischell had a second autoimmune illness, Hashimoto’s disease, or autoimmune thyroiditis, where the immune system attacks the thyroid, leading to improper function of the gland. It’s common for autoimmune diseases to come in clusters.

If not for the ovarian cyst that revealed the endometriosis, she may have never been properly diagnosed: “My extreme monthly suffering for years would have continued to fall under the category of hysteria.” There doesn’t seem to be a similar term for men’s pain, and Kischell feels sure that if men were presenting with similar pain and symptoms in large numbers, “there would be more attention given to these diseases, and more medical professionals would have relevant training.”

Autoimmune diseases — where the body attacks its own tissues — are often the most baffling to doctors and the most difficult to treat. Considered incurable, those who live with them often must negotiate a life of chronic pain and debilitating fatigue.

Kent Holtorf, Philadelphia-based medical director of the Holtorf Medical Group and the nonprofit National Academy of Hypothyroidism, agrees that women are treated differently than men. He’s seen it in his own colleagues: “They’ll just say, ‘Oh, you’re stressed out,’ and you’ll get an antidepressant, when all along it’s an autoimmune disease,” Holtorf says. Whereas, his experience has shown him that “if a guy comes in with those symptoms, the doctor says, ‘Hey, there’s really something going on here.’”

Treatment for autoimmune diseases often include chemotherapy-like drugs that suppress the immune system and have numerous negative side effects, or “biologics,” drugs that target the inflammatory molecules of pain. Neither guarantee remission of the disease, and many people with autoimmune disease live with daily chronic pain that has to be managed with steroids and opioid pain medications.

So why is research so slow to catch up to a cure? Could it be that 78 percent of those afflicted by autoimmune disease are women? Medical research is still lagging in addressing the reality that women have greater vulnerability to illness and pain and different drug tolerance levels. In lieu of better research, the medical model still tends to treat women who report the kind of pain and fatigue associated with autoimmune diseases as emotional stress or hormones, often missing important diagnoses for years.

While receiving a diagnosis is the first step in getting treatment, a diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) didn’t stop Sonya Huber, a creative writing professor and author of the essay collection Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System, from hearing “ridiculous things” from her doctors during her three-year journey to find answers for her chronic pain. One doctor actually told her, “You’re too young and attractive to have RA.”

Then Huber couldn’t find a specialist who would let her try the biologics that can cause remission in some patients if given soon after symptoms start. “Emotionally it was horrible, because I wanted the pain erased, and the grief involved in realizing I would never have my old life back was devastating.” Recently divorced, a single mom, and a tenure-track professor, Huber was already under a significant amount of stress.

She is convinced that inherent sexism in doctors’ attitudes makes it difficult for women and nonbinary people who present as female to get diagnosed and treated. “Almost every single medical interaction, with the exception of my current doctor, has involved doctors seeming repulsed or disbelieving about my level of pain. If you don’t have RA, you can’t understand how pervasive the pain is.”

Women and nonbinary folx with autoimmune disease may soon be vindicated when the results of a collaboration between Wesley H. Brooks, a research assistant professor of chemistry at the University of South Florida, and Yves Renaudineau, a professor of immunology at the University of Brest in France, make their way into the mainstream. More than 30 years of research have gone into their working hypothesis, “X chromosome-nucleolus nexus,” which posits that the main source of a female bias in autoimmune disease is neither the often-assumed female reproductive hormones nor emotional stress; the culprit appears to lie on the second, inactive X chromosome in cisgender women and those assigned female at birth.

To understand this, a bit of biology is necessary: When the egg and sperm cell fuse to make an embryo, each female cell in the embryo inherits a maternal and a paternal X chromosome—two in total—whereas the male cells inherit only the maternal X chromosome. Most genes on the X chromosome are not related to sexual development, so the female cell only needs one active X chromosome, like in the male cell.

“At some point, when there are only a few dozen cells in the developing female embryo, each cell decides which X chromosome will remain active and which will be inactivated—in effect, epigenetically silenced,” Brooks explains. The inactivated X nonetheless persists in expressing its RNA along the X chromosome, recruiting epigenetic factors to further suppress expression from most of that X chromosome’s genes.

That silenced X chromosome, also called the Barr body, becomes a densely packed structure that is pushed to the side of the nuclear membrane by all the active chromosomes spread out in the nucleus. When the cell divides, each resulting daughter cell essentially inherits the decision of the earlier embryonic cell.

In the best of times, cells remain relatively unstressed, and the inactive copies of gene, such as on the Barr body, remain dormant. However, during the cell’s synthesis phase, when the cell doubles everything (DNA, proteins, etc.) in order to split into two daughter cells, the Barr body is the last chromosome to be replicated.

This can leave the inactive X chromosome vulnerable, with some genes left “open” with the potential for later expression. (Keep in mind that the X chromosome is the eighth largest chromosome and has about 1,100 protein-coding genes, Brooks says.)

Under cellular stress, however, which can be induced by many different environmental factors — chemicals, drugs, viruses, bacteria, UV light, and more — a structure in the cell’s nucleus called the nucleolus expands in reaction, producing more “intracellular machines” such as ribosomes and transfer RNAs (tRNAs), which help the cell recover from the stress. “These machines are themselves RNA molecules and proteins that must be properly folded and assembled into ribonucleoprotein complexes [RNPs],” Brooks says.

The location of the Barr body adjacent to the nucleolus in about one-third of the cells makes these female cells vulnerable. “This puts one of the most active, dynamic, and multifunctional components of the cell, the nucleolus, right next to one of the most inactive components, the Barr body,” Brooks says.

Under stress, the expanding nucleolus disrupts the Barr body, which leads to overexpression of X-linked genes, now from both X chromosomes. Overexpression of some of these X-linked genes can cause the nucleolus to fragment and lose its ability to function efficiently.

If the resulting RNPs are improperly folded or assembled, the immune system interprets them as foreign material and produces autoantibodies to them. “Many of the main autoantigens in an autoimmune disease like lupus are actually components of the nucleolus, at least transiently,” Brooks says.

This hypothesis differs from many others in that it does not put the blame on the immune system or on a yet-to-be-discovered “lupus gene,” but rather on an accumulation of damage from stressful events at the cellular level that disrupt epigenetic control of X-linked genes.

As an even more compelling case in point, Brooks points out that men with Klinefelter syndrome, in which they have an extra X chromosome, have a 14 times greater chance of developing lupus compared to males with only one X chromosome. And in females with classic Turner syndrome, in which they have only one X chromosome, there are only one or two reported cases of lupus. “It points to a role for genes on the extra X chromosome in autoimmune disease development and involvement of cellular stress and the nucleolus,” he says.

Lastly, viruses are one of the more common culprits of cellular stress. In fact, dormant virus genes, of which our genome is partially comprised, can cause autoimmunity problems later in life by becoming active. “Ninety-five percent of us have had exposure to the Epstein-Barr virus, which can be inserted into our genome,” Brooks says. That’s the virus that causes mononucleosis, “the kissing disease,” in teenagers. If the Epstein-Barr virus is awakened later in life, it can trigger the autoimmune disease multiple sclerosis as much as 30 years after the mononucleosis episode.

The good news, Brooks says, is that researchers have identified some genes that can be targeted to block disruption of the nucleolus for new kinds of treatments that don’t suppress the subsequent immune response. He is hopeful for the future.

This biological vindication can’t come too soon for women and nonbinary folx who suffer from autoimmune diseases.

“I felt like a failure when my body didn’t respond ‘correctly,’ but my success has been in making a new life with it,” Huber says. It’s huge and life altering to get this kind of diagnosis.”

Kischell is grateful to have answers and medications, but treating her pain is an ongoing challenge that, in addition to medication, requires “self-taught” lifestyle changes, such as cutting out inflammatory foods, thanks to her own research and the advice of her fellow autoimmune community, not her doctors.

If Kischell could do things over again, she’d have gone straight to a rheumatologist. “It’s absolutely unconscionable that physicians are so ignorant to these diseases and their treatments and symptoms.”

Holtorf joins in the frustrated chorus but offers one suggestion: “Try to find a doctor that tries to be more of a detective.”

He wakes from another fevered dream, a puddle of sweat mixing with the permanent stain of bronzer on the silk bedsheet. This one was a corker: a humiliating walk naked across the White House lawn, his ignominy (Melania calls it his “Little Trumpet”) exposed to a chafing wind.

Ahead, clamoring at the railings, mobs of millennials and Communists rain spit and rotten fruit down on him from the curbside. Hillary Clinton walks behind him, lashing his flabby back with a sheaf of emails, crying, “Shame!” — such a cursed woman — “Shame! Shame!”

Donald Trump shudders. Walks to the bathroom, twists the diamante-studded faucets Melania recently had installed in the gaudy en suite. He splashes a palm full of water onto his face and looks in the mirror, purses his lips into a self-regarding pout, extends his neck to uncrease the double chin. Pats the hair implants into their iconic frozen wave…puffs out his chest, sucks in the gut…then exhales, a long mournful sigh.

And says to himself: “What the fuck am I doing?”

No one has the foggiest idea what they’re doing.

This is my new overarching theory to explain Trump, the universe, and everything. Not you, not me. Neither that dribbling moron over there, nor that tenured professor over there; no one really has a clue.

One of the weirdest things about engaging with modern political discourse in the age of social media and 24-hour news is how little seems certain anymore. The more society polarizes, the hazier it all becomes, a snowball of sophistry and confusion growing in size every time Seb Gorka barks “fake news.”

We are 7.4 billion points of view, each one undermined by its owner’s hypocrisy, hubris, and bias. How have we reached a stage where everyone’s opinion is equally open to question?

In pursuit of some kind of answer, let’s start by visiting my own intemperate shores: Great Britain. During the debates that preceded last year’s Brexit vote, then–Justice Secretary Michael Gove, a prominent advocate for Britain leaving the European Union, gave a television interview in which he uttered a line that reverberated around the country.

The exchange went like this:

Faisal Islam (interviewer): “The leaders of the U.S., India, China, Australia, every single one of our allies, the Bank of England, the IFS, the IMF, the CBI, five former NATO secretary generals, the chief executive of the NHS, and most of the leaders of the trade unions in Britain all say that you, Boris and Nigel, are wrong. Why should the public trust you over them?”

Michael Gove (forthright, jowly, condescending, I hate him): “I’m not asking the public to trust me. I’m asking the public to trust themselves…I think the people of this country have had enough of experts.”

And lo, there it was: the origin story of the Brexit.

The people of Britain were done with experts, the people who studied stuff and knew about shit. For those who voted Remain, Gove’s words encapsulated the way democracy was being subverted by idiocracy — an admission of the unreasoned, economically illiterate emotion characterizing the Leave campaign.

On the surface, the verdict seems damning; it doesn’t require an extensive trawl through the archives to see that undercurrents of anti-intellectualism have attended some of modern history’s most aberrant social phenomena: Mao, Stalin, Nazis, WWE.

But then what, precisely, had our propensity to defer to the experts achieved? The economy was creaking. Wealth inequality was rocketing. Two centuries of fossil-fuel dependence had choked the skies. For the first time in generations, children were set to have worse prospects than their parents. Ordinary people, increasingly, were spending great swathes of their brief lifetimes staring at little oblongs of liquid crystal. Our Oxbridge-educated politicians were short-termist charlatans. Our democracy had turned into a faltering production line pumping out the same old people advocating the same increasingly discredited free-market principles.

The experts used big words like “quantitative easing” and “stakeholder engagement.” But their supposed wisdom hadn’t resulted in a nation of contentment and common purpose. Far from it, as the referendum laid bare.

People, generally, don’t indulge in this kind of cynicism for fun. To some extent, a society’s inherent stability stems from its population’s often delusional willingness to collude in the idea that things are under control. In his recent film HyperNormalisation, the documentarian Adam Curtis described this impulse in relation to the twilight years of the former Soviet Union, where people cleaved to their leaders’ illusory reassurances even as the country crumbled.

“The Soviet Union became a society where everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real because they could see with their own eyes that the economy was falling apart. But everybody had to play along and pretend that it WAS real because no one could imagine any alternative…You were so much a part of the system that it was impossible to see beyond it.”

Today we are starting to witness what happens when such illusions shatter.

One of the most remarkable things about modern life is the ambivalence many of us now feel toward public figures. In an age of all-pervasive media scrutiny, it’s getting harder to differentiate between good guys and bad. Yesterday’s heroes seem forever to be destined to become tomorrow’s villains, as former idols become tainted by mortal error. Multi-Oscar-winning film producers turn out to be serial sexual predators; iconic champion golfers mutate into puffy-eyed philanderers; former Nobel Peace Prize winners look at their feet as minorities fall victim to ethnic cleansing; queens, venerated for decades of selfless public service, become serial tax avoiders. We are wont to ask whether Ghandi would have stuck it out under today’s merciless public gaze, lest some rumor of historical impropriety sent him scuttling off to a Himalayan ashram in disgrace.

The tenet that underwrites representative democracy — that governance is best left to the grown-ups — looks forfeit when the grown-ups start to appear so irredeemably fallible. In this respect, the anti-elitism that was an animating force for Brexit, the Trump election, and the more general upsurge in political extremism that attended 2016 marks an understandable, if dangerous, response to the death of righteousness and all the moral authority that goes with it. Competence has begun to look like a performance art.

This precipitous collapse in trust in our political class and the vital institutions it oversees has arisen at an infelicitous time. Coupled with a global financial crisis that no one predicted, and amid the disorienting clamor of social media, it has surfaced an uncomfortable epiphany: the gathering realization that those who purport to be in control are, in fact, just powerless bystanders like the rest of us, beholden to their own personal knot of ignorance and bias.

We have come to know, in some visceral way, that the complexity of the modern world is so intractable that everyone — no matter their status in society — is more or less playing at being sober adults, when in reality we all exist in a state of permanent bewilderment. Like the inner child in the poet Ted Hughes’ famous letter to his son, each one of us has been exposed as “the wretchedly isolated undeveloped little being” we truly are.

“And that little creature is sitting there, behind the armour, peering through the slits. And in its own self, it is still unprotected, incapable, inexperienced.”

When a butterfly flaps its wings…who the fuck really knows?

The story of 2016 was in many ways the story of this awakening. As the fundamental social compact of the capitalist system — that if you work hard, you can have a home, family, a holiday each year and a pension in old age — starts to crumble, people everywhere have started wrestling with the idea that the promises that shaped their expectations were never guaranteed.

For some, the realization has yielded a sense of hopelessness and dread (and, given the scale of the challenges we face, one could argue that this response is the most rational one). For others, however, it has provoked an urge to suppress this realization, come what may.

Much of the recent political destabilization in the West can be ascribed to this reflexive denial — the replacement of one illusion with another. It is hard, after all, to accept that the world’s problems might be insoluble; much easier to believe that the challenges can be surmounted just as soon as we tear down the status quo.

In vying to wrestle some sense from our confounding times, people have retreated into whatever narrative most supports their preexisting prejudices.

Suddenly, global chaos no longer needs to be ascribed to a billion uncontrollable variables. Instead, it’s the Rothschilds. It’s the liberal elite. It’s the swamp. It’s the cucks. It’s Russia.

It’s the bots, the corpocracy, the deep state.

It’s a malignant nexus of the Kochs, Tea Party activists, and Fox News, with their 30-year project to infantilize the lumpen proles for their own avaricious ends. (Actually, I have some sympathy for this last one. But hey, I never claimed to be above this stuff myself.)

And, of course, it makes many of us beholden to the simple populist figure inured to introspection, who boils the multifaceted world down to simple binaries of good versus bad, us versus them. Whatever your political persuasion, most people would probably agree that there is an undefinable press about the modern world, an ineluctable crush of news, opinions, and information.

Donald Trump, the simplest man of all, is a cipher for all those millions of people straining to hit pause, or rewind, or any button that might repudiate this cacophonous, disorienting background noise. It is an atavistic urge so powerful that it even overrides all the obvious danger signs we see in Trump’s moral turpitude and our historical awareness of where divisive tribal politics can lead.

Because in a world where nothing is certain, we are all fools. And the people who think otherwise are the biggest fools of all.

John focused hard. He’d done one jump before, but it was always across the room to grab something. Or maybe across the street if he was sure no one was looking. He’d never jumped across the country, or the world. He didn’t even know if he could do it.

His girlfriend, Emma was on a flight to Paris…alone. She’d tried to get John to go with her, but he dragged his feet and then turned her down. He hated the idea of traveling. She would land there in an hour, according to the airline’s website.

She was off exploring the world and John was standing in the same old Oklahoma farm town he’d always been.

Emma wanted to go abroad and leave Three Pines behind. She wanted to see what the world had to offer. John’s feet were planted firmly at home.

But John loved Emma and he wanted to build a life with her. He regretted not going, especially on a trip that was so important to her. He paced around his laptop in the small kitchen of his home.

One hour, he thought.

He’d been looking for a way to surprise her and pop the question for a long time. He had the perfect engagement ring and it had been burning a hole in his dresser drawer for over a month. The problem was that John couldn’t seem to come up with the right way to ask. But maybe…

What if I was there when she landed and asked in the airport and asked her there? He kept pacing around the kitchen. I mean, she’d be surprised. But what if she doesn’t say yes? He scrunched his eyes and rubbed his eyebrows. She did really want me to go with her. Maybe it would look like that was my plan all along?

He paced another lap around the kitchen. Finally, he resolved to give it a shot. He looked at the clock and refreshed the browser window with her flight on it.

58 minutes to arrival. John decided to jump to Paris.

John had this ability to instantly jump from one place to another. It was fun, but not of much use to him. Sure, he could see the world faster, but he liked home. In the year that he had the ability, he never tried to jump farther than across the street.

Emma would love to be able to do something like that. She could travel whenever and wherever she wanted. But he hadn’t told her about it. He hadn’t told anyone. He thought it made him a freak and didn’t want her to look at him differently.

So John decided to stay small.

But still, he knew he should have asked her to marry him already. He had waited long enough. I should be sitting beside her on that plane right now. She wants someone to travel the world with and I want to be there beside her.

John opened up a tab on his browser and searched “Eiffel Tower”. He clicked on “images” and then on the first photo that grabbed his attention. He focused on it. He felt the small vibration that usually came with a jump. He focused on it and tried to imagine himself stepping into its source. The world started shaking around him. Suddenly something snapped and pushed him. He tumbled backward and slammed hard into the oven door.

He shook his head and stood up on shaky feet, a little dizzy from the impact. The photo seemed like a good idea. I guess not. I’ve always tried jumping somewhere I can see.

He looked across the street and focused on the ground next to the big maple tree. A powerful vibration overtook him and his mind easily leapt into the source of the shaking. A whoosh of air deafened his ears for an instant and then he stood underneath a huge canopy of leaves. He quickly looked around but didn’t see anyone. He relaxed.

Okay, he thought. How far can I go? He focused on the furthest thing he could see and the world shook again and changed like a light being turned on. He looked around and saw a road in the distance. He jumped to the intersection and hung his head. Country roads 13 and 42 crossed just 10 miles outside of town. Jesus! I’m never going to make it.

He closed his eyes and the world shook again. He stood in his kitchen and sighed. But then a thought occurred to him. I could’t see my house, but I made it here just fine. Maybe it’s because I know it so well?

He thought about work at the feed mill and pictured his locker in the dusty corner of the break room. The world shook and suddenly he was there. He lit up. I might actually be able to do this.

He saw movement at the edge of the room. The rough looking mill cat, Mr. Heels eyed him suspiciously. It glided up to John, delicate and light. It had a very proper air for such a mangy thing.

He thought of the barn at his parents’ farm. Mr. Heels hissed and fled out of the room. The world changed around John again. The smell of hay and bullshit filled his nostrils. He smiled.

The world lurched again and he was back in his kitchen.

A plan started to form in his mind. Maybe if I look at a bunch of photos of the Eiffel Tower, it will work. I need to know it better, just like here.

He went to his laptop and opened another image and stared hard, focusing all his attention. Everything shook faintly. He clicked another photo and the vibration grew. It’s working, he thought. He clicked again and again. The vibration was almost strong enough. He could feel it.

He grabbed his phone and put it in his pocket. He clicked another image of the Eiffel Tower but this one seemed different somehow. There were lights everywhere and tall buildings all around it. The world slid and John was thrown into hot, arid air. The Eiffel Tower tower loomed over him.

He slowly stood up as people stepped around him. Something’s not right, he thought. It’s not supposed to be this hot in Paris is it? And the buildings don’t look like I thought they would.

He saw palm trees too. This can’t be it. He walked down a nearby street and saw a sign that said “Las Vegas”.

He looked at his phone again. Thirty minutes left to get to Paris. This is never going to work.

He turned and saw a pyramid in the distance and suddenly every photo he’d ever seen of pyramids started running through his mind. Before he could stop it, the world shook and he was thrown to the ground again in a roll. The air was even hotter and he was surrounded by more sand than he’d ever seen.

He slowly stood up and saw three huge pyramids towering in front of him. He was right at the base of one. Great! He turned and saw men in uniforms running at him, guns drawn. Panicked, he backed up with hands raised. Suddenly, images of a great, snow-capped mountain flashed through his mind. Mt. Fuji he thought, from that random romance novel he read in high school…Sayonara.

He closed his eyes. Angry shouts were replaced with birds on a gentle breeze. He looked up through the trees to Mt. Fuji and let out a huge breath, lowering his raised hands.

Well, I guess it’s working. I just have to figure out how to get to Paris…England is close to France. That clock is in England….Big Ben I think. Images dashed through his memory from geography and history textbooks, documentaries and web searches.

Suddenly John stood outside of British Parliament. No one seemed to notice him. People just walked right by. He pulled out his phone and waited for it to locate him. It seemed to be taking longer than usual. The map shifted from Three Pines in Oklahoma to London and his little beacon appeared.

He pinched the screen and zoomed out to see Paris to the southeast. He turned until the arrow by his dot was pointing toward it. He glanced at the time. Fifteen minutes until Emma would land.

Well, I jumped 10 miles that I could see. Maybe I could go further?

He looked ahead and focused on the farthest thing he could see. He found himself at the edge of the sprawling city, homes spreading far and wide. Not enough, he thought.

He looked up to the sky and considered something new. He set his eyes further out in the distance and the world shook hard.

Suddenly John was falling. He looked below him and tried not to panic as he saw the ocean coming up fast. Tumbling through the sky, he spotted land in the distance and closed his eyes. He hit hard and rolled into the sandy beaches of Normandy.

Emma’s aisle was finally up. She stood, stretched quickly and grabbed her backpack from the overhead bin. She made her way through customs, tired but excited.

The only thing that would’ve made the trip better was if John had decided to be adventurous for once and come along. She loved him but didn’t know if she could stay with someone who hated something that she desired so much.

She walked out through the security gate and stopped dead in her tracks. Her mind reeled, trying to figure out what was happening. John looked at her and smiled. He looked exhausted. He was covered in sand, wet and windblown.

Emma smiled back.

He laid a bundle of broken, battered roses down on the floor and dropped to one knee.

Emma’s heart leapt.

One Hour — Short Story was originally published in Lit Up on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As the smoke settled over the busy round-about roads, I made my way through the small crowd that had formed around the woman. She lay on the ground, her right foot shifted ninety degrees and missing one half of her pair of heels. Her toenails painted red, some of them curved inwards, some of them shifted certain angles to the right and left. Above her left knee her thigh bone was peeking through a tear in her dress, from which blood leaked and collected in a thick pool around her.

One man was calling an ambulance. As he did, another man pointed a torchlight at the woman’s belongings. Her purse was torn open, spilling cash, lipstick and a rosary on the tarred road and into the thick pool of blood on the ground.

When the light hit her face, I saw her eyes.

They were wide open and showed hints of a final spark frozen in the pale of her face, like a firefly caught in quicksand. Her lips were parted slightly, little streams of blood falling off in quiet fluxes down her cheeks and neck. On her face registered an expression halfway somewhere between surprise and fright.

As people made their way in and out the crowd, flashlights blaring and tires screeching, my mind searched itself. The dress. The face.

Earlier that night I was at the balcony of my apartment. I was smoking a cigarette as I listened to the busy flow of the city’s night life. Halfway through, a woman in a black dress and a grey babushka walked past me to the third room from mine. I heard laughter, music, chatter.

After a while, silence. The woman re-emerged.

Through the smoke and the fog that hung over the air that night, her image peered. She had her face in her palms and was sobbing as she walked.

As I watched her, I wondered what the story could have been. I spun one hypothesis after the other.

But as I stood before her corpse on the tarred road later that night, I realized something.

As the woman walked past me earlier that evening, sobbing and clutching her face, a part of me had stopped. Amidst the gossip and chatter and the loud music, I’d stopped to watch her walk by, cigarette in hand, smoke drifting in thin clouds.

Everything faded to the background. Everything melted, dissolved.

It was pain.

A part of me had stopped because a part of me recognized something familiar. A kindred spirit. Her pain cut through the noise and fog that night, sent a beacon into the dark.

Her pain said: this is me, look at me.

And I looked for a while, then lit another cigarette.

My friend once spoke to me of insomnia.

We were having drinks at Matilda’s on a Tuesday evening, Sade Adu’s Smooth operator seeping through hidden speakers in a dimly-lit bar. The skin beneath his eyes bloated and sagging.

He said the city poisoned his mind with gossip and loud conversations. Every night he’d barely fall asleep when he’d awake again and again to the sound of his mind in a chatter with itself. He said he loved the city, but that the city betrayed him.

And so most times he’d talk about moving to a new place in a new city. A small town hidden in a quiet suburb, he’d say. A place where rent and sleep came cheap.

“Any luck sleeping last night?” I asked.

He was staring into space. I nudged him by the shoulder.

“Yeah?”

“Any luck sleeping last night?” I asked again.

He shook his head. “I need to stop coming to this bar. You know?”

I knew.

“You remember the drunk guy from two days ago?” He asked.

“The Victorian knight?”

He nodded. “Throughout last night I could hear his voice echo in my head.”

That night I accompanied him to his apartment. He had dark sheets taped over his windows and his record player disconnected.

That night we spoke about cities. About the culture and people that shape them. He’d been born in this one, but had gradually become disenchanted by it.

“There’s something about this place that has killed something in me,” he said, “nothing feels real anymore. It feels like deep down, there’s a corpse sitting inside of me.”

After a while, I fell asleep.

The next day, he didn’t show up at the bar. I called, texted. Nothing. Days passed and I thought I’d check his apartment.

He’d overdosed on sleeping pills. His corpse reclined on the sofa. Drink in hand, Sade Adu’s long hard road seeping from a lonely speaker.

As I stood over his body, I realized something. This city hurt him. I thought about the times he spoke about sleep and cities. I realized that in those times, he was speaking about pain.

His pain said: this is me, listen to me.

And I listened for a while, then changed the subject.

Weeks after his funeral, I ran into an old friend. We shared old memories over beer and suya at a dimly-lit bar.

There was a fight that night. One man refused to pay his bills. He claimed he was a Victorian knight, and that the queen had him covered.

That night I stayed awake to the ghosts of loud conversations and inaudible chatter. To shuffling feet, voices of drunk Victorian knights and angry bartenders.

Days bled into weeks and I found the skin beneath my eyes bloated and sagging. Every day I met the usual blend of civil servants, preachers and prostitutes. And every night, something from those encounters snuck into my head and stole sleep from me.

I taped dark sheets over my windows and had my record player disconnected.

Something about this city snuck inside me and was slowly chipping away at my core. I knew it was time to leave. But something about this place kept me from leaving. A strange blend of nostalgia, and a feeling deep down, that no other city would accept me like this one.

As time went by, I spent less of it in public spaces. I steered clear of bars, libraries and bus stops. Leaving the city seemed to me a delicate affair. One does not just leave a place one has known too long without consequences. There’s a certain type of ritual to it. A slow, deliberate rite of passage one must follow.

A few days before I left, I thought I’d visit the bar one last time.

The place was as before: dimly-lit, soul music seeping away from hidden speakers, drunk civil servants making a big deal about the new cost of rice.

I ordered beer and suya.

Halfway through my food the bartender walked over, placed a bottle of ciroc on my table, then pointed to the far left corner where a woman was seated. She looked middle-aged, was spotting a cream-coloured tweed dress and a red hat. When our eyes met, she raised her glass halfway to her face, then took a sip.

I did the same.

After a while she came over to my table.

She was of average height, with a thin face that looked in contrast to the hat, like a small animal being sheltered by a tree branch.

Her lips too were small and had a blackness about them that stood in sharp contrast to her face.

We were seated in opposite directions. Her hands covered in black gloves and resting quietly on the table.

A calmness floated between us for a while before it occurred to me to say a proper thank you.

“I heard what happened to Mike,” she said.

“You knew him?”

She nodded. “We were lovers,” she said.

“Lovers? He never mentioned.”

“Of course he didn’t,” she said, “he was one of the damned.”

“Damned?”

“All my past lovers fall into two groups,” she said, “the absurd and the damned. The absurd always tend to be detached. It’s as though they realize the futility of our affair and so refuse to commit.”

She searched her purse for a lighter and cigarette; she found and put a benson between her lips.

“And the damned?” I asked.

“The damned commit too much. Always ready to do anything for the relationship. So it’s no surprise Mike didn’t mention our affair to you. It was our little secret.”

“I see.”

“When was the last time you slept?” she asked.

I thought about that a while.

“About a week ago,” I said.

“And for how long did you sleep?”

“Three hours,” I said.

“Impressive.”

“Why’s that impressive?”

She shook her head. “Never mind,” she said, “let’s get out of here.”

We took the back door to a half-lit alley. The path was made even narrower by the parked motor cycles, refuse dumps and a small chain of mai suyas grilling beef and mutton on a make-shift charcoal stove.

In the middle of the road, one man was scrapping dead cats with a shovel and collecting them in a polythene bag. In their place, he put an egg.

We were close to the main road when we noticed someone running from behind us. As he ran past us, the man shoved the woman in the red hat to the corner of the road. Few seconds passed and a group of police men followed in pursuit.

Her left hand met one of the charcoal stoves, her glove and left sleeve catching a quick fire before the mai suya put it off.

She searched her purse, and on not finding what she was looking for, went back to the stove, put her left hand back in the fire until she recovered her lighter.

“Are you not hurt?”

She shook her head. “Let’s find a taxi,” she said.

We found one headed to her place. As the car swayed to a start, we passed underneath a streetlight from which light trickled in, casting quiet beams on the right half of her frame, before fading off as we drove by. At that moment, I wondered if the light was like a bird too scared to linger too long on a murky water. If pain and light were two parallel lines treading two lonely roads to an unknown place.

About halfway through the ride, she leaned sideways and rested her head on my shoulder.

We reached her apartment around past two in the morning. It was a one-room, self-contained apartment.

A large mattress sat on the floor by the right corner of the room. To the left was a large wardrobe, beside which stood a hat stand and a shoe rack. The room had a lingering smell of wine and burnt incense.

The woman sat on a plastic chair by the mirror and placed her face in her palms.

“You’re in pain,” I said.

She shook her head, got up and dimmed the lights.

“Pain is merely the friction between the world and our perception of it,” she said, then began to unbutton her dress.

She undressed down to her underwear, stockings, and hat. Her left hand charred and blackened, she started towards the bed, but stopped halfway to put her gloves back on.

I lay in bed, face turned upwards. She joined me, her legs spread in a squat, her lower half seated on my crouch.

With her right hand, she began twisting her left shoulder blade, until the full length of her left arm came off. She reached for the drawer by the side of the bed for a cigarette and lighter.

“This is me,” she said, “look at me.”

She put the cigarette between my lips and lit it. She unzipped my trousers, pulled my penis out and slid it inside her.

After a while, I came inside her.

That night I fell asleep.

As time went by, my mind drifted between fading dreams of a new city and one in which I’d slowly become disenchanted by.

I spent night after night in bed with the woman in the red hat. Each time, before sex, she’d detach the full length of her left arm, and each time, she’d let me come inside her.

Days bled into weeks and months. The monotony of the affair began to creep up on me. I longed again for a new life where sleep came easy, and free of coital consequences.

And each time we were together, I wondered where I was headed. I thought of her past lovers and her way of grouping them. I wondered where I stood. If for her, I was an absurd lover, or a damned one.

The Long Hard Road was originally published in P.S. I Love You on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“I don’t like what you do.”

Last night The Boy and I went out with another couple we’re friends with.

They’re both great people and fun to be around — which is why we hang out with them pretty regularly. But last night she started doing That Thing that so many of us do in relationships. Let’s call it “The Painted Neg.”

“Negging,” for those not in the “pickup” community (i.e., most of us), is when you deliberately cut someone down while flirting in order to lower their confidence.

It’s for people who don’t have enough confidence of their own.

And while some people do it while flirting, waaaay more of us carry it on into our actual relationships and keep it going there, too. Except, in that space, we call it “love,” with shit like this postured as though it’s “loving” — we’re all so quick to smile and nod and accept it as such — but it’s not. It’s just a shitty violation of boundaries, and blatant insecurity.

In this case, she didn’t like his shirt. The worst part was that he’d deliberately tried to wear a shirt he thought she did like, thinking the one she didn’t like was a different one, but it turns out she didn’t like either one and by the sounds of it, the guy had fucked up. But it was a perfectly fine shirt — some kind of printed button-down anybody could wear in my office.

So while they were going back and forth, The Boy and I were just sort of standing there like “oh my god, who gives a fuck?”

The answer is: only her. Because she’s petty. And him, because he cares.

Nobody else was criticizing him. And she wasn’t criticizing anybody else but him.

He honors and cares about her far more than she honors or cares about him.

“Sorry about them”

Don’t ever apologize for your partner’s “behavior” after they leave the room. It makes you look super shitty pretty much no matter the reason.

• If it’s a big deal: it reflects poorly on you for staying with them, and for acknowledging it to others instead / ahead / outside of addressing it with your partner
• If it’s not a big deal — some minor annoyance, like telling dad jokes or something: then apologizing on their behalf just makes you look like a dickhead who’s too embarrassed to stand by your partner’s side on stupid shit. (This is even more awkward if you were the only one who noticed or was bugged by whatever they did — and you very often are.)

Either way, apologizing for your partner makes you look insecure AF — enabling your partner at worst; throwing them under the bus at best.

We were once out with friends and it was getting late, so one of the husbands politely said goodnight to the table, kissed his beloved wife goodbye, and headed out. The minute he was gone, she groaned, “ugh, sorry about him.”

I stared at her.

The dude literally hadn’t done anything wrong. He was an utterly nice person who had been nothing but polite and was just ready to go to sleep. Which made her look like an imbalanced, insecure shithead in comparison, regardless of how “well” she socialized otherwise.

If you’re apologizing on behalf of your partner the minute they step away, y’all need to stop. If you feel compelled to “win points” socially at the cost of your partner, you should seriously reevaluate your priorities.

The only time it’s really okay to apologize “for” your partner is if it was a one-time thing and your partner was really not in their right mind — i.e., they would apologize too, if they could.

For example: one of my ex-boyfriends very unexpectedly lost his mom, with whom he was very close, while we were dating. We were grabbing dinner in the aftermath a few days later and he suddenly completely lost it at the table, then got up and stormed out of the restaurant. I had known the dude a year and had never seen him act this way — on the contrary, he always put a high value on social norms and polite behavior — so I gently apologized to the server and followed him out.

Because that’s exactly what he would’ve done, had he been his normal self, so apologizing in a case like this is being a unit.

“You can’t do what you love”

There’s one thing everyone knows about my dad: the man loves cars.

During his teens and twenties he owned just about every classic car under the sun, starting from the white ‘69 GTO Judge to the baby blue Corvette I recall from childhood. After the Corvette, he traded his keys in for slightly more reasonable family vehicles — SUVs, pickups, a Jeep or two, one big ole Blazer.

And while his life was devoid of classic cars while he raised us, there has always been one thing Dad has talked about wanting in retirement: another classic car.

That’s it.

And it’s not so much that my mother would fight him on this (which is good, because if she tried, she’d have all five of his kids, who wholeheartedly have his back on this issue, to reckon with) —but more that she’ll allow it rather than embrace it.

I want to give her full credit here — because she’s gone four-wheeling with him in the Jeep and has reported back that his other cars are “fun to drive” (music to his ears.)

But my mother is also the sort of woman who thinks it’s okay for a spouse to act cooly towards their partner’s passion, to openly scoff and refuse to participate in any of the ancillary activities, like car shows — in person, or on TV — both of which my dad loves. It breaks my dad’s heart that she won’t join him, and that means it breaks each of ours.

“You’re just here to fill a role”

Most specifically: “spouse.”

One of the biggest “anti-love” moves in the world is the marriage ultimatum.

We don’t really question this, do we? It’s always the fault of the person who didn’t want to “commit” — who was too busy “dicking around” or “didn’t love enough” to “settle down.”

But what if that’s not the case? What if they love their partner very, very much — but don’t support the (possibly outdated) institution of marriage?

If it’s unloving for someone to risk losing their partner by refusing to get married…

…then it’s equally unloving for someone to risk losing their partner by demanding it.

In both cases, each person’s ideals around Marriage were more important to them than keeping their partner. So if it’s a matter of “not loving enough,” then neither of them did.

The Boy and I are both lukewarm on marriage. But if either of us wanted it badly enough, the other one would readily do it.

But conversely— and this is important! — we also both agree:

Neither of us would ever let the other person go just because they didn’t want to get married.

Because we both care about each other far more than we care about our stance on marriage, for or against.

And that’s whole lot closer to true love. And if we all want to admit and agree that marriage isn’t about love anyway, that’s totally fine. (Because it’s not.) But don’t combine the two in one conversation unless you’re honest about what you’re saying.

“You’ll have what I want”

The worst example of this is kids.

I don’t know when we started thinking it was “cute” or “understandable” that a wife (or sometimes girlfriend!) dictate that her husband or boyfriend is going to have a kid — against his openly-stated wishes. Maybe it’s just some horrific leave-over from conventional times gone past, but, like, c’mon people.

Shit’s so fucked up.

I’m not talking about accidents. I’m talking about both partners entering into an open, honest relationship saying that they don’t want to have kids — and then one of them either starts pressuring hard for them. Or just goes and has a kid anyway, regardless. Completely steamrolling their partner’s wishes.

How love looks: “I’m okay”

The problem is that love makes us feel insecure. We’re vulnerable, we’re exposed, we hang too much of our identity on our partner and we expect them to embody too much.

We get insecure and then we let that insecurity turn into hurting others.

Love is about starting to take responsibility and define better boundaries — acknowledging what’s our domain and what isn’t, and identifying the real issue behind our “issue” with stupid shit like shirts, or why publicly announcing that someone is the “love of your life” is more important than actually treating them like it.

How love looks: “You’re okay”

There are actually a couple of things at play here, and the first thing is boundaries.

It’s not healthy to nitpick what shirt your spouse wants to wear — especially if they specifically picked a shirt they thought you’d like. Your controlling behavior isn’t cute — you’re being a monster.

Let them dress how they want to dress. It’s their body. They are not your public status symbol. They are a person.

How love looks: “What’s important to you is important to me”

This is the biggest thing.

Loving someone means honoring their values. It means celebrating and making space in your lives for the things that are important to them — as long as those things are healthy.

As long as their interests aren’t gambling or strip clubs or drugs or booze or whatever else, I mean fuck man, let them have comic books! Let them buy the car! Let them bake and make dad jokes and wear the shirt they like that you hate.

In fact, no — don’t just “let them” have these things —because you don’t own them. Rather, encourage them to have — support them in having — these things that make their heart sing.

Because doing so — and seeing how much happiness it brings them — should make your heart happy in return. That’s how to love.

We’re Shittiest To The Ones We Love was originally published in Startups & Venture Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The holidays, those time-warped and distorted periods of time when we’re forced (or force ourselves) to spend time with family, can, for many, be a literal reversion to the past — to the children they were, that is — in the presence of their parents. It’s not unusual and both once-children and parents somehow manage to rewind and step into their old habits with equal ease, neither able to avoid the traps of bringing up things that weren’t resolved in the day, or treating each other as if the intervening years, responsibilities and events had never happened. It doesn’t have to be that way.

It’s easy to blame the neuroses, belief systems, baggage in general on our parents. They’re the ones who took a clean slate of a child and scratched all over it with their own poisons and baggage, after all, right? It’s easy to forget that for most new parents the levels of anxiety are high, there’s no training course beforehand, no manual, nothing but the questionable lessons of their own upbringing to fall back on. Does anyone believe the outpouring of how-to-parent in the late sixties and right through to the nineties was due to anything other than a massive, rabid anxiety about getting it right for that generation as they stepped into having families?

Anxiety and ignorance are not a couple that do well together. Small things become huge things and mistakes are the invariable consequence. Parents and children alike wish it were different. But be real. Your parents are just people. They are not wiser, stronger, more capable or intelligent than most other people. On a bad day, they make mistakes and like most people, confronted with their mistakes, they justify, rationalise, try to make it seem less than it was. It doesn’t make them monsters. Just human.

There are a number of milestones people look to in the effort to understand the maturing process. Finishing school. Moving out of home. Having a serious relationship. Getting married. Having children. But one of the most overlooked and the most important milestone you’ll recognise in becoming an adult, independent and truly responsible for yourself and those under your care is that of seeing your parents as just people. For some, having children of their own brings this revelation, seeing firsthand how mistakes with impressionable young minds can and does occur. For some, it might be seeing your parents stumble closer to old age, the cycle turning to them needing your help as they gave theirs. For many, that step just never comes. Parents remain parents, circular patterns resume the second they set foot over the threshold of the home they grew up in and all the old battles raise their ugly heads, ready for the past to go on repeat.

Have you asked your parents about their lives? Listened as if to a stranger or friend or acquaintance? You might think you know all about them, but the chances are very good that you see the tip of the iceberg, the rest has been submerged, because you are their child and they don’t really want you to see the real life under the involuntary facade they built for you.

I was fifteen when I had my first ‘adult’ conversation with my mother. We were talking generally about relationships and the expectations inherent in them when she casually mentioned she’d been married before (my father) and had, in fact, had an affair with my father before divorcing her first husband. That little bombshell rolled around my head for minutes before I could think a single question. My mother! An affair! It changed the way I saw her in that instant. Changed the way I saw both of them, to be honest. Not as the middle-aged parents with responsibilities and demands. In my mind’s eye, they were now a young couple, passionately in love, but held back by her marriage. She managed to shock me further by admitting she hadn’t loved her first husband — she’d married him because he had a boat and she loved sailing. Not just a young woman swept off her feet by a passionate stranger, she was now also a young woman in a failed marriage of pragmatic convenience, swept off her feet by a passionate stranger. It was hard to get a grip on.

From that moment on, however, they stopped being just my parents and had become people with lives unknown to me, whose motivations I didn’t yet understand, and who were interesting in and of themselves, without the connection to me.

As no one is all good or all bad, and no one is an archetype or just one shade of anything; neither are our parents just parents and nothing else. Getting to know them as people does one thing that is essential to maturity — it destroys the patterns and habits of our upbringing. It’s impossible to slip back into those patterns once someone is seen as a person instead of a single-dimension character, and the very act of changing one’s own responses — automatically and finally — changes the responses of the other person. That was a lesson I found particularly applicable to any relationship as well. Destructive patterns do not survive when one person notices and changes them. A new pattern might emerge, but that too can be derailed.

If nothing else, getting to know your parents as people, who had a life before you came along, and have built another life since you left the nest, means that the holidays can be evaluated objectively, instead of subjectively, for their value as reunions or get-togethers. There are, undoubtedly, many parents who cannot or will not change, even in the face of having those old patterns of behaviour destroyed, and perhaps relationships like that are better severed, the toxic love in them bad for both parents and children. But for those who have inadvertently dropped back into the old patterns whenever the family comes together, it can be a way to draw closer, to understand more and to finally let go of childish things, resentment and disaccord and find out where you truly came from?

Seeing Your Parents As…People was originally published in P.S. I Love You on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Bitcoin (BTC) recently smashed an all-time high of $11,400 USD and subsequently dropped to as low as $8,595 within a few hours. It’s incredibly important to not get lost in the pandemonium and to stay informed about how Bitcoin is progressing technologically.

Anybody considering buying Bitcoin should at the very least learn two things:

1. the history of the technology behind Bitcoin
2. and more importantly, what lies ahead in Bitcoin’s future.

As Bitcoin expert Andreas M. Antonopoulos says, “Invest in education instead of speculation.”

With Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain being such incredibly new technological concepts, it can seem daunting at times to try and research and understand its underlying technical details. This article is written in an effort to highlight the scalability problem Bitcoin faces, and what expected or proposed solutions to that problem are. There are some really exciting ones out there that this article discusses!

I wrote this as I was learning about Bitcoin myself, to aggregate the great amount of information about Bitcoin’s future from countless sources out there. When writing this, I kept in mind even those who don’t possess a programming background. However, it is assumed that the reader has a very basic understanding of Bitcoin as a currency and what a blockchain is. Coindesk has a great 5-minute read that should get you up to speed here if you’re just starting out with Bitcoin or if you need a refresher.

Let’s begin with the scalability problem Bitcoin faces.

The Transaction Throughput Problem

When Bitcoin was first introduced to the world, its creator Satoshi Nakomoto described Bitcoin in the Bitcoin whitepaper as “A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.”

One of Bitcoin’s fundamental values was instant and secure peer-to-peer payment transactions. Now, more than ever, Bitcoin is emerging as the prevailing cryptocurrency in the global market, with a 1,200%+ increase in value over the last year alone.

Because of this unprecedented growth, the number of transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain has also increased, with up to 400,000 transactions per day being conducted. This rapid increase in transactions is posing to be a serious scalability problem for the blockchain, with over 90,000 transactions being backlogged as unconfirmed at the moment.

In order to understand why transactions are being backlogged, Bitcoin transactions must first be explained.

Every time a user sends a Bitcoin transaction from his or her wallet to another, the transaction is added into the memory pool (mempool), which is essentially a pool of all unconfirmed transactions in the Bitcoin network. This pool is upheld by smaller individual pools on machines that hold a copy of the blockchain ledger, called nodes.

From the mempool, miners select transactions that they want to verify. Once miners validate a transaction (i.e. confirm that the sender actually has enough bitcoins to send to the receiver), they add it to a new block, which is eventually published to the blockchain. Other nodes then iterate through this newly published block’s transactions to ensure the block is valid, before accepting the block as a part of its ledger.

Let’s calculate the throughput of transactions:

• The median transaction size approximately 250 bytes
• A block’s size is limited to 1MB (1000000 bytes)
• Thus, a block holds around 4000 transactions (1MB divided by 250 bytes)
• A block can only be published to the blockchain once every 10 minutes on average (600 seconds).
• 4000 transactions (at most) are published every 600 seconds, at a rate of 6.66 transactions / second

With over 90,000 unconfirmed transactions in the mempool, how does a miner select which transactions to verify? Transaction fees! The sender of a transaction has the option of adding a custom transaction fee to its transaction intended for the miner, incentivizing a miner to select the transaction and have it verified faster. Miners will select the transactions that have the highest fee attached to them to maximize profits. Theoretically, you can send a transaction with no fee. But if there are transactions that have fees higher than yours in the pool, why would yours ever get picked?

As Bitcoin’s user base grows, so does the average transaction fee. At most, there are only 7 transactions that are processed every second and everyone wants to get their transaction verified first. At the moment, the average transaction fee is approximately $3.58 USD. This fee is certainly not ideal — if you want to send your friend a couple of dollars worth of bitcoin, you may end up spending more in transaction fees than the transaction value itself! Therein lies the problem, and if all else remains equal, transaction fees can be expected to rise due to the transaction bottleneck.

Solving the Throughput Problem

A proposed solution to this bottleneck that has brought great controversy to the Bitcoin community is to simply raise the block size from the original 1MB limit, thus allowing more transactions per block.

Every time the block size is increased in the chain, a hard fork is required, meaning an entirely new copy of the chain must be created, therefore requiring consensus from the Bitcoin community. Because millions of people use Bitcoin, gaining consensus is difficult and efforts should be made to avoid it. Furthermore, although the block size can be increased enough to accommodate the current backlog of transactions, as Bitcoin’s userbase continues to grow, there will eventually be another backlog of unconfirmed transactions, so another block size increase will be needed, and subsequently another hard fork.

So why don’t we just make the block size large enough to ensure the throughput will never be a bottleneck, no matter how many people are using it? First, the mathematics of a block size even remotely large enough to handle mass adoption are impractical and will restrict mining to incredibly powerful machines that only large corporations will be able to maintain, introducing an element of centralization.

Furthermore, recall that once a block is mined, all other nodes must validate the block before accepting it. If the block size was incredibly large and somebody were to publish an invalid block, nodes would waste a large amount of time attempting to validate the block before discarding it as invalid and moving onto the next block. A denial of service attack can essentially be orchestrated by repeatedly publishing insanely large invalid blocks to the network, stopping valid blocks from being processed for a long period of time. As stated by blockchain pioneer Nick Szabo in this interview, the small block size acts as a technical security parameter to prevent network flooding.

You can read more about the full impact of an increased block size if Bitcoin were to take over the world, in an article I’ve written here.

If we can’t increase the block size, what can we do? Luckily, there are several solutions in the works that are expected to be deployed in order to solve this issue.

Segregated Witness (SegWit)

Segregated Witness (SegWit) has actually already been implemented into the Bitcoin network, as of August 2017. It’s a fundamental network change that modifies the format of transactions, essentially slimming them down in size, and allowing more transactions to be fit into a block which increases throughput. SegWit is considered a soft fork, meaning it is completely backwards compatible with existing Bitcoin protocol, although nodes and wallets must upgrade to take advantage of all SegWit features.

Each transaction has a signature from the sender, or in other words, witness data; this is usually the largest part of the transaction. This data is not actually necessary to verify the transaction, and so SegWit moves this data to the end of the transaction, segregating it. If this transaction is sent to a legacy node (a node that has not upgraded to SegWit), the node strips the witness data off the end of the transaction before inserting it into a block, thus reducing the overall transaction size and saving space. The added benefit of this is that nodes can no longer modify the witness data, changing who the transaction was from, an ability nodes previously had. This makes way for the implementation of multi-layer solutions that we’ll discuss soon. Users also save on transaction fees, as they’re usually calculated per transaction byte, and SegWit reduces total transaction size.

Furthermore, SegWit changes the definition of a block: instead of a block being defined in terms of bytes, its now defined in terms of “weights”; a block can have a maximum weight of 4,000. Legacy transactions have a weight of 4, while SegWit transactions have a weight of 0.25, thus enabling a block to contain many more SegWit transactions and have a slightly higher size (approximately 2 megabytes at most). Nodes must upgrade to SegWit to follow this definition, and wallets must incorporate SegWit in order to send SegWit transactions. As a result, SegWit adoption has been slow, accounting for only 12% of current traffic.

Because of the aforementioned benefits of SegWit, I highly encourage anybody reading this to use wallets that have incorporated SegWit to speed up SegWit adoption. A neat list of them can be found here (my personal favourite is Samourai Wallet for Android). If you want to learn more about the intricacies of SegWit, Jimmy Song has written a great article about it:

Understanding Segwit Block Size

Multi-Layered Solutions

As it stands, the Bitcoin blockchain isn’t very feasible for micropayments. If you want to buy a $2 cup of coffee, you’re probably going to pay more than $2 equivalent of BTC in transaction fees, and the transaction won’t be confirmed instantly — you must wait for the transaction to be published in a verified block on the chain, which will appear within 10 minutes at best.

Second and third layer solutions are networks layered on top of the Bitcoin blockchain that enable users to send several transactions of small amounts of Bitcoin almost instantly, with no transaction fees.

The Lightning Network is this layered network currently in development expected to alleviate Bitcoin’s scaling problems. This network consists of two additional layers and enables users to open direct channels between each other to send an effectively unlimited number of payments to each other in an instant manner.

Lightning Network

The Second Layer

A user joins the second layer network by conducting a transaction on the blockchain that declares the user is committing a certain number of bitcoin to be used in the layered network. The user then joins a group of nodes that are interconnected with one another, called channel factories. These nodes essentially uphold a lobby of individuals that potentially want to conduct transactions with one another. Channel factories then enable an unlimited number of micropayment channels to be created on the third layer (hence the name factories) between individual parties.

The Third Layer

Micropayment channels are set up to ensure direct payments between two users on the third layer. Because the blockchain is no longer present in this layer, it cannot be used to validate transactions and ensure one party paid the other. Instead, smart-contract technology is employed, such as multisig addresses, meaning addresses that can be signed off by multiple users to enable the movement of funds, and hashed time-lock contracts, which are cryptographically secure automated contracts that lock funds for a certain period of time to ensure one parties that cannot cheat with another. These technologies eliminate the need for trust between users that are connected in micropayment channels.

Here is an example of how a Lightning Network micropayment channel works:

1. Alice wants to dedicate 1 Bitcoin to a micropayment channel between Bob. She declares this 1 Bitcoin to be used in a commitment transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain. This 1 Bitcoin is then locked up in a multisig address that both parties can sign off on if they want to close the channel. This address is secured with a hashed time-lock contract which states, “Alice has 1 BTC and Bob has 0 BTC, to be released in one hour”. This means the 1 Bitcoin Alice has is locked for 1 hour after which it will be returned to Alice and published to the Bitcoin blockchain once more.
2. Alice then decides to give Bob 0.1 BTC. This transaction is logged with a new hashed time-lock contract stating “Alice has 0.9 BTC and Bob has 0.1 BTC, to be expired in 50 minutes”. This contract has an expiry time of 50 minutes, meaning it will be published to the blockchain before the original contract stating Alice has 1 BTC. Therefore Bob instantly knows he has the 0.1 BTC because this new contract will be published to the blockchain before the original contract, essentially making the old contract invalid.
3. Once the full hour passes, the micropayment channel closes and the final balance between Alice and Bob is published to the blockchain. If Alice and Bob want to continue making transactions, they can extend the expiry time of their channel for as long as they want. If one of them wants to close the channel early, one of them needs to sign off on the original multisig address that the Bitcoin is stored in.

The network enables transactions to route itself to its final destination by using other connected users in the channel as intermediaries. This can happen even if a direct connection to the desired user isn’t able to be sought the current micropayment channel. For example, if Alice has a channel open with Bob, and Bob has a channel with Mark, and Alice wants to send Mark some Bitcoin, the network can route the payment to Mark through Bob, all while ensuring no party has to trust another.

The implementation of lightning network transactions and their trust-less nature can get incredibly complex, and is best explained by the Lightning developers in this conference or in the following series by ecurrencyhodler:

The Lightning Network (Part 1)

Ideally, a user will only create a commitment transaction to the secondary layer very rarely because he or she will remain in the layered network for prolonged periods of time to conduct most of their day-to-day transactions. Once a user wants to exit this multi-layered network, a settlement transaction is made on the blockchain declaring the user’s final Bitcoin balance after all of the second-layer activities. This reconciles their total Bitcoin balance on the blockchain after comparison with the original commitment transaction. In total, only two blockchain transactions are made in order to let the user to conduct a limitless number of transactions for free on the second layer.

As mentioned previously, SegWit paves the way for the lightning network because it removes nodes’ abilities to modify witness data, which is what is used to identify a user’s entry into the second layer. If the user’s commitment transaction can’t be found because the witness data referring to the user was changed, there is a greater level of difficulty involved when trying to reconcile the user’s settlement transaction.

The second layer of the lightning network involving channel factories was very recently introduced in this whitepaper. It is still under heavy development, so a lot of its concepts are explained abstractly. However, the network is poised to launch in 2018 and will be by far the biggest improvement in transaction scalability thus far.

Schnorr Signatures

When a user sends a Bitcoin transaction, the inputs of the transaction (the amount you’re sending) is calculated simply by retrieving from the blockchain the total unspent amounts of Bitcoin you previously received. So for example:

• Starting with an empty wallet, I receive 1 Bitcoin in transaction #1, and then another 1 Bitcoin in a separate transaction #2
• I now want to send 2 Bitcoins in a transaction. There will be two inputs to this transaction: transaction #1, and transaction #2, summing up to 2 Bitcoin

Under the current algorithm for generating signatures (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm), each input requires its own signature. This increases the total transaction size and therefore increases the transaction fee.

Schnorr signatures are an alternative and more efficient way of storing signature data in transactions. All inputs are accumulated and then stored as a single signature by utilizing the Schnorr algorithm, which greatly saves space in a transaction and further helps increase transaction throughput by allowing blocks to store more transactions on average.

Schnorr signatures can be also be used to aid Bitcoin’s advancement in privacy by benefiting CoinJoin transactions. CoinJoin is a method of introducing anonymity to Bitcoin transactions. It works by pooling transaction inputs together with other peoples’ transactions when making a payment to a receiver. When payments are pooled, it becomes difficult to track which user sent what input, effectively making them anonymous. However, CoinJoin transactions have increased fees due to a higher number of inputs in a single transaction resulting in a higher number of signatures. Utilizing Schnorr signatures would enable all signatures in a transaction to be compressed into one, saving greatly on transaction fees and encouraging the use of CoinJoin.

Furthermore, Schnorr paves the way for complex multisig transactions which require signing off from multiple parties; no matter how many parties’ signatures are required for a transaction, all the transaction needs is one Schnorr signature.

Schnorr signatures are only now a possibility because of the implementation of SegWit; because signature data can’t be modified by third parties, it can now be used to effectively create a Schnorr signature.

MimbleWimble

MimbleWimble is a radical but incredibly powerful proposed change to Bitcoin architecture that was anonymously introduced through this whitepaper in July 2016.

Named after the tongue-tying curse from the Harry Potter series, its aim is to remove transactions entirely from blocks. Under MimbleWimble, transactions consist of nothing but input amounts, output amounts, and a signature. The signature of the transaction can only be decrypted by the receiver, and so transaction verification is left to the receiver.

By extension, blocks consist of only the list of all transaction input amounts of all transactions, all transaction output amounts, and their corresponding signatures. Blocks can then be merged seamlessly with previous blocks as they’re nothing but pairs of input and output amounts. Nodes then have the ability to cryptographically ensure that transactions in blocks do not create extra bitcoins (i.e. their net difference between inputs and outputs in blocks is 0) without having to decrypt transactions.

This removal of transaction storage grants complete anonymity to all users by stripping away the ability to generate transaction history. Furthermore, with blocks only containing the unspent transaction outputs (meaning the number of Bitcoins that have been received in an address but not moved out yet), the blockchain size can be reduced by over 60% according to the whitepaper. This reduction in size means that in order to validate a MimbleWimble blockchain, nodes will only need to look at the set of unspent transaction outputs instead of the entire set of transactions, which will exponentially increase performance.

The mathematical details of MimbleWimble are outside of the scope of this article, but are explained in detail in the whitepaper. Although MimbleWimble presents some clear advantages and technical breakthroughs, its implementation requires the removal of Bitcoin’s Script system that much of the existing architecture relies on. As a result, MimbleWimble’s implementation on the Bitcoin blockchain is not technically feasible.

However, there are proposals for MimbleWimble to exist as a sidechain. A sidechain is a separate blockchain directly attached to the Bitcoin blockchain through the use of a two-way peg. This peg enables assets between the two chains to be exchanged and “pegs” the value of the sidechain asset to the value of Bitcoin. In this setup, users would be able to exchange Bitcoins for MimbleWimble coins, conduct completely private and rapid transactions on the MimbleWimble chain, and then exchange their MimbleWimble coins for Bitcoin whenever they please.

In fact, a group of developers are already in the process of developing MimbleWimble as a separate cryptocurrency called GRIN; it was recently deployed on a test network and may be launched in the near future.

Rootstock

Rootstock — Smart Contracts on the Bitcoin Blockchain

Rootstock is for whatever reason one of the less talked about advancements in Bitcoin technology but is by far one of the coolest. Rootstock is described as “the first open-source smart contract platform with a 2-way peg to Bitcoin that also rewards the Bitcoin miners via merge-mining, allowing them to actively participate in the Smart Contract revolution.”

Much like MimbleWimble, Rootstock is being developed as a sidechain solution to the Bitcoin blockchain. Its fundamental value lies in its focus in smart contracts. Rootstock aims to be a Turing Complete (completely programmable) smart-contracts platform that will be backwards compatible with Ethereum’s virtual machine. This means that Rootstock will be able to execute any smart contracts developed for the Ethereum platform and have smart contracts developed for its own platform.

Rootstock aims to implement this versatile smart-contract functionality all while leveraging Bitcoin’s comparatively dominant userbase and value by acting as a two-way pegged sidechain. It is also being designed to be secured by the existing Bitcoin mining network, therefore not needing to incentivize miners to secure its own blockchain. Rootstock also aims to tackle the transaction scalability problem by implementing its own version of a multi-layered solution called Lumino. With this, it may be able to accomplish up to 20,000 transactions per second.

Rootstock is aiming for a launch by the end of 2017. Overall, the platform aims to fit in perfectly alongside Bitcoin and if its claims hold true, it will undoubtedly bring unprecedented utility to the Bitcoin network.

If you’ve gotten this far, congratulations! I hope you were able to learn something about the future of Bitcoin and are as excited about it as I am.

Bitcoin isn’t perfect and is faced with challenges that its community must work to solve. However, it is backed by an incredibly dedicated and thriving developer community that is working day in and day out to tackle these problems. There are constant innovations happening everyday, and I am sure by the time you finished reading this another new and exciting proposal for the Bitcoin blockchain popped up.

This article by no means covers everything out there; if there’s anything that you’re aware of that I didn’t mention, please mention them in the comments!

Follow me on Twitter and Medium if you’re interested in more in-depth and informative write-ups like these in the future!

I’m a relative Bitcoin beginner myself so if there are any mistakes or if you have any feedback please don’t hesitate let me know!

BTC Address: 3MGguJhw1bm95tDQjZ3b8ySBwZLJ77CgG1

Here are some resources if you’re interested in learning more:

• Mastering Bitcoin, an comprehensive book written by Andreas M. Antonopoulos
• The Bitcoin Wiki
• The Bitcoin whitepaper
• A collection of Bitcoin resources by Jameson Lopp
• This highly informative interview with Nick Szabos conducted by Tim Ferriss
• Ivan on Tech on Youtube, who is absolutely amazing at breaking down technical Bitcoin concepts

What You Need to Know About the Future of Bitcoin Technology was originally published in freeCodeCamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the middle of having sex with someone, sometimes I remember this poem I wrote called “As Distracting As A Condom”. I came up with the poem while reading a book by Barbara Kingsolver at my summer lifeguarding job. At one point, the main character and narrator of the story describes something as being “distracting as a condom”, and I had to stop and put the book down so I could write a poem about that.

The poem is all about how a condom does indeed cut strangely into the rituals of sex, but how sometimes you don’t really notice. It mentions how my mom became pregnant with me because she’s only human, and addresses my confusion at a time in my life when I had just begun to scratch the surface of having sex. Years after writing the poem, I still find myself thinking about it, and having to restrain myself from mentioning it aloud while in the physical act of being distracted by a condom.

It’s kind of strange to think about sex, and condoms, and how simple it all is, isn’t it? I remember fantasizing about being kissed for years before it actually happened, but I didn’t really spend much time thinking about intercourse before I started having it. All of a sudden I became a girl who was actively having sex, and after a few weeks I decided it was time to have a talk with my mom about birth control. It’s not like anyone gave me a talk about what to expect, in depth. No one told me that it takes a while before you’re comfortable doing it without any accompanying music to drown out the sounds you and whoever you’re doing it with will inevitably make. No one told me that there is a real difference between doing it with the lights on and doing it with the lights off. No one told me you don’t physically feel a difference, you can’t physically feel a difference, between when you’re being safe and when you’re playing with the chance of pregnancy. Your body doesn’t tell you at the moment of conception, that you’re at the moment of conception.

No one told me that you get tired sometimes, and sweaty sometimes, and your partner does too. No one told me that sometimes if you aren’t entirely comfortable with someone, you notice all their physical flaws while they’re inside you. I wasn’t aware until it happened that during sex you can notice the way someone’s skin isn’t perfect everywhere, and you can notice the way their nails feel kind of uncomfortable when they grip your bare shoulders. No one gave me a warning that at its core, having sex is something that you kind of know how to do naturally, but that also, at its core, sex can be something that you can kind of be really bad at. That sometimes you’re just not going to have a rhythm with someone, and you’re going to notice the way that your hips and their hips always seem to be going in opposite directions and its going to be frustrating, and it’s going to make you want to stop moving your hips at all.

No one told me that sometimes you’re going to be with someone in an elevator, and you’re going to start kissing them when the doors close, and your body is going to push you into them in a way that makes you feel like immediately taking off all your clothes, but you can’t do that, you won’t do that, you’re in public, and so you just pull away and let the doors open and get off on your floor. No one told me that once I started having sex, really having sex, with someone I was doing it with regularly, that I was going to want to do it all the time, and everywhere, and that I was going to end up doing it on two red lifeguard tubes, on the dirty cement floor against the employee refrigerator at one of my jobs. I wasn’t aware that after, I was going to feel both accomplished and dirty at the same time.

I wish someone had told me sooner that sometimes you’re going to be in the exact right situation to have sex, but that you aren’t going to want to, despite everything. That sometimes you can be in the middle of things, but then all of a sudden you’re going to wish you weren’t doing it anymore, and your body will betray you and make that known. I wish that someone had warned me that sometimes you won’t want to have sex to begin with, but that sometimes you’re so young and so naive that you end up doing it anyway, and you will wake up in the morning and wish things hadn’t happened the way that they did. Sometimes it’s going to hurt, and it’s going to hurt in a way that is specific and new and especially uncomfortable.

I wish someone had warned me that having sex with someone doesn’t always make you dependent on them, but sometimes it does, and sometimes it does so fiercely. And sometimes it makes you take a train at midnight to get back to school on time, and sometimes it makes you skip class altogether because you’re afraid to be by yourself after the way you’ve become used to having another person around you, and sometimes it’s going to make you feel insignificant and unwanted, in the way that water feels insignificant and unwanted when you let it run straight down the sink.

I wish someone had told me that people don’t always expect sex from you, but when they do, things get uncomfortable very quickly when you refuse to give it to them. I wish someone had told me that one day in a house in South Africa, I was going to sit quietly and look through Instagram on my phone, all while having someone else’s fingers in places I wish they weren’t. I wish someone had told me that my indifference to the prodding was going to turn into something that was my fault.

I’m glad that no one told me that sometimes having sex can make you feel like you’ve been transported, briefly, to another dimension, and that sometimes just kissing someone can make you feel like you’ve disappeared until all of a sudden you remember that you’re a creature that must breathe and therefore must surface for air.

No one told me that putting on condoms can be distracting but also extremely sexy. I had to figure out that one on my own.

Things I wish I had known about sex (before I started doing it) was originally published in Polar Tropics on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Raising kids doesn’t appear on any lists of the world’s most stressful jobs but — no disrespect to mountain guides or stuntmen — I think parenting is right up there. Emotionally, at least.

A young mother I worked with was worried about how much screen time her three-year-old son was having. She’d been struggling with anxiety around her parenting and the iPad was a go-to strategy when she needed time out from him.

Now she feared she was nurturing a tiny gaming addict.

“I want him to be tech savvy but I want him to do other, healthier things,” she said.

“What do you have in mind?”

“That’s the problem. I want to be the best mother but all I can think about is everything I’m doing wrong. Do you have any advice?”

I hesitated. I long ago learned there’s no point telling anxious young parents to let go their perfectionist standards, both for themselves and their children— they won’t hear you. Nor will they believe every parent screws up, even though we who’ve raised kids know it’s true.

It takes raw experience to learn it’s not only okay to grow “smart enough, nice enough, happy enough” kids — it’s also a triumph.

Looking back, I know I left some things out of my daughters’ “life education” and I’ll never get that time back. I’ve also seen difficulties amongst adolescent clients which stemmed from skills they hadn’t learned as children.

So for this young mother and others like her, here are the things I’d go-to if I was doing it all again:

10 Life Skills for ‘Smart Enough’ Kids

1. Amuse yourself (without technology).

Encourage children to play alone sometimes; they shouldn’t need or crave external stimulation. Provide young kids with creative toys (blocks, toy animals, dress-up clothes, sand and water, and let them invent games. Don’t constantly intervene and make suggestions. They need to answer their own questions and — if necessary — laugh at their own jokes).

2. Finish something. Like your own homework.

Kids do need to try lots of things and they don’t need to finish every single thing they start. But often they give up because they don’t think their work is good enough. Teach them it’s okay to make bad art; they won’t be judged for it. While it’s good to praise effort, don’t talk up truly awful art — smart kids will see right through that. And guide homework, but don’t do it for them. You’ll take away their power.

3. Ask a good question (and absorb the answer).

Being able to ask a question that shows genuine interest in another person (and listening to their response) is the hallmark of social intelligence. Good social skills turn into good communication skills and transfer across many contexts. Put some effort into this one.

4. Name your top three strengths.

It’s helpful for kids to know and name what they are good at. You’d be surprised how many adults can’t do this. Test yourself (leaving out your work strengths). Teach kids to add things to the list as they try new things and learn new skills.

5. Make up a story (but don’t lie).

By this I mean make up a fictional story, to be able to put words together imaginatively. Help kids out by starting a story and letting them finish it. Make them the hero, sometimes. But beware of the crossover into Real Life — that’s called a lie and it’s not a skill you want to foster.

6. Read a book.

Reading doesn’t come easily to everyone. But this is a metaphor — as an extension of playing on their own, kids need to learn how to sit still. Too many young people hit adulthood with a restlessness they can’t shake. Being still means you can relax WITHOUT activity. That’s Art.

7. Settle a fight.

Conflict resolution skills are gold — so start early. Kids need time and ways to resolve a dispute without intervention. No bullying tactics allowed either! Listen and guide their ideas: they often have clever and novel solutions.

8. Cry.

Children need to know it’s okay to express their feelings. You can teach them to name different emotions — and they should be able to go beyond the Big 3: happy, sad and angry. It’s the basis for sound emotional expression as they grow into adulthood.

9. Stop crying.

A key part of emotional expression — the one that’s often left out — is being able to calm yourself down after being sad, angry or even over-excited. It is a learned skill and you need to guide your kids as to how much is too much — both in their emotions and behaviour. Too many young adults don’t know when or how to turn off the tears or the frustration. The type and amount of emotional expression should be appropriate for the situation.

10. Make a sandwich.

Okay it’s not really about the sandwich. It’s about meeting a primal need. It’s about planning, hunting and gathering fillings, thinking through process. It’s about creativity, adaptability and problem solving. It’s teaching good nutrition AND trying to ensure your kid never goes hungry. When they leave home, it might be the most valuable skill of all.

If you liked that, you might like this? https://medium.com/on-the-couch/the-pocket-guide-to-a-good-enough-life-dcac224c2436

Please feel free to share. If you want to talk more, leave a comment or message me on Facebook, tweet me, or visit karen@onthecouch.co.nz

10 Things I Wish I’d Known About Raising ‘Smart Enough’ Kids was originally published in On The Couch on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Our parents don’t see us as we are — they see the kid they remember. Our friends don’t see us as we are — they see the friend they remember. Only a stranger met on your travels sees you as you truly are right now.”

These words were shared with me recently by Conor Neill, Leadership and Communication Professor at IESE Business School (#1 center for executive education — Financial Times) and owner of a Youtube channel that discusses these very topics, when discussing how important travel is in regards to raising your self-awareness.

This story, handed down to Conor by one of his Japanese MBA students, got me thinking about how traveling and living abroad has shaped my life and the important lessons the world has taught me at a time when I was in desperate need of answers.

Seven years ago when people asked me why I had decided to trade in a comfy management job for a one-way ticket to Spain, where I had zero friends and the same number of work opportunities, I told them that I wanted to see the world.

But that was a lie.

I left because I had made a mess of the world I had created.

Somewhere between prioritising what I thought others wanted from me and caring too much about trying to fit in, I lost track of what I wanted for myself and I stopped looking for where I truly belonged.

The beauty of traveling is that we each come away with something different.

For me, that something different was that traveling and living abroad opened my eyes to the reality of the person I had become and gave me a glimpse of the person I was capable of being.

In short, traveling has taught me to bet on myself again.

And the following lessons below that traveling and living abroad have taught me are why I will continue to do so.

THE IMPORTANCE OF LEARNING HOW TO FAIL FORWARD:

The beauty of traveling or moving to a new country is that you learn how to fail forward. In fact, there is no failing — just a change of direction.

A missed train is quickly forgotten about after you make a new friend waiting for the next one. That hellish bus ride? A great anecdote for years to come.

Nothing about traveling is perfect and in that lies its beauty. We stumble forward and fail often. As a reward, travelling takes us to the places we were always meant to go and in the process teaches us about who we were always meant to be.

YOU DON’T HAVE A CAREER — YOU HAVE A LIFE:

One of the biggest takeaways from anyone who travels, or even anyone who goes on vacation, is that there is so much more to life than work. It is great to be passionate about something, and the world moves because of “ideas plus action,” but one of the glaring differences between many of the places I have visited and the U.S. is that people take the other pillars of their lives just as, if not more, seriously than their jobs.

Being surrounded by people who work to live instead of live to work could not have come at a better time as I was coming out of a decade-long corporate blackout. This mindset has been a reminder for me to get back on track when I’m leaning too far in the opposite direction of what makes me happy.

THE BEST WAY TO BE SUPPORTED — IS TO FIRST BE SUPPORTIVE:

I like to think of myself as a nice person. However, traveling and living abroad has taught me about the importance and power that comes with being proactively nice. One of the first realisations I had upon arriving in Barcelona was that there was absolutely no one around who truly cared about me, and that it was up to me , and only me, to give them a reason to.

Somewhere along the way I had forgotten to take notice of the details that made the people around me smile. I had gotten so wrapped up in my own head that I rarely raised it to see how I could make life easier for the people I cared about.

Maybe it wasn’t Barcelona at all. Maybe it was just the fact that I had taken a step back. But traveling has taught me that there is no higher compliment than showing interest in someone and truly listening to what they have to say. After all, the best memories and greatest lessons are often not seen, but heard.

YOU START TO NOT ONLY ACCEPT CHANGE — BUT EMBRACE IT:

When I was 23, I took a sales job to get over my stutter. In the beginning, I produced some of the worst (and longest) pitches in the history of mortgage sales. But I got better and the more uncomfortable I felt each day, the more comfortable I felt the next.

Looking back on why I traded in cushy salary for the unknown had nothing to do with the work. However, it had everything to do with the fact that I had begun to prioritise words like “familiarity” and “security” over words like “growing” and “pushing myself” — the very reason I achieved some level of success in the first place.

We can all be extremely resourceful when we need to be, and traveling and moving to a new country forces us to do and be just that. Traveling challenges us every day and over time it teaches us that the unknown is not scary, but simply a path to the version of ourselves that we always knew we were capable of being.

Rarely does media mogul and social media expert, Gary Vaynerchuk, make a video that does not include the importance of being self-aware. Yet in a conversation with Larry King when asked how one achieves it, Gary replied, “I don’t know.”

If it had been me talking with Larry, my answer would have been simple: travel.

Traveling and living abroad teaches you pretty quickly what personal traits have allowed you to survive in the world thus far and what you need to work on in order to thrive.

Traveling and living abroad smacks you in the face with the reality that no matter how worldly you are, you cannot do it alone and the type of people best suited to join you on your journey.

Traveling and living abroad teaches you to shift your mindset from saying, “I believe,” to first asking others what they believe.

Most of all, traveling and living abroad shows you who you are and gives you an idea of the person you want to become.

The Japanese student referred to in the beginning also said that during his travels he met the three most important person in his life, “his wife, a wise mentor…….. and himself.”

It is hard to say if I would have eventually learned these lessons by staying put in the U.S. I like to think yes, but I am sure that getting out of my comfort zone and living abroad has sped up the learning curve a great deal and helped me to meet the person that I was also meant to be.

If you liked this article, please give it a 👏 so other people will see it here on Medium. As someone who just re-discovered his love of writing this past year, your claps, comments and follows mean the world.

Visit www.thefirstknock.com to learn more about ways to improve your confidence and well-being and feel free to connect with me on Linkedin.

The More Uncomfortable Today — The More Comfortable Tomorrow was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.