I want to be honest about this because it matters to what comes next. Thirteen different people. Thirteen different conversations. Some were fine. Some were awkward. Some were people I could see myself liking. Some totally flopped. But none of them were love at first sight. Yeah you read that right. Love at first sight actually exists. You only know when it happens to you like it did me when I first saw Gloria.

I was 35. I had been through enough to know what I actually needed in a partner. I needed someone so bubbly with so much energy that it would be able to pull me out of my funks. That was my thinking at the time. Yes, I am selfish. I needed someone supportive, kind, and compassionate towards others. I needed the female version of myself. Ha. I needed someone who could look past my injury and see me for who I really am. It just took me 13 dates to find her. You maybe luckier. You maybe unluckier. Either way, you need to pay the price, go on those dates and experience it for yourself. There’s no easy way around it. Finding a partner is just like anything else you need to find. You need to put in the work and make the effort.

Then came the fourteenth date.

I knew she was the one the moment we met. Not in a film-script way. Not fireworks. More like recognition, the feeling of arriving somewhere you didn’t know you were heading. I went on five more dates with her even though I sort of bombed the first one just to be sure. Five dates to confirm what I already understood in the first five minutes.

Five months later, I proposed.

This is the story of what happened next. And more than that, it is a letter to TBI survivors who have found someone and are trying to figure out how to hold on.

What Changed When She Arrived

I have written in this series about the tools that rebuilt me. Exercise. Sleep. Structure. Therapy. Community. Each of them was real and each of them helped.

But there is something a partner gives you that none of those things can. Not a therapist. Not a best friend. Not a support group, as good as those can be.

A partner sees you at full resolution. Every version of you, the capable, the struggling, the difficult, the tender, the victim, the depressed one. A therapist sees you for fifty minutes once a week and gets a curated version. A partner sees you at seven in the morning when your processing is slow and you don’t feel like getting out of bed. They see you when the plan falls through and you don’t handle it well. They see the version of you that you’d rather nobody saw.

And if they stay, they choose to stay. Again and again. With that full picture in front of them. That does something to you that nothing else can replicate.

It tells you that you are worth staying for.

For someone with a TBI who has spent years fighting and healing the “not good enough” wound that was hope. That was revolutionary.

Our first date was at the airport.

She was on her way to Hong Kong for a POV (Psychology of Vision) workshop. For those who don’t know it, it’s a personal development framework created by Chuck Spezzano. It’s based on the idea that the problems and patterns you keep running into in life (relationships, work, health) are projections of unresolved inner conflicts.
The work involves identifying those patterns and transforming them rather than managing symptoms.

Gloria had booked this overseas workshop, paid for it (not cheap), and was heading there alone. She agreed to meet me at midnight for our first date.

In this cafe at T2, I remember sitting across from her and thinking. This is someone who doesn’t run away from hard things. She faces her problems. She was willing to spend money, time, and energy to grow. To become better. To face whatever needed facing.

I was the same way. Always have been a self-help junkie, even more after the accident. You don’t rebuild a life after a TBI without being obsessed with self-improvement. You have no choice. You either commit to the work or you don’t recover.

I recognised her immediately. Like recognises like.

That was the moment I knew she was the one. Not because she was perfect. Not because she was cute as hell. Because she was pointed in the right direction. And she wasn’t going to stop. Of course, it helped that she had an energy about her that was addictive.

The Best and the Worst of You

Here is the part I want to be honest about, because this series has always been about honesty.

The right partner does not only bring out your best. They bring out your worst too.

Not because they are doing anything wrong. Because proximity is a mirror. You can manage your deficits in public. You can compensate, mask, prepare. You can give a good account of yourself in a meeting or at a social event. At home, with someone who knows you, the scaffolding comes down. Whatever you haven’t dealt with, the irritability that comes with fatigue, the overreaction when you feel overwhelmed, the difficulty communicating what you need. It shows up in the relationship before anywhere else.

For Gloria and me, the friction had a name, my mom.

This is not a criticism of my mom. She is one of the most important people in my recovery story, period. After the accident in 2005, she was there. She helped me manage my finances for years when I could not do it myself. She made sure I ate well and got my ass out of bed every day. She was present through the darkest and slowest parts of the rebuilding. I would not be here without her. There is no version of this story where that is not true.

But that closeness, built over eleven years of her helping me survive, did not simply switch off when Gloria and I got married in 2016. And Gloria is an independent woman. She always has been. She did not sign up to have a third person at the table for decisions that belonged to the two of us.

The home we live in. Financial decisions. The way our household runs. My mom had a say. Sometimes because she had contributed financially, sometimes because she had been the one managing things for so long she didn’t know how to stop. And I was caught in the middle. Son and husband. Deeply grateful to one, deeply committed to the other, and genuinely unsure, in some moments, how to be both at once.

There were also moments where my brain/nervous system simply shut down. Where the situation was too complex, the emotions too layered, and the processing too slow. And I had to try to navigate something that would have been hard for anyone. While also managing the cognitive weight of a TBI that was still, in some ways, ongoing.

What helped us was not any single conversation. It was work, structured, intentional work on the relationship.

We went to Heart of Sophia for family constellation workshops. I first met 周老师 at a Family constellation workshop organized by The Kingsley Foundation. Later joined 钻石成长版 and met 学长s that later became our friends and closest supporters. These spaces gave us a language for things we hadn’t been able to name. They gave us somewhere to put the things that had no other place to go. They became a place we could go to work through our issues when it was not possible to resolve on our own.

I am not going to pretend we have no more issues. As a couple, we still have tons of work to do, it’s an ongoing effort. The important thing is we have a common language. An understanding and way to address our issues whenever they come up and to do it together. We decided that we were worth more than the dispute. The dispute is information. It is showing you where the work still needs to happen. The couples who grow are the ones who learn to read that information together rather than using it against each other.

That takes time. It takes trust. It takes a particular kind of willingness to be seen in your worst moments and keep coming back to the table anyway.

Gloria and I have had to build that together. We are still building it. Twenty years after my injury, I am still learning things about myself that only she can teach me.

Why TBI Makes This Harder (And Why That’s Important to Know)

Let me be direct about what you are asking of a partner when you have a TBI.

You are asking them to be patient on the days when your processing is slow. To understand that irritability is sometimes a symptom, not a choice. To adapt to a schedule or structure that keeps you functional. To accept that some environments that feel fine to them are genuinely overwhelming for you. To communicate about something you yourself don’t always fully understand.

That is a significant ask. I want you to feel the full weight of that, not so you feel guilty, but so you feel grateful. And so you understand why the work on yourself is also, in a deep way, work you are doing for your relationship.

The hardest thing about being a TBI survivor in a relationship is that the injury does not affect you in isolation. It affects the person next to you. The slow processing days. The moments when your brain goes offline in the middle of an argument and you cannot finish the sentence. The carry-over from a family history that ran long and complicated, and that your partner inherited not because she chose it but because she chose you.

Gloria chose me knowing something of what that meant. And she has stayed in the easy moments and complicated ones. That is not a small thing. That is the whole thing.

The inverse is also true. You are asking your partner to grow in ways they would not have grown without you. To develop patience they didn’t know they needed. To communicate more clearly. To pay attention to another person’s experience in a way that most relationships do not require. It’s not always go to work out. It’s never going to be perfect. But that’s alright. That’s life. If you don’t give up, you deal with it together.

Done well, this makes the relationship stronger, not weaker. The stretching, if you do it together and not against each other, becomes something you are both proud of.

What the Research Says

Social support from an intimate partner is one of the strongest predictors of long-term recovery after TBI. The TBI Model Systems database, the largest long-term study of brain injury outcomes in the United States found that living with a spouse was one of the biggest predictors of how well someone reintegrated into their community two years after injury. In some analyses, it mattered more than how severe the injury was. The people around you shape how far you go.

Source: Sady MD, Sander AM, Clark AN, Sherer M, Nakase-Richardson R, Malec JF. “Relationship of preinjury caregiver and family functioning to community integration in adults with traumatic brain injury.” Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, 2010. See also: Sander AM et al., Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, 2012;93(5):842–848.

A loving partner also changes what happens inside the brain. Studies in the general population, not TBI-specific, but directly relevant show that the presence of a trusted partner lowers cortisol, calms the nervous system, and releases oxytocin, the brain chemical most tied to trust and bonding. After a brain injury, your stress response is already broken. It fires too easily. It stays on too long. Having someone safe beside you helps turn it down. A stable partnership isn’t just nice to have during recovery. It’s part of how recovery works.

Source: Ditzen B & Heinrichs M. “Psychobiology of social support: the social dimension of stress buffering.” Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience, 2014;32(1):149–162.

None of this means partnership after TBI is easy. About half of both survivors and their partners report serious dissatisfaction in the relationship. The personality changes, the cognitive fog, the emotional flatness. These test even the strongest marriages. But here’s what the research also shows: despite all of that, the vast majority of marriages survive. Kreutzer and colleagues found that 75% of survivors who were married at the time of injury were still married three to eight years later. A larger follow-up across sixteen centres found 85% stability at two years. The marriages hold. Not because they’re untouched by injury. But because something in the commitment itself becomes part of how you heal.

Source: Kreutzer JS, Marwitz JH, Hsu N, Williams K, Riddick A. “Marital stability after brain injury: an investigation and analysis.” NeuroRehabilitation, 2007;22(1):53–59. See also: Arango-Lasprilla JC et al., Brain Injury, 2008;22(7):565–574. Kreutzer JS et al., NeuroRehabilitation, 2016.

How to Stick Together

This section is for the people who have found their person and are trying to figure out how not to lose them.

Here is what I have learned.

Name the TBI in the relationship. Do not leave your partner to guess why you reacted the way you did, why you need things structured a certain way, why some days are harder than others. The more transparently you can name what is TBI and what is you, the less room there is for misinterpretation. This requires you to understand your own condition well enough to explain it. That is part of the work. The counsellors I saw helped me with getting into the practice of naming my emotions and sensations.

Build routines that serve both of you. Structure is good for TBI-affected brains. But if the structure only serves you and taxes your partner, it will become a source of resentment. Find the rhythms that work for the relationship, not just for you individually. This takes communication and communication takes honesty.

Do not make your partner your only community. Day 12 was about community for a reason. If your partner becomes the only person you rely on for connection, emotional support, and stimulation, you will exhaust them. The other relationships like friends, peers, and support groups protect the partnership by distributing the weight.

Repair quickly and sincerely. TBI can affect emotional regulation, which means conflict may happen more easily than it did before. The skill is not to eliminate conflict. It is to repair it well. A genuine apology after a difficult episode, followed by a conversation about what happened and what you could do differently, does more for the relationship than pretending it didn’t happen.

Let them know what they are doing for you. Do not assume they know. Tell them, specifically and regularly. The people who stay with TBI survivors often do not fully understand the magnitude of what they are giving. Give them that understanding. It changes what their sacrifice means to them.

The Chance to Say You Have Fully Recovered

I want to end with something I believe deeply, even though it is hard to measure.

Surviving a TBI is one thing. Rebuilding a functional life with work, structure, community, and health is even harder. But there is a third thing, and it is the hardest of all.

It is building a life of genuine intimacy with another person. One where you are known, fully, and chosen anyway. One where you have grown not despite your injury but in some ways because of everything it required of you.

Finding the right person and doing the work together, year after year, that is something beyond recovery. That is a life rebuilt. You have not just rebuilt yourself. You have built something new. Something that did not exist before your accident.

I think that is the closest any of us gets to being able to say, I have fully recovered. Not because the injury is gone. It is not. But because you have made something beautiful in spite of it. You have overcome it.

Gloria made that possible for me.

So Gloria, if you’re reading this and you probably are, because I’m going to send it to you. I want to say this clearly, in writing, where it cannot be taken back. And I want the whole world to know it too which is why I’m minting this on Paragraph.

I would not have come this far without you. Not even close. You have a special place in my heart that no one else occupies and no one else ever will. I would do anything for you. I mean that without condition.

I know all your weak spots. I know the childhood wounds that still show up in unexpected places. And I am promising you here, in front of everyone reading this, that I will never use them against you. Not once. You trusted me with those things and I take that seriously.

I also promise to keep making you laugh. Because you love my goofiness. And honestly I love that you love it. It’s one of my better qualities and I’m glad someone finally appreciates it properly.

We are going to grow old together. Whatever comes and things will come and when they do we will get through it. That is not optimism. That is a decision I make every day. I choose you. I will keep choosing you.

Now stop crying and go make dinner. I’m hungry.

Your Turn

If you are in a relationship right now. What is one thing your partner does that you have never properly thanked them for? Tell them today. Not in a text. Out loud.

And if you are in a relationship that is under strain right now. If the TBI has made things complicated in ways you did not expect, if there are other people in the picture, if you have found yourself in the middle of something that has no clean answer. I hope you hear this.

It does not have to be clean to survive. Gloria and I did not navigate our hardest years cleanly. We went to workshops. We sat with facilitators. We found people who could help us see what we could not see alone. We did the work, messily and imperfectly, because we had decided that the relationship was worth it.

If your relationship is worth it, do the work. Get help. Find your supportive community, the workshops, the people who have been through something similar and can hold the space. Do not try to figure it out alone in your own heads. That is how good relationships quietly break.

And if you haven’t found your person or community yet, the work you do on yourself right now is not waiting time. It is preparation. The version of you that is doing the hard work of recovery is becoming someone worth choosing. Keep going.

The work you do on yourself is also a love letter to the person you haven’t met yet, or the person you are trying to keep.

Keep doing the work.

Next read > Day 14 — [Coming soon]

Beyond Broken Brains exists because recovery happens in community. If this found you at the right moment, pass it on.

As I learned more about what they do here. I became excited about the possibilities. Of not just combining my passion for writing earning some crypto in the process, but also exploring a potential partnership with these guys.

How could LonesomeShark, a liquidation protection platform on Ethereum work with Reserve Protocol is for another time.

With my limited understanding, Reserve protocol solves the problem of inflation.

They believe access to stable money is a human right. Almost two billion people around the world don't have a safe place to store their money or are excluded from financial services such as payments and credit.

This is because some banks do not see the unemployed, women, or low income people as worthy customers. Apparently, lack of formal ID is one of the main reasons why women don’t have access to financial services. Source.

This is the reason why Muhammad Yunus started Grameen Bank. They pioneered the concepts of microcredit and microfinance. Loans are given to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans.

Struggles with inflationary currencies prevent families and communities from building basic economic security. To help solve this, Reserve Protocol offers financial services in high inflation economies. Their app (aka Rpay) users in Latin America can easily save and spend in US dollars, without worrying about their money devaluing overnight. They are not a bank. They are a new way to store and move money, creating new saving and spending experiences beyond borders. Source.

The Reserve protocol is a really interesting approach to enable the permissionless creation of stablecoins.

The success of the protocol and the first RTokens will depend on the participation of $RSR holders.

What are $RSV and $RSR tokens?

1. $RSV is the stablecoin pegged to the US Dollar that people use on Rpay.

2. $RSR on the other hand, is an ERC20 token common across all Reserve tokens (RTokens). RSR can be staked on a particular RToken, where it has two roles:

   1. Staked RSR receives a portion of the RToken collateral’s revenue in exchange for being the first capital-at-risk in the case of collateral default. (This is how we can earn).

   2. Staked RSR proposes and votes on changes to the RToken’s configuration.

For more info see this page.

Currently, Rpay is only available in Latin America (Spanish). However, the team plans on releasing an English version in the near future.

In summary, how reserve protocol fights inflation is that users can exchange their local currency pesos or boliviano (in the case of Latin America), with RSV coin, the Locals can then use the Reserve app to save, spend, and receive money without the need for a foreign bank account. You can use your local bank account and move money between them or use the app to make payment at online merchants that accept cryptocurrency.

Why am I excited about this? It is because this is another proven use case of a protocol finding product market fit.

Blockchain isn’t suitable in all use cases. However, in this case, it is. And that excites me.

From the beginning Andreas Antonopoulos, co-author of the book “Mastering Ethereum” was already talking about one of the benefits of DeFi - providing universal access to basic finance for the unbanked.

What Reserve Protocol is doing in high inflationary countries is a testament to that.

Kudos.

Mirror’s editor was a bit funky. Think I’ll feedback this to the team. Formatting and alignment is a bit off. The main topics are highlighted in bold.

• 1) How much of a problem is MEV? What are the different methods of MEV extraction? There are both positive and negative consequences to MEV on Ethereum. Below I rate each of them. Here’s a link to the ethereum developer docs on MEV. Reminder: not all MEV is bad.

  1. Exploitation - sandwich attacks aka sandwich trading, backrunning or frontrunning. Bad.

  2. Neutral - eg. DEX arbitrage opportunities. Good.

  3. Liquidations - Good for lending protocols. Bad for crypto users who lose a portion of their collateral due to liquidations. 50/50

Should dapps have MEV resistance built-in? The verdict is still open on that. As a           builder, I'll leave that to you to decide.

2) What was the rationale for the core dev team to build certain features in house and outsource others? What was their thought process in prioritising activities.

1. a. EIP-4337: account abstraction using alt mempool.

   b. EIP-1559: fee market change for ETH 1.0.

2. These two EIPs were of higher priorities. In my words, the Ethereum core dev's team rationale for deciding what to work on was this: core devs have limited bandwidth. Therefore it is preferable to outsource some tasks if possible.

3. 3) Danksharding was split off. That is, the dev. work was outsourced to external parties. They mention who this party is but it escapes me now. This keeps the ethereum base protocol simpler and faster which enables faster roll outs.

4. 4) UniswapDAO has tons of funding still. On a side note, at Mainnet2022, I met a guy who was working on creating a market maker within Uniswap V2. They got angel funding from Kain Warwick, Synthetix and mentorship. I could have sworn I took a selfie with him. Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is if you got an idea for a dapp or protocol that uses Uniswap’s tooling in someway, you could try and apply for a Unigrant. Note: from my experience with LonesomeShark applying for grants, protocols will not fund you merely because you use them Eg. if you use Chainlink Keepers in your dapp that doesn’t qualify you for a Chainlink grant. I imagine every protocol has a different eligibilities. Read their docs.

5. I'm passionate about public goods and making a difference in people's lives. That was one of the motivations I decided to make LonesomeShark a public good. Token based public goods funding needs to let layer 2's prosper by offering separate revenue streams. Today, Optimism's funding comes directly from the centralized sequencer, accruing to The Optimism Foundation for redistribution. More info. Then, that can be further distributed to public good projects.

6. The other thing I'm passionate about is security. The notion of shared security is different from interchain protocols that build on an architecture of bridges. When it comes to Ethereum, it uses a shared security model. Rollups derive security from the base layer. Where unlike bridge protocols, Each chain is considered sovereign and must maintain its own validator set and economic security. More info.

Listen to the full episode here: https://epicenter.tv/episodes/467/

What you may or may not know about brain injuries is that right after the injury there’s a small window, a sweet spot if you will where you can dramatically boost your recovery rate. All you have to do is push yourself by doing things that make you uncomfortable, learning new things, and connecting with people. That is it!

Of course, all of which require you to be thick skinned. The point I’m trying to make is that because of my brain injury, mental health is the one thing I struggled with the most. I get these highs and lows. When I was in a low, I found myself escaping and not doing the things I was supposed to be doing. This sometimes affected my ability to hold on to a job. That is why in January 2021 an opportunity came up for me to be my own boss and I took it!

I was accepted into a startup incubator with an idea for building 1-click infrastructure provisioning web app. It was a 3-month program. By March 2021, that idea turned into “Mental Health Stack,” a resource for finding self-help tools & apps for managing mental health. During the ideation phase that is how things sometimes are. You are constantly pivoting and embracing new ideas. As an entrepreneur, you’re encouraged to move fast and not be fixated on any one idea.

During the program, I met a few blockchain enthusiasts who turned me onto Ethereum. It is a decentralized, open-source blockchain technology. It was founded by Vitalik Buterin, a boy genius, Russian-born Canadian programmer. I would recommend reading his blog except sometimes I’m scared to.

There are many different explanations to the question “What is Ethereum” that you can find on the web from technical to non-technical. I describe it in 2 ways.

1. It is a world computer. It uses the fundamental principles of Math and Cryptography to solve a fundamental problem, how do you get strangers to trust one another.

2. It is an underlying blockchain technology that provides the ability to build decentralised applications (aka dapps) on top of it.

From that initial conversation about buying crypto led me down the rabbit hole to doing cryptozombies, reading the Ethereum whitepaper, and joining my first blockchain hackathon, 2021 Virtual Chainlink Hackathon.

This was what we built.

My background is CS. The more I learned, the more it occurred to me that this was going to be the future. I knew I wanted to start a blockchain company. As this was all new to me, I didn’t know what problem I was going to solve. This article by Chainlink has a good summary of the different use cases for smart contracts. What are smart contracts you may ask? In layman terms, a smart contract is a self-executing contract with the terms of the agreement between buyer and seller being directly written into lines of code. Source.

But this was all new to me and there were different use cases for it. I knew blockchain and the entire ecosystem built around Ethereum was where I wanted to be. And it is a robust ecosystem from the vast array of tools and dapps available.

I’m not sure how many dapps there were in 2021 but as of this writing there are 2,970 (according to stateofthedapps).

My plan to learn faster, validate ideas, and find out where I fit in would be best done by becoming a full time hackathoner. That was what I did for the rest of 2021.

To be continued…

I wasn’t going to even post this but after some inspiration from Grant. Thanks! And some inspiration from crushing the fear of posting). I’m posting this 344 words short. I figure, it’s better to be imperfect and publish than perfect and not.