I Took A Sabbatical From Bloom

It was a passing thought in my mind, “What I really want to do is take two months off of Bloom.”

I had been grinding my face off since 2011, with a particular intensity to 2022-2024 when leading the build of our social networking platform, and coding all the web3 integrations myself. At the end of that, it became clear to me that we had everything we needed to build the FLO Exchange, the way our community can use their reputation token earned from participating in local hands-on actions to access goods and services by fellow Bloomers. I was so excited that over Christmas / New Year time, instead of resting, I hammered that out. Announcement soon!! By then everything was visibly catching up to me. I had a panic attack on a group call, I was exhausted all the time, struggling to stand up to work.

I mentioned the thought of taking a break to Meg and she said “Oh you are doing that.” She strongly told me to not worry about what happens to Bloom, the volunteer teams will take care of it. And if it falls apart it falls apart, you need to rest.

Before I left, I put everything I was doing into SOP (standard operating procedure) documents, for the Community, Grants, and Finance/Admin teams. I made sure people had the credentials and logins they needed for operations. It’s INSANE how much work and how many tasks I’ve been doing. No wonder I felt like I was painted into such a corner and struggling physically to be ok. We had built the equivalent of a $5M build on approx $250,000, let alone the volume of community wisdom contributed by the Local Bloom nodes over 18 years of R&D, on the ground and also in terms of voicing what they needed from a social media network that they weren’t getting from the mainstream networks. I had been working 1x, sometimes 2x fulltime on Bloom alongside day jobs for too long. Thank goodness I took a break!!

Here is some of what I experienced and learned during my time away. I share this to inspire you to take a break when you need to, and for you to support leaders in your community or workplace to do the same periodically. Not simply a 2-week vacation, but a solid sabbatical to reorient to what life is and really get some perspective.

My goals at the outset:

1. Break my habit of grinding, rest my body, mind, and spirit.
2. Take a break from being responsive to so many people.
3. Quit caffeine.
4. Find what it means to me to have a life.
5. And, importantly, to reset my mind and orientation on Bloom out of infrastructure design and development, and into a more outward facing, outreach and communications phase.

First, everyone was incredibly supportive and celebratory with me for taking time off. It was touching how much everyone knew I needed it, and were really happy for me doing it, and celebrating what we’d built with Bloom so far. It was such a caring response, I didn’t expect everyone to be so joyful when I told them, and that was so sweet.

It struck me as a stark juxtaposition to typical startup and corporate life. It’s an indicator of how we do things differently at Bloom. It has its own rhythms, it’s more matriarchal, it unfurls at its own pace. No matter how much in the past I’ve wanted to run it like a normal (but cooperative) startup. Bloom has its own life, its own spirit, and I know I’m not the only person who feels that.

I rested, a lot. I did a lot of lying down on the rug in my office, resting and breathing deeply. There were in fact a number of things I had to take care of during my off time - namely Bloom’s Gitcoin grant, taxes, and our Octant listing and promotion communications for it. So, I didn’t get that much of a rest. But relatively, I did achieve a better balance of stepping away from the machine and getting perspective, as a daily habit.

One thing I did at the start of my break, to do something drastically different with my life, is a week-long class on dying textiles with plants, from Kathy Hatori of Botanical Colors. I’ve been wanting to learn that for years, but have never spent the money on myself to take a workshop or make a small lab setup for it. That was delightful and demystified the process.

One highlight was discovering that plant dyed textiles have more depth and richness in their color than artificial dyes do. Kathy explained that most plants have many colors within them, it’s why some plants result in different colors depending on the PH of the dye bath and other factors. Plant-dyed textiles also feel completely different - you can feel the spirit of the plant in them, sometimes you can smell it. I use a scarf I have that was dyed with St. Johnswort by a Mayan women weavers collective in Guatemala, as a teaching piece when I meet people who have never encountered alternatives to chemical agriculture and mass production. Sadly that’s normal in the U.S.

One of my dreams for Bloom, and in general, is to make Fibershed-style clothing production economically viable for average people. Fibershed is an organization and a movement that promotes clothing and textiles being made within the wearer’s watershed, using no materials that will harm the watershed. At the moment, those clothes are often quite expensive, but I believe through cooperatives and some of the infrastructure we’re practicing at Bloom, we can get the cost down for people, and spread the practice of having fewer, nicer, pieces of clothing, made by people, plants, and animals we know! I should write a whole think piece on my dream for this, outlining the factors and roadmap to get there. Leigh Cuen invited me to write it for Des Femmes magazine, but at the time I was too bogged down in leading Bloom’s social network build that I couldn’t.

There is one local Bloom hub doing Fibershed textile production in Turkey. Earthist makes hemp textiles for clothing as well as art canvases. A thing I’ve noticed while doing market research for this over the past year, is that everywhere I look that makes baby clothes, blankets, and toys with organic textiles and plant dyes, is sold out.

Sanborn Mill Farms, the traditional craft and farming training center in New Hampshire where the plant dyes workshop happened

Project quit caffeine is at the moment successful! This is my 20th try, so we’ll see if it sticks. I need a substances anonymous chip for that one. I wish someone had told me as a young person that caffeine is as difficult to get off of as cigarettes. Caffeine is terrible for me. I already grind enough on my own, I can focus for 16 hours no problem doing a thing, for days on end. Caffeine makes that far worse, which is bad for my body because I don’t move enough, and I build up a ton of tension. I don’t like how caffeine affects my writing. I’m often in a position of needing to communicate complexity, as concisely and actionably as possible. Caffeine makes my writing noisier and messier.

What works for me to get off caffeine is to step down gradually. I usually need a 6 week work break to get off it, because otherwise if there’s a stressful work thing I need to get done, I’ll ramp back up. A supplement called DLPA is helpful for headaches and the emotionally withdrawals from caffeine. It doesn’t help with the tiredness though.

Project start meditating, so I can focus on what’s most important instead of the infinite task of five million things that need to get done to get Bloom’s infrastructure up and keep the community together as a thing, is successful.

I got a meditation pillow from Padmani, a company I came across at Fungi Fest in Maine last year, produced by Permatours who are a local Bloom. Dropping $133 on such a thing seemed like a lot, but it looks so inviting, and it's shaped like a lotus flower, that I do actually sit on it. I began working with a plant called Apurinã Awiry, grown and harvested by the Apurinã people in Brazil, as a snuff. It’s helping me stay put to meditate, and it’s not a full blown psychedelic like I did frequently in my 20’s. It’s been guiding me to orient my being more in my heart and inspiration than in the galactic maze of my mind. I made a nice little meditation zone with plants, a candle, my jaw harps and a large ceramic frog - he reminds me to be more body oriented, to stop and stretch at the end of the day, and any time throughout the day if I feel sore or tense, to stop and take a break and be with my body and nature. I love frogs. They're one of my favorite things to draw and paint.

I started playing piano again! I was a professional pianist from age 12-24, until I decided to switch my creative energies to visual art. It’s like being reunited with my soul. Music was the only way I felt I could really communicate with people as a child, and the main way I expressed my emotions. It’s normal for a classical musician to need to stop playing their primary instrument for 10-15 years, in order to learn to play other styles of music, because the training is so rigorous and specific.

I started again by learning a song by ear that I heard a man play at a community healing event I attended in northern New Hampshire in April, with a bunch of medical doctors, psychiatrists, massage therapists and sound healers. It’s about loving the sound of the forest when it rains. His voice is way sexier than mine when he sings it, hopefully he’ll record it someday and you can hear it here on Bloom! Hearing a manly man sing a beautiful, gentle song about loving the forest, with a husky voice, is - pop music needs more of this, trust me. P.S. one of my dreams for Bloom is that we get large enough to influence pop culture. The lyrics and meaning in songs by Bloomers are so beautiful and profound.

Thanks to growing seed starts indoors this year, I won my 3 year-battle against the slugs for who gets to eat the Lady Murasaki mustard greens I’m growing. They’re so delicious and sweet! I’m more and more convinced that the most delicious foods are things you can’t buy in a grocery store. Like apples that aren’t like a massive sugar bomb, what’s up with those, blech. Very excited to add ducks to my garden when I move to a permanent place, so they eat the slugs and I eat their yummy eggs!

In May I finished up a few necessary code improvements, so when I returned formally I could focus on outreach, since it’s hard for me to straddle both mindsets. I’ll write an Impact Report on Bloom about that work for community transparency.

Use your FLO to access and discover goods and services near you.

At the very end of my sabbatical, I finally found space to grieve the 10 years of domestic abuse I experienced when I lived in San Francisco. I’ve spent a lot of time being angry at the people who hurt me. But I’ve never really had the space or wherewithal to feel sorry for myself that I went through what I did. I’ve coped by avoiding the pain of it, and the extreme physical pain I had since a bad bicycle accident in 2011, by working relentlessly on building Bloom Network’s brand identity, governance model, and social networking platform. As long as I was grinding, I wasn’t focusing on the pain in my body and the feeling of helplessness from what my experiences of trying to raise money for Bloom in the Bay Area were like. I hope I found some peace with my past, so I can move forward in my power, and stop giving in to the abuser’s voice in my head pushing me down.

I found some vindication of one dimension of abuse I experienced. At a Free State Project conference here, I learned from a fellow entrepreneur that Silicon Valley VC’s had a reckoning after I had left, around the issue of female entrepreneurs being hit on and propositioned for sex by VCs. Edit, apparently it's still as rampant as ever, with 65% of LGBTQ founders experiencing persistent sexual harassment, and 65% of harassed women founders were propositioned for sex, often in exchange for funding or introductions. I’ve been a recluse over the past 10 years partly because of the dynamic of being hit on relentlessly at any event I go to. Things are very different on the East Coast and now that I’m a little older, and I’m looking forward to returning to being more social and outgoing as we enter the growth phase of Bloom.

The silver lining of the reasons I ground my face off to make Bloom happen is hey, we have BloomNetwork.earth and have maintained our togetherness as a global community! And I’m really excited for what’s next. I left for my break being open to potentially coming to the conclusion that I wouldn’t come back. But I still thought about the Local Bloom leaders all the time, and I see how symbiotic working on it is with everything I want to achieve in life and contribute to humanity, and experience as a person in the communities where I live.

One thing I wasn’t able to do while I was coding and doing legal design and keeping the community together and grantwriting and our taxes and and, was put together a strategy for communications outreach to grow our membership, mentors and volunteers, and high net worth contributors. Throughout my break I had the spaciousness to let that come to mind over time, and I’ve got a list of strategic articles to publish, individuals and organizations to reach out to, and themes to harp on on social media. My next year on Bloom will likely involve a lot more writing, and less infrastructure build. The social platform is feature complete for the current phase. There are a few new features we want to add to improve peer support and relationship building among members, and performance improvements to make. But the core of the system we need is built out now.

We’re in the very exciting phase of Bloom now which is the phase where we grow our presence as a media company. This is really my dream for Bloom. For us to become a major alternative to today’s mainstream platforms that glue you to their screens doomscrolling, commerce, or lifestyle oggling. That sh*t is creepy af. Together at Bloom we know, and are creating, the better world we know is possible. So let’s help more people find it and participate!

And so I return, focusing more on communicating with the world about the magic and promise of Bloom and what we’re delivering together, to help us grow our collective leadership and resourcefulness in the world.

This break was deeply necessary. Thank you all and Meg for your patience and encouragement with me to take it, even though it meant a two-month delay in issuing the next round of grant payouts! I’ll be training the team how to do those so more of us know how to run the finance engine room.