I have a successful career in engineering, but I had to do more than homework to get here.
I have had to sit every day and work with the rage my dad put inside me. It's what I have to do to get to the good shit, the soft brain: willing, open, subtle.
Between twelve and sixteen the beatings were senseless. They were brutal before, but at least they were predictable. My dad was in a rage my whole childhood, but from twelve to sixteen it was something worse – a sickness.
The physical violence from my dad stopped when I got help from our bishop, a former tunnel rat in Vietnam, who let me stay at his house for three days. When he brought me back to my house he talked to my dad––who was a Marine in the late fifties early sixties––and it worked.
Seventeen and eighteen was verbal shit. The names that people who beat you get to use. Your nothingness in word form.
So much violence.
But I got to where family money gets most people in tech. I walked my own path. I took my brain seriously and I worked my ass off to get in the room with you.
And now that I'm here, all I can see is the potential that people like me could be brining to this work. I can't leave them behind.
I raised a daughter. When she was young I knew that what I was taught wouldn't fly. That I couldn't do to her what was done to me. I knew I had to eat it. I knew that it was my job to pass on love and discipline; to raise a fearless child.
Don't you get it? Tech can't put someone who is like me in the loser box. We see shit you don't.
And social media is getting this so utterly wrong. It commodified intimacy. It made the artificial more important than the real. I had to learn the hard way the hard way that a lie that you believe is all you need as excuse to have anger. The artificial will be brutal; a numb world always is.